169: Processed Food Is Quietly Wrecking Entrepreneurs with Abel James – 7FL

Could your food choices be the reason you’re tired, foggy, and underperforming?

In this episode of Beyond A Million, Brad sits down with Abel James, a multifaceted entrepreneur best known as the author of The Wild Diet and host of The Fat-Burning Man podcast. Abel started making money from music online as a teenager, before most people even realized the potential of the internet. But his path took a wild turn in his early 20s when, despite following his doctor’s advice, he found himself overweight, exhausted, and wrecked.

After a house fire destroyed everything he owned, he shifted his life and went deep into self-experimentation, flipping conventional nutrition on its head. What he found transformed his health and became the foundation of his entrepreneurial endeavors. Today, Abel is focused on investing, advising, and creative exploration—leveraging his experience to help others scale meaningfully, not just endlessly.

If you want to take back control of your health and business, this episode is for you.

Tune in.

Inspiring Quotes

• “Buying your food locally supports your local economy, and it’s better for you.” – Abel James 
• “It was curiosity that has always been the driver for me, more than the rewards or the achievements.” – Abel James 
• “Music is a primitive version of language.” – Abel James 
• “I live through the lens of alignment instead of balance. I feel like balance is a mechanism to escape something you don’t like.” – Brad Weimert 
• “Having any framework to follow is better than having the best framework to follow.” – Brad Weimert 
• “The standards we have for our food are so low that we can’t even export the same version of our drinks and foods—because even second and third world countries have higher standards than we do.” – Abel James 
• “Try carnivore, try going plant based, but what you don’t need to do is eat all this fake meat crap that they’re trying to sell you.” – Abel James 

• 00:00:00 Intro 
• 00:01:55 Fat because you’re busy? 
• 00:13:09 The right diet 
• 00:21:57 Lab-grown meat 
• 00:27:16 How Abel got into business
• 00:33:08 Curiosity, learning, and exploring different fields 
• 00:37:42 The biological involvement of music 
• 00:48:56 Creativity and productivity 
• 00:55:29 How to make money 
• 01:02:26 Messaging today vs. 15 years ago
• 01:13:39 Best mistake Abel made in his life 
• 01:17:26 Outro

Abel James 0:00
If you’re fat, your brain is not working, you’re underperforming. You don’t have to do much more than walking. This is stuff that we’re designed to do, and I think we over complicate things. Try carnivore, try going plant based. But what you don’t need to do is eat all this fake meat crap that they’re trying to sell you. The shockingly low quality of food in America is something that you don’t really realize, as an American, until you leave America, we can’t even export the same version of our drinks, packaged food, snacks and chips to other countries, because these second and third world countries have higher standards than we do for our

Brad Weimert 0:33
foods. As an entrepreneur, busy as hell. What are the easiest ways to adjust your diet? I say

Abel James 0:39
just prioritize.

Brad Weimert 0:42
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. 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. Abel James, I am excited to have you here, man, let’s rock. I’m stoked. We were just talking before we officially hit record about the litany of different directions we could go with this. Yeah, but people know you from the wild diet host a Fat Burning Man podcast, which was launched fucking 13 years ago has, you know, 1000s of five star reviews at this point. You’ve got number one apps in the Apple marketplace for a long time. You’ve got New York Times best selling books.

Abel James 1:52
You are an accomplished musician, which is bananas to me. I want to talk about all that stuff, and I want to talk about the business side of things as well. But let’s start with some health stuff, because lots of entrepreneurs blame their busyness for being fat. What advice do you have for them? You’re underperforming. If you’re fat, your brain is not working as well as it could be. So there’s kind of a tendency to think that people who are in shape are carrying extra muscle, or whatever it is, or meat heads, and an element of that can be true. But when you actually look at the research, people who tend to work out on a regular basis, their neurological system just works better. Everything’s firing faster. It’s more connected. You’ve drained out most of the toxins. Because whenever you’re doing some sort of exercise, you’re cycling all of your blood, all this stuff needs to happen. So there are different ways to go about it. I mean, you can do the cold plunge sauna thing if you really hate exercise, but for the most part, most people, if they want to live for a long time and perform really well, you don’t have to do much more than walking. Most days, just do a lot of walking. If you look at Long live people across the world, a lot of them are not like hitting the iron in the gym, you know, or like doing advanced things. They are just like walking to work or carrying baskets on their heads, walking up hills into their 90s, like this is stuff that we’re designed to do, and I think we over complicate things also. Another part of the problem is like in our society, we’re rewarded for busyness and kind of this hyper vigilance, overproduction, rat racy type behavior. We’re rewarded in monetary terms, in terms of status, in terms of, you know, being there and being available for your employees, your partners, your clients, whatever that is. And so that leads people to dangerous places, because if you use lose your health, then everything else falls apart pretty quickly. Yeah, that’s the, what’s the adage of life as well? Yeah? No. It’s like, the, you know, if you I can’t remember, what is, if you have 1000 goals, or if you have your health, you can have 1000 things that are important, yeah? But if you don’t only one thing is important, you write some shit like that, yeah? And that’s true. It’s like, I think about that whenever I get a sore throat or something like that, and it’s the only thing I can feel. It’s the only I can’t fall

Brad Weimert 4:08
like your toe hurts. Yeah? Your toe, right? Your little toe.

Abel James 4:11
I’m not thankful for my toes right now. I should be just like in immense gratitude for all the things that are working. But that’s not how our brains or our emotions work at all. We focus on the stuff that’s out of whack, and also we have big blind spots, especially as entrepreneurs. And so it’s important to recognize that we’re rewarded for short term things, but this is a long game. You got to play that long game, and that definitely includes taking care of your health. Yeah, I think, you know, there’s this, this other outage of Life is short, and I think that’s a can feel that way, especially as you get older, but the reality is, it’s very long. Yeah, in a lot of ways, right? If you make a bad mistake, you realize how long it is. Yes,

Speaker 1 4:49
you mentioned that exercising and being in good shape increases cognitive performance. I feel like there’s a point of diminishing return there. Oh, yeah, and my. Experience in doing endurance athletics is that there are days when you’re pushing well past your baseline, because that’s how you increase your distance. Yep, and I am now acutely aware of I could keep going, but the rest of the day is going to suck if I do this, yeah. And I do not get clarity, I get fog, and the following day also might be trashed, right, depending on how far you push

Brad Weimert 5:22
that. So do you have a mechanism or rule or kind of metric for that? Can you push, you know, let’s talk in Cardio World, or, I guess it could be any, any type of exercise. But do you push 5% past your baseline? Do you stay at your baseline? How do you grow? Yeah, and also maintain cognitive performance?

