170: Outsource EVERYTHING & Work 10x Less? Ari Meisel’s Genius Framework – 8FE

Ever felt like your business would fall apart without you?

In this episode of Beyond A Million, Brad sits down with Ari Meisel — a powerhouse entrepreneur who biohacked his way out of Crohn’s disease and became the go-to productivity expert. He’s the founder of Less Doing, a coaching program that helps entrepreneurs find focus, flexibility, and freedom in their business.

Driven by a mission to make entrepreneurs replaceable, Ari lays out his signature framework: Optimize, Automate, Outsource. You’ll also hear about his 6 levels of delegation, how he beat Crohn’s, and how he easily manages to serve clients across 17 time zones.

Tune in now.

Inspiring Quotes

• “Productivity is not all or nothing.” – Brad Weimert 
• “Just doing more doesn’t have any inherent meaning to it. It’s all about doing the right things.” – Ari Meisel
• “The ancient Greeks used to say you should discuss every idea twice, once while you’re drunk and once while you’re sober.” – Ari Meisel
• “Entrepreneurs are drunk with ideas all the time. It’s when we’re sober that we can evaluate them.” – Ari Meisel
• “I always want to see how people perform at their worst.” – Ari Meisel
• “You can have everything you want in life. You just can’t have it all at the same time.” – Brad Weimert

• 00:00:00 Intro
• 00:01:29 The worst mistake entrepreneurs make with VAs
• 00:04:26 Ari’s outsourcing framework
• 00:08:08 Outsourcing and AI
• 00:11:25 The truth about productivity and efficiency
• 00:17:52 Asynchronous vs. synchronous communication
• 00:28:29 Dealing with the never ending to do list
• 00:32:03 Best outsourcing platforms
• 00:39:15 The 6 levels of delegation
• 00:48:36 Assessing and training new hires
• 00:54:11 Curing Crohn’s disease?
• 01:09:55 Outro

Ari Meisel 0:00
I always want to see how people perform at their worst. A lot of people outsource as like, a knee jerk reaction, right? Like, I don’t want to do this thing. I don’t know how to do this thing. Is I’m gonna hire somebody to do it. That’s the backwards way of approaching this. The ancient Greeks used to say, discuss every idea twice, once while you’re drunk and once while you’re sober. If they match up, then you can do it. I went for a colonoscopy last year, for the first time in 10 years, the doctors going through my history and on say, like, I had Crohn’s disease, you know? And he’s like, What do you mean? You had Crohn’s disease? I had it. I don’t have it anymore.

Brad Weimert 0:30
Through the process of fixing yourself physically, what tests did you do routinely and What actions did you do to correct that? Congrats on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even 10 figures. I’m Brad weimert, and as the founder of easy pay direct, I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. This doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building, and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today in those multi million, eight, nine and 10 figure businesses, life can get exciting beyond a million. Ari Mizell, thank you so much for showing up, man, it’s good to see

Ari Meisel 1:23
you. Yeah, you too. Thanks, Brad. It’s, it’s always fun to have a fun conversation.

Brad Weimert 1:29
We’ve already doing it. Yes, yes, we are. We’ve, we’ve started a while ago. Apparently you, you’re an interesting cat to me, because you bio hacked your way out of Crohn’s disease. You then proceeded to go run an Iron Man in France, which is some evidence of Crohn’s being less of an issue in your world. This led you to this journey of efficiency in business and in life in general. You launched a VA company that served hundreds of clients. I’ve got 15 different directions. I want to go with you, but let’s start with a couple quick ones, which is, what is the worst mistake that entrepreneurs consistently make when they’re trying to deploy a VA in their business.

Ari Meisel 2:04
Oh, that’s a great one. What cool? Okay, so they’re gonna give hard questions, so we’ll get there. So I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, actually, it’s symptomatic of the sort of the bigger issues that, I think, in general, like the one of some of the bigger issues you see with with uh, entrepreneurs, but it, a lot of it comes down to ego, and this idea that like only I can do the thing, right? So that is a very insidious and very sort of pervasive way that they think through all the things that they do, where it’s like it some of it’s about trust, some of it’s about a lack of knowledge. And honestly, at the end of the day, some of it is a lack of mastery, right? Because I would argue that, you know, if you can teach something, then you have some level of mastery of it, right? A lot of people would say that every time, when I used to do a lot of speaking in person before COVID, of course, and like, I’ve spoken, and I think, like 15 countries at this point, and lots of, lots of stages, and I always love to ask people, you know, raise your hand if you’ve ever outsourced something. And you know, you’ll get a large percentage of people raising their hands. And more and more over the years. I’ve been doing this for like, 15 years, and then I’m like, All right, now, if you’ve ever had a bad experience outsourcing something, raise your hand. And inevitably, invariably, more people raise their hands than originally raised their hands, right? So it’s like, all right. So to be clear, more of you have had a bad experience outsourcing than have actually outsourced something. Got it. I was like, so here’s the good news. It was probably your fault, because people are not natural born communicators. Some people might be natural born leaders. I do not think people are naturally born communicators. You really have to it’s a skill we really have to learn. And what always happens with outsourcing is that people approach it if they’re not good at it, they approach it with a very binary kind of attitude, which is that either this is a thing that I have to do completely on my own, or this is a thing that somebody else completely has to do on their own. It’s very binary. And so neither of those is a very comfortable scenario to live in, and what they end up doing is they ask somebody to do something, they give it to somebody who has less information and less context than they do, just by design, while at the same time expecting a superior result than they would have delivered themselves. You are like guaranteeing you’re setting somebody up for failure. And then what happens is that people then have a bad taste in their mouth about outsourcing, and it just gets worse and worse and worse. Like, yeah, I tried that, but this happened.

Brad Weimert 4:26
So, so I think that that, I mean that pertains to all delegation and business period, right? Like, as you go through the phases of, you know, having one employee to having five to 10 to 30 to millions or whatever. Right there are different levels of how you need to effectively delegate and how you have to learn to delegate with virtual assistants in particular. Are there, is there a consistent mistake that people make around that? Do you need more framework with vas? Do you need specific types of tasks? What’s the common pitfall for entrepreneurs when they’re four? First doing it,

Ari Meisel 5:00
yeah, so outsourcing first, that’s the big problem. So it’s not a particularly issue. It’s not particularly an issue with a VA. I think one of the you definitely want to have tighter systems with vas, not so much because they’re remote, but because, kind of, like, by definition, they’re a little interchangeable. And I’m not dehumanizing people, but just like the role of a VA, kind of by design is, you know, swappable, right? You should be able to have somebody else fill in that role. Yeah? So I want

Brad Weimert 5:24
to, you’re going to tell me your framework, and I want to, I want to tee this up a little bit because, yeah, one of the things that I like about how you approach and I think that this is necessary, but one of the things I like about how you approach efficiency is by these sort of building blocks or frameworks that people can follow, like a structure to approach how to be efficient. Elon Musk has a framework for it’s like a his algorithm framework is, I think, what he calls it, but it’s question every requirement, delete unnecessary steps, optimize, accelerate cycle time and automate process. And he’s got probably kind of interesting thoughts about why he does that. You have a similar structure that is, optimize, automate, outsource, and I think where you were going just now was people outsource first instead of those first two steps. So tell me the importance of that structure in that framework for you?

