Short vs. Long Form Content: The Truth About Engagement | Abel James DSH #1314

It's one of those things where it's like, it's obvious now that you don't need to spend

a small fortune or a large fortune biohacking yourself or doing all of these crazy extraneous things to get these results. You actually just need to do the simple stuff and find a way when life gets hard to keep doing that simple stuff and stay on point, you know.
all right, guys, Abel James, aka the fat burning man, one of the podcast OGs. Thanks for coming on today, man.
Thanks for having me, Sean. I'm stoked.
14 years in the space, man. That'd be impressive.
It's been a minute, even longer, if you include the blogosphere before all the podcasting started, but, uh, being early had, had a lot of benefits and, uh, made a lot of connections with people who have continued to be out there and do incredible things with their careers. So it's been, you know, a great experience kind of getting in early and seeing where everything goes.
Yeah. There's been a lot of shifts in the industry.
Now I feel like it's shifting towards clips, short form content. Definitely.
That's where I see a majority of views and engagement these days. Yeah.
For better or worse. But you can also measure engagement in different ways.
It's like, if you want to get out there and be seen, then clips are obviously fantastic. But if you really want to affect someone, I don't think there's anything better than a long form conversation, you know, like really going deep and seeing why people are saying these things or why the message came out that way is so important.
So especially for people who are out there kind of getting caught up in the tendency to just scroll all the time, the best way to learn, I think, is to really sit down and listen to a legit conversation with people who aren't just, you know, saying whatever and hanging out. But actually, you know, talking about their area of interest or expertise.
And hopefully, you know, they've gone down their rabbit hole and can come back with some gold to share with other folks because it's so easy to waste our time. Oh, yeah.
Now when we're trying to consume, it's just entertainment instead of education. And I think it's important that we double down on the educational side of this because, I mean, the opportunities to learn today are absolutely insane.
Agreed. I feel like I'm learning more now than I did in school just because of content, like way more.
Likewise. Every day.
Like I'm either pumping on a audio book or a podcast. I'm just baffled by what I'm learning at the speed of it.
Cause now you can control the speed. So I'm living at 2X speed and it's just like, I'm absorbing so much.
Right. So drink it from the fire hose.
If you can handle, is a fantastic thing to do in short bursts.

And I like to do that around interests, right? So if you go into one domain, say like a near infrared or red light therapy, that sort of thing, then going down that rabbit hole and learning

everything about it for a while is fantastic, but you don't want to be talking about it for 15 years,

right? Like you have to move your areas of interest to keep things fresh and interesting,

especially if you have a podcast like yours. For a killer.
Cover a lot of different topics yeah when i was prepping for this episode i looked you up on youtube you had podcasts with dave asprey 11 years ago oh yeah even longer than that i think i was hanging out with dave yesterday dude i mean the fact that you two are still out it is super impressive not a lot of people made it no no there, no, there aren't so many of us. I remember, um, you know, I think it was in 2020.
I had already been doing it for eight or nine years, my podcast. And, uh, there was a spreadsheet that a friend of mine, uh, had his assistant go through and just made all of the kind of ancestral health, paleo keto podcasts of the day.
And there were hundreds, you know, in this spreadsheet. spreadsheet.
And I checked that spreadsheet like a year after he had sent it to me and tried to see which ones were still there. And 80% of the shows had already shut down.
That's crazy. So kudos to you, man, for keeping your podcast going because it's, it's a haul.
It's not easy. It's a full-time job.
It really is. And it can be in its own way, thankless if you let it be that.
But if you treat it as your own self-guided education that you could ultimately share with other people and building this body of work and knowledge, it's one of my favorite things I've ever done in my life. Having a podcast as well as guesting on podcasts and talking to genuinely curious people who want to learn and contribute their knowledge is the best.
I definitely agree with that. How much has your diet changed over the past 10 years? Because there's always a new trend, a new fat on social media.
Right now, I feel like carnivore is pretty hot. Yeah.
It really hasn't changed much at all. I've tried many, many things, especially early in my career when I was doing a lot of marathon running.
I would try different ways of fueling, combining that with intermittent fasting, overfeeding, underfeeding, kind of strategically around training. And, you know, you can talk about the minutiae and how certain foods are extraordinarily bad.
And I would say just as a blanket statement, most of the stuff that's processed or fried or uses the modern seed oils and vegetable oils is terrible for us.

So that means even if you're at like a fancy hotel someplace or a fancy restaurant,

you're still eating horrible food.

Easily.

So if you know what to choose and what to prioritize and keep it real food,

it doesn't have to be more complicated than like steak and a vegetable.

Right.

And drink some water.

Glowing preferably.

Exactly. So there are a lot of different things that can come on your radar and they should, but there are so many people these days who are obsessively going after one particular diet and completely ignoring the fact that they're getting just blasted by microplastics in the air that they breathe, in the water that they drink, whatever else that they they're doing so it's like those blind spots in a lot of the cases are responsible for most of

the poor performance uh and the obsession with these tiny little pieces of the conversation

largely comes from you know the nature of the modern internet which is rewarding all the bad

things all the wrong things we're mongering the fear mongering the clickbait the stuff that

the headline is not what the content says it's like the opposite of it so it's it's very confusing so

