Ari Meisel
Appearances
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Because optimizing to me is really looking at how we do what we do and really digging into the shining of 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 is a fascinating question.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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 wouldn't you do? And if the things that you wouldn't do still need to get done, then who or increasingly what is gonna do them for you? It's just like a very mind bending kind of experience.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Second question is what?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
But I believe that 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. So grass-fed butter, pastured egg yolks, heritage-raised pork, grass-fed beef.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with 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 try and I don't take those anymore now. It's 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 like fermented foods in the diet in America as far as I'm concerned.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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've never found a meal planner or not meal planner, a meal logger that I liked. They're all flawed in a lot of ways. And what's nice about ChatGPT is that you can be proactive.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
So you can say to it, and I just did this at lunch. So I have a cold right now. And I was, I said to him, 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, not muffins and pound cake. I said, which one would be a better choice?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
And it said, do go with the pound cake because it's a little bit lighter. Your protein's looking great for the day. So great.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I'm taking pictures. Uh, and it's up your plate. Yeah, it's really, really good. And, 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. Um, I want to increase fiber. I think a lot of Americans also, we don't know fiber. Um, Also, it knows the vitamins I'm taking.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
The other day, it was like, you've been taking zinc for five days. You should cycle off it for two days, which I was like, I never knew that was a thing. I asked it why and it told me. The other thing that's really cool with that is that you can take a picture of your fridge and your pantry. You can say to it like, hey, I just had this sandwich or whatever. I'm still hungry.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Like, what can 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 the, take one of the apples from the fridge and the, the Indian yogurt and put that in it with, with, you know, and if you want something sweet, add a little bit of honey. It's great. It's wild.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I mean, I have five kids, man. Like, you know, 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 another house and I may get another one. I love my sauna.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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. Uh, but I also, I work out twice a week. Like I, I just, I don't drink either. That's another one.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
So 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, um, 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 to bring to have a drink because I'll just feel like crap the next day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I have. I mean, I don't need a tracker to know that it's not great. So I operate pretty well, honestly. I'm not that much sleep. I don't know how long I'll be able to pull that off for the rest of my life. But yeah, I've used the Oura Ring. I think the Oura Ring is the best tracker there is.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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. 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things which I think is a really cool sort of thing to talk about now is I've, you know, 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
And I'm involved in a lot of different things and a lot of different, like, uh, nonprofits and municipal committees and stuff like that. And it Cheshire BT manages all of it. Um, so I find that amazing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Absolutely. Yeah. I would say this is that you can't, I don't think that we're at a point where we can outsource or AI taste the I guess we can outsource it, but we can't really AI taste as far as I'm concerned. So that's something that 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
There's sort of geographical shifts that happen. So like 10 years ago, India was the place to go through 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 us ones coming out of Pakistan. Um, India is probably better now for SEO kind of stuff.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
So like you see sort of this movement, uh, all, 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 outsource 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Can't do that now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
So 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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. 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?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Because it's like an inevitability, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Yeah. Um, so I actually have a client who just bought six humanoid robots to work in his warehouse. Like that's, we're there. So I think it's called futurist. Maybe I can't remember the name of it, but like it's, they're getting delivered next week. Like this is, he's there, you know? So, It, on the one hand, you can think about it this way, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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 3 cents 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
The more AI stuff that we have, the cheaper things can 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, uh, it has to do with it. It was, it's an old thing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
It has to do with, uh, 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 when it 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Hey, thanks for having me back.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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, lose some jobs and new jobs. And that's going to be really awful for a lot of people for sure.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
But the ones who don't change are the ones that will, you know, not come out on top.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
So there's, 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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, automate it or outsource it? And it's a sort of a fascinating process to go through because essentially everybody in organizations should do this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
But what you're kind of asking people to do is like, if you were to be fired tomorrow, You know, 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