Ari Meisel 6:21
Yeah, perfect. Thank you. So a lot of people outsource is like a knee jerk reaction, right? Like, I don’t want to do this thing. I don’t know how to do this thing. This is annoying. It takes too much time. I’m gonna hire somebody to do it. That’s, that’s the backwards way of approaching this, right? So with might it’s optimized for us, you need to optimize the actual problem. And a lot of optimizing is actually understanding it. There’s so much of things that we do just because that’s how we’ve always done them, and we don’t have a really deep understanding of why and where you see that the most, and I’ll come back to this in another in a moment, but where you see that the most is when people try to write down or create processes, they skip over all the heuristics and all the shortcuts in their brain that they aren’t even aware they’re using, and then the other person doesn’t have the information. So we have to optimize the actual problem first, because if you give an inefficient problem to somebody else to deal with, it’s like sweeping the dirt under the rug, right? Like it doesn’t actually make it go away, and it just builds up because then that person again doesn’t have the knowledge resources. It doesn’t work. And then the next step, once you’ve optimized, then we want to look at automation. And automation now, especially with AI, is stuff we can automate, things that you know years ago, no, sorry, weeks ago, a person had to do you can have done with a free bot or a free agent on it, on chatgpt. And the thing is, is, if you give that work to a person that you could have had an AI do or something, you’re in essence dehumanizing them, and they will not engage with that work. They will not do a job on it. They will not enjoy it. There will be no sustainability to that. We want to optimize, then automate, and then what’s left is the thing that we want to outsource to some sort of generalist or some sort of specialist, because that’s something where they really need them. We need a human. We need that person with that skill set or that to be able to add that value to that and they will be able to engage with that work in a better way as well. I

Brad Weimert 8:08
mean, we’ve got to now. We’ve got to jump into AI. So how has AI impacted the elements of outsourcing to a VA?

Ari Meisel 8:19
So over the years, I have worked with personally, have worked with over 500 VAs in different capacities, in my own company and other companies in all sorts of different ways. I’m always trying to avoid outsourcing, right? So I want to optimize what I can, and I want to automate as much, or if all of it, if possible. So as much as I’ve tried to avoid outsourcing. I’ve still outsourced hundreds of 1000s of dollars of things and 1000s of 1000s of hours of things, right? So that just shows you, like, how much, how much there is. I have not had a VA or any kind of assistant with me in over three years now, and that is enlarged not three years ago, but for the last couple years at least. That is almost entirely because of using AI tools, primarily chat GBT, but others as well. I’m involved in a lot of different things. I’m involved in municipal groups. I’m involved in a couple different charities. I have five children. Yeah, chat, chat GBT is like is my my external brain at this point. Now, I can’t execute in the same way that a VA can, but it can get me right up to that point where I can

Brad Weimert 9:34
just click a button. It’s March 18, 2025, have you played with Manus yet?

Ari Meisel 9:40
No, I just saw somebody post that they got access to it, and I didn’t even know what it

Brad Weimert 9:44
was. Yeah, I mean, it’s in this moment. It is the, you know, in this is, this is funny, because when I’m specifically, when I’m recording podcast episodes, I’m sort of thinking about the general, fundamental, Evergreen stuff that’s gonna exist forever. And I’m, I’m a. Acutely aware of how click baity, the topical trending stuff is, and how much I, I, I want to stay away from it. But like, it’s a curious point of discussion right now. So manis is the first AI agent that people are really excited about, and they’re like, really impressed with, and actually, you should be able to just sign up for it now. So it’s, invite only. But, like, I think that that was their marketing hook on the front end, and they’re, you know, it’s opening up. Have you played with any agents?

Ari Meisel 10:28
Yeah. I mean, I’ve done, I mean, I’ve built stuff with replit. I have what’s the other one? I’m blanking on what the other one was. I’ve done a bunch of stuff with replit, but be perfectly honest, like, it’s as valuable to me to be like, you know, I have a leak in my house or something, find these three plumbers and then, like, tell me which one I should call first, and then for me to make a call. Like, I’m fine with that. You know, I spend enough time in the car, like, taking kids back and forth to school. Like, totally on a problem. Yeah, I could have a VA do that, but it’s like getting me to, like, the, you know, the three yard line, essentially. And that’s totally fine, because productivity is not all or nothing, right? Like, and there are things that you can learn through that process of being somewhat involved in things. Sometimes the issue is, if you really don’t have the time or the bandwidth and you can’t hand that over, that becomes a problem. And I’m not in that place because of how things are managed. Yeah, you said

Brad Weimert 11:25
something that’s really interesting to me right now, which is, productivity is not all or nothing, and you by being involved, you can learn from the process. One of the things that I have seen consistently throughout, you know, decades in business now, is the frustration that comes from people, but employees in particular, that have been given a task that you like, given a project, and then you don’t use the output, or you seemingly don’t use the output, right? So they’re like, I did all this fucking work, and you’re not even gonna fucking use it. You’re not even listening to me. And I think what you just said is so important for people here, which is, the point may not be the output. The point might be that you got a better grip on the situation and understanding the steps, like how to optimize the process, so that next time you do it, you’re going to be much better. And it’s not actually getting to the output right now, it’s going through the exercise of learning. And I know that it sounds cliche that like, you know, life is a journey or whatever, and it’s about learning. It’s not about the end, but truly, everything you do, if you put focus on it, will serve you in the next step. And that’s a cool thing to think about, relative to AI also, yeah. I

Ari Meisel 12:36
mean, to me, it’s really about being more effective, right? And I’m pretty sure it’s Tim Ferriss, who said this a while ago, which was like, productivity is pretty productivity is producing more, efficiency is producing more with less, but being effective is producing the right things. And so there’s no awards for being, I mean, I guess there are some, maybe, but there’s not really an award for, like, being the most productive. You know, it just doing more doesn’t, doesn’t have any sort of inherent meaning to it right. It’s really about doing the right things, and sometimes, a lot of times, figuring out what those right things are, is that’s the hardest part. That’s a lot of what I ultimately have to help people figure out with my coaching, sometimes because of the ego aspect of that. But like, I could outsource so much more in my life. We could have a private chef, we could have a maid, we could have a driver, but then So, so what? So that I could do more work? You know, like, it’s like, what are we optimizing for? In some cases, I think about that image so often, where it’s like, you get to this point where things are so optimized and so so automated, so streamlined, and, like, if you come up with an idea as an entrepreneur, you can give it to a system, and then that system creates it, and it goes into fresh and you can see that it’s like, well, so then, then what do you do? Well, go do the dishes, you know, like, it’s like, that’s what you do. You put your hands on something, and you do something tangible. And then you, you know, again, with the five kids. Like, if I’m if I’m lucky, I can spend a few minutes at the end of, like, the bedtime routine, like, I can go to each one for a few minutes, you know, and talk about something like, it’s it. Those are that’s why we should be optimizing for these things, so that we can do more of the things that seem mundane, but ultimately the things that are really, that are more real and make us more human. I

Brad Weimert 14:22
think if you define productivity as producing more, which is sort of how you just defined it, right, it’s then who cares? Great, I produced more of what. But if you didn’t produce to the outcome you want, then you didn’t get there. I like the delineation between productivity, efficiency and effectiveness. That was good with a gaggle of kids. What are the efficiency tips that you have for parents that are also entrepreneurs? I.

Ari Meisel 15:01
I get better at sleeping less so from well, okay, so, I mean, there’s all sorts of, like, Kid things you could talk about and stuff, but I mean, so I have a 13 year old to 11 twin 11 year olds, a nine year old and a 22 month old.

Brad Weimert 15:19
And, yeah, at what point do you stop counting months? Is it at the two year mark?