Thank you. The fear mongering, the clickbait, the stuff that the headline is not what the content says.
It's like the opposite of it. So it's very confusing.
So as long, I don't want people to get too caught up in all of the whiz bang nonsense that's out there because the truth is, it's not really a knowledge problem anymore, right? Like we could print out one page. You don't have to read a health book to know what to do.
You could fit it on a half page. And I've given this to it, to a number of people, but basically like eat real food, prioritize protein and get out and move.
Don't be afraid of the sun. Like try to align that with your circadian rhythm.
A lot of this stuff, thankfully has gotten out there and people have talked about it. But the problem is it's not really a sexy message.
It's not really that interesting, but people are obsessing about all these tiny little things on the sidelines and the periphery of the main point, which is that you got to just do it. You got to take action.
Once you figure out what you need to do, you have to do it every day. And that's the challenge that most people run into because it's hard.
It's hard to do the boring things. It's hard to go to sleep on time.
It's hard to eat the right thing when you're at the wrong place or you're with a bunch of friends and they're having pizza. And it's important to recognize as well that we all get a little bit of wiggle room.
You don't have to be completely committed to having everything be 100%, although some people do it that way, that's certainly never been our perspective. I think it's important to know why you're doing this and also appreciate it and have fun while you're living your life.
Eating real food, being healthy is in many ways its own reward. And once you build those habits and kind of those grooves in your mind, then that becomes the default and eating terrible stuff that makes you feel horribly, you know, just a short time afterwards, or certainly the next few days just becomes something that is not appealing anymore.
And then your subconscious, your nervous system starts to learn that too. So you drive by, you walk by McDonald's or something like that.
It does, it starts to smell not like, all right, like that's not something that I crave anymore. Whereas I used to, you know? And so allowing your own tastes to change and your own cravings and that sort of thing is a good part of the process, but it takes time.
Man. I used to eat Chipotle every day when I was younger and I ate it for the first time, like last week in four years.
I'm like, shit. It'll rip you up.
The feed oils and I don't know what else is in there. All sorts of nonsense.
Yeah. Just destroyed me.
The whole day was shot. Right.
Yeah. And I used to eat that every day.
Isn't that weird? So worth it. And you're not old enough for that even to be a problem.
I know. Things start falling apart.
If you don't treat yourself well and make sure that your body is actively recovering. But yeah, if you're just kind of eating the gnarly stuff, as I did as well, when I, when I was younger, you kind of get used to it.
You know, it's like you, you lose your taste. You don't have that sensitivity anymore.
And rebuilding that, that natural sensitivity, um, is kind of a wonderful thing because then you can actually taste the vegetable again and it won't necessarily taste bad this time around or it tastes like nothing. You can start to appreciate the tiny little nuanced flavors and things.
And I really have fun with that because a lot of people who are struggling with their health don't know how to cook or don't ever really attempt it. And if you can just learn how to scramble some eggs or, you know, make a simple stir fry with meats and veggies, you can do that most days of the week and have everything basically taken care of.
Your taste will change. And, uh, there's a lot of, it's, it's an empowering thing when you realize that you don't need to order out all the time that you don't need, you know, to be spending three grand or five grand a month on a professional chef to be preparing everything for you.
You can take it on as your own responsibility because you're going to have to do this forever anyway. So, uh, knowing enough to be dangerous in your own kitchen is, is an important part of the process.
I think. Yeah.
You can make some quick meals that are pretty nutrient heavy, right? Definitely. Definitely.
I think that's the goal because we're all living such fast paced lives. We don't want to spend hours cooking, but something nice and quick, you know? Yeah.
Yeah. At least for me, like I don't want to be spending an hour or two cooking.
No, some people do. And if you get into that, and like my wife, for example, she'll do more elaborate stuff around baking.
And it's amazing. I love that she does.
She's an amazing cook all around. Whereas like I'm not really as into that.
I'll do that from time to time here and there for special occasions, but mostly it's just like, all right, I'm hungry or we're all hungry. What's in the fridge that I could slap together in 10 or 15 minutes that's going to feed us all and hopefully be delicious or even just be a way to be economical and kind of like use up the stuff that's going to go bad first.
and that is not as intimidating as most people probably uh think it is it just takes a little bit of having fun and making the wrong stuff i mean worst thing that's going to happen in in the kitchen is you're going to make something that tastes not great you know then just try again you know it's it's part of the process and uh it doesn't have to be a bummer it should be fun yep what do you think of this lab grown meat trend? Why? You know, like with a lot of these things, uh, the, the vegan meat that bleeds, you know, with the non-natural heme proteins and things like that. It's just something where we already have the answer that's, that's good enough.
So why do we have to go into the lab to try to make this artificial stuff? Is it going to be more economical? Maybe eventually. Um, but I don't, even if it were, that's not a future that I would really want to sign up for.
And there are different ways to think about it. It's like, are we going to feed the world from a lab where it's basically from the top down and large mega corporations are going to be calling all the shots and, you know, feeding people slop.
I've watched enough dystopian sci-fi movies to know that that is not the direction that we want to go. Right.
Um, not to say that that shouldn't happen. I think that, you know, we need to feed astronauts who are going to Mars and we need to, you know, find a way to feed people through science and technology.
Yes. But does that mean that everyone should be going in that direction right now? Absolutely not.
Uh, I think that there's a tendency for humans, especially scientists to have hubris around trying to get the better of nature. And the more that we honor, honor the laws of nature, um, by eating the things that we have for a very long time, hundreds or

