← Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
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- [00:00]
John Gafford
Today's episode of Escaping the Drift is brought to you by Mando. Are you somebody that stinks? Sounds crazy? Or more to the point, you got a teenager that stinks because, wow. This Mando stuff, they sent me a package of it to try out. And if you've got that weird odor emanating out of your teen's room, try Mando all over deodorant. Because this package they got us, man, I put it on the. I put it on the boy and I gotta tell you, he in this room but never smelled so good. I mean, literally, you can use this stuff all over you. I'm talking about your feet, your butt crack, anywhere, anywhere you got skin. This stuff will work as a deodorant. It was created by a doctor. It lasts for up to 72 hours. And all of this stuff is baking soda free and paraben free. So if you want to try it out, if you, if you yourself are stinky or you got a stinky teen, I'm telling you, this stuff will change your life. You can get right now Mando's starter pack, which is purple, perfect for new customers. It comes with a solid stick deodorant cream tube deodorant. Two free products of your choice, like a mini body wash or deodorant wipes. You get free shipping. And as a special offer for our listeners, new customers get $5 off a starter pack with our exclusive code that that means that you're getting 40% off of this starter pack. Just use the code gafford when you go to shopmando.com that's user code gafford@shopmando.com you're going to get 40% off. So support our show, let them know that we sent you. Obviously, this is a paid advertiser, which is how we get to be able to do what we do for you guys. So check them out. Spells smell fresher, stay drier, boost your confidence from head to toe. Try Mando. And now, Escaping the Drift. And now escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, Escape the Drift. And it's time to start right now. Back again. Back again for another episode of. Like it says in the opening, man, the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And today, piped in live from the Interwebs. Now that we have our interwebs fixed. We have somebody that is really a master of time. This is the guy that entrepreneurs that are drowning in task and drowning in all kinds of chaos call. This is the guy that they call when they need help. He is the founder of the less doing movement. He is the author of the Replaceable Founder, the idea of execution, the art of doing less. He's helped thousands of business owners work smarter, not harder. And he turned his personal battle with Crohn's disease into the blueprint for ultimate efficiency. And now for you today, he's going to show you how to optimize, automate and outsource everything. If you are somebody that is trapped by your business and don't have enough time, this today, folks, is going to be the podcast to you. Welcome to the program, ladies and gentlemen. This is Ari Meisel. Ari, how are you, man?
- [03:10]
Ari Meisel
Hey, thanks for having me back.
- [03:12]
John Gafford
No, I appreciate it. So for those of you guys listening, Ari was nice enough to come back again. We had a major technical difficulty that crashed this entire thing about 30 minutes in. And he is taking time to spend with us again. So thank you once again for your understanding. Ari, I appreciate you, man.
- [03:27]
Ari Meisel
I do, absolutely. Sometimes do overs are a good thing.
- [03:31]
John Gafford
I know. So let's talk a little bit. Let's start out like I always like to start out with the nature versus nurture part of what we do. So somebody that is high functioning as you are, tell me about early Ari Young Ari. What do you think burned that type of. Burned that India?
- [03:48]
Ari Meisel
So that's a good question. I think that there was a really interesting statistic that I read a long time ago, which was from the national foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, which said that 74% of young entrepreneurs come from households where the father is physically or emotionally absent and the mother is overbearing for whatever reason. You can draw some extrapolations. So that was mine, my setup. My father is very emotionally absent, not physically absent. And my mother's a Jewish mother. So overbearing. And I guess that just like squeezes out this need to overachieve and get recognition and all sorts of things which I end up having to fix later as an adult in therapy. Therapy. But that's the start of my first company when I was 12. I started working as a model when I was nine and I was doing children's birthday parties as a magician before that, believe it or not. So I've always, always been working.
- [04:43]
John Gafford
What was the first company you started when you were 12?
- [04:46]
Ari Meisel
Website design. So it was a Company called Lion Text. Ari means lion in Hebrew and text was technology extraordinaire. It's like the lamest thing ever. Lion Text. So I've had like eight or more companies at this point. And I find like every company I've gotten involved in is basically like something that I like and then I'm good at and then somebody offers to pay me. And so that's what you know. In 1994 I was 12. And in 1994 you either got a 12 year old who knew HTML or you hired some giant ad company to do a website for $300,000. So I made a website for my father's art gallery and then someone saw it and asked if I would do theirs and ended up doing like 150 or so websites before I turned 16.
- [05:30]
John Gafford
Being that you've always kind of had that entrepreneur dream, have you ever had a job? Have you ever worked for somebody else?
- [05:36]
Ari Meisel
So interestingly enough, yes, I've had several jobs. Many, many, many jobs actually. And they just don't last very long.
- [05:43]
John Gafford
Yeah, I always like to say that people that function very highly as entrepreneurs are what I like to call chronically unemployable.
- [05:50]
Ari Meisel
Yeah.
- [05:51]
John Gafford
Would you say that's you? For sure.
- [05:53]
Ari Meisel
I get it. I would be a terrible. I would have. I mean, I was a terrible employee, I think, in some ways, not because of like quality of work, because I was like always second guessing the bosses and stuff like that. I have worked for Freddie Mac, big mortgage company. I've worked for Mac Cosmetics, which is part of Estate Lauder. I worked my last job before, my very last job, which I guess was now 23 years ago, was in real estate development with a Japanese real estate development company that was doing work in Austin. But that lasted about six months. And then since then, no, I have not worked for anybody.
- [06:29]
John Gafford
Here's a question about that. Because I know which way I leaned coming out of that same situation. But do you find that you took away from the bosses that you had into your companies? Do you think you took more positive things of what they did or did you see things that they did that you perceived as negative, that you're like, I'm never going to do that?
