What If AI Could Think Like Your Best Assistant?

Joe Downs and Peter Swain explore how AI agents are transforming entrepreneurship by taking over repetitive operational work so business owners can return to strategic thinking and creativity. 

They discuss why so many entrepreneurs become trapped in endless busy work, how constant stress limits innovation, and why agentic AI is fundamentally different from traditional AI chatbots. 

Using practical examples, they demonstrate how AI agents can manage emails, schedule meetings, coordinate calendars, delegate tasks, learn personal preferences, and even act as proactive business development representatives. 

Rather than replacing entrepreneurs, these intelligent assistants free them to focus on their unique strengths, ultimately helping them reclaim their time, improve work-life balance, and build businesses that no longer depend on them doing everything themselves. 

Listen for:

5:34 Why do entrepreneurs only get two or three good hours of real work a day?

18:33 What actually makes something an AI agent instead of just ChatGPT or a tool?

29:24 Can an AI agent really tame 250 emails a day and only flag what matters?

36:11 How do you set up a 7 AM AI briefing that runs your whole day for you?

47:51 What happens when you "hire" an AI agent to go find 500 leads a day?

Links Mentioned

Peter's Free AI Business Audit | Storagemoguls.ai | Claude | ChatGPT

Email the “Idiots” Joe and Peter

idiots@successfulidiots.com 

Joe Downs

Website | LinkedIn | YouTube | Email Joe:joe@belroseam.com 

Peter Swain

Website | Email | LinkedIn | X

Transcript

Joe Downs (00:00):

Folks, it was worth sharing the show just for that one nugget right there. 97% of entrepreneurs work on weekends. 81% work while they're on vacation. 73% are checking and answering email on that vacation. 44% have missed a personal milestone, a birthday maybe, a wedding, an anniversary, a school pickup even, because they were too busy running their businesses. And 37% say that working on vacation has caused an actual argument with their partner. Folks, those aren't just statistics. That's a hostage situation. And here's the part that stings. You built that cage yourself. You became an entrepreneur to own your time and somewhere along the way, your time started owning you. Today, we're going to talk about what changes when you hand that problem to AI, not to make you busier, but to make you more dangerous. I'm Joe Downs. With me is Peter Swain. We're just a couple of successful idiots using AI to simplify our lives and optimize our businesses and that's what we're here to show you today through the use of agents.

(01:17):

Peter, true or false, the British version of work-life balance is scheduling a 10-minute tea break between your first and your second email.

(01:32):

As you're sipping tea.That is empirically true and clearly evident based on the video.

Peter Swain (01:43):

I can't believe I just took a swing as you said that.

Joe Downs (01:46):

Folks, before we get into today's episode, real quick, ask if you've gotten anything out of this. And you're definitely going to get something out of this one. Just a favorite leaf is a rating right now, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you're listening, don't bookmark it, or tell yourself you'll do it later or tell us you'll do it later. Just do us a favor. It takes 30 seconds. Give us a rating. We greatly appreciate it. Peter, today I'm hopeful that between our interactions, but mostly it's going to be you, you're going to explain and inform to our listener what a herm is and we're going to talk about pronouncing it. Typically, I'm very, very good at pronouncing names. I have had the worst run of luck on this show.

(02:35):

Past performance is no guarantee of future results or performance.You're going to show, talk to, whatever is explained to the listener what a Hermes or M is. The last 10 weeks doesn't necessarily pop in that direction. And really, I think it's going to be through our interaction that's going to be very evident. And we're not going to get into the tech, not the install, just the magic. Then based on where I actually am in my setup, I'm going to start throwing you my wishlist. Real things that I want personally that I think most people want, not just in my business, in my life. And you're going to tell me if it's possible and roughly how. And I think by the end of this one, every entrepreneur listening is going to wonder how they ever ran their business without something like this.

Peter Swain (03:24):

I'm excited.

Joe Downs (03:26):

We are recording this a day later than we otherwise would have, which means I'm actually even more advanced with my Hermes setup. Yeah. So we're going to see

Peter Swain (03:36):

How well I can do this. A day in the life of AI,

Joe Downs (03:37):

Right? Exactly. Well, that's how fast it moves, right?

Peter Swain (03:40):

100%.

Joe Downs (03:41):

So let's start with the honest conversation here that every entrepreneur listening already knows is true but probably hasn't said out loud. I'm guilty's charged here by the way too. In fact, my whole opening, all those things, the 97%, 60%, 37, whatever it was, guilty is charged of all of them, including the arguments with my wife.That's

Peter Swain (04:00):

The only one I disagreed with. The 30X percent has an argument caused by working on a vacation. If that isn't 100%, it's a hundred- Well,

Joe Downs (04:10):

At one point it's 100. Maybe it's not every vacation, but it's happened at least

Peter Swain (04:13):

One time. It's not every vacation, but certainly every person

Joe Downs (04:15):

That

Peter Swain (04:15):

I can remember saying to Liz when she wasn't part of the business, you know how we paid for us to be here, right?

Joe Downs (04:22):

I was just going to say, and I guarantee you 100% of time that is the answer we give because I've given it a few times.

Peter Swain (04:29):

Yeah. And I'm not justifying it. It's still not correct, but it's like where am I going to ... You see, when you said the list, I was reminded of a sentence that I said, it's kind of a bit painful actually thinking about it. It's when we had our first child. So when we added in the business plus children plus marriage, I woke up every day for at least a year wondering this question, what am I going to fail at today? Because it was impossible when I added in kids as well as this impossible to win. I cannot win everything anymore. It was a really quite negative time of like, I'm going to fail at something today. Is it my marriage, my responsibility as a father, or is it my business? That's my choice. I've got to fail at something. And I don't think that's true anymore because of what we're about to talk about today.