Ari Meisel 15:24
Yeah, I think so. I think so. Because it’s like, she’s not two yet, you know, she’s still, like, mental baby, but then she’ll be two very soon. You know, you can talk about all things, about, like, you know, optimizing things in the house, but, I mean, everyone’s got their own things. There’s plenty of people on Instagram that can tell you that kind of stuff. I will tell you the number one thing that has been the silver bullet for me with with productivity in general, if there was ever a silver bullet, is the exact opposite of what we’re doing right now, which would be asynchronous communication, right? So what we’re doing right now is synchronous communication. We’re live. We can see each other, we can react. And there’s a place for that, and this is one of those places is podcast interviews. The majority of meetings that people have, I believe and argue and push clients that should be done asynchronously. So I would say that about 90% of my communication in life is done asynchronously. And you’re all using asynchronous tools. You’re using email and text and stuff. But a lot of people don’t use them as asynchronous communication tools. They use them as like a leash that anybody can use to get a hold of them whenever they want. That’s not how it’s supposed to work. So my general rule with people, because I get asked to do all sorts of things all the time, and give my time for things, and my general rule is like, if we can do things 100% asynchronously, the answer is immediately, I’ll say yes, yeah, no problem. If you need to have some synchronous time with it, you need to meet face to face or something, then it’s a different conversation. So all of my coaching with clients. I have clients all over the world that have unlimited one on one. Coaching access to me is all done asynchronously. I don’t so I serve clients in 17 time zones. Currently, I don’t have a single zoom call once every week. I don’t have an onboarding call. I don’t even do my sales calls as calls. It’s all done over for me, it’s Voxer, which is a voice communication tool that some people might be familiar with. But so I have clients I speak to every single day for a minute, and what it means is that if I’m at soccer practice for one of my kids, and I have now three kids on three travel teams, I can drop a kid off at the field, and while I’m going to park my car, I can listen to a client’s concern, think about it, and respond and then go back to what I’m doing. I can, you know, so asynchronous communication is the silver bullet for community, for productivity and honestly, for managing stuff with a busy family.

Brad Weimert 17:52
Okay, so there are lots of things about that that I agree with, and I like one is that asynchronous communication can allow you to think through your thoughts more clearly than synchronous communication. It also is much easier to coordinate in your own schedule than trying to juggle two schedules and figure out when you can connect specifically when with really busy people or or people that just do a lot of stuff. What situations do you think async? Asynchronous communication fails and synchronous communication is better?

Ari Meisel 18:27
So it’s you bring up a really interesting point, right? So there’s some people who are talk to thinkers, and some people are think to talkers. I’m going to get I’m going to answer a question, but I first want to say one of the ways that asynchronous communication works really well for that. So Voxer, particularly, has been really fascinating. So if you don’t, if you don’t know what Voxer is, if people don’t know what Voxer is, it’s primarily a voice communication tool. Think about like audio messages in in iMessage, similar, but it’s just a little smoother, I think, and it has some features that work really well that other tools don’t have. I have found that as a coach, it used to take me maybe three months, sometimes or four months, to really develop trust with somebody, because a lot of the stuff I deal with is not what looks like productivity on the surface, a lot of it ends up being very sort of, you know, between the ears stuff. I find that I can get there in two weeks now with Voxer, because it’s like somebody is speaking into the ether, almost. And like, you know, So Brad, you know, you just cracked your neck while you’re sorry, right? So, like, does that in my head. Should I be like, Oh, wait, he’s getting bored, so I should change what I’m saying, right? And I know you’re not, but when you’re synchronous and you’re seeing things like, we inevitably have reactions. We change course, we adjust. But I will have people who will just talk for 15 minutes into nothing, you know, and it’s almost like a diary that I’m gonna read. And people, you know, somebody starts a message talking about the employee that they are frustrated with, and then they go into something that happened with their kid the night before, and in their marriage today. And we like, they one of the. Things that you learn in EMS is, if you get a patient to keep talking, they will tell you what’s wrong with them eventually, like you’ll they will identify they’ll diagnose themselves. If you can get a patient to keep talking, it’s the same thing in these situations. So without that feedback, that immediate feedback loop, they fill the space. And some of it’s, you know, nonsense, but some of it, they have to get out of the way. The non they have to get the nonsense out. The nonsense out of the way of the real stuff. So that’s that’s one of the things where it works really well. Where it doesn’t work as well, in some cases, is some of the more, like brainstorming, more group kind of things that you would have. And so to me, that’s like a great case for a synchronous meeting. You need to get three or four people in a room. It’s still going to be really hard to get three or four people that are on a very similar, like circadian rhythm and can really connect at a high level at the same time. But if you frame it right and you set up the right parameters and guardrails, then that’s a situation where it’s like, hey, what about this? Now, that doesn’t work, you know, okay, but what if we add this to it, like, then, then, then you can get that, like, momentum and that energy, and that’s some place where asynchronous does not necessarily work. I think

Brad Weimert 21:04
that there are plenty of people that are don’t need to talk in order to think. They are really think to talkers, but they’re lazy, and it’s easier to try to get somebody with them to talk through something than to actually commit the time to thinking through the process. And you know your framework of optimize, automate and outsource. The fundamental of that in the beginning was understand the process better and understand the problem better. And one of the things I do like about asynchronous communication if you do it thoughtfully, is it necessitates, if you do it thoughtfully, that you actually spend time articulating the message. Now, what I don’t like about, you know, a Voxer platform, or, you know, fucking I messages the audios is most of the time, people just vomit stuff, and then the onus is on me to listen to their rambling narration of their life for seven minutes, and that’s that’s feels like a burden. So A, how do you handle that? And B, how do you think about if you’re doing asynchronous communication, how do you think about the boundaries of SLAs? How quickly are you obligated to give a response to that? How do you organize those responses? How do you think about that structure?

Ari Meisel 22:21
So first of all, in Voxer, you can listen at two, three and four times speed. So fortunately, right now, my client, my one client that talks the most, talks very slowly, so I can listen at four times speed, and that’s great. I kind of think about it like and also I know I know my clients well enough that I know when a client I like before I even open the message, I know it’s going to be a tactical question, or it’s going to be like, I just need a vent. And that’s there’s value in that. So I kind of think about it like a podcast sometimes, right? And I’m in the car a bunch and I just, I’ll listen. And what’s nice is that if that person were in front of me speaking for 15 minutes straight, it would be very hard for me to not look bored, and that’s part of the way that my mind works, right? Like, I just, I can’t, there’s just a limit, right? Yep,

Brad Weimert 23:10
I’m familiar with that, yeah.

Ari Meisel 23:13
But at the same time, I am then on the spot and expected to give, like, this amazing answer, right? Because, like, I’m the guy, I’m the person they’re paying for the answer. So what’s, what’s really interesting for me is that I can listen to a long message like that. So I’ll listen to a 15 minute message, you know, in five minutes, let’s say, if I listen at 3x speed, I can think about it for a little while, and then I can give them the, like, 32nd answer that it was exactly what they needed to hear. And also, there have been many times where I have in my head been like, you know, because my my style of coaching, I would say, not in general, but a lot of times is, I’m very people like to call it direct, right? But it’s, I mean, I can be very harsh sometimes because I want to get to a result quickly. And I’m also not going to just, I’m not going to beat around the bush, so I’ll tell somebody when they’re acting like an idiot. I’ll use better words than that, worse words, depending on how you say it, and it’s like you’re and I say like you’re wrong. You were wrong in the situation, like, you know, you might want to hear like you did it okay, but no, this was really wrong, and this is something you need to fix, and then they can sit with that before they respond. But I have definitely had those times where I’m like, I’m trying to like, I’ll go through versions of how, how direct I want to be, you know, or, Oh, maybe I should take a different approach to this. And it also, honestly, like, it allows me to sort of learn some of my own self management sometimes, right? Because it’s like, I can have an immediate harsh reaction to something that somebody says, like, Oh, that’s so stupid. Your employees a total moron, like you should get rid of them right now. And then I go through and I’m like, All right, well, maybe they were thinking it this way, and maybe the client should be thinking that. Maybe they were thinking about it this way. So I’m going to give sort of all the different scenarios. It’s, it’s, I always like to say, you know, you can’t read the label from inside the jar. I. This really gives you an opportunity to sort of get outside the jar and figure things out. And then one other thing about that too is that I do a group message every week or so, which is like my private podcast for my clients, and it usually will provoke some sort of answers. So what’s fun with that is that I’ll get two or three clients responding to that privately and be like, Oh, I was thinking about this, when you set that message, and sometimes hearing it from multiple clients, then gives me sort of an answer that I want to give all of them so I can, like, amalgamate that answer, and it’s like, oh, wait, they took it this way, and that was not how I actually intended it. And then this person took it this way, which was also not how I intended it. So besides clarifying my message, like, Okay, well now I can address that this way. It’s just giving that space, right? It like gives you that that momentary space between stimulus and response, which is a good thing.