Abel James 5:37
Yeah? Well, that’s a, that’s an awesome question, because there are so many different factors to consider, and it’s all around, like, what are your, let’s say the goals of the season, right? Because if you want to stay in top marathon running shape, like, you don’t want to stay in that shape forever, like, that’s going to burn you out and not ultimately be good for you, whereas if you focus on that for a season, or half the year, or something like that, then you can trend toward training and performance that you’re looking for. You don’t want to peak too early, right? You don’t want to peak too late. You don’t want to get injured. So especially as we get a little more advanced with age, like in your 20s, maybe you can get away with just pushing it and going harder. But you know, as you reach your 30s and your 40s, especially for go getters like us, the tendency is to like we usually win by pushing harder and pushing through pain, right by being in that uncomfortable state. But there’s another side of training, which is trying to be as comfortable as as possible while you’re training. So kind of like zone true. If you’re thinking about the zones, it would be zone two, where you’re keeping your heart rate relatively low. You’re able to, the way that I measure it, without devices generally, can you breathe through your nose and maintain your pace and trying to build up the capacity of that? Oh, I could do this all day, pace without redlining it. Building up that capacity takes a lot of time, and that’s kind of like the fat burning zone or whatever. And that’s not exactly right, but the more that you can spend time in that zone, the more likely you are to get benefit without stressing your system and getting into that highly parasympathetic state where you’re just running on stress hormones and burning yourself out. So like, the challenge becomes, do I run a 10 miler today? When I was scheduled for 15 or 20, when I turned 40, I re examined my goals, and I’m like, What exactly am I doing here? Because carrying more muscle becomes problematic, right? Like your joints can give out if you’re too top heavy and you want to continue endurance training. So this is a long winded answer to your question, but it’s based around where you want to peak and when, and so you really to a given event, not relative to your life. Well,

Speaker 1 7:51
what’s the difference? Right? At some point, it doesn’t have to be an event. It could be like, if you want to be in the best shape possible by this date. It could be around a race. It could be around just, like, a personal goal. For a lot of women, it’s wedding or, like, an anniversary. I meant more in terms of, like, the entire arc of your life. Well, you want to peek into the entire arc of your life, right? But you’re talking about a given time phase of your life, right? Yeah, training for something. I want to get in shape for something, etc, yeah. I think that, I mean, I like that, and I think that, I think that’s life thinking about the trade offs right? It’s not I fundamentally, and I say this often, but I fundamentally don’t believe in right or wrong or good or bad. I believe those are relative constructs to an outcome that you might be after. Yeah, right. And so you look at is running 15 miles, healthy is running 30 miles

Abel James 8:41
good for you? And the answer is, it’s good if I’m training for a 50 mile Ultra, yeah, right, or 100 mile Ultra, and it’s probably not good if I’m doing it every day, and that’s my mechanism for exercise, yeah, probably. So if you’re trashed, whether you feel that way before you lace up your shoes or you hit the gym that day. Like, it’s important to check in. And on the days when your body is just not ready for that, shouldn’t push it, because that’s when you get injured, that’s when things happen that that are regrettable for the most part, if you target those days when you’re really feeling good and swing for the fences. Go for that. PR like do that. But ultimately, if you look at the pro athletes, for example, who do really well later in their careers, it’s not because they’re getting stronger or faster. In fact, the opposite is happening. It’s because they’re recovering better. You know? They realize that the older you get, the harder it is to recover, and the longer it takes, the more you have to do. And also, you aren’t rewarded as much for pushing it to that ultimate level. You can’t get away with that anymore, so you need to be smarter about it. Ultimately, I think if you want to simplify everything, it’s really prioritizing sleep. If you can prioritize sleep, and it’s really boring answer, but if you can do that, then you’re doing exactly what all the. Top performing athletes and performers and actors and everyone else is doing. It’s not that you have private chefs or like all this bio hacking gear. It’s really that you’re dialed in and you have a routine that’s such that you know when you show up, the automatic thing that you do is the right thing. So speaking of routines that involve lots of sleep, do you think that Brian Johnson is crazy? I don’t think he’s crazy from the sleep part. I love that he talks about that and prioritizes, yeah, but having blood boys, I think, is ethically and morally a little gray area at best. It’s certainly like some of this. So the way that I think about it is the internet started off, especially early in the blog sphere and stuff like that, kind of like a library, and now it’s like a circus, absolutely insane, and all these hysterics. And, you know, having hung out with Brian a few times in person, the on camera version is often different than, like, the real life version. And I enjoyed being with with Brian, and kind of like asking him a few questions in person, it’s very thoughtful. But I think a lot of the marketing spin and the videos that come out and the clips or whatever, and some of the stuff that he says is doing what it’s meant to do, which is kind of get people riled up and talking about one thing that’s wild to me, though, is that I was like the young guy when we started, and a lot of other folks had been doing it for a while, whether they were authors or writers, scientists, that sort of thing. So now they’ve been doing it for 30 years, some of them with deep expertise in longevity. What used to be called Quantified Self is now kind of called biohacking. But, you know, real scientists and people who know what they’re talking about, whereas the biohacking world, and kind of like the internet celebrity world, is driven by people who have a lot of hype and a lot of attention right now, and like this dude, Brian Johnson, for example, was crushing it in business for many years payments. So he built Braintree and sold it to PayPal, right? Just my world, right? So I’ve known him for a long known of him for a long time, because I respect him for building that, sure, but he then went on his own personal health journey, and it’s really only been the last two years where he’s hyperbolized bio Well, and that’s the thing. So it’s like he was a business guy neglecting his health, right, the vast majority of his entire life, and that’s his expertise and and the tendency is, especially for smart, driven people with resources, is to say, like, I’m an expert here, so I’ve got to be an expert here. I must be the smartest person in the world, or the healthiest person in the world, or like that. That sort of pipe is a little bit ridiculous to me, having interviewed, you know, hundreds of people who are true experts, who have been doing this for decades. It’s it’s kind of shocking to see how, like, the entire world turns its head toward one person who’s been doing it for like, two years or four years, and says that they’re the best. It’s amazing. Yeah, well, he’s got a good marketing spin, for sure, he does, and ultimately, I hope that this is all for good and encourages people to sleep more and do the simple things. But I definitely disagree with him about certain pieces, whether it’s the vegan, plant based piece or the, you know, ultimately, transhumanist agenda and AI and integrating that into the human body, like, I am very much a Luddite, as far as it goes through that are very conservative on the end of like, I don’t think we should be jacking into the matrix anytime soon. Well, let’s talk about the diet side of things. So the wild diet did wildly Well,

Speaker 1 13:17
carnivore, vegetarian, pescatarian, eat fat, don’t eat fat. Have dairy, don’t have dairy. What’s the right diet? All of it, it’s all right. It’s all wrong. It’s