Joe Downs (05:22):

Yeah. I was going to say that I don't think I've ever had those thoughts, fortunately. That doesn't sound very Tony Robbins. I'll tell you that.

Peter Swain (05:31):

Well, I mean, I met him a bit later on.

Joe Downs (05:34):

All right. And this isn't just about vacation though, right? So vacation is where it becomes evident. I think if we're honest with ourselves, if I look at my own day and if I'm being honest with myself, there's really only two to three hours a day where you're actually doing the thing that moves the business forward. The rest of the stuff, it's just busy work, right? And for me, because I'm probably someone that still holds onto the vacation excuse of, well, why do you think we're here? It's because I'm able to do that. But I think there's going to be more of a less noticeable, maybe less noticeable, but definitely more of an impact just in your day-to-day when you're not on vacation of just if there was a magical agent who could just take care of a whole bunch of busy work for you if you set it up that way.

(06:32):

We used to live in a time where we'd say things like, "Oh, it'd be amazing if and wouldn't be nice if. " And we don't live in that time anymore because we now live in a time where I'm saying, "Wow, I can't believe I just set that up and it's going to do this every day for me. What else can it do? Am I doing it right?" Those sort of things. And then now it's just what can you imagine? And I've said this before in the show and I've said it to many people. We were all lied to when we were younger that if you can dream it, you can do it. One in a million could. I dreamed of playing in the NFL someday. My body said, "No, I don't think so. " But now if you can dream it, you can ideate it and short of my body being big enough to play in the NFL, you can do it.

(07:29):

So that's what I want to focus on today because there's entrepreneurs out there that I know are losing time and it's not because they're lazy, it's because they have no system, it's because they just don't know that they don't know what's possible. I'll say it that way. I only know what's possible because of how much I've leaned into AI and with your help and everyone listening knows what's possible because we're talking about it and maybe they're getting it from other sources as well, but-

(08:05):

Why

Peter Swain (08:06):

Are they doing that?

Joe Downs (08:08):

I'm sure they see stuff on social media.

Peter Swain (08:10):

Polygamous relationships. I didn't

Joe Downs (08:12):

Say they're listening to others people.

Peter Swain (08:14):

Okay. I'll take it.

Joe Downs (08:15):

Yeah. Anyway, we have our egos to stroke here people. All right. So what is actually happening and this is going to be a little bit an abstract question for you, but I love pitching you these slow curve balls and see how you hit them. So what is actually happening in your opinion or in your experience to the entrepreneur's brain when they're stuck in the cycle that we've always been stuck in before? What's going on there?

Peter Swain (08:50):

Oh, that's a great question. So look, very, very broad strokes. There's going to be like a brain doctor that listens to this and says, "That's wrong." And it is, but it's right enough. We have two versions of our nervous system. We've got what's called the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic, easy for me to say, parasympathetic nervous system fires when we're at rest, when we feel abundant, when we have money, when we have shelter, food, water, et cetera, it turns on different pieces of our brain. Our sympathetic nervous system fires when we're under stress, when we don't have an abundance of resources, when there's a car coming, when all those kind of things and it actually turns other pieces of our physiology and our brain on. So creative thinking, creative thought, and being able to see the thing that you need to be able to see in order to navigate and grow the company only happens in your parasympathetic nervous system.

(10:00):

So if you put yourself under consistent pressure, you actually denigrate quite quickly your capability to use your prefrontal cortex and be this amazing Cuban. You become very reactive and you actually start making really, really bad choices really quite quickly and you stop being the machine that can find this distinction and make a million dollars and instead you become this machine that can grind out another 30 or another 10 or another five in order. So you end up just staying there for a long time, made worse by the fact that we then go on vacation where we can actually reground and recenter ourselves and then we, because we're in such scarcity, we carry on the same pattern so we never actually recharge and recuperate. I don't know the statistic on this, but I'm willing to put a bet down that heart attacks, stroke and suicides are probably entrepreneurs have got to be in the top five.

Joe Downs (10:58):

That's interesting. I'll have to look that up. You nailed it. Guilty is charged, especially you've had a front row seat to what I've been going through lately building this storage moguls.ai education community platform for teaching people how to source evaluate under by storage facilities and entrepreneurs by definition are visionaries, right? There's have to be.

Peter Swain (11:30):

Delusional visionaries, by the way.

Joe Downs (11:32):

Fair enough. I've suffered plenty of delusions, but sometimes we hit on good ideas, right? So the

Peter Swain (11:40):

Visionary- Can I explain that? Because it's actually really relevant to your last point. I'm sorry. The reason I said that was the underpinning of being an entrepreneur is basically you saying, "I know how to do it better than somebody else." You wouldn't invent a product if you're like, "Oh, a new form of COLA." A stupid example. You wouldn't invent a new form of Kohler if you went, "I know that mine is going to taste worse than the others." You wouldn't do that. And it's quite arrogant.

Joe Downs (12:13):

Better or new, right? Introducing something new

Peter Swain (12:16):

Or

Joe Downs (12:17):

A better version of something that exists. Is

Peter Swain (12:19):

That fair? But there's an arrogance to this of being able to ... Which is, I'm saying it's a prerequisite to being a successful entrepreneur, is being delusional and arrogant because you have to say, "I'm going to will my thing into existence with no evidence to tell me that it's going to work. In fact, you've got lots of evidence if you look at any of the statistics to tell you it's probably not going to work and yet you do it anyway. And the reason I said that is going back to your last point. The number one prerequisite of being a successful entrepreneur is being able to believe in the thing that you're building even when the evidence is to the contrary.

Joe Downs (13:00):

Are you trying to mess with my psyche right now at such a fragile point of launching storage models?

Peter Swain (13:05):

Well, actually, I think it's a compliment because it's been a bit of a rocky road and I think you've done incredibly well. It's those moments where you're like, "I believe. I believe. I don't have any evidence, but I believe." Yeah,

Joe Downs (13:18):

That's all I get you through.