Brad Weimert 25:46
Yeah, I like that mechanism. I think there are a lot of different forms for that. One is being deliberate about what you post socially or into any environment, right? Any platform that you want to test a message or see how people are going to respond. You use the construct of your coaching, but I think it’s relevant there. One of the things that is a challenge, I think, for lots of entrepreneurs, is the sheer volume of shit that ends up on their plate, and the sheer volume of things they’re trying to navigate. And so there are, I know that I want to talk about your framework for delegation and the six levels of delegation, and maybe this will lead into it, but specifically with asynchronous communication, one of the challenges that I have is I’m like, yeah, yeah, but I want to get this shit done and get it off my fucking plate right now. So async, how do you set standards for turn time and, like, final execution of the task. If you’re basically recording something asynchronously and saying, Hey, this is what the thing is, when do you expect a response? When do people expect a response from you? How do you create that structure? Yeah.

Ari Meisel 26:52
And also, I just realized I didn’t fully answer your last question, and I can do that really quickly, which is, you know, talk about response times. So I purposely, I do not set any expectation of response time for my clients. So it could be, it’s usually within a few hours, but I’ve gone on vacation for a week and not told anybody, and, you know, responded when I got back. You know, when you want to get something off your plate right away, like, you know, I want to get this fucking done, like you were saying, outsourcing, it is not the right way to do that in most cases, almost all cases, right? So that’s where the external brain concept that I talk about comes in. You need to have a place to do that. Your ideas need flow. You need be able to capture those ideas. It’s a rare instance where you’re gonna be like, I need to do this thing now. I’m gonna go outsource it. Like, that’s, that’s, that doesn’t usually work unless you already have a really good system set up in place, and it’s, or it’s something very, very small and specific, you know, like shit. I got to get this flight. Book died tonight. Book the flight like, that’s very different. So I’ll just touch on external brain really quick. You have to have capture systems all over the place, and that can be emails. It can be voicemails. There’s all sorts of tools we can use, if TTT is actually really great for bringing that all to one place. I can I can take a screenshot of my phone. This is one of my favorites. And IFT, will add that as a Trello card to to my my list. And then at the end of the day, eight o’clock at night, or whatever, then I can go in and I can sort those ideas, right? So maybe something is something I need to buy, all right, send that to a VA to buy, if I was using a VA, this is something I need to tell my wife about. This is something I need to sign up for for this. This is a bigger project I need to talk about with my coo tomorrow, right? So you need to have those mechanisms in place. So let

Brad Weimert 28:29
me recap that for people, this is a phenomenally common situation. For entrepreneurs, there’s a never ending to do list, and I think it’s comical when people say things to me like, do you have free time like to address something I’m like, fuck you talking about No, there’s no free time. There’s a never ending list of shit to do. The question is, what do I want to prioritize right now? And one of the things that people have trouble with is capture, and I love what you just said about taking all of these different capture mechanisms, because in some environments, verbally spewing something is the easiest way to get it out. In some environments, sending an email is the easiest way to get it out. In some environments, opening the project management tool is the right way to get it down. But I love the idea of using automation platforms to funnel everything into one location. In your case, that’s Trello. That’s awesome,

Ari Meisel 29:24
yeah. And so just to reiterate that a little further even so, like I said, if TCT is really good for that kind of thing, because, like, Zapier, maybe now I can, but Zapier and, like, more complicated things, a lot of times, don’t work with things like smart home devices. So I can do the screenshot on my phone. I can call the iftc number and leave a voicemail. I’ll usually do that if I’m in the car. We’ve got the smart home devices all over the place. I can send an email to IFT. I can, of course, open up. I can add a Trello card from my lock screen. There’s also whisper memos, which is a. Really great iPhone app that has a shortcut for the front so you hit that. It records your voice. It transcribes it with one of the AI transcription tools. Is really good. You can even have it, summarize it and, like, flush it out, and then create a Trello card. So, like all of these things, like, you should never be more than 20 seconds away from capturing an idea no matter where you are, what you’re doing, including in the shower, right? I can reach out the shower and say, so, because we have ideas all the time, and what, what? What it it’s one thing to lose a good idea. But what’s more often happens is then you’re like, oh my god, this is the greatest idea ever. Three hours later, you’ve been like, on this idea and like, this is the worst idea I’ve ever had, and now I lost three hours of time doing, you know, these things I could have done. But it also is, like, so much of what I do has been fueled by this idea of not being overwhelmed, like over what my my first like, my entry level course is called overwhelm ology, right? And overwhelm is what led to my illness in a lot of ways, and stuff like that that I was able to get over. So it’s so freeing. Like, if I’m with the kids or I’m literally, like, got like, a like, the baby in my arm, and it’s like, oh my god, I got this idea. Like, you know, I got to do something about this. It’s really great to be like, hey, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, All right, it’s there for later. I can go for later. The other thing is that we have three very different sets of like neurology. One is the capture, or is the idea, like the ideation brain, a very, very different brain is the one that you want executing on things? Yeah, right. And in the middle, there’s that brain that sorts those ideas and says, like it’s the ancient Greeks used to say you should discuss every idea twice, once while you’re drunk and once while you’re sober, if they match up, then you can do it. So like, entrepreneurs are drunk with ideas all the time, right? It’s when we’re sober, and we can be like, oh, yeah, that’s a really good idea, and that’s gonna or be like, Yeah, somebody already did that, though, and it didn’t work. And this is why, and I don’t want to attack that, you know, yeah, yeah, I

Brad Weimert 32:03
do. And I also think that if you don’t get the ideas out of your head, they weigh on you, and I think a huge sense of overwhelm is that you’ve got these ideas ruminating through your brain, and they get in the way of effective prioritization. And if you could just get them out and write them down somewhere, you’re not going to forget them. They’re there, they’ll be there later, and then you can