thousands of years, which is healthy animals raised on their natural diet. That's a really important thing.
So it's like grass-fed beef isn't just important because they were eating grass. It's more that they were out in the sunshine in the pasture eating their natural diet of grass.
So contrast that to the um the CAFO or the basically industrial farmed beef and cattle, where they're spending their life standing in their own filth in a lot of the cases. Even if they do get outside and see the sunshine for a little bit, they're eating the wrong food.
They're eating GMO feed that they're not adapted well to consume. So they put on fat really quickly.
And you can certainly draw a line and see the similarities between fattening a cow and fattening a human. The reason that we have so many fat humans is the same reason that we have so many fat cows.
And we fatten the cows on purpose by feeding them GMO corn or soy or corn or soy or other food. Well, it's cheaper because of subsidies.
So that's another whole giant problem. It's like grass that grows out in a field that comes from the natural process of sunlight, photosynthesis, the water that falls from the sky is a heck of a lot cheaper in certain countries than it is in the states.
And so that's something that we also need to get back in line and in balance because right now we're subsidizing the wrong foods, which enables this entire big food system so that all the kids are eating goldfish and all the adults are eating Subway sandwiches and this stuff that kind of resembles food and looks like food. But as you know, when you eat it, it rips you up and you lose your health.
And we have some serious problems. It's like if we're talking about longevity and biohacking and all of that, it's more about subtraction than it is addition.
You know, we need to get rid of the stuff that's obviously not working. All of us who are just the toxic burden that we're taking on, even if we're eating all the right foods is so insane that I don't think we have the, the margin, um, to play with of, of eating the crap anymore, you know, like maybe a generation or two ago, if you look back at family pictures, I don't know about you, but it's like, um, pretty much everyone in every family has put on 20, 30, 50 plus pounds on average, you know, in the past generation or two.
And so it's like, we're doing a lot of things wrong that we need to clean up before we start doing all this newfangled stuff and eating lab grown meat and trying this soy based protein. It's like, there's an obvious incentive for large corporations and the marketing arm of these corporations to float these things out there and test them out.
You know, for they're trying to get us to eat bugs, cricket protein, that sort of thing. And thankfully, a lot of times they'll trot this stuff out and people will try it and be like, that one didn't stick.
I don't think so, man. It's like I had the opportunity to invest in some of those companies early and try their products.
I was like, I don't think so. I i'm gonna stick with beef consumers talk with their dollars right even the plant-based meat companies are struggling right now what i hear yeah they are and rightfully so because their products suck yeah i mean there's seed oils in the product it makes no sense for a meat to have seed oils no and it's completely unnecessary and it's also just like trying to get around something that's a natural part of the ecosystem.
You know, if you look back in time to North America or really the entire world, we had a lot more animals that resembled modern cattle historically that were actively helping the environment. You know, this is the way that soil is, is meant to work, like be trampled on, be fertilized by animals.
And so taking proteins and animals out of the equation or into the lab is something that I'm highly skeptical of. I think, you know, maybe decades or hundreds of years from now, we'll have a good solution there.
But I think it's the burden of proof is on them. And, uh, we're going to see a lot of things trotted out in the next few years that are going to be gnarly.
So I think it's up to us to say, no, thank you very much. I'm going to eat my real meat burger and you can have that other stuff.
Cause it's not even cheaper. And if you look at their, their sausages, it's like they're limp.
And it causes a lot of problems as well when you're eating these seed oils and these fake meats, these newfangled foods. It essentially clogs up your whole system and you stop running right.
Once you get out of your own way and you let your body do its own thing, you're dialed in, it becomes pretty easy to keep that momentum going. You can completely change your life, completely change your results and your performance and your baseline.
And so once you get a taste of that, you start to realize that doing this other stuff or whatever the newest TikTok trend is just is not worth it. It's just all noise.
And that's where I want people to be. It's like build those very simple, healthy habits

so that you don't need to be scrolling around

on Instagram or TikTok for the next big thing

because you know you don't need it.

There is no magic bullet.

There is no miracle potion.

And if you're feeding yourself, right,

and you're getting out there and moving,

you're sleeping well,

and you're, I think another piece of this too

is you're actively training your mind to be present and, and performing in the moment, not being distracted. So I think technology is a much bigger part of this conversation than most people make it out to be because it's, it's like, should we be eating lab grown meat? Should we be eating this food? Should we be vegan? Should we be carnivore? There it's totally questions to be asking.
But the answer is a little bit of all of it. It's going to be a little bit different for everyone.
And so like trying to get the answer from the fringe corners of the internet or whatever is most popular is kind of a fool's errand. And I think a lot of people would be well served by once again, going back to just the fundamentals and hitting them.
How do you put this into action in your own life and get your family and your kids or your parents or whoever's around you to hopefully hop on board following your example? You don't want to be trying to convince other people around you to change or be a certain way, but if they see you have great results by making a few simple changes, putting them into, putting them into action, then for the most part, they start asking questions and becoming a little bit more interested in what's working for you. And, uh, that's, that's something that I hope everyone can experience at some point because you deserve it.
And most of us haven't ever felt that good because we've been eating Chipotle and all this other crap our entire lives. We hopped on that train when we were in school, most likely, because school food in the cafeterias is terrible.
Most people, when they're in the corporate world or working in an office, also the food is terrible. You know, you go out to lunch and it's the same crap.
So it is some level of, it definitely effort. And people don't want to hear that.
It takes pre-planning, you know, before you go anywhere, you kind of want to have a plan for what you're going to be eating and hopefully bring some snacks with you if you're traveling or if you're going into the workplace and have something high quality around, because if you do, you'll eat it. And if you don't, you'll eat something terrible.
Absolutely. Yeah.
Lead by example, right? A lot of people share their opinions on social media, but you should have some results first. Men talk.
And like, I worked with a guy on a, I was on a TV show many years ago on ABC and his name was Kurt. And when I, when I met him, he was 352 pounds, had a, uh, a medical history that was four pages long.
Holy crap i was you know flipping through before i met him and uh over the course of 14 weeks he lost 87 pounds with me and went from being i think he was over 50 body fat see that's the highest i've ever heard it was insane um to around and i can't remember the exact numbers, but somewhere around like 27% body fat after that. And so that meant that he was below the weight that he needed to be to try rock climbing for the first time and to go out and he finished a half marathon.
And all these other things, it's like, it didn't take any sort of newfangled tools or specialized resources or knowledge or expensive equipment. It took him committing to the plan and then following it, prioritizing protein, getting out there and moving and walking most days, doing some level of strength training to make sure that you maintain your body composition, even if you are under eating for a period of time, and a few other simple things.
And as long as he stayed on the plan, which he did, um, we found a way to kind of like make it worth it for him. Um, to experience those results.
It's, it's one of those things where it's like, it's obvious now that you don't need to spend a small fortune or a large fortune biohacking yourself or doing all of these, uh, crazy extraneous things to get these results. You actually just need to do the simple stuff and find a way when life gets hard to keep doing that simple stuff and stay on point, you know? Because there is that notion on social media where people say you need a lot of money to be healthy, right? To eat healthy.
Do you believe that? No, no, I don't don't because it's way way more expensive to be

sick than it is to be healthy right so it depends on how you're doing your accounting food costs

money but uh having a roof over your head tends to cost more money than that right like we all have

expenses uh that come up just by virtue of living here on earth and and having time here so we need

to say that like yes it'll cost some money uh to be here once we understand that then it's like