- [06:50]
Ari Meisel
Yeah, I think there's a lot more negatives. So like, Freddie Mac is a good example. So Freddie Mac is the big government organization for mortgages and stuff. So I got there for a summer internship and I had seven bosses that I met my first day. All seven of them gave me a project to work on. And then all seven of them Went to some convention for, like a week, and I finished all of the work that they had given me that day, that first day, and then was just like, you know, bouncing around for the rest of the day. I went to. Actually, I grew up in New York City, so, like the. The Lincolns at Tyson's Corner or the Tyson. I don't know. It was some big mall in Maryland. That was, like, mind blowing for me. I spent more time at that mall the first week than I did working at Freddie Mac. Plus, the company had flex hours, so you had to do 7 hours and 45 minutes of work any. Any given day. But the building operated 24. 7. So I'd come in at like, 5 and be done by lunch, essentially, and then just be done, so you're done for the next. A lot of weird ways to organize it. I wouldn't say a government organization is necessarily the most efficient. Yeah. So I definitely learned more about what not to do.
- [07:57]
John Gafford
Would you say there's anybody from that young time of your life that stands out as a mentor that you can say, this was the person that I kind of modeled after?
- [08:06]
Ari Meisel
I don't know that I modeled for, say after it, but I definitely had several mentors, actually. And maybe the most impactful was actually in college is a guy who's still alive named Michael Tomczyk, who ran the Innovation center at Wharton. And I worked for him while I was there. And Michael's sort of big claim to fame is he was one of the original founders of the Commodore 64.
- [08:30]
John Gafford
Oh, wow.
- [08:31]
Ari Meisel
And wrote the book on personal computer wars, essentially. Really fascinating. But he was great. He was an army officer. Just really, really interesting. And was an important part of my growing up, I'd say, in a lot of ways.
- [08:48]
John Gafford
Yeah. I think the Commodore 64 kind of summed up my childhood, which was, you know, everybody was getting the Commodore 64, but my mom was on a budget. So we got the Vic 20, which was like the model down. Yeah, there it is. Yeah.
- [09:00]
Ari Meisel
But this is what I had a little bit after you, I guess.
- [09:03]
John Gafford
Yeah, yeah. So we had, like, the Vic 20, which was like. And all your friends look, you know, look down their nose at you like, oh, you can't get the 64. You could only get the 20. Yeah, that was the story.
- [09:15]
Ari Meisel
I remember when a friend of mine. It was like such sour grapes. A friend of mine got a 28.8bond modem, and you don't even need that if you're running a business. 14, fourth. Fine.
- [09:28]
John Gafford
I know you're like, you're hating up at him, you're like, no, it doesn't work. Oh, my gosh. So at what point now you went to Wharton, which, you know, we talked about a little bit on the last podcast, that we'll never see light. A. To me, that's like the super bowl of business is. I know you didn't take it as that much of a compliment. I guess us normies looking from the outside in, we see it that way. How did that experience kind of change you, shape you, and what was the value you got out of that?
- [09:56]
Ari Meisel
Yeah, you know, it's interesting, people. There's obviously a lot of cloud around Wharton, and I'm very happy that I went there. And it's definitely opened doors for me to be there, that I went there. There's no question. But, like, it's been for a very, very long time, it's been a known thing that, like, Harvard produces more CEOs and Wharton produces more operations analyst kind of people. So it does a much better job of creating, like, human machines, I guess, in a way, but it doesn't necessarily create leaders. And I hate to overgeneralize, but that's one of the things that was, like, a big issue when I was there. The other thing is that the entrepreneurship major had basically gone defunct in the 90s. So while I was there, I actually worked with a few other students and we recreated it and redesigned it from the ground up, the entrepreneurship major. But Wharton, I don't even know now if Wharton is in the top 20 schools for entrepreneurship. Absent is kind of like the gold standard. So it kind of depends what you want and what you think you want, what kind of experience you want. But I was there for three years, so I graduated a year early, and I graduated with two majors and two minors and a terrible GPA that, you know, I got a job right out of college, obviously, but, like, it was. It was like a 2.68 GPA, which I think is barely passing. And I have a handwritten personal letter from the dean thanking me for my service to the school. So, like, it. That was just how I operated. You know, I. I knew what I was there for, and it was not to get a job at Goldman.
- [11:24]
John Gafford
Right. Well, that, you know, it's really interesting that you say that, because I think people think so linear in opportunities like that, like, graduate top of your class, then get a job at Goldman. Like, that's the linear way to do it. But you. Probably your recommendation from the dean thanking you or the president University was probably worth as much as a 4.0 would have been to real world executives, Right?
- [11:52]
Ari Meisel
Exactly. Yeah. And that's what I always said. So, like, another good example of that is that I had this incredible real estate development class with and the teacher was the former CFO of Trammell Crow. So like big, big time real estate guy. And the class was so cool because every week we would do a case study on a real project that had been developed, and the next week he would bring in the person who developed it. The guy was very connected and just very, very cool. And I was doing terribly in the class and I knew that I wanted to be a real estate developer, but my analysis. So I was. It's really funny. This is like really sort of like exemplifies how this works. So we had to do these one page executive summaries, essentially. So we would have hundreds of pages. These cases would take hours and hours and hours. And the very first line of the page was, I would invest in this project or I would not invest in this project. And then you have to give an analysis. So in the entire class, which I had to get a permit to take the class, it was an MBA class, I always got the right answer in terms of investing or not investing, but my analysis was terrible. So on paper it didn't make sense, but I just knew like, what, what made sense for a good project. And we met. I met with him at one point. I was like, I'm getting really bad grades in your class, but I really want to do this for a living. And he's like, yeah, look, if you, if you try to get a job somewhere, I would be surprised if you make it six months. Like, you need to go do this, this and this. And it was. He was a mentor too. And so what I always say is like, I got a shitty grade in real estate development. It was like, I got a C minus in real estate, which I ended UP doing for 25 years. But of all the people in my class that got A's, I don't know how many of them are still in touch with the teacher.
- [13:30]
John Gafford
Sure, yeah. Because they don't remember him. So the teacher obviously recognized that you had. It's odd that you're teaching a class that's based in math and science effectively, but you also understand there's an art to it. That kind of. The art side of it is where the real success comes from. Because I'd like to think that the people that are really successful in business depend on those that think linear for data. That helps them give them data points and make decisions. But at the end of the day, there's always kind of a nuance that runs between the numbers that if you can't see that, you're not going to get there.