Ari Meisel 32:27
focus exactly. And that’s huge. And a lot of people, it’s a really hard thing for some people. So to get back to your question before about delegation and outsourcing or in timelines stuff like that. So I, like I said, I don’t have a VA, but I have outsourced stuff consistently over the last couple of years. And my favorite platform for probably a decade now is Fiverr. Fiverr is a gold mine. Not only is it a gold mine for talent, because a lot of those people are on the other platforms as well. I have, I have real issues with like Upwork and oDesk and Guru and all those. I think that they do a really poor job of managing the client interaction. First of all, and I’ve had a couple like, disputes where they’ve really not done a good job handling those. Fiverr is amazing. And what I particularly like about using Fiverr is you can get a very micro task done, right? So it’s not just like, set up a CRM. It can be like, I need this one setting changed in WordPress, and I don’t know how to do it. Here’s a guy who will do it. Here’s a person will do it. So the way that I do Fiverr is I will find that thing. And a recent example of this is I was setting up a domain, a website for a nonprofit in town that needed to do it for free. So we were using Wix. And with Wix, you, you can’t, inherently have, you can’t have a domain name on a Wix site unless you pay, but you can point the domain name to Wix, but it’s a little bit more complicated than the normal way of doing it. And I tried to do it, and I messed it up, and so I literally, like I didn’t, I didn’t, I couldn’t figure out how to get the C names right. And this is really annoying, because I’ve done web development since I was literally 12. But like, I couldn’t figure this out. And my rule is 15 minutes, if I can’t figure it out in 15 minutes, I need to take it to somebody else. So I literally went on Fiverr and I searched for C name, and the first thing that pops up is this person, like, I will fix your C name issue. Awesome. So the way that I do Fiverr, though, is I write what I want. So this is the problem. This is what I need done. Here’s a screenshot, whatever. And I message the person with that I will immediately then, so I search for C name, right? So now I immediately go to the next person and the next person, next person. So I will usually do five to seven people immediately with that same cut and paste message, right? So within 90 seconds, two minutes, I’ve messaged seven people with the same request. And what’s great about Fiverr is so by the time I get to that seventh person, two people. Already responded. Then while I’m talking to that one person, they asked me a question that I hadn’t thought of. Now I take that to the one that also responded, and I clarify with that information. I kind of play them against each other. What’s your budget? I don’t know what my budget is for this. You tell me what it is. I can do it for, you know, 50 bucks. So then I go to the next person I’m like, my budget is 25 you know, and then two more people are going to jump into the conversation. One of those people, their their communication style is whether it’s, you know, a language issue or what, it’s just not doesn’t work for me, right? They’re not quite getting it. They’re asking questions that I find annoying and that I don’t like. That’s not going to work. Two people don’t respond because they’re in a time zone that they just don’t work on the same time zone as me. And within 10 minutes, I have basically vetted and almost tested the person that I’m now hire for 10 bucks, right? And I have, I not in recent years, but I have, in my career, I’ve hired over a dozen people full time to work for me off of Fiverr using that method. So it’s, it’s an incredible resource for finding people to do things, and then ultimately, you can also get to that question with them. It’s like, I need this done in an hour. Can you do it? No, I can’t, but I can do it in three next person. Can you do it in an hour? Yes, I can, you know, okay, but it’ll be $5 more. Okay, great. Now I know I got my options. I’ve played

Brad Weimert 36:19
with all these, all these outsourcing platforms for a whole variety of different things, and we actively use them for lots of different random shit. But I think more important than the platform, the message that I got there was one that I think about all the time, and it is a, I think, a cornerstone of efficiency, which is take all out massive action immediately, and that the biggest mistake people make with trying to get things done quickly is they throw the monkey on somebody else’s back, and they think that that’s going to be the answer to getting it done. The problem is, when that person fails, then you have to start over. And so by starting the game with, I’m not going to go to one person or two people, but I’m going to go to seven, and then I’m going to keep the conversation actively moving through that process and reiterate the information back to the Group of Seven to get answers from all of them. You get to vet at the same time and increase the tempo to get to your answer much quicker. I love that, yeah.

Ari Meisel 37:17
And it also, you know that there’s that old interview question, like, what’s the what’s something? And I don’t ask this question because I find it actually very annoying in that setting. But when people are like, you know, what’s something, I should have asked you that I didn’t, you know. It’s like, you know, ask me about my my baseball card collection, like, I don’t know, but, but in this setting, it’s really helpful, right? Because it’s like, oh, yeah, I wouldn’t have thought to ask that, you know, because it’s not necessarily something I understand. So then I can ask somebody, you know, if somebody, if like, one person, responds, they’re like, I suggest using this framework. And this actually happened. I this was a few months ago. I needed somebody to create a basic dashboard for me. And what I first did was, I go online, I’m looking for basic dashboard software. It’s like Tableau. And what’s the other one? That’s a big one. I don’t remember, but I signed up for an account. I start digging into it. 15 minutes, I’m into it. I’ve done nothing. That’s where I’m like, All right, I’m gonna go to this. So somebody responds. They’re like, I really like Looker studio from Google. So I looked at I was like, This looks great. So now I can go back and be like, I want you to create a dashboard in looker. I want you to create a dashboard in Looker, you know. So it’s something I had no idea about before, and now I can use that to be a more informed negotiator and delegator in the other conversations. Yeah,

Brad Weimert 38:31
that’s super interesting. Okay, this is the interruption where I’m supposed to take money and let somebody else advertise on the podcast, but I don’t really want to do that, so I’m going to remind you that I also own easypadiq.com and if you’re a business that’s accepting credit cards or needs to beyond the fact that we can do a rate review to save you money, beyond the fact that we give you dedicated account reps, world class customer service, world class technology, and can actually optimize the way you accept payments online, you should understand why We have 1000s of people a year come to us off of platforms like Stripe or PayPal and why they prefer easy pay direct. You can check us [email protected] forward slash b, a, m, that’s epd.com forward slash bam. One of the things you talk about is your the six levels of delegation. Can you explain that framework to me, yeah.

Ari Meisel 39:21
So as I mentioned before, right though, a lot of people approach delegation as a very binary activity, meaning, like, I do it all, or they do it all, and neither one of those is like a great situation for most people. So the six levels of delegation basically says, like, there are gradients to ultimately, how much we’re empowering people, because that, to me, is really what outsourcing should be about. It’s about empowering people that work with you, not just brushing off shit that you don’t want to deal with. So level one, level one is just do it. Just do what I say. Rather, right? So that could be like, order this book on Amazon with my credit card, like, and that’s it, and that’s, I don’t want your opinion. I don’t want you to tell me, Oh, I found. The sale. I don’t want you to ask me anything. Just, just do this exact thing, right? So no empowerment there, but there’s a place for that. Level four is you make a decision, but keep me informed, basically, right? So, like, you, you like, what software should we sign up for? For the dashboard? I’m telling this person, like, Hey, I trust you to look into it. Just, just let me know what you decide before we move forward with it, and I can give you the final green light. So a little bit more, a lot more empowering, but ultimately not like autonomous. Level five is my favorite, and that’s where I operate a lot, with people who are on teams with me. And level five is you decide within limits. So the limits can be whatever you want, money, time, space, whatever, but money is a common one, right? So one of the rules I had in my company for a long time was, if the decision is a $500 or less decision, you don’t have to ask anybody just do it, right? Because I never wanted somebody to have a client complain, you know that, oh, $300 got missed, or whatever, and then they have to wait three days because they want to talk to me first, if they can refund the money, it’s like, no, you up to $500 you made decision. I don’t even know about it. That’s fine. Really empowering at that point, right? Because it gives somebody a really ample playground kind of to get deal with. And then level six is just get it done. And level six is fascinating. So, and by the way, level six is not better than level one. It really depends on your level of comfort, your ability to communicate, and the person you’re communicating to, not only in level six that you’re saying, I completely trust you, whatever the result that you produce, I’m going to be okay with but what it’s also saying is I’m recognizing, particularly as a founder entrepreneur, that in this scenario, any involvement on my part would only hinder the process. So I am stepping out of your way. You do you? Boo, right? Like that’s and so I’ve had, I had a writer who worked for me for a number of years, Amy, who was amazing and wrote several of my last books. And she, when she was working with me to begin with, she she proved herself very early with her ability to get me and get my writing or get what I wanted. And then she would send me, you know, what do you think of this blog post? And I would respond, l6 meaning, like, Don’t fucking ask me, like you got this, and what that means, it’s and she often refers to that as, like, these moments of growth for her, where it was like, All right, yeah, I can do this, and this is going to be great. And if I didn’t like what she produced at that point, it’s my fault, not hers nothing for her to do, you know, with it. And there were definitely things that I would delegate to her at different levels. But that was something that was like, this is level six. And then the other thing about that is that there’s this idea of the doer, the there’s a Yiddish word for it, which is a Maher, right? Like somebody who gets shit done. You think about there was that, right? You ever see the show, Ray, Donovan? Yes, right? So the fixer, right? The guy or the girl who could just fix things,

