Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Tue, 29 Apr 2025
Visionary entrepreneur Ari Meisel transforms the way we think about productivity and time management. From launching a web design company at just 12 years old to founding the innovative Less Doing Movement, Ari has turned personal challenges, including a bout with Crohn's disease, into opportunities for growth and efficiency. He shares the blueprint that has empowered countless entrepreneurs to reclaim their time and avoid the pitfalls of being overwhelmed by business chaos. Ari's journey is one from the "chronically unemployable" to a successful entrepreneur, enriched by diverse experiences at companies like Freddie Mac and Mac Cosmetics, and under the mentorship of Michael Tomczyk from Wharton. His story is as much about the transformative power of overcoming obstacles as it is about embracing innovation through biohacking. The episode delves into how a shift in health priorities led to the development of unique productivity strategies, culminating in his guidance for founders and CEOs through coaching and writing. The conversation with Ari also ventures into the future of work, highlighting the pivotal role of AI in reshaping personal and professional spaces. With tools like ChatGPT enhancing everything from diet to productivity, Ari discusses both the opportunities and ethical considerations of automation. The episode concludes with practical insights on maximizing productivity through process optimization, challenging the notion of busyness, and advocating for technology to elevate human roles. Tune in for a wealth of practical strategies and inspirational stories that promise to unlock potential and efficiency. CHAPTERS (00:00) - Optimize, Automate, and Outsource for Success (05:29) - Entrepreneurial Journey and Mentorship (14:51) - Overcoming Crohn's Disease Through Biohacking (19:50) - Advanced Biohacking and Dietary Insights (25:06) - Future of Work and Automated Innovation (32:40) - Maximizing Productivity Through Process Optimization (36:55) - Evolving From Startup to Legacy Businesses (46:26) - Productivity Tools and Personal Growth (55:31) - Unlocking Productivity and Solutions 💬 Did you enjoy this podcast episode? Tell us all about it in the comment section below! ☑️ If you liked this video, consider subscribing to Escaping The Drift with John Gafford ************* 💯 About John Gafford: After appearing on NBC's "The Apprentice", John relocated to the Las Vegas Valley and founded several successful companies in the real estate space. ➡️ The Gafford Group at Simply Vegas, top 1% of all REALTORS nationwide in terms of production. Simply Vegas, a 500 agent brokerage with billions in annual sales Clear Title, a 7-figure full-service title and escrow company. ➡️ Streamline Home Loans - An independent mortgage bank with more than 100 loan officers. The Simply Group, A national expansion vehicle partnering with large brokers across the country to vertically integrate their real estate brokerages. ************* ✅ Follow John Gafford on social media: Instagram ▶️ / thejohngafford Facebook ▶️ / gafford2 🎧 Stream The Escaping The Drift Podcast with John Gafford Episode here: Listen On Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7cWN80gtZ4m4wl3DqQoJmK?si=2d60fd72329d44a9 Listen On Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/escaping-the-drift-with-john-gafford/id1582927283 ************* #escapingthedrift #arimeisel #productivity #timemanagement #entrepreneurship #biohacking #ai #automation #outsourcing #health #diet #futureofwork #efficiency #coaching #innovation #legacybusinesses #productivitytools #personalgrowth #solutions #lessdoingmovement #chatgpt #michaeltomczyk #wharton #crohn'sdisease #optimize #automate #outsource #success #mentorship #entrepreneurialjourney #freddiemac #maccosmetics #negativeexperiences #positiveexperiences #balance #negative #positive #biohackingtechniques #dietaryexperiments #veganism #saturatedfats #butter #butyricacid #lowsugar #highfiber #fermentedfoods #gpt #meallogging #busylifestyle #fivekids #workouts #alcoholconsumption #saunas #sleeppatterns #biohackinggadgets #wellness #globaloutsourcing #bloodtesting #medicalprofessionals #geographicalshifts #employment #ethicalconsiderations #humantasks #machines #government #economy #automatedmanufacturing #humanoidrobots #ultimatekpi #repetitivetasks #busyness #realestate #constraints #innovation #legacy #businessconcepts #zirtual #virtualassistantcompany #externalfunding #onproductivity #oldestcompanies #longevity
Chapter 1: Who is Ari Meisel and what is his entrepreneurial background?
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 Maizel. Ari, how are you, man?
Hey, thanks for having me back.
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. I do.
Absolutely. Sometimes do-overs are a good thing.
I know. So let's talk a little bit. Let's start out. I always like to start out with the nature versus nurture part of what we do. So somebody that is as high functioning as you are, tell me about early Ari, young Ari. What do you think burned that India?
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.
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.
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Chapter 2: How did Ari Meisel's early experiences shape his productivity mindset?
So interestingly enough, yes, I've had several jobs, many, many, many jobs actually, and they just don't last very long.
Yeah. I always like to say that people that function very highly as entrepreneurs are what I like to call chronically unemployable.
Yeah. Yeah.
Would you say that's you for sure?
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.
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.
Here's the question about that, because I know which way I lean 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 gonna do that?
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 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.
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Chapter 3: What role did mentorship and education play in Ari's career development?
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.
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, you know, 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.
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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Chapter 4: How did Crohn's disease influence Ari Meisel's approach to biohacking and productivity?
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.
Not dude, man. And I, but I guess that's your whole thing, right? So, but, 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?
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.
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. Uh, but I also, I work out twice a week. Like I, I just, I don't drink either. That's another one.
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.
Do you wear, do you wear, were you wear a tracker to track your sleep? Are you doing all this stuff?
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.
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.
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Chapter 5: What biohacking strategies and dietary choices does Ari recommend?
Because it's like an inevitability, right?
No, it completely is. And I wonder, part of the tariff push is bringing manufacturing back to the States, not 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
But the ones who don't change are the ones that will, you know, not come out on top.
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Chapter 6: How does Ari Meisel use AI tools like ChatGPT to optimize health and productivity?
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.
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?
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,
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.
Well, you know what I found is, and I challenged 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? We have a very large real estate company and realtors are famous for this.
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 two 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 loss of just time?
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.
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Chapter 7: What is Ari's perspective on outsourcing, virtual assistants, and the impact of AI on work?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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Chapter 8: How are global outsourcing trends evolving in the era of AI and automation?
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.
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.
That's what they play.
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
Oh, God. And in Japan, that guy was probably wearing one of those signs and getting publicly humiliated for whatever they do with their business culture.
Yeah.
Because I think when we build a business, I think everybody wants their business to be around forever. But I think, again… Do you think… Yes. I think your first business, yes. And I can tell you this because I think your first business, when you build it, 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. Like we need to, we're building this to sell because that's what you need to do when the market is right. And I think, I think that's the evolution, but that very first one, man, I think people, so maybe 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. Yeah. Could they have sold off that Japanese company earlier and still made money or do they 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.
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