Abel James 13:30
the thing is, these conversations have been going on for a lot longer than people realize. So when I was writing the wild diet, I was looking into, well, how long have been people talking about like, low carb or eating mostly meats or eating mostly vegetables. And it’s like people have been having this exact argument for well over 100 years longer than that. You look at different religions and things like that, and you’re supposed to eat this meat, but not that meat. And in certain countries, it’s like not really spiritually acceptable to eat certain meats or animals while other ones are including rodents or bugs or totally on the menu and so weird as far as humans go, I think it’s most important to subtract the stuff that is obviously killing us right now, which is the new fangled processed foods. The shockingly low quality of food in America is something that like you don’t really realize as an American until you leave America, right? Like a lot of people go to Europe for the first time, oh, my God, or South America, and it’s like, Australia, yeah, you’re eating like a pig, and you’re eating all these baked goods and these sourdough breads and drinking beer and whatever it is, and you’re losing weight, like getting healthier as you do. The reason for that is our toxic burden here in America is just absolutely off the charts, and the standards that we have for our food are so low compared to other countries that we can’t even export the same version of our drinks, packaged food, snacks and chips to other countries, because these second and third world countries have higher standards than we do for our food. So. So, yeah, it’s important to recognize that, that you have to put your shields up and really redefine your relationship with what it’s like to eat food in the modern world as an entrepreneur who is busy as hell and finding themselves in the place where they’re rationalizing eating bullshit, yeah, what are the easiest ways to adjust your diet without going like full board. I’m gonna count my macros and have a chef, etc, etc. Yeah, I say just prioritize protein, high quality, clean proteins. And some people do well with, like, whey and dairy based proteins. I do whereas people who are more sensitive to dairy, which is a large portion of the population, collagen is great option, but mostly just going after real proteins, meats, if you can eat meats most of the day until you’re full, with some smattering of fresh veggies that are hopefully local and seasonal. Same thing with fruits and a palm sized portion of carbs, like white rice or sweet potatoes, things like that. Combined with training, it doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that. You can get away with eating a little bit of junk here and there, but I would encourage everyone to just have very, very high standards for what you eat. Maybe not at first, but after a while, like going to a restaurant, instead of getting, like, the big burrito or the fried stuff the Mexican place, you get a big ass steak with some delicious fajita vegetables that are all sauteed up together. And it’s hard to complain about that after a while, you might you might still prefer the fried stuff and all the chips and that stuff for a while, but as soon as you get away from it, your tastes start to become more sensitized to like natural the flavors that would come from the natural world, from an actual vegetable, or from an actual good, well cooked piece of meat. You know, it’s like, if your sensitivity is high enough, the right foods are going to start tasting really good. And conversely, when you go by McDonald’s, or you just walk by, you get that loft of the smell. It’s like that smells like rancid oils. Now, you know, like you start to appreciate that the stuff that we’re eating is industrial gear oil, like it’s not. The vast majority of the oils that we eat in this country weren’t meant to be food, and that is startling and terrifying and disgusting, and I think it hopefully is on its way toward change. At least. We’ve been talking about this vegetable oil stuff for a long, long time, but now people are really starting to pay attention, hopefully make some changes. But yeah, well, I just sent Sean Kelly to my buddy Jack’s restaurant in town. The well night, oh, the well is awesome. Well, awesome. And all of their properties now, most of their properties now, are no seed oil, yeah? And local, I think they’re on organic, no sugar, like, pretty high bar. And you know what’s funny is, it’s not a high bar, yeah? But it’s, it’s, it’s a high bar from a profitability perspective, because it’s so cheap to buy all of the trash from Cisco or even higher end suppliers, right? And it’s more expensive to go and make an effort to do the rest of the stuff. What’s interesting, though, is that, like, sometimes the most expensive restaurants are still getting everything absolutely like, that’s far for the course, and so especially if you’re the type of person who’s an entrepreneur or whatever, and you’re trying to prioritize your health, for example, like go to the nice, fancy restaurants that actually have clean food, because those exist too. Yeah, more and more now, yeah, more and more. And even, you know, I don’t want to say a step below that, but a step below that in cost and affordability, are places like modern market or, you know, true food kitchen there. There are a few others in there, some that are kind of like fast casual, where you don’t even have to sit down and flower child, yeah. And some of those do still have some level of seed oils, but I think they’re all talking about it now and at least like trying to work through some better option. Because, yeah, I mean, it’s, I don’t know what it is, but it’s a small fraction of the cost to use a crap oil compared to using the ones that we would traditionally use. But for the most part, that’s because of the wrong sorts of incentive, incentives in our system, the subsidies that support corn and soy and GMOs and all this nonsense. We’re paying for it with our dollars, and we’re paying for it on the other end with our health, with our health and our medical bills and so like that. That just needs to stop. Yeah. How do you feel about Bobby Kennedy? I’m very encouraged by the fact that he’s a part of the equation now. And I hope it’s not some type of a, you know, ploy just to get more votes and then it’s a lame duck type deal. The reason I don’t think, hopefully that that’s going to happen is because, you know, just this weekend, I was at an event with del Bigtree and Callie means Mark Hyman, and a bunch of other people who are in town, talking about how to make all this better, and also, to some degree, pretty deeply involved with Kennedy’s work, and so I respect a lot of the conversations that are. Happening. I’m really encouraged by the fact that they’re finally happening, because these are the exact things that I was being censored and shadow banned for, and as was everyone else who was talking about it, yeah, just a few years ago. And so that change gives a lot of courage to the people to really come out there and just speak truth and say, we deserve better. The Next Generation deserves better. Where are we going as a country, like, it’s, it doesn’t have to be circling the drain. Like, there are a lot of things to be optimistic about. The fact that technology is at the place where it is, like, if we use it for a pro human cause, as opposed to just like, trying to eliminate humans and and kind of get the better of them in some way. I think that the future can be very bright, and at the very least, someone like Bobby talking about the issues like dyes and foods, the poor quality vegetable oils, the sorry state of the pharmaceutical and medical industry, the backwards incentives like at least the conversation is happening, and so hopefully enough people hear that, listen to it, honestly. Take everything with a grain of salt. But like, consider this. Like, do we deserve better, or is this the direction that we all

Brad Weimert 21:08
want to be going? Yeah, that’s how I feel about everything right now. Like, the entire administration everything going on. And you know, you’ve got a more divided, you have some polarized shit happening, but in general, I look at the whole thing and think, do we want a better quality of food? Do we want a better budget? Do we want better do we just want a better system? There is no question that across the board, we have all sorts of crazy chaos that has found its way into government, and as a result, has found its way into our lives. Yeah, we cannot get around, or we have a very difficult time getting around right quality of food is one of them. It is last question on food, because I want to talk about business stuff with you and the rest of your life, because you’ve got a pretty like, bizarre path in life, and I mean, in a lot of ways. So I want to talk about a couple different areas of this, but lab grown meat? Is it the devil? My question is just like, why? You know, do

Abel James 22:05
we really is and is this the future that we want? Once again, it’s like, they’ve trotted out these things from year to year. It’s just like, well, we should be eating cricket protein. So like, eat your bug bars that one didn’t take no did not the bleeding fake meats made out of like, non heme iron, like this, this bizarre soy based stuff, beyond burgers, impossible, all that flopped spectacularly as well. Have they? I mean, they’re around now. I mean, they’re around, but it’s they didn’t catch the way they thought they would. It seemed like it was going to take over the world a few years ago, and I think they thought it was, and we’re putting a lot of money behind that now that they see that it’s not really catching on, or at least those fake meats aren’t catching on. Because I think you know, if you want to go plant based, a lot of people can have success doing that and trying it out for a while. I am a fan of elimination diets on both sides of that. Try carnivore, try going plant based, but what you don’t need to do is eat all this fake meat crap that they’re trying to sell you, because the advantages of going plant based, for most people are the fact that they’re eating salads and locally and real foods, not that you’re prioritizing this crap. So same thing with lab grown meat. It’s like the future that I want to see is more regenerative agriculture, where there are cows out on pasture and chickens running around. They’re fertilizing and they’re, you know, putting their hooves into the dirt, and there’s a healthy soil beneath them, and the water that comes from the sky and the sunshine that’s coming from the sky is the natural energy source that supports a lot of this, compared to taking all this out of nature and then doing it in artificial light with artificial man made ingredients and all it’s like I could see how that would be more profitable. But why don’t we find a way to make the natural system more economical for everyone? Because there is a way to do that. You go to other countries, and it’s not just because of the strength of the dollar, but sometimes by virtue of the fact that it’s it’s easier in that ecosystem to have grass fed beef because you can’t afford to feed them soy or corn and that sort of sort of thing. So you find that the chickens or the beef in certain countries are much higher quality and much lower cost than in the US. So I think that there are ways to go about all of this, and we need to get rid of all of the junk and the Bloat and the backwards incentives in the top down system right now and do what we can to at a local level or at a grassroots level, like meet your local farmer if you can, and try to join you know, community supported agriculture and that sort of thing. CSA farms and buying your food locally supports your local economy. It’s better for you, if you want to look at it kind of from the quantum side. Some people talk about eating certain foods, and I agree with this gives your body information about where you are and what time it is, and this all can help align your circadian biology or. It can throw it out of whack. So interesting. You don’t think I’ve ever heard that? Yeah, eating locally has you think has something to do with aligning you to the time zone that you’re in. Yes, interesting. So, like, if you’re doing I frequently refer to myself as a terrible time traveler. It takes me so long to fucking adjust when I switch time zones. Me too. And you think that making a point of eating the local food there would help with that, definitely. So when I went to Peru many years ago for the first time, they were handing out coca leaves and Coca teas, not cocaine, you know, just the leaf, which is like a very mild tea. And they were saying, Drink this, because it will help you with the altitude. We were at, like 11, 12,000 feet, and it’s pretty rough up there. If you’re not, like, ready for that sort of altitude experience. What city is that on the way to, like, the Sacred Valley, Cusco. Cusco, like, you fly into Lima, and then you go to Cusco, and then you take the train to Machu Picchu. Yeah, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. Cusco, I think said 11,000 right? And or somewhere around there. And so I found that having just, you know, a cup of tea, usually once a day, helps enormously. And I was, you know, there are different reasons why that could be, but one that I suspected was like, okay, my body is, if everything is information, it’s digesting this. It’s kind of taking the nutrients my brain and my body is also processing this in a certain way. And every cell takes in information, digests that, and processes it, turns it into something else. And so having something that was grown with the DNA that’s been there for 1000s, hundreds of 1000s, millions of years of these different plants and animal foods tells your body you’re at 11,000 feet, make these adjustments and that sort of thing. So a lot of this can sound Woo, but even if it’s not true, I would choose to believe it. If that makes