- [14:05]
Ari Meisel
Right. Exactly. And also, you have to be able to connect the dots to the real world. A really good example, actually, is what's happening right now in the world with tariffs. If you look at Homo economicus, the perfect version of somebody who responds the right way to economic changes, like, you learn this in macroeconomics. In the first year of college, 20% increase in tariffs should reduce a 20% reduction in demand. That's how it should work. But we can't grow coffee in America. Some people still want Swiss chocolate, even if it's double the price. Take those things into account. That's the context that really matters of.
- [14:45]
John Gafford
How does that actually affect the real world. Let me ask you this. Now, obviously, when did you get diagnosed with Crohn's disease? Because that kind of started this whole journey that you're on now. When did that happen?
- [14:55]
Ari Meisel
So I had just finished this really big real estate development project in upstate New York in Binghamton, and I was 23.
- [15:03]
John Gafford
So you're 23. And for those that don't understand what Crohn's disease is and don't want to Google it, how did you know you had it? How was it affecting you? What was it?
- [15:12]
Ari Meisel
Yeah, so I didn't actually. I didn't know what it was in retrospect. I'd actually been having symptoms since I was 14, but it was so infrequent that we never got it checked out. And so Crohn's is a chronic inflammatory condition that affects the digestive tract. It is considered to be incurable by the medical community, and it is very debilitating, very painful. And for most people, it means frequent trips to the bathroom, not being able to sort of draw nutrients effectively out of your food. But for me, I had what's called the obstructive kind. So basically, food would get stuck in my intestines and create blockages and create scarring. And it's one of the most painful things, actually, like a human being can experience is the stretching of your intestines.
- [15:58]
John Gafford
Oh, God. Yeah. I had a bout once with diverticulitis once, and I've heard that it's similar to that. So to have what I had just flukishly one time, to have that as a repetitive thing, I can't even imagine. Dude, that's dreadful. Yeah, dreadful thing. But how did that change the trajectory you were on into where you are now, obviously that was a catalyst. I know you've talked about that.
- [16:24]
Ari Meisel
Yeah. So I've been working these crazy hours. I was working in construction, like hands on in Construction for three years at that point. And I also had amassed $3 million of personal debt when I was 23. And the short answer is that I went from working 18 hours a day to working an hour a day because I was just so weak and sick, unable. And I started taking a lot of medicine. And initially what it started with was sort of this biohacking journey which was really starting to take shape as a movement at that point. And the idea of like looking at all the blood tests I've been getting all the different medicines and supplements and trying to experiment, that sort of analytical look at my health really, I feel like formed the basis for the first part of my system of productivity, which is optimize. Because optimizing to me is really looking at how we do what we do and really digging into the shining a light, as it were. But also, and what I feel is sort of the genesis for everything that's come since then is that that idea of what would you do if you could only work an hour a day? It's a fascinating question. I love to ask people that because there's so many productivity systems out there that are really about like eking out every last little percentage of your day and your hour and what you're doing. And you ask somebody what would you do if you had to leave the office an hour early? Most of them just say they would skip lunch. But if you say to somebody like what if you only had an hour a day to get things done? At that point, it's really not a question about what would you do, it's really what wouldn't you do? And if the things that you wouldn't do still need to get done, then who, or increasingly what is going to do them for you? It's just like a very mind bending kind of experience. So that question is what really led to me starting to experiment with all sorts of different productivity methods. A lot of the things that I teach are very counterintuitive to what a lot of other productivity people teach. And it worked and it's grown since then to coaching, speaking, writing, all that stuff.
- [18:25]
John Gafford
Yes, I don't think people fully grasp that concept until something happens either to you or to somebody that's close to you. A friend of mine that we're in business with, his wife, they were in Hawaii and his wife was pregnant, and they were just there on vacation, and she had a complication where she couldn't fly. And so all of a sudden, you got six months left on this pregnancy. Your business is here, and. And she can't leave the island. I mean, she can't go on an airplane. So he just figured it out how to run his business from Hawaii. And now I'm pretty sure they go back there for several months every year just because they figured it out. And I think, you know, they say necessity is the mother of invention, of course, and I just think people have to get there. Now, that obviously led you to writing your first book, right? Which I want to talk a little bit about it. The first book was the Art of. That was the first book, right?
- [19:22]
Ari Meisel
The first book.
- [19:23]
John Gafford
That was the first one. So obviously that book, like you said, well, you know what, I want to go back a little bit further because you glossed over something that I love, which was, we talked about biohacking. So what were the things that you did to get ahead of your Crohn's disease? That's the first question. And the second question is, what do you still do today?
- [19:41]
Ari Meisel
Second question is, what.
- [19:43]
John Gafford
What do you still do today? Are you still adding new stuff to the protocol? What is the Ari Mizel biohacking protocol? That's what I want to hear.
- [19:50]
Ari Meisel
Yeah. So it was definitely an interesting experience. There were definitely things that I did that did not help. There were some things that made me feel worse, but ultimately what I learned. So I tried all sorts of things. I tried a vegan diet, a vegetarian, pescatarian. At this point, I can pretty much eat. I mean, I eat anything I want. But I believe that the. The best diet, overall, it's not about being gluten free. It's not about pescatarian or anything. It's that it is low in sugar and very, very high in saturated fats. Okay, so grass fed butter, pastured egg yolks, heritage raised pork, grass fed beef butter is. I think butter should be prescribable, honestly, because one of the things that a lot of people don't realize is that butter is called butter because of butyric acid. And butyric acid is one of the main ways that probiotics in your gut or the bacteria in your gut communicate with each other. So butter it up as much as you can eat.
- [20:52]
John Gafford
Tell me the butterfly.
- [20:53]
Ari Meisel
It's incredible. And then there's a bunch of supplements. I think that the supplements are kind of easy. There's some weird ones. I definitely tried And I don't take those anymore. Now I just probiotic and krill oil and vitamin D and some zinc, I think is what I'm usually doing now. But the other one is we don't have enough fermented foods in the diet in America, as far as I'm concerned. So things like sauerkraut, even pickles, like real pickles and kimchi and other fermented foods. Fermented foods and real yogurt, like all that kind of stuff, I think is really good for Crohn's disease. But ultimately it's really an inflammatory condition. So stress is a big component. And that's really kind of where less doing played into this. So nowadays I wouldn't say that I'm particularly biohacking at this point, but I am using ChatGPT to do all my meal logging, which has been incredible through all of this process. I never found a meal planner or not meal planner, meal logger that I liked. I think they're all flawed in a lot of ways. And what's nice about ChatGPT is that you can be proactive so you can say to it. And I just did this at lunch, so I have a cold right now. And I said to it, I was like, I don't feel great right now. And I'd kind of like to have dessert, which I don't normally have. So I took a picture we have from Costco, banana nut muffins and pound cake. I said, which one would be a better choice? And it said, do go with pound cake because it's a little bit lighter. Your protein's looking great for the day.