Brad Weimert 43:04
damn. I had to dig for that one. I don’t know when that came out, but yeah, man,

Ari Meisel 43:11
so I have to say like, so I am that person for a lot of things that I do in life, right there, there I am. I’m very proud of that aspect of that aspect of my personality, but there are people who an organization I work with, where they can call and at any time of database, and it’s like, this is a problem. How do I fix it? And I will fix it, and I will get it fixed, and I’ll figure it out. When you find somebody like that, you you should, you should hire that person and have them in your company. But that’s another level six operation where it’s like, this is just the person that fixes the problems, finds the solutions, and that’s a that’s another level six arena, but it really is situation dependent, relationship dependent, and provides a lot more comfort for people to delegate more effectively.

Brad Weimert 43:56
So there, there are two things I think, I mean, I have a very similar thought process and structure in my life, but also inside the walls of easy pay direct in particular, I will move from one type of delegation to another with a human inside of the six, you know, six levels of delegation framework you have, I’ll move from, call it five to six, and when I meaning, I’ll say, Hey, here’s $1 amount you can run with. And I might set that dollar amount at 200 bucks, or 500 bucks or $5,000 but when I do that, I will set it for a period of time for revision. And it’s a super important structure for me, because one of the things that I find, not only with delegation, but with tons of things in business when you’re trying to do a lot of stuff, is it’s very easy to put a system in place and then find it two years later and be like, Ah, fuck. I’ve been doing that for two years. Shit. I meant to change that. That’s number one. I. Yeah, the other is that. The other is you can have level six delegation on certain tasks with certain people, that under no circumstances could they be a level six delegation task in a different arena, right? So it’s important to have that delineation and not say, oh, this person, because not everybody’s the fixer, not everybody’s look, if they were, they’d probably be doing their own thing, maybe. But it’s very uncommon to find people that are just good at everything, and if they are, they’re probably accelerating in life on their own, just owning their shit. So the question is, what are they good at? Under what circumstances can I fully be hands off and say, You do whatever you do to get it done, I fully trust you. How do you go about assessing who is right to be in those different categories of delegation?

Ari Meisel 45:56
So I want to attack that. So we’ll say one of the things is that I think that entrepreneurs and founders and CEOs in general have to do a better job of being a sorter. So sorting things, right? So a hot potato. A lot of times they hold on to things for too long, right? We need to be able to be identify a problem or a task or an idea, whatever, quickly and then hand it off to the right person with the right information. And that’s a skill that a lot of leaders need to develop more of, and in doing so, sometimes you do get to see where people falter or not. We also have to create a culture in general where people are okay with failure and learning from failure. There’s a Mitsubishi method from the 30s or 20s that I always like the implementing companies, which is called the five whys. So like, W, h, y, right? So if a problem occurs, you ask, why did that happen? And then you ask, Well, why did that happen? And then why did that happen? And you go five degrees deep, essentially. And then they are supposed to come up with their own solution based on that. And in my VA company, we had a policy that if, there was a, not even a like an actual failure, but if there was a client interaction that didn’t go well for some reason. If the VA presented us with the five wise form, and we had a jot form for this before we heard anything from the client, like there was a reward for that, you know? So like, identify that there was a problem and identify a solution, find your own solution, but make that a systemic part of how we operate, right? So something goes wrong, you don’t try to figure how to cover up. You don’t, you know, get defensive. You actually find the way that we make that better so it doesn’t happen again. And like, then you’re you’re absolved, essentially. And then the other one is that I always want to see how people perform at their worst with writers, particularly like creative work, coders, things like that. It’s always fascinating to me when you and I’ve interviewed probably 2000 people in my life, it’s always fascinating when somebody’s like, you know, give me a sample of your work. Give me a sample of your writing, right? They’re going to give you a piece of writing that has gone through seven drafts that their college professor, you know, like, polished for them, and that’s going to be their best work. What I always like to do is like when I was hiring copywriters, for example, here’s a shitty piece of copy. Make it better. Make it better. Now, right? This, this WordPress, this WordPress site is not working. How would you fix it? Right? Those are the that’s how you test people really, really quickly, not only to see if they actually can solve the problem, but to see how they handle being presented with the problem in the first

Brad Weimert 48:36
place. Yeah, I love that. I think that the we have everybody that we bring on for easy, pay direct. And this applies to other businesses that I’m a part of as well. We have, we have some sort of functional test, and they vary across the board in terms of what we’re trying to test on. But part of the test is not just the competency of whether or not you can do it, it’s how you approach it. And so like one of the one of the tests that we run for all frontline new employees, for easy pay direct, is we ask them to write an SOP on how to use our software, our gateway. Well, two things. One, there’s a demo account you can sign up for online so you can go in and use it. Two. We’ve literally already written the SOP, and it is posted online. So if your approach is, I don’t know, how the hell would I know that? What means you didn’t take the basic initiative to Google this shit, because it’s literally like the first or second result. What are we doing, right? So I think that that mechanism for I think tests are really, really good opportunity to see how people behave, not just how they perform, but that’s cool. I love that approach well,

Ari Meisel 49:49
and so the other thing, though, is also I have four questions I always ask in interviews, only four. So the first two are easy with the second two are not. So the first two is why you. Second one is why us? Yes, right? Relatively simple. But like, you know, why us is sometimes a little harder than why you the third question is, I want you to tell me about a time that you screwed up at work and how you handled it. And in that one, a lot of times, what I’m really trying to look for is a lot of, like, collaborative, we kind of language, so not like, you know, I was late on something, so I stayed up late and got it done for the client. I love to see more like this thing happened. So I came to appear and brought them in to help me with this. And then I actually ended up outsourcing part of this to somebody on Fiverr to help me get it done in time, like you collaborate. The fourth question, though, which is my favorite, is, if we do not hire you, why do you think that will be which is such a gut check for people and and most people fail that question miserably, because what that question is asking you to do is have a little bit of self awareness about how you showed up in the interview. So, like, right? So like, for me, a great answer to that, for me personally would be, if I and you know, to be fair, like I’ve had a long decades to prepare this, right? But a great answer for me would be, I know that I probably come off as somebody who’s kind of a lone wolf and likes to do their own thing, run their own show, and doesn’t take direction very well. I know that that is how I show up. But I’ve worked on teams where I have been in this position and that position, I’ve collaborated on this, and I really can get it done no matter where I’m at in the chain. But I know that this is how I show up. So that’s that’s a great answer. Somebody who’s like, oh yeah. Well, you know, there’s probably just so many great applicants, and maybe I just didn’t stand out. It’s like, Yep, you got that one, right?