Brad Weimert 26:53
sense, it does make sense. Does make

Speaker 1 26:56
sense. I quote our buddy Jesse all the time, told me years ago, it’s more important that I believe serves you than that. It’s true, yeah, and it’s interesting. It

Abel James 27:05
is. And I just, I have a hard time getting myself to believe things that seem to woo or that are ridiculous, yeah, in my head, right? But it’s an interesting construct. I like it. So, all right, I gotta ask you about kind of origins of business here, because you, I rattled through the stuff when we started, but you wrote some books that did very well. You have had a podcast forever that’s done very well. You launched an app that’s done that did very well right out of the gates. What is business for you? How do you make money? And how did that start? Yeah, I made money in all sorts of different ways, but the way that it started was really with music. And so I was a teenager in the late 90s, and the Internet was kind of just taking off, but specifically audio on the internet, we just started to have the bandwidth where you can stream audio. And so for me, I was obsessed with music at a young age, and put together various recordings just playing all the instruments and saying most of it was absolutely terrible, but a few of the things that I uploaded, people started listening to and I started it was called mp three.com back then, but I started uploading my songs, and people would buy the album, or they’d download the track for a certain amount of money, but mostly they would just listen to the stream, which was ad supported. And this is in like 19 like, 1998 1999 Damn. And I was, you know, 1516, years old, whatever, making 1000s of dollars from this, from selling songs, writing songs, streaming songs, and then, you know, with a bot.com

Speaker 1 28:35
bubble. When that all imploded, it got bought out by CNET, I think, and they basically shut that down. And the music industry ultimately changed forever after that, but I did see the proof of concept of like, if you can build a website, or you can go on a platform and create something that people engage with, you can actually build a business with damn and so what a crazy time to get that data point. Yeah, it was like 15 years old with the initial.com when the initial.com wave I was so I was 18 and 98 okay? And that initial wave, I remember talking to at the time I was selling door to door, and so I was in people’s houses all the time talking to random people. It was bizarre, but, but I’m selling these people, and I would, I remember talking to people that were involved periodically in internet startups, yeah, but I just did not get it at all because I had no data point. I had no reference for this being anything other than, like, something that was going on, yeah, that people were talking about on the news or whatever the internet, right? But I didn’t have any other anchor to it. So you found this early, and you got proof of concept immediately to say, oh, I can sell shit online. Yeah. Where did you take it

Abel James 29:46
from there? Then I started playing with eBay. And mostly that was just a way for me to get better instruments, you know, like musical instruments back then. And so I would try to buy these things that I noticed that a lot of. Stuff was overpriced. Some of it was underpriced because it wasn’t listed well. So, like, it didn’t have a good description. They didn’t have a good camera and photos. They didn’t put the time and effort into it. So I would buy these old guitars or pieces of equipment and basically just take better pictures, do a nice description, even if it was broken or whatever, I would say, like, this is what’s broken, and here’s, you know, a potential solution, whatever it was. And so, you know, once more, at 16 or 17, I started doing that with with musical instruments, and then some computer gear and stuff. And that didn’t turn into, like, a ton of money, but it’s certainly out earned between music and doing a little bit of that, any sort of work study program that they wanted me to be on in college, for example, where I just have to, even though I’m going to an Ivy League school, paying a fortune to be there and going into debt whatever, I’d have to be sitting at a desk making 15 bucks an hour at the library or something. Doesn’t make any sense. So I was doing these other things on the side, and playing a bunch of music and mostly using the internet to reach people. And so back then, even back then, I was starting up a newsletter that was basically a direct marketing response, just it was around music, but the mechanics are absolutely the same as what happened later, when I transitioned into health after working in consulting. After college, I started writing about health in the blogosphere, and that caught on early on RSS. And so I had, I think, like, 40,000 RSS subscribers early in the time that I was writing my blog, and that got enough critical mass where I kind of burned myself out playing too many live shows as a musician, and I wondered about the whole podcasting thing. A few people are just like, hey, you’re a musician. Why don’t you start a podcast? I’m like, what these podcasts back in 2009 2010

Speaker 1 31:50
and we were already live streaming our shows, believe it or not, back then, I remember from Austin, like live streaming from the roof deck. And so, like a lot of this technology was already kind of there, but it wasn’t being used yet. It wasn’t good. Either. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t good and it wasn’t accessible, right? Yes, so it wasn’t like you had to know what you were doing, yeah, sort of similar to the evolution of websites. You originally had to know how to write HTML, and then you also had to know how to host things, and you had to know how to interact with like cPanel, or what or whm, or whatever it was, right? You have to, know, kind of the tech stack to do it right. And probably similar to live streaming, you couldn’t just go to, you know, an app and press go live. It wasn’t that simple back then. And I liked the fact that a lot of this stuff wasn’t simple. It’s like a lot of my background was in, essentially, audio engineering, especially around, like, recording and the music

Abel James 32:42
industry, didn’t correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you also go through high school and college really quickly? Yeah, so you went through high school and college in like, six years? Yeah, I finished high school in three years, and then I did basically finish the undergrad in three years. And then the last year I did at Dartmouth was a fellowship where I worked with professors on, like, interdisciplinary technology and mostly around how music can change and affect culture, and explore how that’s happened over this

Speaker 1 33:07
motherfucker, okay, we’re gonna get we’re gonna get to that part. But, but the I asked, because I was gonna ask you what it was that was different about you that led you to dig in to the point where you’re figuring out how to live stream music before the internet really exists, but it seems like you’ve got sort of the curiosity to drive quickly anyway, yeah, if you’re the person that’s pushing through school at an accelerated pace, you have interest and intrigue in a way that wants that fosters curiosity. That’s

Abel James 33:43
actually largely the reason that I skipped a grade my freshman year of high school was, like, I was there with a teacher in English class, and I, like, was correcting some of the stuff that he was writing on the board. And, like, after a few classes, like, he sat down and he’s like, you’re so curious. You’re so smart, like, you don’t belong here. Let’s get this going. And I felt

Brad Weimert 34:04
he was like, I hate you. You keep correcting me. Get the fuck out of my class.

