Ari Meisel

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126 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard Apr 2025

Ari Meisel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Escaping the Drift with John Gafford · The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel · 29 Apr 2025 podcast

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, uh,

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.

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.

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.

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.

So I had just finished this really big real estate development project in upstate New York in Binghamton, and I was 23.

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, create scarring. It's one of the most painful things actually like a human being can experience is the stretching of your intestines.

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.

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 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.

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.

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