Peter Swain (13:21):

But when you're on holiday still working and all that stuff we were just talking about, your ability to actually see the positives greatly diminishes. That's what I was trying to

Joe Downs (13:33):

Get to. 100%. And that's what I'm trying to get to as well. I have felt it, seen it in my own right, because I've been going through the minutia of dotting I's, crossing Ts, blocking and tackling stuff that I don't want to do, stuff that is not my unique ability because I want to be the visionary. I want to be the person that says, "Oh, and then once we do that, we can do this and user X will love this and user Y will need that. " I have felt like a shell of myself in the last several months because I haven't had the chance to let my brain go on vacation because I've been doing the minutia and it's a tornado of emotions there. There's feelings of failure because I'm doing things that maybe I'm not the best person to do. I know I can't do things that I want to do because I don't have time because I have to dot Is and cross T's and get this deliverable done and that deliverable done and deal with this problem and deal with that problem.

(14:52):

And it's just incredibly frustrating from a personal psychological standpoint without getting too ... I'm okay everybody. I'm fine, but you understand what I'm saying where-

Peter Swain (15:09):

100%.

Joe Downs (15:11):

I'm not free to be the visionary that I want to be because I'm bogged down with so much crap.

Peter Swain (15:20):

It's become work, not play.

Joe Downs (15:22):

And it's not fun, right? When you enjoy what you're doing, it doesn't feel like work. When you don't enjoy what you're doing, but you have to do it, it's not play, it's work. And on top of that, up late nights,

Peter Swain (15:36):

Weekends- And just work without a paycheck as well.

Joe Downs (15:41):

100%.

Peter Swain (15:42):

At least if you're working for, I don't know, EY, you're like, "Okay, I hate this, it sucks, but thanks for the $30,000 on the 30th." That makes it feel a bit better.

Joe Downs (15:53):

Yeah. That's always fun to explain to your wife why you're also not making money while you're doing this

Peter Swain (16:00):

Or your husband. Sorry, we're in 2026, Joe.

Joe Downs (16:03):

Is this still the successful idiots podcast or if I'm officially moved to the couch? So introduce Hermes here or is it Hermes or Hermes?

Peter Swain (16:18):

Let's go for Hermes.

Joe Downs (16:19):

Okay. Hermes. I'm sure everyone listening has been hearing a lot about agents for sure. Maybe they haven't heard of Hermes. Might have heard of Open Claw. Is it fair to say Hermes is the Open Claw on steroids but with guardrails? Is that-

Peter Swain (16:36):

Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

Joe Downs (16:38):

Generic way to put it. And that's what I want to get into right now because Peter, I'm only in the very beginning stages of it and then we're going to walk through some stuff later in the show, but for the first time in a long time and I did have Manus working for me for a little bit and it was helping alleviate some of the dotting of the I's and crossing the boring just responding to this email, that type of thing. But then that I outgrew it, let's just say that and it started to just be too expensive and costly and whatever because of all the ... Is it tools or tolls? And I can't even tell. Tokens, whatever.

(17:18):

I see the light. I am now invigorated again. There was a period of time, I'm never going to say it was a dark period in my life in the last two months, but I definitely couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel. I now feel like, oh yeah, the solution is here and I'm only touching the tip of the iceberg of it right now, but I want to address something before we get into Hermes in general. And that's for everyone listening, right? Because when I first heard the word agent, I thought it kind of sounded weird and impersonable Or cold, whatever, something like out of a movie. So I want to talk about the fun part before we get into what it can do. Is that why we name them? Yours is named Jet, not because you're a horribly misguided fan of the New York Jets.

(18:18):

I think there's another reason, right?

Peter Swain (18:21):

It was my first crush as a teenager.

Joe Downs (18:23):

Joan Jett?

Peter Swain (18:25):

No, Jet was a gladiator on the UK TV show.

Joe Downs (18:28):

She was a gladiator.

Peter Swain (18:33):

Okay. Before we go into why we named them, let's talk about something else just very, very briefly if we can, which is what is an agent Because the word is thrown around like it's candy and I was on stage at DC Tech Week at the end of last year and I was on a panel with other experts talking about AI agents and I asked what I thought was a very innocent question and I said, "Before we begin the discussion, what is our definition of an agent?" I was on the stage with five other people and Joe, not one of them could actually define it. And

Joe Downs (19:15):

These are experts.

Peter Swain (19:17):

I mean, some of them selling it, peddling it, national speakers, journalists. I'm like, "Are you kidding?" My language was a bit more fruity, but I'm like, "Are you kidding me? You're going to sit in front of 400 people and you can't even define what an agent is. " So here's my definition that I've used since number one and this is to qualify as an AI agent versus AI like Claude ChatGPT. So what makes something an agent versus a chatbot?

Joe Downs (19:50):

Or a tool even. A

Peter Swain (19:51):

Lot of people

Joe Downs (19:52):

Have

Peter Swain (19:52):

Said

Joe Downs (19:53):

An agent's just a tool you can use. And I was like, "I don't know. That's

Peter Swain (19:56):

How I read it. " So number one, the agent must start itself in the most natural way possible. What I mean by that is if you're asking it to say analyze a transcript of a call, you shouldn't have to tell it there is a transcript of the call. You should not have to go and download the transcript to feed the transcript in. It should detect that a transcript exists and do the process. So that's number one. It must start itself, instantiate itself in the most natural way possible. Criteria number two, it must complete the task to the same degree as a human or better. Now you can define the task very, very small, like move this to here when this happens, great. That would not change whether it is or isn't an agent. It would change how useful the agent was, but it must start itself in the most natural way, number one.

(21:05):

Number two, it must complete the task to the same degree as a human or better. Those are my two. If you can tell me your thing does those two things, then to me, we're now in the world of agentic AI not chat AI.