Thank you. just by virtue of living here on earth and having time here.
So we need to say that like, yes, it'll cost some money, uh, to be here. Once we understand that, then it's like, how are your food dollars going to be valued to you? Are you trying to get the best possible food for your health to avoid medical costs later that are going to go absolutely insane for most people? If you compare, uh, especially if you look at the generation above generation above you, if you look at your medical costs and how much that adds up to over the course of a year and you look at your food costs, I would separate that out and just try to value.
You like say, what do I want to experience here? Do I want to try to pinch pennies on the food equation and save a thousand or $3,000 a year

or something like that?

Or do I want to try to pinch pennies on the food equation and save a thousand or $3,000 a year or something like that? Or do I want to dial in my health like $3,000 a year, 5,000, let's say $10,000 extra a year for just like the highest quality food ever. $10,000 a year is almost nothing in medical costs if you look at it that way.
So if you develop some sort of issue with your blood pressure or with pre-diabetes or with, you know, you're looking at potential heart disease down the road, pre-Alzheimer's, all these other things. I mean, these conditions cost eventually hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes more than that if you wind up with cancer.
And this stuff is largely preventable by virtue of what you're eating and how you're living. So if you can turn those dials in your own way, then yes, it'll seem like it costs a little bit more to buy grass-fed beef compared to the normal stuff or to buy pasture raised eggs compared to just the eggs that are out there.
But like I said, those are artificially cheap. It's that way because of subsidies.
And for us now, I think to vote with our dollar is probably the most important thing that you could do. So think of it not easy, not only as the best decision for your own health and that of your family, getting the highest quality food that you can, but also supporting a system that we want to see in the future.
So regenerative agriculture, where there are cows and chickens and other animals just out in the natural world, fertilizing, like I said before, being a part of the ecosystem. We want more farms, not fewer, like littler ones, right? We can't, we want this decentralized, not top-down centralized.
Not the Bill Gates farms? I don't think so. I'm not a huge Bill Gates fan.
Everyone deserves to have their say in their own opinion, but we've listened to enough at this point. And there are obvious incentives at play that are anti-human in a lot of ways, that are anti-lower class, whatever it is.
And so I think we need to stand up for ourselves and really say that we do deserve the best food and the best ecosystem as well. There's a tendency for the plant-based crowd, and there are

a lot of incentives there from the top down and corporations to say that any meat eating is bad

for the planet and you're a bad person if you engage in that. The true story is that has no

basis in reality. That's an insane conversation to even have, I think, at a certain point.

And other people have covered off on the talking points better than I will today. Rob Wolf has

Let's go. insane conversation to even have, I think, at a certain point.
And other people have covered off on the talking points better than I will today. Rob Wolf has an incredible book and documentary about this sort of thing.
But when you're trying to make it a financial-based discussion, I think a lot of people are wasting money on other things that could easily be applied to food, but the easiest way to save money on food, especially if you're buying the highest quality stuff is to stop eating out so dang much, right? Try to fill up at home, um, for the vast majority of your meals. And, uh, once you do that, you can suddenly afford things that you never would be able to afford at a restaurant.
So, for example, if you learn how to just cook a steak, which a lot of people who are struggling with their health don't really know where to start cooking a steak, grilling up some chicken, whatever it is. If you can just learn how to do that, then you can buy the best possible steak for, I don't know, let's say 20 bucks or something like that.
And you'll probably get more than one meal out of that. If you go to a restaurant and order the same exact steak, especially here in Austin, you're talking 80 or a hundred bucks.
And, uh, so I think there's a tendency to have this conversation be like real food is so expensive and the, the best quality stuff is just like completely out of reach. But if you go to your farmer's market or you go and join a CSA, CSA, basically you go to a farm or you sign up with a local farm for whatever they're cooking up or whatever they're growing that season.
And they'll give you a box of whatever they're growing. So that'll be something that'll like cycle between, you know, you'll get zucchinis one week and then you'll get cucumbers and kale and other things like carrots.
So whatever they're harvesting, whatever is freshest at the times what you're getting, and you can usually get it for a lot cheaper than you otherwise would at the store because you're cutting out the middleman. So growing your own food, working with a small farm or finding one that's relatively close to you and cutting out the middleman could be a great way to do it if you really have no money you can even work on a lot of farms for like half day on a saturday something like that and then they'll just send you off with a ton of food so there are a lot of creative ways to if you want to make this a priority which i encourage everyone to do as young as possible because once once you see that like, oh, my brain works better.
I'm crushing it at work. I'm meeting my goals.
I'm sleeping better. All these things.
I look, feel, and perform better operating this way. It's just not worth it to go back to the other side.
And you see that your dollar is really well spent. Absolutely.
Did you follow this feud between Brian Johnson and Paul Saladino? No. Oh, you didn't see that? No.
Catch me up on that. I'll fill you in.
Basically, Brian Johnson was attacking meat. Paul Saladino stepped in and was defending it.
I don't know where it's at now, but I'd love to see those two debate in person. Yeah, I know both of them.
And it's a debate that I also would be entertained by, but I'm not sure it's really going to solve many problems. Even Paul, for example, you know, like he called me up when he was coming out with his book, I don't know, 2018 or 2019, Sean Baker as well.
And I had them on the podcast way back. And, you know, as an elimination diet, I think the carn carnivore approach makes a lot of sense for certain people at a certain time, but it's an elimination diet.
It's not a place where you live forever. It's not the solution.
And also it's like meat eating is important, but it's not the only solution, right? I encourage pretty much anyone who follows our work to, I made a lot of mistakes when I went vegan and vegetarian early in life, which wound up affecting my thyroid and I gained weight and had just all sorts of different problems that came up. So I think a lot of people are served well by eating some level of meat, especially red meats.
Being afraid of red meats has caused us a lot of problems as a population, I think. Wow.
Protein is pretty much the most important macronutrient, I would say, for people to focus on. Because carbs, yes, you want to eat some of them, but you don't want to avoid them completely.
You don't want to go overboard, be eating tons and tons of sugar, especially if it's of the high glycemic variety. And then as far as proteins go, it's pretty simple, but it's hard to overeat them and you don't crave them as much as junk food.
So if you can learn how to fill up on complete proteins from meats, you'll find you'll be craving a heck of a lot less of that other nonsense that's kind of getting in the way. But yeah, the debates between carnivores and vegans have been going on for more than a hundred years.
Like a lot of people don't realize, a lot of this stuff is sold as new, but the carnivore approach and the vegan approach, if you look back when I was writing my book, I went back and looked at some of the stuff that people were writing about diet and cookery, as they called it back in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s. And they were arguing about the same exact stuff.
Wow. That's crazy.
It's insane. So we haven't evolved from that.
Exactly. So banting is what keto used to be called back at the turn of the century eating very very low carb and getting results that way it used to be part of the protocol that they gave to diabetics before they discovered the pharmaceutical interventions so if you look back at the original treatments for people who suffered from various conditions such as diabetes or prediabetes,