We kind of 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 average. Right? So look at your day and anytime you use the word every, so every time a customer signs up, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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, 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,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Absolutely. Sometimes do-overs are a good thing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Yeah. So I think the actual average across all industries of productive work in a nine to five kind of position is like an hour and 12 minutes. productive work.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I mean, it's kind of like 80-20, right? Another really funny statistic is that in the average nonfiction book, there's like 12 pages of actual content. Everything else is just bluff. So we see that all the time. And 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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 have 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, uh, busy. I'm just busy. It's like with what are you, you're not busy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Exactly. Uh, so. people have too much time. There's an unpopular opinion, sometimes too much money. Like that's where these restrictions are really what breed innovation, as you said, mother invention or necessity of the mother of all invention restrictions are the mother of innovation as far as I'm concerned.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
No, so the first one was Less Doing, More Living, and then I wrote another version of it called The Art of Less Doing, and then I think the third one was Idea to Execution. Okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with 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 than I thought. But they very suddenly went out of business. They basically ran out of capital. And I guess, you know, requirement-wise, they had to let everybody know, like, hey, we can't pay you, so you got to go home.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
So it was like a Sunday night. No, probably like a Wednesday night. Excuse me. They sent out this email. And I had a lot of clients that were using Zirtual, 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 VA's who needed jobs and people who were like, I just lost my assistant. Like my life's over.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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. That was my setup.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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, uh, he was working in finance, but he was, he had working on a productivity app. It was kind of in space. So we're talking about it and about the, about Zortral.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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, let's do it. He's going, well, my, you know, my wife's pregnant with our fourth child. Like things are good. And he was like, what if we do it together? And I was like, okay, but we got to do it quickly because I'm going away, you know, next week with my family.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
And I guess we'll try it. So we launched two days later, a VA company with, 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 like a less doing image in a way. And three months later we were operating comfortably.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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 quadrupled the business overnight, essentially, and then grew from there.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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 300 or 400 clients and everything was being managed with Trello.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
and amazing automations that my partner built coded custom stuff so uh that was a big turning point there because at that point not only uh up until then i've 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 uh
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
it was a lot of like on the job learning in a way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Yeah. So the latest book is actually called on productivity, which is like my sort of, Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, no, no. It was second to next or last year, 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
And in particular, I got the, 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
My father is very emotionally absent, not physically absent. My mother is a Jewish mother, so overbearing. And I guess that just like squeezes out this like need to overachieve and get recognition and all sorts of things, which I ended up having to fix later as an adult in therapy. But I got to start my first company when I was 12. I started working as a model when I was nine.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with 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, actually. There are many of them, but they didn't like. They weren't overnight successes, you know, by any means.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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. There are beer gardens. There are banks because banks used to be private institutions. All sorts of really crazy stuff and everything in between. But so...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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, these companies have existed through literal like regime changes, wars, famine, disease, like all sorts of things. Uh, another one was that all of them tend to see themselves as a member of a greater community.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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, of a bigger community around and, and, and acted as such a good example of that is Fiskars. So, you know, Fiskars, I mean, it's the orange handled scissors and like gardens. Yeah. So Fiskars is a 350 year old iron smelting company from Finland.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Um, and Zildjian Zildjian that makes the big symbols, right. Symbols Zildjian 400 years old. It was a Turkish guy who had this secret formula for making a metal alloy that was like, no, like 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
lots of really fascinating stories like that and this really inspiring so and then like the oldest of all time is kongogumi which is the construction company from japan which started in the fifth century and essentially it was liquidated four years ago uh because it just couldn't at that there was just too much debt in japanese economy kind of screwed them over but the 80th generation of the congo family had to put this business out of business we're talking about pressure
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
And I was doing children's birthday parties as a magician before that, believe it or not. So I've always been working.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with 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 ChatGBT, I guess the second one, maybe. I think the second one was familiar with my writing. It was one of the first things I asked was, do you know of R.A. Maisel? He was like, yes, he wrote this and this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I was like, write this in the style of R.A. Maisel, and it did it. So whatever compendium of knowledge they scanned their first set from, 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 thing for me is I am a really bad reader.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
So 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 have to read the same page seven times. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
That's a terrible one to remember all the time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Website design. So it was a company called Lion Techs. Ari means lion in Hebrew and techs was technology extraordinaire. It's like the lamest thing ever. Lion Techs. 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 that I'm good at. And then somebody offers to pay me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
That's great. Totally. So I am involved. Fortunately or unfortunately, I'm involved in a bunch of things right now that require an enormous amount of reading. So 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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 Chachi Petit 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Like everything from smoking policies in the school to like how parents are supposed to behave