Abel James 34:10
But I mean, I cared about writing more than he did, which makes sense, you know, like he’s just I did ultimately, work with a teacher who loves writing and continues to be an incredible professor to this day, and a good friend of mine. But, like it was, it was that curiosity that has always been the driver for me, more than the rewards or than the achievements, which some a lot of times to my own detriment, like I will lose interest in something that is going really well because I just don’t want to maintain it. I feel like I’ve already learned the thing that we were there to do, and maybe made a splash as well. So I think a large part of my career is kind of a vertical or an industry hopper. Is driven by a desire to learn and that curiosity. And as soon as it feels like it’s gone on a little bit too long, I’m pretty ready. To explore a whole other universe, because this interdisciplinary connection between different verticals or different industries is what really fascinates me. It’s like, Can you can you apply the world of fitness and training and nutrition and health and biohacking to the world of music or vice versa? Like, how is the world of training and getting better at a skill or craft, a musical instrument, different from being the fastest sprinter on Earth. There are a lot of similarities. So when you can take some expert from from one field and bring them over to the other man, you can learn so much. And I don’t try to be the expert that way, but more the generalist that’s hopping from one to the other and seeing those things that are similar. Okay,

Brad Weimert 35:40
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 easypadirack.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,

Speaker 1 36:22
bam. And you mentioned this, sometimes it bites you. Do you feel like you are compromising the opportunity to be an expert when you lose interest,

Abel James 36:35
not necessarily because, like, oddly enough, for me, the whole health side of things has always been a passion. It’s not my specialty. It’s not I mean, my undergrad was around psychology and brain science and that sort of thing, not touching nutrition or health or fitness, really at all. I suppose it’s also a never ending well, like you’re never really gonna know, like you said, relative to diet, there isn’t really a right answer. We don’t really know and so and there’s always new stuff coming out,

Unknown Speaker 37:05
yeah,

Abel James 37:06
and there’s a tendency as well to think that the new stuff is better or more true than the stuff that’s come out before. And that is just not how it works, unfortunately, in our current system and the way that research is funded and all that. So I know how to read the research, and have done a lot of research heavy projects. But the longer the time goes on, the more I realize it’s about the fundamentals, and it’s about mostly putting those fundamentals into action, whether we’re talking about training in sport or in some other area of life, it’s it’s much more simple than people make it out to be, and it’s not usually an information problem, especially not anymore

Speaker 1 37:42
when you talk about how different areas of life intersect, or how different concepts work together,

Abel James 37:49
you mentioned music working with other areas of life. So you started in music. At what point did you dive into, sort of the biological involvement of music, and not just you playing music in college. A lot of the research that I did was looking into what happens to the brain when you engage in musical training, and if there are any differences between the brains or the way that the brains work of trained musicians compared to just people who are untrained musically speaking from a playing perspective. And what the research showed was really interesting, because these crossover skills that you can build through training, can they apply mostly to the world of language? And the question that I was trying to answer when I looked into this is just like, I don’t know why I like music. I don’t know why I play it all the time. It doesn’t make sense to me that, like you walk into an elevator or the shopping mall and you hear music. People are in their cars listening to music. They’re walking down the street like people are listening to music all the time. But why compared to, you know, if you look at evolution or the evolutionary reason that we would do something like eat or procreate, makes total sense. Music doesn’t. It’s complete waste of time. Like, what are we doing here? Yeah, that’s interesting. And so in trying to answer that question, well, where does music come from, and what benefit does it? Does it give to us, whether it’s listening to it or creating it, and it basically lights up the whole brain, right? So when you’re playing music, especially not always, but you can reach a state of flow, like a basketball player or ski or someone who’s just operating at an elite level, and you need to stay completely present, and so you’re almost building, if you think of your brain like a computer, you’re building capacity in RAM, like you have processing power that you can use immediately that allows you to listen to, not only music, musical sound. And be able to hear not just like the big mess of music, but you can pick out, oh, that’s a trumpet, and that’s probably a major scale, or that’s mixolydian, or you don’t have to label it, but you can hear it. You can go in there and and pick it out, as opposed to just, you know, hearing the whole wall of music is one thing. Yeah, I think also, as you as you dig into playing music or producing music, which I’ve had huge chunks of my life, where I’m involved in different capacities and never gone as deep as I think I’ve wanted to. But as you get deeper into playing or producing, those elements show up and you hear them and you understand them, yeah, and so whether it’s the rhythm or the actual instruments, or the tempo, or you start to isolate elements, and you hear an element, and you can track an element, right? So great music producers know when to use what symbol, right, yeah, or what drum you know, or even what drum kick you know, like, and they can modify the the noise and identify, oh, it would sound better if this happened, right? But that happens in deep expertise, and good musicians play all day, every

Brad Weimert 41:07
day, and it’s fucking crazy to me, like I look at, I look at the these lifelong bands that are like, you know, they’ve been going for decades, yeah, or yeah, just, we’ll leave it at that, people that have been going for decades, and they play into physical activity, and they’ve been doing it for eight hours a day for 50 years. Why does that happen?

Abel James 41:28
It’s an excellent question, but I’ll say this music is a primitive version of language to our brain, so it engages the emotions and even some of our thoughts and the way that we think about things in the absence of understanding vocabulary or words that are being spoken. So there’s one of the skills that I found that musicians have that’s that’s much more developed than non trained musicians, is what’s called speech prosody. It’s the ability to process the emotional content of what’s being said in the absence of words. Basically, you can understand someone’s point where they’re coming from, their physical state, their emotional state, much better than people who are non trained. Conversely, you could also potentially, and this is theoretical now, because that wasn’t in the research, but I’m thinking you can also communicate with your voice better, because you’re using it as an instrument with those different you know, like you know where to put the symbols or the pauses in the rhythm. So when you look at music, you’re you’re thinking about melody, you’re thinking about pitch, timbre and rhythm, speech is exactly the same thing. And so like, for me, I’m primarily a guitarist, and I play lead guitar and solos, and I started off on doing, like, saxophone solos. And you know, a lot of people might think that you’re just going up there and shredding notes or, like, playing whatever, but what you’re actually trying to do is tell a story. And you start off by introducing an idea, and you build up the energy, usually in the middle, and then you like end it off with some sort of hand off to whatever’s happening next. It’s much more strategic, even though it might not be explicitly conscious. This is like a storytelling skill that’s being developed over time. And if you get good at doing that in one area, then you can absolutely apply that to another. And so I think that things like musical training, not just musical training, but things like musical training, actually increase your ability to be present in the moment and to do things like podcasts or just have a good conversation. So a lot of people who think that they’re tone deaf or have no hope of being a musician, are kind of missing the point, because I’m not great at doing visual art, but I try to sometimes, and one of my best friends is an incredible artist, and has been for many, many decades, and just one of the top in the world, really, with his skills. But what I realized when he had me do a few exercises, and looking at the way that he goes through the world is his training is allowing him not to paint better or draw better. It’s not really about the mechanical skills of that he can see better. He can see the perfect color that needs to be there before it’s there, and then put it there like he sees it in his mind. He sees the colors in the world to a degree that I’m just, you know, seeing this much, and he’s seeing this much similarly as when I hear music, or trained musicians listen to music, they can hear all the little stuff and pick it out and maybe recreate it and play it again. So that’s what we’re trying to do with these different skills in life. I think so being good at a sport, being good at a game, and music, art, these sorts of things that are being kicked out of schools and colleges right now. We need to double down on it in our own personal lives, even if you think you suck at it, that’s that’s not the point. Like it’s part of being human dancing, too. And I need to take my own advice, because

Speaker 1 44:57
that’s not something I do on break me, either. Yeah, that’s a fascinating parallel to draw. I frequently I live through the lens of alignment instead of balance. I feel like balance is a mechanism to escape something you don’t like enough. Yeah, and I think that a lot of people live in business in this way, where they we as a culture, are told that we’re supposed to take breaks from work, right? And I don’t like that idea fundamentally, because I feel like if I’m into something enough, I shouldn’t have to take a break from it. I should be excited about doing it. And there’s this other camp of people that feel like they get in a flow state. And then you know that it’s the adage of, if you like something enough, you’ll never have to work another day in your life. It’s that idea, and that idea, to me, is alignment, right versus balance. But this construct is that these other activities, which don’t seem like they’re working, that they are work at all, are, in fact, an exercise mechanism for the rest of your life and for work.