we already had the answer more than 100 years ago. So we'll keep having these debates as long as they're entertaining for people, but I'm not sure how much we're actually going to learn from

them. Like I said, the best way you're going to learn is try doing some of these things for a

week or so, or God help you 30 days. I don't do well 30 days without meat.
I haven't tried that in a long time. Um, I've never gone full carnivore either.
And for the most part, I'll try to follow my own cravings and also align it with whatever my, my training goals are, because your appetite is going to be all over the place. Like training for strength versus endurance.
You're going to have to fuel in a completely different way. You're going to have a different body composition.
And by age, it's also going to change a lot. So I started doing my health podcast and blogging about it when I was in my mid-20s.
Now I'm 40. And so it's like, things are quite a bit different, not completely different because I've had things dialed in for a while, but back to my earlier point, like for you getting on the health train early, you know, so in my early twenties, I was already having those problems that I was describing, you know, like problems with my thyroid, regulating body temperature, putting on body fat, felt like a middle-aged man, really low energy,

had to eat all the time to keep my energy up. By fixing that early in my mid-20s and getting the hang of it and learning how to eat better and feel better and ultimately feel and perform a lot

better, that tiny little tweak back then has made an incredible difference to where I'm at now,

right? Like you look at my biomarkers now and they're better than when I was in my early 20s. And my biological age, which we weren't measuring back then, now is completely dialed in without doing a lot of the newfangled, you know, Brian Johnson stuff.
Yeah. Do you believe in the biological age stuff? Because I hear mixed things on that.
Not really. Yeah.
I don't. I don't really put too much.
much i don't even usually talk about it i think this is the first time i've really talked about it publicly because i i don't think it's a fair assessment and i think there are also once again incentives for some of these platforms who are measuring your your biomarkers to say hey you're doing great here's a bold star yeah you know because then you start talking about that platform and platform, I'm 40, but I'm only 28. What do you think about that? Maybe you should try and sign up.
Here's my affiliate coach. I think that there's a risk of that.
And so we shouldn't put too much attention into it. But it's more about like, be honest with yourself.
How do you actually feel? How well did you sleep last night? Are you crushing it at work? Do you feel, um, that, that drive that only comes when you're kind of at your standard? Right. Because like, once you're below that standard, you know, if you follow that for, for example, I went to a really competitive smart kid school and some of my peers who very, very smart people, you know, went off to work on wall street or, um, I started off in consulting and maybe they stayed there, but I made that early transition into health.
Um, the ones who didn't though, they remain incredibly intelligent, uh, have degenerated some of them. It's like, it's bizarre, you know, going to a reunion or cashing up with some of these dudes and they they look and act like they're in their 50s or 60s you know like bald fat totally gray hair and it's just like man what what is even happening here and it's the combination of stress like bad sleep bad food that just over the course of those you know 10 15 years may sound like a lot if you're young.
If you're a little bit older, 10 years doesn't sound like nearly as long. It can go by pretty quick, but as it's going by, you're getting healthier or you're kind of maintaining those standards or you're degenerating.
You're getting old fast. And that's how I felt in my 20s.
You can reverse that to some degree, but the longer that you're just kind of burning it at both ends uh the more at risk you are of some serious stuff happening to you losing your your mental clarity and mental performance is something that i've seen happen to people around me uh whether it's in the world of banking or the music world that i've also come from it's it's really bizarre to some people, the way that they age, some of them will continue to get better, get smarter in the world of music. Their voices will get better over time.
Storytelling will get better. The creativity, that sort of thing.
Whereas other people will get forgetful. They don't quite have the chops that they used to have.
And that largely aligns with what you see in their face. Like you can see people's health or not a lot of times by looking them in the eye, seeing their face, seeing the color, seeing the natural energy, the way that they carry themselves or not.
And so getting that trajectory pointed and just nudged in the right direction very early, as early as you can is so important because you don't have to learn much. You just need to start doing a few simple things and avoid subtracting some gnarly stuff that everyone else is doing early.
And if you do that, you're going to be able to perform at an incredible level for many, many, many decades. I will say mitigating stress for me has been a game changer because I was graying at 21.
Well, and you didn't take a day off for five years. Did I hear you say? Yeah.
So I was graying, literally graying hairs at 21 years old because of stress. I believe it.
That's how it works. Yeah.
So how did you find a way to get over that? A combination of things, getting out in nature, changing my diet, I would say is the biggest one one though because i was eating so bad yeah terribly um but getting outside touching grass as they call it for sure i mean i was working 18 hour days seven days a week for five years straight that is not healthy my physical health was complete shit yeah um i did the biological age test it said i was like five years older than i was right so i don't know how accurate that is but yeah just my blood work was awful and that was kind of of like a wake up call for me. My testosterone was low.
Yep. I had a similar thing when I was in my twenties.
Cause I was, uh, you know, went to that smart kid, kid school. And so I took on a bunch of loans and wanted to pay off, pay them off as quickly as I could.
So I took a big high paying job, uh, worked my ass off and then was moonlighting as well, doing computer programming and also gigs on the side working like three jobs three jobs and uh at some point things fall apart and i think we all have have at least some point in our lives where we push ourselves too hard and you need to find the edges i think to find your way back to the sweet spot yeah so as long as you find yourself at that edge and you're honest about it and you like tap the brakes a little bit, then you can find your way back and you can, you can see why it's worth it to kind of have these, these simple strategies for staying on point, like going to bed, hopefully at a reasonable time on a regular basis, you can have exceptions and you can have, uh, you know, some nights where you, you tie one on and you're not going to pay for it. Um, you know, with like losing years off of your life.
But if you're living that lifestyle, um, and trust me, like being in the world of music, I've seen people do it both ways. The ones who are out there still crushing like A-listers touring, um, especially later in life, they're not living the rockstar lifestyle.