Brad Weimert 51:48
That’s great. Those are great questions. When we make change in a process or system, there are a whole litany of different areas that the change has to happen, but the starting point really is changing procedure and then adding it to training. And you can’t expect to change procedure and not add it to training and expect it to just work right like, you have to put it in training right away, memorialize it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and it’s like, well, even if you memorialize in an SOP, like, that’s not good enough, because you really need to indoctrinate the process before you can expect it to execute appropriately in the future. And like, it’s fine if you have a really small team and you’re not growing, but if you expect to hire new people, like you’re setting yourself up for the same fucking problem two months, three months, six months, 12 months from now. Well, and

Ari Meisel 52:34
it’s been really interesting, actually, it’s particularly working in this rescue squad, because you just naturally have a lot of turnover in an EMT organization, and especially a volunteer one, right? So like it, we know that we have people it’s like revolving door, and we have members who have literally been here for 40 years, and members who are here right now and may leave in six months, because it’s not for them, right? So and protocols have changed, and all sorts of stuff. So it’s a constant, constant, not like catch up, but it’s just like something I have to stay on top of all the time, because it’s as vice president, it’s kind of become my responsibility. One of the things I implemented last night, and I already put somebody through this, which I never thought of doing before, but this kid, and he is a kid, I was like, You got an email in the recruiting process that explained what these requirements were. Do you remember? And he’s like, if I’m being really honest, he’s like, I kind of remember it. And he’s like, I may have just sort of skimmed over it. And I was like, I totally appreciate your honesty on that. That’s that’s great. But so what I did was I made a video where I’m like, All right, we’re about to, you know, you’ve completed all the requirements. Your membership is ready to start. There’s one last thing I need you to do. I need you to record a video saying what your name is and that you understand that these are the following responsibilities that you will have as a member. And then I listed them, and I just had a guy doing and a video, and he’s like, all right, my name is this. I understand that I have to do these hours and this meeting and this thing. So it’s in video, but I’m saying it so it’s not so much I gotcha because, I mean, it would be at some point if I’m like, Look, you recorded the video. It’s also, though for them, I think it reinforces it to, like, say it out loud, record it. And hopefully that that helps. I think that’ll actually help a lot. Okay,

Brad Weimert 54:11
well, I’ve got a bunch of other things I want to ask you, but because we’ve got a time constraint here, I have to ask you about we do. For me, I am, unfortunately, back to back today,

Unknown Speaker 54:24
no free time. Yeah,

Brad Weimert 54:27
we need to work on my efficiency internally. Maybe I’ll listen to this episode again and try to implement some stuff I want to hear about. You know, we I kick this off by talking about a diagnosis of Crohn’s disease, which is incurable as as is, you know, prescribed by the medical community. You went through a series of things that left you in a position of having no signs of Crohn’s anymore. First question is, is that just a good hook for your marketing, or do you actually have no signs of Crohn’s? I actually

Ari Meisel 55:06
have no signs. So I went for a colonoscopy last year for the first time in 10 years. And I always loved this experience. I mean, it hasn’t happened that much in the last 10 years, because it was the first time I’ve done this. But the doctors going through my history, and I say, like, I had Crohn’s disease. And he it’s like, literally, like, like, the record scratches, you know. And he’s like, What do you mean, you had Crohn’s disease? Yeah, I was like, I had it. I don’t have it anymore, you know. And he’s like, Well, you know, I just want to manage expectations. Even if you’re feeling better, you probably still have clinical science, because it’s really not curable. It’s like, okay, let’s do the test. And to his credit, he did the colonoscopy, and he said to me, he said, If you had not told me about your history, I would not have known. So that’s supposed to be impossible, and not only is it not impossible, but I’ve replicated my results in a whole bunch of other people. You know, it doesn’t not everybody. I mean, there’s some people who really struggle with it forever. But ultimately, I found that stress was like one of the biggest components of the illness, and it is with a lot of inflammatory conditions, and it’s probably one of the reasons why. Like, in order to affect Jews, like we just carry around so much neuroses all the time. But yes, I have no signs of it at all, nothing, nothing that would show that I have Crohn’s disease.

Brad Weimert 56:34
What tests to through the process of fixing yourself physically? What tests did you do routinely, and What actions did you do to correct that? So I

Ari Meisel 56:48
did a lot of blood testing. I was getting blood because of the medicines that I was on initially, which I probably wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for those medicines. So I’m not anti medicine. I needed those medicines to be able to get the space to do this. The problem is, a lot of times people get on medicine, they don’t make the lifestyle change that they need to make. So I was getting blood tests like, every five weeks. There’s a lot of data that I had to sort of manually, like, put in Excel and sift through at the time and see what had correlations to what. And I’ll be completely honest, some of those, those correlations may have been completely spurious, like I’m just, you know, might have just been guessing, but what it did for me was it was it made me feel more in control. And that is not to be discounted, because what often happens in a health journey is that people become passengers. And that is not just that that’s becomes a psychological issue and it becomes a physical issue, the idea of taking control and ownership over my journey and over my data and saying, like, Okay, I’m going to try this new supplement, and I’m going to see if I find a correlation has a real effect on how your body deals with those situations. So control, to me, is the antidote to stress in many situations, and particularly with an autoimmune disease, when you feel like you’re at war with your own body. With your own body and like the enemy is always inside you, you know, right, waiting to pop out. That’s really hard. This like it depression and suicide are highly correlated with people with with Crohn’s disease. So, so there’s a lot of blood testing. There was all sorts of weird ones, like I did, like DEXA scans, which now are so much more common, but like the dual X ray absorption, I’m sure you get, you know, all the specific breakdowns I did because of the Iron Man stuff I was doing, like vo two Max tests initially, when I went to do, when I started to train for Iron Man, the coach that I brought on didn’t want to work with me because she was afraid that it was going to re trigger the Crohn’s Sure. And I kind of, like, I convinced her, and I took on the ownership of that, and it didn’t. But like, there were definitely extreme things I was having my body do and sometimes, and it didn’t trigger it. So to see that lactic acid thresholds, things like, you know, stool testing, genetic testing, all sorts. I mean, you name it. I did kind of everything. But the most valuable, in some ways, was HRV tracking, which is now so commonplace, but really wasn’t at the time, but the idea of, like, tracking the resilience state of your body and your nervous system, because that’s um, that like day to day, you can see changes in that depending on things that you

Brad Weimert 59:25
did. Can you explain heart rate variability for people?

Ari Meisel 59:30
Yeah, right. So think about, like a rubber band, kind of as, like the variability, and you want it to be able to stretch more and more and more, but also and then come back to its original state, right? Like that sort of elasticity. So heart rate variability is a number, usually between one and Well, I think if it was one, you’d be dead, but it’s like between one and 100 and the higher it is, the more variability you have, which means that, like your your nervous systems were able to be like fight and flight, and then come back to center, fight and flight, come back to center, and you want more and more. That variability, and it’s something you can train. There’s ways to train it, there’s breathing exercises, all sorts of things. But also sleep has a big effect on its stress. Obviously, some of the things we eat have a big effect on that is really interesting. I so I generally, I know this is gonna sound weird. It’s not because I’m like Brian Johnson. I’m trying to do this a lot of times I end up eating dinner before before 5pm because the kids get home from school. And a lot of people, I think, like to do, like, snacks after school and stuff, which we have definitely done, but my wife has gotten in the habit of basically making dinner. So when the kids get home starving, they can have a big meal, and then they can have, like, a snack or two later. So a lot of times I’ll have dinner with them at that point, and I just don’t eat later on. The other night, we had friends over, and we had dinner, like, eight o’clock, and my aura ring the next morning was like, did you have a late meal? Your heart rate took a lot longer to come down to, like, baseline than normal. So normal, normally, like, my lowest heart rate is like two in the morning. And apparently this time it was, like, it’s six. So that doesn’t matter. That’s not going to hurt me right now, but like, it’s, it’s a really, it’s a very like, immediate sort of indicator. Sometimes when things are going wrong and when you are stressed out for really long time and you’re unhealthy for a long time, your variability gets lower and lower and lower and stays there. And that’s very scary, awesome. That’s

Brad Weimert 1:01:19
super helpful. So the there’s a huge gap between a lot of unknown ailments and conditions that entrepreneurs find themselves in and people in general, in Crohn’s right. But there is no question that a whole host of things cause inflammatory responses in humans, and we don’t seem to be very good at handling it in general, certainly as a medical community or as a as a the US economy doesn’t do a very good job of reducing inflammation, diet and all sorts of other shit. As an entrepreneur, what advice do you have for us to drive and produce in a way that lots of entrepreneurs want to and avoid wrecking your body physically and burn out and insane inflammation.