Abel James 46:10
Yeah, so because I’d been writing songs since I was 10 or something like that, and writing poems and using words to tell little stories in each sentence, or just make it succinct and communicate ideas. By the time I went around to writing books like they were pretty good, like right out of the gate, because I’d put in whatever amount of hours you need to put in before that to develop those skills, I was coming at it with a higher degree of practice and training and a whole different way of thinking about words than a lot of the other people. When I came into the workplace and we were writing proposals for private sector clients or the government, I was just pumping them out really, really quickly, because I knew how to communicate in words, ideas and complex, complex things. I remember sitting down when we were all, like, interviewing for the job, and they put us all in a room, and it’s super dystopian, right? Like, we’re all around the table being tested, and then it’s like, take all this information and put it into an email, and, you know, they gave us something like 45 minutes or whatever I was done after like, 10 or 15 everyone else is just, like, working. I’m like, Did I miss something like, what is what is wrong here? But I think that the real answer is that I’d been obsessing over this for a long time, and at this point it kind of come naturally. So I think for a lot of people to go back back to your point about like taking breaks or not feeling like you’re working, I agree with that. But I’ve also been in a situation where no matter what I’m doing, no matter how passionate of a project it is, or or whatever, or how much I was into it, I can turn it into work. It’ll become work if I’m not careful. And the way that I mitigate that is usually just by taking a break, physically, like going to a different location, on vacation, working from somewhere else, working from the road or whatever. And once I get out of my little thing, maybe once a month, or certainly like once a quarter, like go and take a trip like that, spend some time away from your phone, away from your normal activities, and then you can all back in love with whatever you’re doing, because you can get away from the minutia, subtract the stuff that needs to go, because when you’re too into it, or at least when I’m too into it, I find myself getting too caught up in some of the lower level tasks that I think are now important. I go away for a while, and it’s like, I don’t know, let’s get rid of that and completely pivot here, because that’s what’s going to be effective now, yeah, I you know, I think that I’m sort of on this constant pursuit to find structures and frameworks that tell me how to do things in a black and white manner. Yeah, this is the right way to do it, or like, this is the most productive way to do it, and this is a less productive way to do it. And

Speaker 1 48:56
I also generally believe that having any framework to follow is better than having the best framework to follow. Yeah, because you just are, you have a structure. I also believe that the music is in the empty space, so to speak. And there’s stuff to learn there, and stuff if you’re there.

Abel James 49:18
I guess my question is, do you think about those activities like music or writing or dancing as productive, deliberately productive things in the name of business or or vice versa, or do they just work together? That is a difficult question to answer directly, just because it’s it’s a big sloppy mess of like, where are you squeezing money from? You know? And so the way that I like to think about it is there are certain activities and and projects that are worth pursuing and can either pay for themselves or generate income. But most projects for me, anyway, that draw my interest are. Like that. There are also different ways that you can go about things. Like, for the most part, writers are broke. Authors don’t do well. But, and I’ve done it both ways, I’ve done kind of like books of poetry and satire, a deeply scientific book, as well as a more commercial, health based book, building it to be commercial. It’s like, I got a huge advance. The book did really, really well. It was a huge income source for a while there, but I didn’t want to keep doing that, you know, to stay on the train of, like a New York Times best selling author, most people wind up publishing books every one to two years that they’re not writing, that are rehashing the same stuff that they said. And the first one is kind of like the same thing that happens with movies, where it just gets worse and worse. People keep buying it for a while, but then, like, dilutes the whole thing, and the message is lost. I don’t want to be a part of the problem, and also, I don’t want to work with idiots. And I found that, you know, and I don’t need to disparage anyone in particular. But, you know, working with some of these large companies, like I was on an ABC TV show as well as worked with Penguin Random House on a book. And it’s like I was expecting working with, you know, these big names or whatever, to to be working with some of the best, smartest people out there who were really on point, doing great work, delivering on their promises, staying on their deadline, and when that wasn’t true, and when there was a lot of just amateur hour going on, like, I don’t have tolerance for that. I would rather work with nobody than work with like a team of a few slackers and a few people who just need to say something to be heard that day, this other person who wants a meeting. Like, I got out of this the strategy consulting world for that precise reason, you know, like, I don’t want to be in that room that that leads my wife. We’ve been together now for more than 14 years, married for more than 10, and been working together for pretty much the whole time. And so it’s important for us to stay aligned on, like, do we still like this or not? Like is it working each other or the business the bit well both right? There could be some overlap there if you push it too hard in the wrong direction, but for the most part, we’ve managed that really well. But that means taking a step back and really cutting off the projects that just aren’t drawing that magical energy or not generative from a financial or an energetic standpoint. So that’s more how I think about it. Like, some things will generate financial resources, right? Other things will find you’ll kind of generate a more spiritual energy that drives you, like so when I wake up in the morning, generally, I’ll prioritize my most important tasks, like, why am I here on Earth? How can I use my skills to contribute in a way that that feels right, and a lot of times, that’s practicing new songs, writing new songs, playing music for an hour or two before I ever check my phone or do any other sort of work. Sometimes, if I’m writing a new book, and that’s like my main priority, I’ll wake up and I’ll write for a couple hours most days, but for the most part, all these projects like don’t start off with a good financial plan. I’m in that position now because I I work really, really hard early in the career, when the podcast was taking off, especially in 2012 2013 2014 having one of the top podcasts in the world of health and beyond, like in multiple countries back then, things were mostly in the Apple ecosystem. Recognizing that I thought, well, how can I leverage this into another kind of business or another project? So started developing apps, and because most of the listeners to podcast back then already used Apple devices. They had extra money to spend on apps that like didn’t really exist in the Android marketplace or anything back then. And I don’t there even was an Android marketplace, but I don’t think there was. Man, I can’t remember when Android launched. We’ll have to find it and throw it in the show notes. But certainly, well, iPhone launched in, oh, seven, right? So it was at least a few years before Android jumped in. And even in terms of, like, mostly, even if the if you technically could sell an app for androids back then, there wasn’t an interest in doing so until it had, like, some level of market share. It took a long time for them to catch up. But ultimately, we did develop for Android as well. And so having the knowledge that these are kind of like early adopters in the world of podcasting, listening to podcasts in the world of health, like these people are kind of early they have more disposable income than the general population, let’s kind of tailor premium apps for them that recreate challenges, or cookbooks, some sort of interactive interactivity that can also drive traffic back to the podcast within this ecosystem of Apple. And so that a lot, we published some of our own apps, and then we published apps for other people, and kind of started our own agency around that, and published it was five or six, number one, food and drink apps in a raw. Just like, bam, bam, bam, bam, because we knew how to do it. And kind of have a launch strategy that’s not super complicated, but you’ve got to do the work. And if you do it right, and you know, you basically, we have a four page or so just checklist of things for launches that we do, for books, for apps, for other projects. And if you go through and you do most of these things, well, then you have a really good chance, if you combine that with your platform or a partner’s platform, to make a big splash in the marketplace. Okay, so

Unknown Speaker 55:31
how do you make money? Was, I think, where we started. Yeah, don’t lose

Abel James 55:35
money is a big part of my plan, especially as far as investing goes, which I think is critical to my success in the long term. So I was saying, uh,

Speaker 1 55:47
worked really hard early, you know, like, around the time I was, I was 30, and wanted to be successful in a certain way financially. Well, let’s start. Let’s go back to the music. Because, like, Yeah, you, you, I’m trying to piece all the pieces together. And I know, like, one of the fundamental things that’s interesting to me with you, and this is what we’ve been kind of poking around the whole time, is the relationship between creative pursuits in business, yeah, and music was clearly a creative pursuit from the beginning, right, in a point of curiosity, but it made its way into business as you started to make money with it at 15 or 16, yeah, right. And then that moves into a podcast. But the gap there was, did you start the podcast with the objective of money? No, okay, so the pot, but the podcast was around health, yeah, okay.