Joe Downs (21:23):

Okay. I think that's pretty clear.

Peter Swain (21:26):

Yeah. So then with that, why do we name it? We name it because it changes the language that we use because when I've spoke to people across the last three years, at the beginning of their AI journey, they say something like, "It didn't work." When I can move them to he or she, they stop saying it didn't work because you can't say it about he or a she. You get to, why didn't they do what I wanted? And what comes after that if I get it right is people then say, "What did I need to say differently?" So what's happened by the simple act of giving something a name is you've moved it from being a technological engagement to being a communication engagement.

Joe Downs (22:26):

I was going to say it humanizes it a little bit.

Peter Swain (22:28):

You humanize it. By anthropomorphsizing something, you develop a relationship with it and people go, "Well, that's weird." And then I remind them that they probably don't call their dog dog. Dogs aren't human. People give names to their cars. They give names to boats. We give names to planes. When we want to develop a relationship something, your brain needs a hook. Literally, it needs a hook of like, well, what is this thing?

Joe Downs (22:58):

I like

Peter Swain (22:59):

To think

Joe Downs (22:59):

Of it as a personal assistant.

Peter Swain (23:01):

Yep. And yours is called, by the way?

Joe Downs (23:05):

Gritty.

Peter Swain (23:06):

Gritty. Where did that come from?

Joe Downs (23:09):

Well, one of our core values in our office is gritty, grit. It's supposed to be grit, but we had fun with it called a gritty. Why gritty? Because gritty is the name of the Philadelphia Flyers mascot, kind of like a Philadelphia fanatic looking thing. I don't know what it is. Animal.

Peter Swain (23:31):

It's not

Joe Downs (23:31):

An actual animal. Neither is a fanatic. You know the story about Griddy? So Griddy-

Peter Swain (23:37):

You told me, yeah.

Joe Downs (23:39):

It's still a good

Peter Swain (23:39):

Story.

Joe Downs (23:41):

I'll tell it quick. So this is so Philadelphia. So they come out with Griddy, I don't know how many years ago and they introduce it in Philadelphia and we go, "What the hell is that? " It's this big orange folks, Google or I can't believe I said Google. Search using your favorite AI tool, Gritty so you can get a picture of what Griddy looks like. And who, by the way, it's a phenomenal mascot now. Anyway, they come out with gritty and all of Philadelphia is besides them like, "What is this? What have the flyers done? Are you kidding me? " And then I think we sat with it for 48 hours going, "What is wrong with them?" And then the national media catches hold of it and the nation is now going, "What the hell is this? And Philadelphia is God awful looking thing. And what was Philadelphia's response?

(24:38):

F you, that's our gritty." And now he's beloved Philly versus the world folks. Anyway, that is why mine is called Gritty. So it's grit, but it's also humanized even though it's a mascot, but you could actually go see gritty and you go to a Flyers game or you'll see Gritty.

(25:04):

All right, we've got the distinction, that's why we name it. It's more of a, is it fair to say it's not a tool, it's tool-like, but really takes on more qualities that a human personal assistant would take on, or I don't know if quality is the right word to use there, but abilities has more human-like abilities than a tool. Is that fair?

Peter Swain (25:32):

Well, I mean, the answer is quite simply yes, because if you just describe it by the interaction, like for example, let's describe an interaction with the tool. I go to the toolbox, pick up this object, hold it at the wooden end and use the metal end, which I swing in an elbow pivot at a nail.

Joe Downs (25:55):

It's

Peter Swain (25:55):

A hammer. Yep. One of the criteria or one of the truths about a tool is a tool can never help the human become better than the human is at doing the job. The hammer doesn't make you a better craftsman.

Joe Downs (26:18):

Makes you a faster one.

Peter Swain (26:20):

Sure, but not better. You can't do better carpentry by than you have the capability to do. Okay. Let's take a bit easier example. I suck at golf. I am terrible. I'm talking like handicap 32 plus. It does not matter how much I go ... I know you can confirm that. It doesn't matter how much I go and spend on golf clubs. I still suck.

Joe Downs (26:45):

Ah, good point. I tell my kids all the time, it's the putter, not the putter, or the driver, not the

Peter Swain (26:49):

Driver. 100%. You could give Roy McElroy any of the clubs that I say don't work.

Joe Downs (26:58):

And he'll break par. Yeah.

Peter Swain (27:00):

Yeah. So it's not the tool can't make rotten oranges integrate orange juice. Doesn't matter how good an orange juice juicer you get, rotten oranges that equal bad orange juice. So it's one of the qualities of the tool. Whereas if you describe my interactions with Jet, they sound like I wake up in the morning and I don't want to kind of like do a spoil on the rest we're going to talk about and I get a report around X, Y, Z. And then throughout the day bur and bur and bur happen and I get pinged on Slack by Jet to let me know they happened. The way that I communicate with my actual human assistant and my AI agent are exactly the same. I brief both of them on Slack.

Joe Downs (27:54):

I think I'm right enough

Peter Swain (27:59):

For

Joe Downs (27:59):

The context of this to say it's more like a human personal assistant. So why don't we just jump into it? So here are some of the things that I'm starting to set up. So some of them I know, but I'm going to ask because I'm the idiot, I'm going to ask on behalf of the listener. So without getting technical, Peter, give me the, yes you can, this is how you do it, or these are all the things you could do, right? So mine's gritty. I want gritty checking my email every 30 minutes and telling me only what I actually need to look at. Realistic?

Peter Swain (28:38):

100%. I'm going to take a few iterations of self-learning to get there, but yes, 100%.

Joe Downs (28:46):

Okay. So I can have my Hermes agent, which I've named Gritty and yours is Jet and folks, name it whatever you want. You know what, by the way, I almost went with Kit from Night Wolf.