- [22:24]
John Gafford
So let me get straight, because I use my fitness pal, which can be cumbersome sometimes, and I find that the macros can be off a little bit. So you just created GPT and said, you're going to log on my macros and just log into that one particular GPT and say, here's what I just ate. I mean, are you giving the exact. Are you just taking pictures? That's what you're doing?
- [22:42]
Ari Meisel
I'm taking pictures. And it's off your plate? Yeah, it's really, really good.
- [22:47]
John Gafford
And.
- [22:47]
Ari Meisel
But I can. I find it to be really accurate and it understands what my goals are. Right. So I'd like to sort of lean out a little bit. I want to increase fiber. I think a lot of Americans also, we don't have enough fiber. Also, it knows the vitamins I'm taking. So it literally, the other day it was like, you've been taking zinc for Five days. You should cycle off for two days. Which I was like, I never knew that was a thing. And I asked it why, and it told me. And the other thing that's really cool with that is that you can take a picture of your fridge and your pantry, so you can say to it, like, hey, I just had this sandwich, or whatever. I'm still hungry. What could I add to it? That would be a good choice. It will say to me. And it has said to me. It's like, take one of the apples from the fridge and the. The Indian yogurt and put that in it with. You know, and if you want something sweet, add a little bit of honey. It's great.
- [23:38]
John Gafford
That's wild. No, dude, man. And I. But I guess that's your whole thing, right? So. But outside of, like, food and supplements, are you doing it, like, is there a hyperbaric chambers or your cold plunger, any of that stuff?
- [23:51]
Ari Meisel
I mean, I have five kids, man. Like, you know, there's.
- [23:53]
John Gafford
There's.
- [23:54]
Ari Meisel
There's a limit to how much biohacking gadgets I can do. We had an infrared sauna, which we just sold. We're moving to in the house, and I may get another one. I love my sauna. Yeah, I hate the cold. I hate it. But I have tried the face in the bowl of water a couple of times, which actually I think is pretty good. I do like that. But I also. I work out twice a week. Like, I just. I don't drink either. That's another one. So, yeah, I used to, and I probably will again. But at this point in my life, my sleep is generally fairly shitty just because of the lifestyle that we have with the kids. And I work one overnight shift a week on the EMS squad. Like, so recognizing that my sleep is shitty, like, it's not worth it for me to have a drink because I'll just feel like crap the next day.
- [24:39]
John Gafford
Where you wear a tracker to track your sleep. Are you doing all that stuff?
- [24:42]
Ari Meisel
I have. I mean, I don't need a tracker to know that it's not great, but. So I operate pretty well, honestly, on not that much sleep. I don't know how long I'll be able to pull that off the rest of my life. But, yeah, I've used the Oura Ring. I think the Oura Ring is the best tracker there is. But currently I go through these phases where I track a lot, and then I don't track anything because I kind of have a sense of things.
- [25:06]
John Gafford
Yeah.
- [25:07]
Ari Meisel
But I do do my own blood testing. Every six months. So that's usually, that's like the big one too for me. And that's as well.
- [25:14]
John Gafford
Yeah, I think everything. Checking your blood, I, I get my blood and I upload it to chat GPT immediately. I learned that as 10x health was scaling, right. And obviously Gary Breaker has had a major falling out with them and I lived through that. Like, I understand why he had a falling out because I signed up for 10x health and I did the blood work and it came back. And the way that it kind of laid it out on the sheet, like I basically Google doctored myself and gave myself liver cancer based on these results. I was freaking out and. Right. Because I'm like. Because they're like, well, a doctor's going to talk to you in three weeks. And I'm like, what do you mean three weeks? This thing says I have liver cancer. Which it wasn't. It was just some nonsense that happened in my blood work. But now whenever I get my blood, I get. Every three months I go right to Chat GPT. I don't wait to, I don't wait to have the doctor review of me. Just goes over everything, tells me if I need to adjust my supplements and tells me if I'm taking too much of anything. It's great, it's wonderful. I imagine that Chat GBT has just taken the, or whatever AI you're using, has taken so many of the concepts in your methodology over the years and just turbocharged them.
- [26:23]
Ari Meisel
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things which I think is a really cool sort of thing to talk about now is in my career I've worked with hundreds of VAs. I've outsourced thousands of hours of stuff and spent tens of thousands of dollars on it. I have not had a team or any support staff in any shape or form in the last two years because I do everything with ChatGPT and I'm involved in a lot of different things and a lot of different, like non profits and municipal communities and stuff like that. And ChatGPT manages all of it. So I find that amazing.
- [26:58]
John Gafford
Well, I had a guy reach out to me that I had used as an outsourcer previously in India and he was like, hey, do you have any work? And I was like, dude, same story. I'm like, man, you know, art goes out to you, but you should probably learn to do something else because I think there's a large segment of the Indian economy, Pakistan economy, that part of the world, Bangladesh, the Philippines, it's going to be hard hit by this.
- [27:25]
Ari Meisel
Absolutely, yeah. I would say this is that I don't think that we're at a point where we can outsource or AI taste, I guess we can outsource it, but we can't really AI taste as far as I'm concerned. So that's something I think will hold out for a little while. But yes, en masse, I agree with you. But I would also say this, like, I've done so much outsourcing over the years. There's sort of geographical shifts that happen. So like 10 years ago, India was the place to go to for VAs, but I wouldn't say that that's necessarily the case now. You're seeing a lot more coming out of the Philippines and you're also seeing low cost ones coming out of Pakistan. India is probably better now for SEO kind of stuff. So like you see sort of this movement all over the place. And like graphic design is a great example. There was a coding, actually there was a time where Ukraine had like the best outsourced coders. And that changed way, way before the Russian war and stuff. But like that changed at some point. Graphic designers used to be able to get amazing graphic designers out of Switzerland. Can't do that now.