Abel James 56:35
Apps certainly had to be about money. At some point you had to pay. Like, how were you making money, and what was the gap? Okay, so yeah, early in the podcast, I started developing and selling my own books and courses and so no sponsors for the first like, 2012 2013 Yeah, this is back in like 2011 2012 same thing with with the blog I I wound up writing like a manual and a book and PDFs, courses, that sort of thing. So early I was selling, selling that directly from the podcast, and people who are interested in subject matter would buy it with apps that was kind of similar. You need to have a lot of scale with something that’s lower priced, like an app, right? And so I understood that, but we had scale, you know, like, basically trying to create the thing that our audience would want was part of the process. So, like, we had a big community of 1000s of members who would kind of chime in and be like, hey, we want to see this from you. Or what if you made an app that’s kind of like this, and then we would open up that line of communication and start building these ideas with people who were ultimately going to be the customer. And by doing that and kind of delivering it well at the right time, you know, hundreds of 1000s of app sales and hitting the top of the charts, I think one of them caveman feast, hit number six in the entire app store on Apple, and stayed up there, like, above Martha Stewart, and above Angry Birds and above all this other stuff for like, a minute, and I was just like, wow, this is, this is pretty wild. But when I looked at the numbers, you know, having two developers on staff, working with a partner and splitting some of the profits there with an app that costs 299, that sometimes is discounted even more than that, even with hundreds of 1000s of sales, the carrying cost, if you will, or the overhead of having this team of developers on staff that need to be there, because Apple is going to say, hey, you need to redevelop by next week because we’re having the software update and all this stuff is going to break. If you don’t, your entire app is going to like, that became so much management and kind of like a money pit, or I could see it turning into one eventually, that I’m just like, Okay, this isn’t the business that I want to be in. This is fun. Did I do it to make money? Not necessarily? Yes, we knew that it would be a profitable venture to some degree. But also the biggest reason that I started the blog and a podcast and that sort of thing is because I got sick in my early 20s by following my doctor’s advice so well that it was just taking me straight downhill toward all of the problems I was trying to avoid, like high triglycerides, high blood pressure, history of heart disease, problems with a thyroid and so after 18 months of working with one of the best doctors in DC, with my fancy insurance that I had for the first time ever, I was like, 30 pounds overweight. I had the biomarkers of even though I was 23 or whatever I was early 20s at the time, my biomarkers looked like a fat guy in his 40s. And I’m like, Well, this long story short, I came home one night shortly after I moved to Austin in 2008 and my entire apartment building was up in flames. I lost everything, all my instruments, the book I was working on, like everything and so that. Was a critical moment for me, where I looked at myself in the mirror, because all I had was my clothes at that point and this fat face I’m, like, kind of puffy, and I was used to being like an athletic dude, like, I didn’t really know what went wrong. I didn’t know why I felt so bad. Was so sleepy and low energy. And so it took basically doing all the things that my doctor said would stop my heart to, you know, like trying cyclic ketogenic dieting for the first time, not being afraid of fat, giving up the morning orange juice, not being afraid of dietary cholesterol, saturated fat, that sort of thing. All of a sudden, you know, I went down to single, single percentage body fat, you know, hitting all these personal bests, and that was by doing the opposite of what my doctor told me. So I was pissed off enough, you know, like being the contrarian, to try to spread this message as quickly and as far as possible. So the blog was a big piece of that, and the newsletter as well as the podcast, and then the apps became another mechanism to kind of spread this message. Real food can be fun. This is and I learned this from the world of consulting and working with a lot of schools in education, that food tends to be the biggest lever of young people’s lives. If you have great food available, whether it’s at home or at school or at a friend’s house, these kids perform better. They don’t have as many behavioral issues, health issues, it’s these transformations can be absolutely insane. And so once I kind of had that, that knowledge and some of the data and statistics and research that really says that this is true, trying to build that up from the grassroots was a big part of what I was doing, and I was grateful to be able to partner with a number of people who were aligned on that and, you know, publishing apps, publishing some of their books, helping with their launches, was something that I think, allowed a lot of these messages to get out there. So now they’re out. You know, like people have heard of eating like intermittent fasting, or eating in a way that’s slightly seasonally ketogenic, and eating locally like this is something that is not completely bizarre now, whereas a lot of these things were really, you know, in the woo sphere or edgy or wrong or dangerous and really thrown under the rug for a long time. So I feel like when that mission is accomplished, or whatever, in my mind, I don’t want to be repeating myself and doing the same thing again. So that’s another reason why we kind of go after other projects here and there. So you launched a podcast very early. You sold information products very early. You were pushing out blogs very early. What do you think has changed about how you release a message today versus 2012 and what stayed the same? Yeah, well, I would say back then I was practicing kind of the macro. This is pre influencer, right? Like, pre the word, I don’t like that word, but, like, as a macro platform, trying to reach as many people as possible, and so that requires that you’re out there, hitting it hard on other people’s podcasts, going to events and speaking at conferences, putting out books, doing media appearances, whatever that is. It’s it’s an extraordinarily, you know, high pressure type situation, and it’ll go on as long as you let it go. And so that’s one way of doing it, where I eventually started up a big team and kind of headed operating like an agency for ourselves as well as sometimes taking on clients. But then over the course of time, I found that I was taking on projects just to pay my team more than because it was really fulfilling, or something that I helped thought would would help the world as much as other things could. So over the years, you know, hitting a few home runs and then reevaluating taking some time off, we decided to go small and scrappy and stay nimble, especially these days when you just don’t know what’s true on the Internet. In the world of AI, anything can be generated, whether it’s video, audio, conversations, written like you just don’t know if that’s the person anymore, and that sort of thing. So the way to win now is in the macro influencer space is still volume, right? Starting up all these fan accounts and posting 1000s of videos and 1000s of clips is the way that that people win, or at least the way that you get and stay big, but if you are honest about why you’re doing this, which you have to be at some point, so for me, it

Speaker 2 1:04:29
behooves you to be like a lot of people having figured that out years