Peter Swain (28:58):

Oh, nice. Remember? That'd be cool.

Joe Downs (29:01):

There's something about, I think it was because it was a car and I'm not using the cars. Anyway-

Peter Swain (29:07):

Kit was not a car. Kit was an intelligence in a car. How disrespectful of you.

Joe Downs (29:13):

Yeah, but the car also had some pretty incredible, like it was bulletproof. It's

Peter Swain (29:18):

True. They've got to bring it back. Okay, let's move on. Come on. This is a rabbit hole that I want to go down, but not helpful.

Joe Downs (29:24):

All right. I want to know this is like where we enter wishlist world. How much time do we waste on emails and checking emails constantly as entrepreneurs? I don't want to do it anymore. I want to know when I have something important, right? Check, you can do it. I want spam going to spam, which most email programs do. But the promos, you sign up for something or you sign up for this, that, and then now you didn't check the right box. Now you're getting their promos. If I left my email inbox untouched for an entire day and Easily over 250 emails and that's with already unsubscribing to 500, right? Oh,

Peter Swain (30:06):

By the way, fun fact as an ex marketing, you should never unsubscribe from any email. Do you know that?

Joe Downs (30:12):

Why?

Peter Swain (30:12):

Because as soon as you do that, they now know it's a valid email and the value of selling that email to somebody else has just gone up from around $10 to $40.

Joe Downs (30:20):

I was pretty sure that I feel like there's some companies where you unsubscribe and then doing so you end up on like 25

Peter Swain (30:26):

More. You do literally because you've just said this is a valid email and they didn't know it was valid. So this is a fun thing. You should always just archive and throw them in the folder.

Joe Downs (30:33):

Folks, it was worth sharing the show just for that one nugget

Peter Swain (30:36):

Like that. I genuinely, I've sat with people that are like, "Oh, here's our list of non-validated emails. We'll sell those to you for this. And here's our list of people that have unsubscribed. We'll sell those to you for this.

Joe Downs (30:48):

" Oh my God. Plus they know everything about you. All right. So I want promos handled. I can't think of a great example, but you know there's emails you get where you just have to respond yes received or yep confirmed or I want-

Peter Swain (31:09):

Well, I got one on Wednesday. I want to

Joe Downs (31:10):

Deal with

Peter Swain (31:11):

Them. One on Wednesday came in because the temperature is so hot. We won't go into that, but this is from the school, because the temperature is so hot, you have the option of whether you're bringing the kids in tomorrow or not, but please reply to us if you are not going to bring them in, because if you're not going to bring them in, it'll be an unauthorized absence unless you let us know. And Jet said, "Which way are you leaning?" And I said, "I don't know. Ask Liz on Slack what she thinks." Sent a message to Liz. Pete's wondering what you think. Replied. She came back to me. It was in Jet came back to me and said, "Yeah, Liz thinks we should give them a home." I'm like, great, let the school know.

Joe Downs (31:52):

So that ties into my next thing. Exactly. And you're doing us all through Telegram, right? So you've just telegram- You can use WhatsApp or hundreds of different, but Telegram. Actually, it was even offered that I could set up SMS, so I could have done this through my text messaging. I set up through Telegram. I was comfortable with that. So smart routing is another feature that I'm setting up right now. I'm a guest on a podcast. Whenever they release it, they send us all the transcript, the artwork, the promos they do, they want us. Well, they send it to me. Well, now I've got to take that and then forward that to Giselle, my marketing team, whatever. I don't want to even want to deal with it. I didn't even want to see the email. I'm in the process of setting that up. That's no brainer for an agent.

Peter Swain (32:46):

So easy that once you set the first two or three up, you'll find within a couple of weeks it starts saying to you, "You normally send this to Pete. Should I just add that to the list?" You're like, "Yeah."

Joe Downs (33:02):

And so folks, if you're listening, what you just hopefully picked up on the fact that it's learning too. It's learning our behaviors. This might be a minute here, three minutes there, but you start stacking those up in emails, 100 emails a day that I don't have to respond to.

Peter Swain (33:19):

That's a lot of minutes. The estimate is that we have this word multitasking, which if people don't know, has been proven time and time again, humans can't do. Can't do it. It's physically impossible. We can't do it. What we can do is very quickly context shift. But if we context shift out of flow state, it can take as a minimum 15 minutes to get back in it. So answering the one email may only take you 10 seconds, but it will cost you at least 15 minutes and 10 seconds of productive time.

Joe Downs (33:54):

Ready? Here's one of my absolute ... I can't stand this. And I know there are Calendly exists and apparently you can do this in your Google calendar. I still haven't figured out how to do it, but scheduling.

Peter Swain (34:07):

Oh, simple. You

Joe Downs (34:08):

Just talk- Are you free? All right, give me three dates and times. Oh, they don't work for you. Now you're back and forth and if you got more than two people, forget about it. Can my agent handle all this? One am I

Peter Swain (34:20):

Free and check my schedule? Agent handle this one, Joe, but I did this one a couple of weeks ago. If whoever I did this to listens to this, it wasn't you, it was somebody else. I said to Jet, I need to send this meeting, this invite, but I really don't want to do it. And he advice was, "Well, I see they're on Pacific time, so why don't I send them only invite times that wouldn't work for

Joe Downs (34:47):

Them?" That wouldn't? Yeah,

Peter Swain (34:49):

I didn't want to meet with them.

Joe Downs (34:52):

That's great. I miss that part.

Peter Swain (34:55):

When they came back to Jet saying- That's the next

Joe Downs (34:57):

Level.