Ari Meisel 1:02:15
Human beings are really good at just pushing harder and digging faster and doing more right until we can’t, and that’s often the solution. I think entrepreneurs sort of take that into like hyperdrive many times, right? So even you know you have like Elon Musk, as you mentioned before, he just said that he’s doing 120 hours a week with Doge, right? Like, that’s not sustainable without drugs, which I guess he uses, because he talked about that, but which is also not sustainable at some point, right? And I’ll be honest, there are people who I’ve seen, and I think he’s probably one of them, where it’s like, I just want to get as much output as I possibly can in the time I have on earth. You know, whether that’s a year or 10 years, like, I’m just going to get as much out of that as I possibly can. That’s not my approach, right? So that really go, it’s harder to stop and take your head out of the water and be like, should I actually go in that direction? Right? I’m going to stop for a second and I’m going to lose it, actually, in Iron Man. This is really funny. So or not really funny, I got punched in the back of the head in Iron Man in the swim. I think it was pretty funny. Yeah, so it’s the Iron Man swim is really aggressive, like, I kicked in the face, like, it’s like sharks, right? And I got punched in the back head. I boxed for a number of years, right? And I got punched in the back head. And I was like, it shook me for a second. I was like, Nope, that’s okay. And I stopped for a second, and I got my bearings, and I kept going. And in the swim, particularly, I was swimming in the it was Iron Man France. It was in the Mediterranean. You learn and you train to, you know, you you have your head to the side, to the side, but then you bring your goggles up right above the water, just to make sure that you’re still going towards the buoy. Entrepreneurs don’t tend to not do that, right? We just, it’s like, I’m just going to keep going that way. And it’s the difference between further and farther, right? You know further, farther being a measure of distance and further being a measure of degree, right? So like, we can go deep right here, or we can go farther in a direction, and if you lose sight of that, then you’ve lost sight of that. And so that’s the first thing is like to to have that wherewithal to stop and ask yourself frequently, like, is this the right thing to keep working on this way? And like I said, I have my 15 minute rule. Like, it’s very rare that I will and I recognize you could be like, Oh, that’s crazy. ADHD, it’s not. It’s a recognition that if I spend more than 15 minutes on something, there’s going to be a diminishing return, diminishing, you know, economies of scale at that point, and I need to give that to somebody else, or build an automation or whatever, and move on to something else. So that’s one is sort of having that self awareness. The other one is prioritizing your health in any way that you can. And that might sound very obvious, but. I’ll give you an example. My sleep is shitty. Okay, so I have kids one night a week. I work an overnight shift on the ambulance, you know, for 12 hours from eight hours from 11pm to 7am yeah,

Unknown Speaker 1:05:14
brutal, yeah.

Ari Meisel 1:05:18
So my sleep is shitty. And last night, my wife and I were talking about this, and she was like, was like, she was getting frustrated because I was like, tired and I couldn’t remember, like, a conversation that we had had, and she’s like, You need sleep. I was like, What do you want me to do? I was like, I’m going to sleep at 1030 like the aura says, and, you know, I’m getting up at 630 whatever. But in between, there was, like, seven wake ups according to the ring, you know, the dog needed to go out. The baby came to our bed, the baby, you know, like there’s always something, so that’s not something I can rely on. So what does that mean? I don’t drink I never drink alcohol. I used to, never to excess, but I used to, but now I don’t, because it’s not worth it to me to screw up my sleep even more for that purpose, right? So we had friends over there at night, big wine drinkers. I was like, I can’t she’s like, are you working on the ambulance? I was like, No. I was like, it just I don’t want to fall asleep in the middle of our conversation. So, you know, and I don’t want to make like I’m functional, obviously, like, I’m doing fine, but that’s because I eat really well. I don’t drink. Sleep is just something that’s not in the cards for me right now. And then the other thing is that, and this is, this is a real hard one for me to swallow, but I, like I did Iron Man. I was doing CrossFit for a long time. You know, I could dead lift for 350 pounds at one point now. A workout for me is like 20 minutes of stretching, you know. And I’m not 60, you know? I’m 43 so to me, it’s like, no, I should be able to be lifting, but I’m but I also do an average of 17,000 steps a day, right? So I’m always moving. I feel great. I’m in a good I’m in a good way. My blood markers look really good. But doing a hard workout is just not something in the cars for me right. Now, me right now. And that’s that has to be okay, so that that that’s what a lot of it is, you know. And especially when you’re seeing on Instagram, you know, the people who are like, getting up at five in the morning and putting their bowl their ice and their face in a bowl of ice, you know, and then they go run 50 miles and stuff. It’s like, that might work for them. So biohacking is about figuring out what works for you.

Brad Weimert 1:07:26
I think it’s also, I think there’s a a big element of this idea that you can have everything you want in life. You just can’t have it all at the same time. Yeah, right. You can choose to, you know, be an endurance athlete and run 50 miles or 100 miles. You cannot simultaneously be a power lifter. You physically can’t do that. And I think the you know, the story there of recognize what those things are, and if you want to optimize, just be really clear on what you’re optimizing for, and know what some of the trade offs are. I that can be very, very hard. And some of that is ego for entrepreneurs. Some of it is ignorance and and I’m sure there are a million other reasons,

Ari Meisel 1:08:15
well and sorry, and also, like your your fitness or your health really should serve the function, like the functions that you need in life, right? So, like, I need to be able to lift a 250 pound patient off the floor, right? Like, I need to be able to do that, and I can’t totally do that, no problem. 350 pounds, I’m gonna ask somebody for help and be okay with that too, because some people won’t. Every half the EMTs in the world have back problems. I need to, I want to that if, you know, at nine o’clock at night, my daughter’s like, I’ve got a lot of energy. I want to go play. I need to be able to do that, you know, so, but I don’t need to be able to lift 400 pounds, like, I don’t need to be able to run, you know, I can run a 26 minute 5k right now. I don’t need to run a 22 minute 5k because that would require a very significant change in the way I do things. Yeah, minimum

Brad Weimert 1:09:04
effective dose. I like that. All right. I’ve got a million other questions, and I have to run so until next time. In the meantime, where, where do you want to point people? Where can people find out more about arise everything is at

Ari Meisel 1:09:20
less doing calm for the most part. But also, I always like to tell people, to tell people, you can go to Vox with R, a.com V, O, X, W, i, t, h, R, E, so A, R, a.com it’s a short YouTube video explains what YouTube or what boxer is and how I use it, and then reach out. And I really do mean that you reach out and it will be me. It will not be an automation. Will not be a VA. You’re going to hear my voice and tell me your productivity challenges, tell me your your your business growth challenges. I always like to hear them and learn

Speaker 2 1:09:49
awesome. Love it, man. Thanks so much for the time. Thanks for having

Brad Weimert 1:09:54
me. All right, that’s a wrap for this episode. I’m supposed to tell you that you should subscribe to the show you. And you should leave a review. I really want you to leave a review, though, because it makes, like, a radical difference in the algorithm and getting other people to be able to see the show. So can you please go leave a review? It’ll take you, like, 30 seconds. Also, if you want more episodes that are amazing, you can check out the full length video versions at beyond a million.com or youtube.com. Forward slash at beyond a million, you won’t regret it.