- [28:32]
John Gafford
Well, I know we're taking kind of a hard left turn into the unknown now, but I mean, do you kind of watch some of the stuff you can do with ChatGPT and do you lay a. Do you ever lay awake in bed and think, what are people going to do? Is it literally every time something comes in your brain, you're killing a job? Because I know that's the way I think about it. I'm like, oh my gosh, we're going to get to a point where what are people going to do?
- [29:01]
Ari Meisel
It's a good question. My way of thinking about it is this, is that if you give work to a human being that a computer can do, you are in essence dehumanizing that person because it's very hard for somebody to engage with the work and do it well and not make errors when they know and you know that a computer can do it and a computer should be doing it. So in an ideal world, the idea of the replaceable founder is that we're replacing people up, not out. In reality, that doesn't always end up being the case. Right. And sometimes people have to end up reinventing themselves and getting into a different line of work. But it's not so much like, are we taking the jobs? It's more like, just how are we going to adapt to that because it's like an inevitability, right?
- [29:48]
John Gafford
No, it completely is. And I wonder. Part of the tariff push is bringing manufacturing back to the States. Now, even though most of those plants as they're building them into the new world will be automated plants, but they're still going to need bodies to run them. Do you think there's a thought in our government of, wow, look at all of these people that are not going to have jobs. We need to do something to create an economy at scale where they can work?
- [30:14]
Ari Meisel
Yeah. So I actually have a client who just bought six humanoid robots to work in his warehouse. We're there. I think it's called Futurist. Maybe I can't remember the name of it, but it's. They're getting delivered next week like this is there, you know. So on the one hand, you can think about it this way, right? In an ideal world, what this ends up doing is making every product cheaper, right? So somebody with like a job that makes $7 an hour could still buy everything they want because, you know, it now costs $0.03 to make the thing because we don't have people doing it. So. And obviously I think that there's a lag for that kind of thing. But long term, that's probably something that will happen the more AI stuff that we have, the cheaper things to get. Although there is a. I can't remember the name of it, there is a. An effect. It's some like, psychological effect where it has to do with. It was. It's an old thing. It has to do with coal plants in the 1880s. But essentially the idea is as we get more and more efficient, the idea is that we have less jobs, we need less people. But the truth is what actually ends up happening is we just end up building and making more of those efficient things. So same thing with, like, AI chips. As the chips get cheaper and we'll be able to do more, faster. That doesn't mean we're going to need less. We're going to end up needing more and it will expand faster. So I think it's more like there's like a seesaw effect. Right. So it's going to. We're going to lose some jobs and then some new jobs are created and that's going to be really awful for a lot of people, for sure. But the ones who don't change are the ones that will, you know, not come out on top.
- [31:53]
John Gafford
Maybe I'm just watching too much Black Mirror lately, watching old reruns of Black Mirror, the DYSTOPIAN future is upon us, Ari. It's terrible.
- [32:04]
Ari Meisel
It's a possibility.
- [32:05]
John Gafford
I mean, it's a possibility. Well, let's try to help some people that are still living and working today, shall we? Instead of depressing everybody with our podcast. Now, you're so big on optimization in that first book, obviously, optimize, automate, and outsource. How should you go about finding things to opt? Like, walk me through your data point analysis of your daily workday, of your daily work life, to identify things that you can do that with.
- [32:35]
Ari Meisel
So there's a couple of ways to look at that. Excuse me. So I have a framework called the ultimate KPI where you look at the 20 things that you do on a regular basis. And that could be everything from, you know, I'm meeting with my team to I'm doing podcasts, to I'm making deals, whatever it is, 20 things that you do on a very regular basis, and then the idea is to look at those 20 and pick 16 of them that in one year's time, you will no longer be doing. And basically, we reverse engineer. Are we going to optimize it automated or outsource it? And it's. It's a sort of a fascinating process to go through because essentially everybody in organization should do this. But what you're kind of asking people to do is like, if you were to be fired tomorrow, what would we have to do to replace you? And what that does, again, is it frees people from the shackles of the level that they're at so that they can rise up to the next level, as far as I'm concerned, so they can push that work down and down. So that's the first thing. We have to take this again. It's like shining a light. We look at how we do what we do and start to dig into the processes. The next one, which is a big one about automation, is the word every. Look at your day. And anytime you use the word every, every time a customer signs up, right, Every time I record a podcast, every time I travel, the word every suggests that you're doing something repetitively. And anything that we're doing repetitively probably can be automated, definitely in part, but probably in its entirety. So that's a ripe opportunity for optimization or for automation. And then once we have optimized and automated at that point, whatever's left, that's when we can look at outsourcing or delegating to some sort of specialist or generalist. But if you do it before that, which a lot of people do they try to outsource first? Because it's this like hands off, knee jerk reaction. I don't want to touch this. That's where we get into problems.
- [34:29]
John Gafford
Well, you know what I found is, and I challenge the people that work for me to do this a lot, which is in that process of going through your day, how much actual work do you actually do? Because especially being in real estate, right. You know, we have a very large real estate company and realtors are famous for this. Like, it's like, oh, I get up in the morning and I come to the office and then I have a cup of coffee and then I talk about my weekend. And then I got to go on social media because we got to do that. And then I do this. It's like, and then, you know, by the time this and it's 2:30, I got to go pick up the kids and then I kind of drop them off and then I come back. It's like most realtors actually do an hour's worth of real work in an eight hour day, but yet they've positioned themselves to feel like they've had this long day. Oh, I went to this meeting, I sat in this class, I did this. But activities that will actually bring you dollars, they're only spending maybe an hour of actual work a day. So I mean, do you find that in other industries or is it just really sales? I mean, where do you find that, that loss of just time?
- [35:30]
Ari Meisel
Yeah, so I think the actual average across all industries of productive work in a 9 to 5 kind of position is like an hour and 12 minutes of productive work.
- [35:40]
John Gafford
All right, so I'm not just single, not realtors for that. That's okay.