Peter Swain (34:58):

That would be three o'clock in the morning for me. Does Pete have any other time? Jet actually turned around and said, "Sorry, Pete's quite focused on maintaining his boundaries about when he works when he's with his family." So that would be the only times that would be available. Brilliant. I was like, "This is the best thing ever." My agent just shut the door on somebody politely with an idea that I wouldn't have thought of. Amazing. I can text Jet now saying, "I need to meet with Joe." And the first thing he'll do is go, "Joe who?" Because he'll look through my email, find the Joe's, but it will probably go ... I'm willing to bet at least 10 bucks, he'll probably go, "I'm presuming you mean Joe Downs because of the frequency of communication at the beginning recently." And I go, "Yep. So great. How important is it would probably be the next question." I go, "Not that important, but I'd like to chat in the next week about X, Y, Z or needs to be today or needs to be tomorrow." And she will do exactly what you said.

(35:56):

Go onto my Google calendar, find the gaps, email you, send you options and back and forth. Now where this gets really cool is when Jet can email gritty, that's where this starts to get really fun. But we're a few months away from that, but that's where we're heading towards.

Joe Downs (36:11):

Agents, talking to agents. Okay. This one I have set up, but it's in development mode, meaning I'm not sure exactly what this is going to look like a month from now versus what it already looks like today. If you're an entrepreneur, lean in for this one. My daily morning briefing. So I have it set up at 70 AM. I get on my Telegram app I get a message in the message is calendar preview for the day, flagged emails, urgent items. This is all one summary, article digest. So actually that's at night. So you know how you get emails, people, "Oh, you could check out this article. You should read this. You should do that. " Whether they're industry articles or not, I get so excited. I'm all over the place right now. At night, I'll do this one first. At night, I have a report scheduled to give me a summary of every article that was sent to me to read.

(37:11):

It's going to read the articles, summarize them, give me the link in case I want to read the full article. But in the morning, back to that. In fact, here's what happened today. I got the calendar for the day,

(37:25):

Any emails that came in last night or in the middle of the night that seem important, which shouldn't be too many in the morning, tasks. So it's reading my tasks. Hey, these are the tasks that you really have to do. Overdue tasks. Hey, this one's been, you've been putting this one off for a week. The weather, I have it giving me two quotes, one for me inspirational and motivational, one for me to share with my kids. I'm going to send them a text every morning with an inspirational quote. I got a sports update in there. In case I missed anything, what's going on with the Phillies, Eagles, Villanova, Penn State. I'm close with the speech. I want to know how Jordan Spieth's doing in tournaments. And whatever your focus is, your sports focus, your entertainment focus, maybe you're into Love Island. I don't know. You want to know what happened, what's going on or what the gossip is.

(38:19):

That's all in one morning. I wake up, boom. I'm sitting in bed, I'm waking up. That's my go- to in the morning. I want to read that first.

(38:30):

When I go to ... Oh, I scheduled this as a ... And I'm going to have you quickly break this down, but I've created another skill that anytime we go to schedule something or someone asks me, "Can you make this meeting, this trip, this speaking engagement with this? " It checks the Downs family calendar for any personal conflicts in case I miss them, especially the further out they are. So I have them check my daughter's going to college, she's a dancer, do I have to be away that weekend? My boy's sports schedule, family obligation schedule, all that stuff. I feel like I'm doing a lot of talking. People really want to hear you. But I'm so excited about all these things I'm using for. What am I missing? Actually, I'll tell you this one. You know I go to Strategic Coach.

(39:22):

I have it set up so that, and I haven't seen this work yet and I love your advice on this. Now that I'm able or it will be soon back to being the visionary, I've got ideas. I want to say to Jack, Jack, for storage moguls, I want you to do this or that or here's an idea. How could we go run with this, right? Figure it out. I have it set up. I haven't tried it yet. Tell me where the fail is here of using the Strategic Coach tools. So one of them is an impact filter, which says, "All right, here's the project, here's what's at stake, here's what success looks like, here's why it's so important, what could go wrong, who are the stakeholders? How do I support them?" I have it asking me all those questions when I say, "Here's a project or an idea for X." Is it going to work?

Peter Swain (40:19):

Is

Joe Downs (40:20):

It capable of that?

Peter Swain (40:21):

So just back to the daily briefing, just want to offer this to people because if you suffer from this, this will be your biggest unlock probably on this whole call. The biggest thing that's made a difference to me on my daily briefing is I suffer pretty badly from allergies. Getting a pollen count is a godsend.

Joe Downs (40:43):

So what do you do with that information?

Peter Swain (40:45):

Well, if the pollen count's high, then I know when I can walk around, when I can walk, when I can't walk, when I need to be in, I know whether I need to put eyedrops in, it changes what I wear. It literally changes a whole host of different stuff. I added in something the other day, which I think you might like, which is a me time countdown. So it requires me to go, "Okay, I've scheduled some time for myself, like a round of golf or the driving range or getting my haircut." And it will literally say, "Hey, Pete, it's two days since. It's three days since. It's four days since." And at seven days it's told to interrupt everything we do literally at seven days if I haven't said, "Yeah, I've taken some time away from everything," it will answer everything I ask it to do with, "Have you scheduled some downtime yet?"

Joe Downs (41:37):

So that's actually another strategic coach principle, and I'm glad you just brought that up. It's called free times. You're supposed to schedule your buffer time and free time and focus time. So you're putting in rules in place guardrails for your own personal sanity.

Peter Swain (41:55):

One of the things I love- So that you can

Joe Downs (41:56):

Relax your brain and that's brilliant.

Peter Swain (41:58):

And we've spoken about this in the other AI conversations, but it's even more prevalent here. One of the things I love about AI is the ability to be completely vulnerable because this thing cannot judge you. It's physically impossible for this thing to judge you. So you can tell it what's really happening with the cash flow or the weight or the relationship or your sex life or your mental health or your relationship with God or your kids or the affair. Literally whatever it is that's happening, this thing doesn't care. So one of the things that I've kind of really leaned into is letting it know my weaknesses. I am terrible, terrible at delegation, terrible at delegation. I have a pattern and I play the same pattern and I've played it for a decade, which is I don't delegate, I don't delegate, I don't delegate, I don't delegate.