They're not staying up all night, partying, drinking, doing drugs. Like for the most part, the ones who are still out there crushing it later in life are almost completely straight edge.
And really, from a lifestyle perspective, pretty boring. You know what I mean? Like just boring is one way of saying dialed in.
It's simple and they have their routine and that's the thing that you really want to focus on because the times that you go out with your friends on the weekend or you're going out to dinner on a weeknight, something like that, those are the exceptions and that's not going to be as big of a deal as the stuff that you do kind of invisibly without thinking about it every single day. So if you can nail a couple of meals a day and you know that they're going to be great, then you can afford to have fun from time to time or have imperfect days once in a while.
But I wouldn't encourage people to do the hardcore cheat day approach. You can experiment with that, especially if you work out a lot.
I don't think he's going to age super well. You look at people who carry an enormous amount of muscle, professional wrestlers or something like that, or linemen and football bodybuilders, they don't tend to be a shining example of longevity.
There's a point where it's too much muscle. Absolutely.
And also that muscle at some point steals from other parts of your body like your nervous system so you're you're fueling your muscles instead of your brain wow they know that there is something to be said for that holy crap that's why there's that stigma with gym bros how they're not the smartest though right yeah there's it but if you look at the research the people who work out are smarter oh really it does increase your performance for sure to work out so i don't want to get too lost in saying like meatheads are are bad or dumb there's a lot of sad stuff that's wrapped up in that too like football players are did become dumber because of the head trauma for sure that they were subjected to for many many years and still are thankfully that's getting a lot better um but yes i think the point is that if you're looking at longevity then short-term performance is not the same as long-term performance right like aging well is different than looking like the rock today right i did want to touch up on the music industry. Do you believe music

has been weaponized in modern times? It's been weaponized for a long time. Really? Oh yeah.
If you look back at the history of it, even the original Beatles mania and some of the songs that came out of Laurel Canyon and kind of LA back in the day, especially the sixties, these revolutionary songs and revolutionary revolutionary artists a lot of them came uh

in of LA back in the day, especially the sixties, these revolutionary songs and revolutionary artists, a lot of them came, uh, in one way or another from the military. And I don't necessarily need to get too deeply into that here, but I would encourage other people to look into that a bit.
I cover off on some of that in my poetry book and in some of my, my music, but basically a lot of the big pop stars or rock stars, uh, from back then in the revolutionaries came from military families. And if you look at, um, what some of the songs said around wartime, it's highly suspicious.
Let's now, and I'll just leave it at that, but I will say this. There's a lot of people have appreciation for music in church or in a spiritual way.
And so when people are singing in church, it's a spiritual exercise, right? Like it's a bit like a mantra or it could be in some cases, literally a mantra that you're singing or you're repeating. And so for most people, when they're listening to music or singing along with music, they don't really think about it that way.
But the way that I approach this is either everything matters or nothing really matters. And I choose that everything matters.
And so what we're listening to is feeding directly into our subconscious. And as someone who's been writing songs for a long time, you can kind of put things in there that people don't realize to make them think of something that isn't really crossing that conscious barrier.
There are other things like don't think about the white polar bear. Like our brains don't have the ability to not think about something.
It doesn't understand the negative. And so whatever ideas that you're imbuing into music, whether it's violence, crime, certain ideologies, it's a sneaky way for whoever might be putting the songs together or the music together to share ideologies with someone who's on the other end of that, who might not be understanding what exactly is going on and how it's changing their thought processes.
So this might sound a little nuts, but if you're listening to a Taylor Swift song 20 times and it says, I'm the problem, it's me, or whatever her lyrics are, it's like, that's getting in there in the same way that a mantra is. So I would encourage people to be, it doesn't mean that you need to listen to like Christian music all the time or whatever.
That's not where I'm coming from at all. Or even classical.
Yeah, it's more about, music is a magical, magical thing. That's part of the human experience that's deeply linked to, and my first book was called The Musical Brain, about where music comes from and why we have it.
Because it doesn't really have any sort of clear adapted function. It doesn't make sense why we're listening to music all the time compared to like eating, procreating.
Yeah. You never thought of it that way.
I guess just entertainment, right? Entertainment, but it's also kind of like tickling a piece of our brain and our nervous system that is the earliest form of language. So if you don't speak the language of a neighboring tribe and you want to communicate that you're there as a friend or someone to trade with, or as an an enemy you just deep down we can tell what like a drum beat like a war beat sounds like compared to just like something that's kind of sweet and friendly that's true it's wired into us cross-culturally so when you look at these different cultures there's no real reason that we should be able to hear one piece of music that sounds aggressive, intimidating, like war or whatever.
Another piece of music that sounds like mourning, you know, like sounds like a funeral or another one that sounds like a wedding or a birthday, a celebration, but it's in there. It's in there through the rhythm, the melody, and also some of the inflection in the words, if there is word, if there are lyrics in the song, all of these things are being interpreted by your brain and your physiology as well and being affected by it, usually without your conscious knowledge.
So you can use music and musical tools to improve your performance, to aid your focus, to help you sleep, to help you relax and recover, or to help you amp up and perform better when you're exercising, that sort of thing. A lot of pro athletes have done that quite famously from Michael Phelps to famous runners aligning their cadence to certain songs.
But is music weaponized? Absolutely. So be very, very choosy with what you choose to pump into your own ears because it's getting in there.
Absolutely. Yeah, I'm big on nature music and binaural beats when I'm working.
Helps me focus for sure. Me too.
I've been doing that for a long, long time. Or listening to the same song that doesn't have lyrics usually, that can help enormously because listening to music with lyrics as you're trying to work especially if you're doing tasks that involve writing of any kind yeah uh here's