- [35:44]
Ari Meisel
I mean it's kind of like 80, 20, right? Like the other. Another really funny statistic is that like in the average, not in the average non fiction book, there's like 12 pages of actual content. Everything else is just bluff. So like we see that all the time. And what. It's one of the reasons that oftentimes when people say to me that they have no time or they don't have enough time, typically what I find is that they actually have too much time and they're just not using it correctly at all. I have no idea. I love when someone it's. I mean, I'm kind of a jerk about this, I think. But some when people are like, oh, I'm so busy, how you been? Oh, I'm just so busy. I always like to be like, what are you busy with? And like nine times out of 10, it's like, no answer, busy. I'm just busy. It's like, with what? Like, are you.
- [36:31]
John Gafford
You're not busy. You're overwhelmed with the thought of all the things you should be doing that you're not doing.
- [36:37]
Ari Meisel
Exactly. So people have too much time and unpopular opinion, sometimes too much money. That's where these restrictions are really what breed innovation. As you said, necessity is the mother of all invention. Restrictions are the mother of innovation as far as I'm concerned.
- [36:56]
John Gafford
Well, after you wrote the first book, now it's just so interesting to see how the world has changed so much, but the concepts remain the same from 2016, when the first book came out, to this. Because the second book, I think, was ideal to execution. Is that right?
- [37:09]
Ari Meisel
No, second book. Let's do more living. And then I wrote another version of it called the Art of List Doing. And then I think the third one was idea of execution.
- [37:19]
John Gafford
Okay, now that's. I feel like you started to shift more thinking from everyday use into being more specific with founders, CEOs, that type of stuff became a user manual that. Was there something that happened in your life that created that out of necessity or was what happened there?
- [37:34]
Ari Meisel
Yeah. So this was 2015, August of 2015, a very large virtual assistant company at the time called Zirtual, which I think is still around in a different form, they got bought, but they very suddenly went out of business. They basically ran out of capital. And I guess requirement wise, they had to let everybody know, like, hey, we can't pay you, so you got to go home. So it was like a Sunday night. No, it was probably like a Wednesday night. Excuse me. They sent out this email and I had a lot of clients that were using virtual. And I had worked with several of the VAs. And so the whole day, the next day, I'm getting calls from both sides being like, VAs who needed jobs and people who were like, I just lost my assistant, like, my life's over. And I was connecting different people, like, throughout the day. And that night I had planned on having dinner with a friend of mine, and he and I had dinner. And he was. He was working in finance, but he had been working on a productivity app just kind of in the space. And we talked about it and about virtual. And he was like, why don't you just start your own VA company at this point? And I was like, I don't want to do that. I was like, les doing well. My wife's pregnant with our fourth child. Things are good. And he was like, what if we do it together? I was like, okay, but we got to do it quickly because I'm going away next week with my family and I guess we'll try it. So we launched two days later a VA company with basically two VAs, which was me and my partner. And I took 10 of my coaching clients and brought them into it. And we did everything with free tools and we sort of built everything from the ground up in a less doing image in a way. And three months later we were operating comfortably. We had like three or four assistants and maybe 20 or 30 clients. And then we spoke at this. No, sorry, we had like 20 clients and we spoke at an event, at Joe Polish's event actually. You know, Joe Polish, right. And got 70 clients from that one presentation and like, you know, quadrupled the business overnight essentially and then grew from there. So what we wanted to do, the idea was to document month by month what we were doing to build the business because we never put a penny into the company. We did a million dollars the first year. We had 183 people working for us in 17 time zones. And I think at the end of the first year we had like three or four hundred clients and everything was being managed with Trello and amazing automations that my partner built, coded custom stuff. So that was a big turning point there because at that point, not only up until then, I'd been doing a lot of work coaching wise with individuals about their individual issues. But at that point, not only were we growing our own business, but we were starting to service a lot of small business owners. So we were just seeing a lot more issues and challenges. And I was doing a weekly webinar series for them for all our clients. So it was a lot of like on the job learning in a way.
- [40:34]
John Gafford
Yeah, I can, I mean you can definitely see that kind of shift through the way that your writing was. And even with the most recent book now, the Replaceable Founder, I think, I think you've gone from like, like you've gone from your everyday employee to the person running the business to now CEO founder level. And it's almost like that trilogy is now complete in that book. Go ahead. Sorry.
- [40:58]
Ari Meisel
The latest book is actually called On Productivity, which is like my sort of. Oh, I'm sorry, yeah, no, no. Was second to next or last, I guess. But then I did this sort of like opus at the end. But the thing that I think may have also had some contribution there is. So I've always been really interested in history and in particular I found this like passion around the world's oldest companies. So there are hundreds of companies in operation today that have been around for hundreds of years. And there are a few dozen companies that have been operating continuously for over a thousand years. And there are about eight traits that these companies tend to share that make them last so long. And a lot of those I think in some ways have informed the things that I've written about and what really makes a company that is a thing unto itself, as opposed to just a CEO who owns their own job.
- [41:52]
John Gafford
Well, let's talk about that. What are the eight traits that make a thousand year old company? You don't get to throw that out there without me digging deep. Come on man, that's solid.
- [42:01]
Ari Meisel
So one of them is that they rarely if ever took outside investment, which I think is really interesting. And that wasn't a protective thing. It was more just like they wanted to grow under their own steam. So there were no unicorns per se that grew? Well, no, that's not true.
- [42:18]
John Gafford
Actually.
- [42:18]
Ari Meisel
There are many of them, but they didn't like, they weren't overnight successes, you know, by any means. And, and again, so like there is a hotel in Japan that started in 702. There is a restaurant in Austria that started in 806 that is still running. You know, think about the restaurant business. Beer, Beer gardens. There are banks, because banks used to be private institutions, all sorts of really crazy stuff and everything in between. But so that's one. Another one is that they had very, very strong sort of guiding principles. But all of them were very open to change and like accepting new things. Because these companies have existed through literal, like regime changes, wars, famine, disease, like all sorts of things. Another one was that all of them tend to see themselves as a member of a greater community. So that the company was not just like a thing unto itself, doing its own thing for profit. It was part of a, of a bigger community around and, and acted as such. A good example of that is Fiskars. So you know Fiskers, it makes the orange handled scissors and like gardens. Yeah. So Fiskars is a 350-year-old iron smelting company from Finland. And Zildjian. Zildjian. That makes the big symbols. Yeah, right, symbols. Zildjian is 400 years old. It was a Turkish guy who had this secret formula for making a metal alloy that was like. No, the secret was never shared over all these generations. And that's Zildjian, 400 years old. Right. And now like, you know, greatest, like every rock band in the world.