(42:54):

I then dump everything in one go onto somebody and then I get pissed off that they don't do it well and I reinforce the fact that I shouldn't delegate because people let me down.

Joe Downs (43:08):

So this is helping you delegate. I actually built that in too. Sorry, I haven't built it in. This was an idea I had. I'm glad you just said that. I want it to start to tell me

Peter Swain (43:20):

Who

Joe Downs (43:20):

I should delegate certain things to.

Peter Swain (43:23):

So in what's called the soul file, the overarching personality, I have these, I am really bad at this for you to regard yourself as successful, you should do this. Okay. So it has in there, don't you think that's something that Liz should do, not you? I love it. So it will literally, as I say, I need to do this or I'm working on this, it'll go, "Why are you working on that? " And it would just nudge me.

Joe Downs (43:55):

Now, do you have the Colby Clifton strengths and print profiles of

Peter Swain (44:04):

Everyone in your organization? I've done Clifton.

Joe Downs (44:07):

Because I think having the agent have access to those could inform the agent as to who would be best and on top of that, and this is something I have to set up, I want it to help me communicate better with my staff and family

Peter Swain (44:30):

Even

Joe Downs (44:31):

And everyone. If I know this person is a X on the Colby scale and Y on the print and Clifton, whatever it is you're using, disc profile, whatever it is, even when it writes an email, if I say, "Hey Grady, send an email to Gretchen to take care of this, " I want it worded such that it's received, how should I say pleasantly by her or the way

Peter Swain (45:01):

She- Productive, productivity, that word.

Joe Downs (45:07):

Fine, but also in a way that

Peter Swain (45:12):

Doesn't sound like- Aligned with her communication.

Joe Downs (45:14):

Yes, aligned with her communication is a better way to say it. Because I think that it just smooths everything over. There's less friction involved if it's communicating on your behalf in the best possible way.

Peter Swain (45:28):

100%. All

Joe Downs (45:28):

Right. Peter, we've only scratched the surface of all the abilities of an agent, but what we just talked about was easily 30 minutes to three hours a day of savings, depending on how you use it, just the things we talked about. There's a million more, I'm sure I'm still learning them myself and as we retrain our brains to think about how we can use these, the sky's the limit. Let me ask you a question again, not technical. How long and how would somebody set this up? How long would it take to set up a functioning agent even to do what I've just talked about that I either already have in place or want in place

Peter Swain (46:24):

And

Joe Downs (46:25):

How would they do it?

Peter Swain (46:29):

Once you've got over the learning of how to do it, all the use cases we just went through six hours total maybe YouTube university can get you through most of the technical stuff I would say because once you've got it up and running, you're just firing across natural language. You're not coding, you're giving it almost closer to a job description. So there's a lot of variability, but if you say, "Hey, I need you to check my email every day and I need you to classify them in the following way." It's literally going to take you 30 seconds to do that first pass and probably a good few hours to train it through. But I guess my answer, Joe, is certainly not longer than it would take you to teach an assistant to do it.

Joe Downs (47:23):

And your assistant works nine to five maybe

Peter Swain (47:26):

100%. And when they leave, you've got to redo it again and again and again. But that's really the best way to think of the time that it would take is exactly the same time as it would take you to tell, because all you're doing is telling the agent what you want it to do.

Joe Downs (47:44):

And by the way, what we've talked about, your assistant couldn't do everything that I just said. They can do some of it. They could do some of it, but they couldn't go out. And

Peter Swain (47:51):

As you said, you're at 1% ... Do you want to know what I did with mine last night? I said, I need you to become a new BDR for this industry, for this one company that I run.

Joe Downs (48:05):

BDR?

Peter Swain (48:06):

Business development representative. Go and find me 500 new leads a day, email them, follow up with them and put them on my setter's calendar for him to close. Thanks.

Joe Downs (48:22):

Are you saying you could ... Wow. Are you saying

Peter Swain (48:25):

You could

Joe Downs (48:26):

Create a job description and hire the agent to do the job?

Peter Swain (48:29):

Yes.

Joe Downs (48:30):

Quote unquote, hire the agent.

Peter Swain (48:32):

That's exactly what I did. It started running this morning so far it has found 120 leads. It has personalized the email and the outreach to each of them based on press releases that they've written based on articles that they've written based on LinkedIn things that they've done and it's sent them an email saying, "Hey, Joe, da da da, congratulations. We run this. Is it worth me handing you off to one of my team to book a call?" This started today and it's going to follow up with them and follow up with them and follow up with them and follow up with them.

Joe Downs (49:05):

I mean, it's a no-brainer,

Peter Swain (49:06):

Right? That's a $2,000 a month job minimum.

Joe Downs (49:14):

Someone listening is like, "I got to have this. " Obviously there's access to you. You guys can set this up.

Peter Swain (49:23):

Yeah. I mean, that would be my first recommendation. Go to peterswain.com and hit the buy now button. We've got a program running at the moment where we do all the technical stuff and then we enable you and teach you a little bit on how to set these up because obviously everybody's just slightly different. They may not want Villanova, for example. I mean, they'd be crazy not to, obviously.

Joe Downs (49:44):

Crazy.

Peter Swain (49:45):

Yeah. Crazy, but Villanova might not be there kind of thing for some wild reason.

Joe Downs (49:49):

We

Peter Swain (49:50):

Got the Pope

Joe Downs (49:51):

Just basically win the NBA championship.

Peter Swain (49:54):

As I said, crazy, but there are people out there. You just told me there's people out there that listen to other people apart from us. We've all got to move on. So we do all that techie geeky bit so that they can just do the fun, useful bit. If that's not the path they want to go, then it's just a YouTube university. How do I set up a Hermes agent and go through that tech piece yourself?