what's called the phonological loop so basically you have this competition between your brain

trying to parse and understand whatever is being sung on one end and whatever you're writing so if

you are trying to optimize for performance and listening listen to music usually the

The instrumental music is going to be the best thing to listen to. Oh God.

Uh,

Thank you. writing.
So if you are trying to optimize for performance and listening, listen to music, usually the instrumental music is going to be the best thing to listen to, uh, to aid your focus instead of being distracted. So does that debunk multitasking? Cause I always try to listen to a podcast when I work and I noticed I don't retain as much.
Yeah, kind of. I think that if you, if you listen casually, then, uh, you can still kind of pick up on things.
There's nothing wrong with having background music as well. Eric Satie, a classical composer from many, many moons ago, called it furniture music, where it's just kind of music that's over in the corner.
It's not meant to be looked at. It's not meant to be consumed consumed.
Like hotel lobby music. Yeah.
But it doesn't, I mean, it doesn't need to be that bad. But you could also treat podcasts and entertainment that way.
And it depends on the show, right? Like it depends on the podcast. I think some of them are great.
Like maybe Rogan or whatever would be a nice one to listen to kind of casually. Whereas there are others that are just straight into the point, really, really dense.
Tuberman.'ve got to listen, you've got to study it. And so it's up to you.
Experiment with it. But if you're really looking to focus and for performance, the instrumental music, binaural beats and other kind of functional music approaches can be really helpful.
Love it. Let's end off with crypto.
A lot of FUD right now because Bitcoin's at 80K, but what's your overall vision long-term for it? You know, it's interesting because I've been in the Bitcoin and crypto world for more than a minute now and seen many bull rushes and a lot of pullbacks. And so hitting 100K was one of these things where we thought that we'd have all these 100K parties and people would have psyched about it.
But it's funny because a lot of people are so obsessed with the numbers that it's not fun anymore. Right.
But for me, I've basically, I'm not, I'm not a trader. I'm not doing the day trading thing.
Never have. I'm a hodler.
And so I try to find things early and watch them grow in value. And so it's been pretty incredible and befuddling to go through those cycles a few times now over the years where, gosh, back in 2017, went way up and then tanked hard.
And that's happened a number of times over the years when you see it cut off 20%, 40%, 50%, 80% of the value from not just bitcoin but all these alt coins uh it's one of these things that is hard not to take personally and get really emotional about but as long as you're a hodler it's like i'm expecting a lot bigger pullback than we've gotten so far wow like and i hope we get it because then we can just stack some more right like these are is the way that I see it. Or if you're down, if you got in at 100K, are you waiting four years?

Is that your horizon or are you trying to make money right now?

Watching it go down to 80 or go down to 60 or 50 again, something like that.

I'm excited by those moments. It's an opportunity to dollar cost average.
If you got in too high, now you can get in a little bit lower. Or if it's too much, just go into some other asset class.
You know, like this is part of the fun of, we're early in the world of crypto and the world of Bitcoin as well. And I think that we all should be treating this with that four-year timeline that is often repeated around the halving.
If you do that and you just ignore it for a while and you don't check the numbers, and I need to give myself my own advice, right? Because like, yeah, I'll wake up and I'll check the numbers. It's hard not to get bummed out when you see things.
Well, it's unavoidable with social media these days. Yeah, you can avoid it.
But just hang on for the ride. I think it's part of the fun of it.
It's going way up, it's going way down. But compared to the dollar that's lost half of its value in the past four or five years, at least relative to gold and silver, right? It's like half or houses doubled, like gold and silver doubled, all these other things doubled, or our money just got cut in half.
That's how I look at it. So it's you, whether you realize it or not, all that money that you had in your bank or in the equity in your house, that just had a 50% pullback in four years, four years.
So like Bitcoin taking 20 K off of that or 50 K off of that price. It's like, I don't know, it's already happening to your dollar.
So I'm, I'm kind of unfazed by it. And I encourage other people to take another look and be like, man, if it's, if it's going down now, is it really going to go back to zero? Is this really a nothing burger? Probably nothing.
No, I don't think so. There's a lot of smart people in it at this point.
Some of the smartest people I know, um, got in relatively early, but most of the smartest people I know are still not even in. Wow.
They still don't. I mean, people with a lot of money in other assets.
And I've been in the angel and venture capital world for a while now, a lot of those people who have money to burn and money to play with, they're still way too afraid of Bitcoin and the crypto world to really have much money to invest. It's also interesting that a lot of these people who are multi-millionaires they don't have a hundred grand or 80 grand in cash to just throw at some speculative assets so even the the millionaires are being priced out of buying one yeah because they're tied up whole coin yeah because it's tied up in something else so that's really having gotten like not super early like i wish it were earlier but enough.
Like that's an interesting dynamic that I've noticed because it's all kind of gravy. If this is Vegas, then I've been up for a long time and I'm going to stay at the table as I can.
Yeah, we'll see what happens. You in the altcoins too or just the main ones? A little bit, mostly just to play with.
Like the ones that are mostly based around technologies as opposed to like the main coins. I can't stand those, dude.
Because that gives crypto a bad taste in a lot of people. It does.
And even though like I support Trump, I feel like a lot of people got wrecked on that coin. Absolutely.
And it just left a bad taste in thousands of people. Yeah.
I mean, it's going to happen and it's going to happen again. It's going to keep happening.
But I am a, I wouldn't say I'm a 110% maxi Bitcoin, but I am mostly maxi there. And I think the other altcoins are interesting.
I think there's a big opportunity for some of these to work out. Most of them will not.
But the dollar is definitely not working. So anything that's an alternative that could be