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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 do i have any comments on this and i'll be like yeah you should ask this this and this it just it just spits out kids shouldn't smoke parents should act like adults right that's what just there you go and now he has his opinion 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
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Otherwise, I could just be in a meeting and be like, yeah, it looks good. You know, so that's really important.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Yeah. And so by the way, have you tried sesame for the voice stuff?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Try having a conversation with Maya at sesame. Okay. It will blow your mind. Um, so, uh, yeah, so, so that's, that's the other thing that's been really great is the last couple of weeks, uh, chat GPT particularly had really updated their image generation capabilities.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with 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 & Barrel, put this into an image, and it does it is like...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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 because i don't because you can't because like you said you can't teach taste you can't quite get a taste of mood boards where you're cutting and pasting things like now you can just throw it in cheshire it's amazing so that's been really great another thing is like
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I love the video feature in Chezvi, so I can show it like, hey, 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Have you ever seen the movie Runaways with Tom Selleck from the 80s?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
So like, 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
So everything is at Let'sDoIt.com. I do all of my coaching over Voxer asynchronously. So if people want to get in touch with me on Voxer, they can. They can go to VoxWithAri.com. And I really mean that. Reach out. It's going to be me. There's no automation there. No VAs. It's just me. And I love talking about productivity and helping people grow their businesses. Cool.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Definitely Tim was first. There's no question. Tim was first to it. I was such a fan boy of Tim's and I don't know if I told you the story about how I met him. It was not, no, please, please. It was not the best way to be introduced to him. But, uh, one thing I will say is that, you know, Tim, has never had a family.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
And, you know, it's very, very different when you're doing all this and you've got five kids and stuff and all this. I mean, and he's changed people's lives. No question. No one's going to 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
And I walk into this room and I stand in the back wall and to my right is Tim Ferriss.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with 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 Mizell. He is going to be the greatest productivity expert in the entire world, even better than Tim Ferriss. And I guess I got to go. So it's like it's and I've had Tim on the podcast a bunch.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Tim's an interesting character. So, but no, he definitely was there first. There is no question. I would argue that I think a lot of my methods are very, very different.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
So interestingly enough, yes, I've had several jobs, many, many, many jobs actually, and they just don't last very long.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with 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 Estee Lauder.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I worked my last job before I, 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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 Lincolns at Tyson's Corner or the Tyson, I don't know. It was some big mall in Maryland that was like line blowing for me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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 seven hours and 45 minutes of work 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 a lot of weird ways to organize it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I wouldn't say a government organization is necessarily the most efficient. Yeah, so I definitely learned more about what not to do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I don't know that I modeled, per se, 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
And wrote the book on like personal computer wars, essentially. Really fascinating guy, 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
That's the Apple, but this is what I had. A little bit after you, I guess.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I remember when a friend of mine, it was like such sour grapes, a friend of mine got a 28-8 bond modem. Like, you don't even need that if you're running a business. 14-4 is fine.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Yeah, it's interesting. There's obviously a lot of clout 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 analysts kind of people.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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, 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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. Babson is kind of like the standard. So it kind of depends what you want and what you think you want and what kind of experience you want.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
But I was there for three years. So I graduated a year early and I graduated with two majors and two minors and 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
So like it, that was just how I operated. You know, I knew what I was there for and it was not to get a job at Goldman.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Right. 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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 sort of funny. This is like really sort of like exemplifies how this works. So we had to do these one page executive summaries, essentially.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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, uh,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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 development, which I ended up doing for 25 years.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Right. Exactly. Uh, and you know, it also like you have to be able to connect the dots to the real world. Uh, a really good example actually is what's happening right now in the world with tariffs, right? If you look at, uh, homo economicus, you know, the perfect version of like somebody who responds the right way to, uh, economic changes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Like you learned 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. Yeah. Right. Like, so. Some people still want Swiss chocolate, even if it's double the price. Take those things into account. That's like the context that really matters.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
So I had just finished this really big real estate development project in upstate New York in Binghamton, and I was 23.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with 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.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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, create scarring. It's one of the most painful things actually like a human being can experience is the stretching of your intestines.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Yeah. So I've been working these very, 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 and unable. And I started taking a lot of medicine.