Joe Downs (50:17):

So you can do it yourself, you

Peter Swain (50:19):

Do

Joe Downs (50:19):

University, you'll find it. Shortcut, do what I did, go to Peter. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with you on a Zoom, whatever, got a little bit of a how-to. I think you deliver, this is how you create the skills. And now it's just like, what can I imagine?

Peter Swain (50:44):

And if you remember, Joe, that was your biggest block because when I first spoke to you on you, there was a little bit, if you don't mind me putting this out there, you had a little bit- Still there. I don't get it. Once it do it, I don't get it. And then you went, hang on a second. Are you just saying that if I do this and this, then it can do this? I'm like, yes. And then two

Joe Downs (51:04):

Days

Peter Swain (51:04):

Later-

Joe Downs (51:07):

Because it feels unbelievable, which is why there's the mental block. I don't think I'm that different than most people.

Peter Swain (51:13):

That's why I wanted to call it out. It's this what a I'm a doer. And then it's like, oh, and then it's now it's like galloping. It's like, okay, I've done this and I've done this and it's doing this and I was doing this. And we see the same path with most people.

Joe Downs (51:28):

In fact, I'd say I'll bet you I'm like everyone that listens to this because if the people ... Thi podcast, I don't want to throw us another boss here, but it's probably beneath the tech person who already knows they can do all this, right? I think we're representing, at least I'm representing 99% of us out there who are like, "What? That can't be real.That can't be right."

Peter Swain (51:52):

But even with the tech people, they spend a lot of time doing cool stuff with the tech, but the exploring how it maps to the business, honestly, that's a different skill that I don't often see from that side of the aisle. Last

Joe Downs (52:10):

Thing, and then I want to wrap this up. I think you tell me if I'm wrong, but I think you want to, no matter what, I mean, what you haven't said so far isn't blowing your mind. I don't know what else to tell you, but I think you need this setup because I'm predicting, and you tell me if I'm wrong, you are going to be able to buy skills based on your job that you can connect to your agent. If I'm a real estate agent, I'll bet you there's going to be a real estate agent package out there of pre-program skills to find buyers and get listings or whatever it is that takes your business and puts it on steroids. I'll bet you you're going to be able to buy that for a couple hundred bucks or a thousand bucks or whatever the number's going to be, it's going to be well worth it.

(52:59):

The ROI is going to be insane. I'll bet you're going to be able to do that someday. You think I'm off base there?

Peter Swain (53:06):

That's exactly what we're building at the moment, but the way we focused on it, which I think is quite fun, is we're focusing on a two-way marketplace. Well, I want people that write those skills. I could write the realtor pack, right? But I'm not a realtor. So it's going to be my assumed knowledge of how realtors would work.

Joe Downs (53:28):

Oh, okay.

Peter Swain (53:29):

So it's going to be app

Joe Downs (53:30):

Developers is what

Peter Swain (53:31):

You're saying. No, I want realtors to write the skills and then- Sell them to

Joe Downs (53:36):

Other

Peter Swain (53:37):

Realtors. Decide to sell to other people.

Joe Downs (53:39):

Yeah. Wow. I think it's

Peter Swain (53:41):

Going to

Joe Downs (53:42):

Be

Peter Swain (53:42):

Fun. That's exactly where this goes of- We just load this thing up.

Joe Downs (53:47):

This agentic AI, which it feels like a new phase.

Peter Swain (53:52):

It is 100% is.

Joe Downs (53:55):

And it almost feels as if not more exciting than just being introduced to AI.

Peter Swain (54:01):

To me, I used to call them the Excalibur moments when I felt like I was touching the sword of Albion and like, whoa, everything just changed. ChatGPT was the first. Claud code was the second for me of like, whoa, everything just changed. And Agentic AI is the third where I'm like, whoa, this is different.

Joe Downs (54:25):

I feel like I'm in a new world. I couldn't be more excited about it.

Peter Swain (54:29):

Because AI, using AI, using chatbots, we've spoke about this a few times actually, Joe, actually gives you more opportunity. It gives you more opportunity, but it actually really hurts your mental health in some ways because there's so much you realize you can now do. You end up up till four o'clock in the morning because you're creating all this stuff. What this does, what Agentic AI does is it gives you back your time.

Joe Downs (54:56):

Exactly.

Peter Swain (54:57):

Which to me could be the most precious thing that we've ever achieved with AI.

Joe Downs (55:02):

Which back to the beginning is going to give us back our brains to-

Peter Swain (55:08):

To then find the opportunity.

Joe Downs (55:10):

Relax and

Peter Swain (55:11):

Go

Joe Downs (55:11):

Back to being the opportunity-

Peter Swain (55:12):

Be human. Again,

Joe Downs (55:14):

Being human. Yeah. Being an entrepreneur again.

Peter Swain (55:16):

Instead of being an automaton that masquerades as an entrepreneur so often.

Joe Downs (55:22):

I am so excited for this new era of AI. And folks, I understand if you're like, "What? I just got into AI. I get it. But you need to do that. You need to lean into this. This is a game changer of game changers. Folks, I hope this episode blew your mind because it blew mine and it's still blowing mine and it's I'm sure next week and the week after that, my mind's still going to be blown. I'm probably going to be tuning in with, I got it to do this each week and you'll probably get tired of it or not. Hopefully I'll be sharing possibilities with you. Share this with somebody honestly that needs to hear this because it doesn't matter what they do for a living. Everyone needs a Hermes agent. Everyone needs an agentic personal assistant. That's what this is. You don't have to overthink it.

(56:14):

It's not that difficult. You just heard it's 30 or so minutes of the setup and it will change your life. It'll change your business. Spread this podcast like wildfire to your friends, your family, people in your business, they will thank you for it. For Peter Sweene, I'm Joe Downs. We are your successful idiots. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.