- [44:02]
John Gafford
That's what they play.
- [44:03]
Ari Meisel
Lots of really fascinating stories like that, and it's really inspiring. And then the oldest of all time is Kongo Gumi, which is the construction company from Japan, which started in the fifth century and essentially it was liquidated four years ago because it just couldn't at that. There was just too much debt. The Japanese economy kind of screwed them over. But the 80th generation of the Congo family had to put this business out of business. I'm going to talk about pressure.
- [44:31]
John Gafford
Oh, God, that's in Japan. That guy was probably wearing one of those signs and getting publicly humiliated or whatever they do. Their business culture.
- [44:40]
Ari Meisel
Yeah.
- [44:40]
John Gafford
And because. Because I think when we, you know, when we build a business, I think everybody wants their business to be around forever. But I think, you know, again, do you think. Well, yes, yes. I think your first business. Yes. And I can tell you this because I think your first business, when you build it, this is like. It's like your first child. Right. You want it to be there forever. You want to have it. I think subsequently, when you start opening businesses, you're like, okay, we need to set this up right now to sell. We're building this to sell. Because that's what you need to do when the market is right. I think that's the evolution. But that very first one, man, I think people, that's their baby. I think they just want to keep it for as long as they can. And I think people probably wait too long to get out of them, too, which causes some problems. Could they have sold off that Japanese company earlier and still made money? Or did they wait to wait too long to the end? Now, granted, you'd be going for 800, however many, you know, hundreds of years, 1400 years. So the odds are probably in your favor to stick it out through another bad turn, but. But. But probably, you know, they should have liquidated a little faster. Now, my question is this. So I. I want to Talk specifically about ChatGPT and the impact that it's making on your methodologies in those things. I mean, so many people are like, oh, I used it to write my Twitter post. It's like, no, you don't understand. Tell me what you think is the most powerful thing people can do with ChatGPT right now. Because technically speaking, they could ask it to be you and help them find inefficiencies in their business based on your writings. Right?
- [46:21]
Ari Meisel
Yeah. So I actually don't think that that is the most valuable use. Totally could do that. Okay, go ahead and interestingly enough, the first version of Chat cbt, I guess the second one, maybe. I think the second one had my. Was familiar with my writing, right? So, like, it was. One of the first things I asked was like, you know, Ari Maizelis is like, yes, you wrote this and this. I was like, write this in the style of Ari Marzella and did it. So whatever, you know, Compendium of Knowledge, they scanned their first sort of set from, like, my book was in it, I guess. But at least up until now, I think now is a little bit different. It really couldn't sort of innovate and iterate further in some ways. One of the things that I think is the most valuable for it, most valuable thing for it for me is I am a really bad reader. So I just. I've always just been much more of an audio visual guy. I'll watch a movie and I will remember every single line for the rest of my life from watching it once. But I read a book and I read the same page seven times. Yeah, you know, and I know that.
- [47:24]
John Gafford
Yeah, I'm similar, but. But, you know, unfortunately, the stuff that I tend to memorize is every line from the movie Point Break and nothing pretty much else of value.
- [47:34]
Ari Meisel
Terrible one to remember all the.
- [47:35]
John Gafford
Just. Just to drive my wife insane, I guess. I think that's the reason I have it. No, pretty much, yeah. I could do that movie called Pretty much. I could. I don't even know why. I don't know why. I have no idea anyway.
- [47:50]
Ari Meisel
But also such a piece of shit movie too, at the same time.
- [47:53]
John Gafford
I know, I know, I know, I know, I know.
- [47:56]
Ari Meisel
All right, that's good.
- [47:57]
John Gafford
Yeah. At least I'm. At least now you know I'm honest.
- [48:03]
Ari Meisel
So I am involved. Fortunately, unfortunately, I'm involved in a bunch of things right now that require an enormous amount of reading. So I'm. I've been elected to the school board here in Princeton, where we live. I am on the. I'm the vice president of our local rescue squad. I'm on the executive board of the Jewish Center. I'm also on this municipal committee on affordable housing, racial, economic and social equity. And the only way that I can do all of that is because I have a project in Chatgpt for each one. And every time, like the school board, we have a meeting tomorrow where we have to review 20 really boring policies that have been handed down by the state. Like, everything from smoking policies in the school till to, like, how parents are supposed to behave at sporting events, right? So, like. And these are like, you know, very dense legal stuff. So I can just load all of those in, basically be like, like, do I have any comments on this? And I'll be like, yeah, you should ask this, this and this.
- [48:54]
John Gafford
It just, it just spits out. Kids shouldn't smoke. Parents should act like adults. Right? That's what you said about it. There you go. And now Ari has his opinion.
- [49:03]
Ari Meisel
It's like. So it's like. And that's the thing is, like, that's the greatest value I can possibly give to it, other than being like, otherwise I could just be in a meeting and be like, yeah, looks good. You know, so that's really important.
- [49:17]
John Gafford
I have found with me, as much as it speeds things up, it also tends to slow things down because, like, if somebody sends me, like, for example, I'm working with some guys that are really good substack AI developers and built an outbound sales rep for me. Built an out round, an outbound. I trained it. Our scripts, our objections are everything on calling through old leads for our agents. Just trying to re engage with old leads. You can make 10,000 calls a day trained by me. Really, really good. I mean, to the point where when they were testing it, I had it call me and I said, what other features, like, for the house? And I'm like, well, I need a five bedrooms, four bath, and the kids are getting ready to leave for college, so me and the wife are going to need a sex junction. And the AI replied back to that. The AI replied back, okay, five bedrooms, four bath. And apparently you and the wife are looking for some private time. Hey, no judgment. That's what it responded. And it was shocking that it said that, like, of everything else that happened during the call, that to me was the most profound. But these guys had sent me an NDA just to start getting this process working, where normally I just would have breezed through it and like, okay, no problem, and sent it back, sent it back. But instead I've sent it through and it was like, well, you know, I sent it to ChatGPT. What are the pitfalls for me in this NDA? And it was like, well, it's pretty standard with tech firms, but we don't like the feedback where they can essentially take everything that you're giving them back as feedback and use it to create products to sell to other people. And I was like, okay. So I pushed back on the feedback part of the NDA and the guy's like, yeah, no problem. We took. We'll take it out. So, yes, this is speeding things Up. It's also kind of slowing things down because I'm like, well, wait a second. Something that I wouldn't even thought of before is now front of mind.