a little bit better as a store of value or that could have smaller transaction costs for micropayments

that can change the entire media landscape and it already is with the lightning network and

tools like Nostra and platforms and protocols like Wavelake and Fountain and some of these other like

it's it's starting to get there we have proof of of concept. The modern internet is broken.
It can be fixed by some of these new technologies. And I think Bitcoin and the Lightning Network or maybe even some of these altcoins could be a big part of pushing the next generation of the internet to be a little bit better and more of a meritocracy than it is right now.
Because we don't, the truth is we don't need these giant tech behemoths anymore with their algorithms. We can do this without them now.
We have the tech, we have the people, we have the devs. And at this point, we deserve it because most of the people, whether you have a big platform or you're just a consumer, we've all been abused by the algorithms and the platforms, whether it's censorship, shadow banning, having people basically cutting that connection between a creator of something and someone who wants to consume that or follow that, listen to it, whatever it is.
These platforms in the middle have squandered our trust. I think it's on us to really build parallel systems that are better than that.
And I really do think, and I hope that Bitcoin and the altcoin world can help point us in the right direction with that. There's a lot of work to be done, but we're getting there.
Yeah. Yeah.
I bet a lot of people in your space got censored in the health space for providing natural solutions. You can't even say the C word.
No. I had, during the pandemic and leading up to it, I had a list of at least 20 words that I knew I could not say that I was getting shadow banned or censored for.
Like I lost a whole bunch of social media accounts and can't like my Instagram account. I still don't have access to it was completely deleted.
And that's crazy. But my life is a lot better without spending time on mentally.
Yeah. It might've affected you financially, but.
And it also affected, uh, my got really into free speech pre pandemic. And like during the pandemic, because censorship was happening so hard.
And it happened before the pandemic too, because like I've been saying things that are unpopular or kind of against the grain for pharmaceutical companies or whoever's playing the bells of these social media companies for a long time. And so whatever the blacklist is, I've been on it as well as a lot of the people I came up with, authors, podcasters, bloggers, that sort of thing.
We all got on the list around the same time and we all got hosed. Like we went from having the biggest health websites on the internet to overnight having 90% of it just gone.
Pulled the plug and then just kept pulling. And then we started losing all of our accounts.
And I'm like, we're talking about eating food and like exercising. What is the matter? Is this really what we want? Is this really the type of censorship? Because I was very careful not to use the V word or the C word or all these other words.
But nope, I guess we weren't allowed. Can't even give food advice.
It's a weird world where, yeah, you're not allowed to talk about eating. Yeah.
I think times are changing though. I think they are.
And we're seeing that pendulum swing back, thankfully. And it's really on people to say, we deserve better.
Let's fight for this. And let's put a little more energy into just not doing the easy thing, the swiping on Instagram and watching the short clips.
Let's go a little bit deeper. Let's connect with the people who are creating the content.
And I think another thing at play with all this is AI coming on hard the past year or two. Now, we don't know if anything on the internet is true.
If you're listening to a podcast that could be totally generated, whether it's in video or audio, if you're getting a phone call or text message from someone emails, like we don't know if this stuff is real anymore. And so combining, um, finding your tribe and the people who you connect with online and then meeting up in real life and having those relationships, having a powwow in person, building communities around that.
I think that's going to be the future because we're not far off from like everything on the internet being completely BS. Agreed.
You know, like even when I got the message or the email from you at first, I get so many scam messages from people like, hey, come on the Lewis Howes podcast. I'm his manager.
All I need to do is like, we'll log you into your Facebook account and you'll get five grand. It's just like, I've gotten so many of those.
I don't even know which podcast invites are real anymore. I've got some scary ones that look super real and then they ask you to come on and it's like, should I send the money? Like, you know what I mean? Right.
Yeah, it's tempting for sure. I reached out to, to Louis when I got a message from his team.
I'm like, this isn't you guys. Right.
And he's just like, no, this is not like, cause I've been on a show years ago and it's just like, how are we going to fix this? I don't know. The only way that I see fixing this is getting together in person again and being like, okay, this is real.
Going back to communities. Yeah.
Where could people find your community and keep up with you, man? Uh, probably easiest place is

ablejames.com. A-B-E-L James.
Uh, name of my show is Able James show. And, uh, I look forward to

keeping in touch with anyone who finds this interesting or wants to, uh, connect more.

You can shoot me an email, respond to my newsletter. I've got a sub stack, that sort

of thing. Beautiful.
Uh, shoot me a DM wherever you find me, but email is usually the but emails usually the best cool check them out guys thanks for coming on Abel see you guys next time