- [50:57]
Ari Meisel
Yeah. And so, by the way, have you tried Sesame for the voice stuff?
- [51:02]
John Gafford
No, no, no, no. I'm going to write it down, though. What is it?
- [51:05]
Ari Meisel
Goodness. Try having a conversation with Maya at Sesame. It will blow your mind. The other thing that's been really great is the last couple of weeks, ChatGPT particularly had really updated their image generation capabilities.
- [51:24]
John Gafford
Yeah, great. Way better.
- [51:26]
Ari Meisel
We're building a new house right now. We're going to be moving in in June. And being able to say, this is the vanity that we bought from Restoration Hardware and this is the lights that we just got from Crate and Barrel. Put this into an image and it doesn't. Is, like, insane. Our designer was like, oh, my God, I'm gonna be out of a job. I was like, well, no, people still have to make the choices.
- [51:45]
John Gafford
Yeah. Because they don't. Because you can't. Because, like you said, you can't teach taste. You can't quite get taste in your computer.
- [51:52]
Ari Meisel
Making mood boards where you're cutting and pasting things. Like, now you can just throw it in ChatGPT. It's amazing. So that's been really great. Another thing is, like, we'll. I love the video feature in Chesapeake, so I can show it, like, hey, like, the other day, I was making a recipe of biscuits with my son, and the consistency just didn't look right. So I was like, does this look right? It's like, no, it's a little dry. Add this in. It just makes a lot of things easier. It really does.
- [52:18]
John Gafford
It's shocking. So I just. I'm guessing it's going to be interesting to see what we have. I'm going to lean hopefully into your positive thought that we'll just need more things and the world will adapt and not the dystopian future that Black Mirror has presented to us, where we're all being hunted down by robot dogs in a forest. Hopefully not, because we're just. Yeah, I mean, that. That's the day that we don't want us for a. To be like, you know what? We don't really need you people. Just. I don't know what you do. I don't bring to the table here.
- [52:46]
Ari Meisel
Have you ever seen the movie Runaway Runaways with Tom Selleck from the 80s?
- [52:51]
John Gafford
Yes, I have. Yes, yes, yes, yes. The cyborg.
- [52:54]
Ari Meisel
Right? So, like, yes, you know, we'll have to adapt. Maybe That'll be the new set of jobs. Is the people that have to hunt down and kill robots more exciting than.
- [53:03]
John Gafford
Sitting at a desk? I guess is how it is. All right, well, Ari, if they want to find you, want to learn more about all of your great systems. If they want to work with you, man, how do they find you, man?
- [53:13]
Ari Meisel
So everything is@lestdoin.com I do all of my coaching over Voxer asynchronously. So if people want to get in touch with Voxer, they can, they can go to voxwithare.com and I really, I really mean that. Reach out. It's going to be me. There's no automation there. No VA's is. It's just me. And I love talking about productivity and helping people grow their businesses.
- [53:33]
John Gafford
I have one last question that I'm just curious about because I really don't know the answer to it. I can't seem to find the answer when I looked, which is this. So I became exposed to all of these kind of philosophies by reading Tim Ferriss book, the Four Hour Workweek. It was the first exposure I had to this. And I know you and Tim are friends, so my question is this. Which kind of came first, the chicken or the egg? Was it Tim leaning on your ideas? You leaning a little bit back on Tim or you guys coming together because you dose both had a similar idea.
- [53:59]
Ari Meisel
Pat, definitely Tim was first. There's no question Tim was first. I was such a fanboy of Tim's and I don't know if I told you the story about how I met him. It was not.
- [54:09]
John Gafford
No, please, please.
- [54:11]
Ari Meisel
It was not the best way to me to introduce him. But one thing I will say is that Tim has never had a family. And it's very, very different when you're doing all this and you got five kids and stuff and all this. I mean, and he's changed people's lives, no question. North and respect. But I think we have sort of different approaches to some of these things. So I got asked to speak at Joe Polish's Genius Network event. I had no idea who he was or what the event was. I showed up and I walk into this room and I stand in the back wall and to my right is Kim Ferris.
- [54:44]
John Gafford
I was like, oh my God. Oh my God.
- [54:48]
Ari Meisel
And we were chatting. It was very nice. But then Joe gets up and introduces me and says, I'm about to bring up Ari Meiselle. He is going to be the greatest productivity expert in the entire world. Even better than Tim Ferriss. And Guess I gotta go. So it's like, it's. And I've had Tim on the podcast a bunch.
- [55:07]
John Gafford
Oh, man.
- [55:09]
Ari Meisel
Tim's an interesting character, so. But no, he definitely was there first. There is no question.
- [55:13]
John Gafford
Okay.
- [55:14]
Ari Meisel
I would argue that I think a lot of my methods are very, very different.
- [55:18]
John Gafford
Very different. I. Well, cool. Well, I love it, man. Thank Ari. Thank you again for taking time to talk with us, man. I appreciate you so much. The second time, this was indeed better than the first, so grateful for your time, buddy. I appreciate it.
- [55:31]
Ari Meisel
My pleasure.
- [55:32]
John Gafford
All right, we'll wrap it up today, man. If you just listen to that. If you are somebody out there that feels like you can never get anything done, dude, I mean, there's so many methods out there to help you change that. From chat GBT to just picking up one of Ari's books, man. If you want to go next level with some serious coaching, reach out to him. There are solutions available. You're just not taking advantage of them. We'll see you next time. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escaping the drift.com. you can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five star review. Give us a share. Do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you in the next episode.