Abel James 1:04:33
into it. Yes, it’s I’ve seen a lot. In fact, I’ve seen most people who attempt this completely burn out, even if they have enormous success for a while. Like most people, burn out and sometimes flame out spectacularly, you know, in a huge disaster around their financial life, their relationships, whatever it is. And so there’s kind of the micro influencer that you can pivot in. Into and that’s where you’re instead of trying to be everywhere and do everything on all these platforms and having a big team that’s always there that you need to be accountable to, we decided to fire all of our clients, pare down our team to the bare essentials and go after projects like the podcast, which I’ve continued to do for a long, long time it was weekly, or even more often than that. And for the past couple of years it’s been at least two a month. And sometimes it’ll be more than that, if there’s a good reason for me to do more than that, or if there were a bunch of guests that I feel like need to be getting their message out there, like right then, this is something that that has been, that has continued to be a part of the business. But honestly, the longer that it goes on, and the more saturated that everything gets, the less profitable it becomes. And so I can see the podcasting world also turning into kind of like a passion project. But honestly, at this point in my career, having done really well with a number of business to consumer products. I got into venture capital and angel investing more than 10 years ago, and that kind of allows me to put my consultant hat back on and act more in the advisor position, business to business. And with our level of experience, I get a kick out of working in those sort of relationships these days. So being in front of the camera or behind the camera, doing all that work, like I’ve done that for a while, I don’t really care about getting bigger or more famous or like, I kind of know what that is. And in fact, I want to be a little less famous, preferably. And once you define what you really want to do with your platform, then you can get after it and kind of generate income from the right thing. So for me, it’s like a lot more profitable to have a whale or two client a year, or take some, you know, very high priced calls and consulting mini projects, helping other people with my direct expertise, or investing in companies and advising them directly with all the experience and connections that I have at this point to help them get off the ground. Because, like, I don’t want to start another company right now, you know, like, we’ve, we’ve started a whole bunch of things, and right now I kind of want to, like, I don’t want to spend more time sitting by myself in front of a computer on the internet. I want to be out there with people who are doing good work. And, you know, with the rate of change increasing with everything, I think it’s really important that people be honest about like, the fact that having a huge team a lot of overhead means that you can’t move as quickly, and if you need to turn that ship around, which you might real quick in the age of AI, and the way that everything’s changing, financial system, the world of the internet, it’s like, be really Careful, because there are going to be a lot of opportunities that pop up, and I think they’re going to be weird and unanticipated, unexpected, and those are my favorites. So like to go back to one of your earlier questions. I’m a I love being early to things like early to the party in technology, whether it’s the blogosphere, podcasting, Bitcoin, crypto like, those worlds are so much more interesting to me at the beginning. You know, the first few years that they’re having conferences around it or something, then after everyone else has kind of flooded in and turned it into the circus like so I’m looking for those next worlds, whatever they are, and everything’s changing so quickly that I think it’s important that you kind of open up a piece of your availability in the future for those sorts of things, because most of the biggest hits that I’ve had in my life have been from keeping that like reserve for if you meet someone who seems like the right partner to do a thing, that’s how you do it. You’re available. You meet with them and you say, Yeah, I can do Tuesday. Let’s go, yeah, yeah. I think that that’s a, I mean, that goes back to, there’s tons of tie ins here, but it’s preserving some portion of your schedule, or allocating some portion your schedule to curiosity. Yeah. And you could look at that a variety of different ways. But I think that’s, you know, even though it seems sort of contrary to productivity, probably fairly efficient. Yeah, and like what you said about you’ll never work a day in your life if it’s based around, you know, what you want to do. That’s what I’m always looking for. But for me, it’s a moving target, like with so many spinning plates and areas of interest. Sometimes that’s in the world of music. Sometimes it’s in the world of writing. Other times it’s podcasting, or, God knows, some technology or whatever. I get really into making and producing 360 VR videos for years, made over 1000 different experiences, a lot of them around education and virtual tours and dance or things. So it’s like never monetized that, and the plan wasn’t necessarily to do so, but I learned so much, yeah, but by doing that, and I’m so grateful for the fact that I spent spent time doing that, because money is cool, but once you have enough, it becomes less cool, at least to me, like I. I want to play a different game, if that makes sense. Sure, I think that it’s

Speaker 1 1:10:05
interesting. That’s an interesting sentiment, because most, I mean many, many, many, many, many entrepreneurs are in the world of, when is it enough? Yeah, and it never feels like enough. And there’s always a new finish line, right? There’s always a new touchdown. It’s probably a better way to look at it, right? But there’s always a touchdown after that too. Yeah, and making the choice to say enough is enough, and I’m going to shift my focus and have a different goal, is probably where you find more satisfaction. Yeah, no contentment.

Abel James 1:10:38
I hope so, but not always, because we are defined by how well we do financially, right? So I think that was another trip for me, because I was defining it as how much I made that year, until I made oodles and then got taxed at like 50% and paid more in taxes that year than I would have paid in cash for my first house, like, what, this is what’s happening, and this is where it’s going, and this is what they’re doing with it. Like, that was after I had already worked in consulting with the government, and I knew that they were just burning it, yeah, taking it and all sorts of other stuff. So I was pissed. And I looked into, well, you know, if they’re gonna, if I don’t want to be financing this beast by working hard and doing well, like, what are the other ways to do that? So that was one of the reasons I doubled down in ANGEL and venture capital and nesting, because then it’s not income, it’s capital gains, as well as looking at Bitcoin and crypto and these other alternatives to the dollar, because not only are you being taxed at that that rate or some rate, but also our money has been devalued so much so quickly that we’re basically, you know how far the dollar goes, has been cut in half in the past four years. And so if you used it, if 100 grand a year used to be a good salary. Now it’s 200 grand a year, right? That you need to be making to just be at 100 grand, in our minds, and that that sort of math makes the chasing of numbers, or like building $100 million company, or something like that. A lot of us kind of set these arbitrary goals, and I do as well. It’s like that’s a complete illusion, like, if you’re defining it by the nominal terms of money, it’s, it’s quicksand, you know, or it’s, it’s going to it’s too ephemeral to mean something in the future, and so it’s important that we redefine exactly what we’re going at. But for me, it’s like when I went from making oodles in income to making a small amount to trying to minimize the tax burden and build up the assets that were investments. It’s like, oh, is this how I define myself now? Am I, like, lower class? Because I’m not making this much money every year, but I do have, like, this much in assets. It’s a weird trick of the mind that I think a lot of entrepreneurs go through. It is, and I think that a lot of those ultimately, even if it’s real money, it’s still a vanity metric. Yes. So there’s, there is the question of, What? What metric Are you measuring? And across the board, the same metric might be vanity to one person and not the other. Yeah. So it is a dumb fucking mental game. Yes. You know the I think it only comes into play really once you get to a point where you have made a bunch of money, and you look at it, and you can see a balance sheet move, meaning assets that you’re holding, but aren’t producing money for you, or a lot of money, but they’re worth a lot of money, right? And that would be a balance sheet move versus active income, right? Or passive income, or whatever, but the whatever you’re taking home every year, so to speak.

Brad Weimert 1:13:39
Yeah, it’s tricky business, man, well, through the journey, because I know we’re coming up on time here, which is too bad, because I want to talk about the VC stuff and the investment in all that jazz, yeah, another time, I suppose. What? Yeah, be great.

Speaker 1 1:13:55
What is a notable mistake that you’ve learned a lot from? What’s the best mistake that you’ve made in your life. Wow,

Abel James 1:14:05
I’m gonna have to think about exactly what what that is. I try not to have mistakes in my mind, because the lessons that I’ve gotten from them, I think, are so important. But when I was when I was younger, for sure, and when I was coming up, I had my blinders on, and like long term friends, people who you’ve known for a long, long time, those are exceptionally important relationships, if you let them be and if you nurture them over time. But you know, when I was working really hard and things were hitting. And, you know, my phone was blowing up, and everyone was trying to get in touch. It was, it was too much for me, right? Like, when, when things were really popping off, and I was doing the TV show and the podcast was really hitting, like, I couldn’t walk down the street, and even places that I didn’t live, or other countries that I went to without being recognized, and like, people wanted to take pictures. And so that’s. Of overstimulation, socially, for me, caused me to shut out almost everyone for a while, aside from my close family, and so that, you know, probably caused more damage to some of my longer term, not even many, but just like a couple of them, like old friends, where we lost touch and things happen in their life that I wasn’t there for, and so I know a lot of the reasons that you know I did well were because of that focus, but at the same time, it helps me appreciate now that like being present with people is such a rare thing, and you don’t know if you’re going to be there the next Time, not because they’re dead, but maybe you know, like sometimes you know with close friends who you know you live long enough, and you see people who are your age and younger pass away, and then they’re not there anymore. But mostly it’s like you’re not at that stage in your life anymore. Now they have kids, or just like, now they live in some other country. And so I think it’s the biggest mistake was not being present, or it’s being too present to my own version of the goals and the future that I wanted, and not being totally there for the people who are around me in my own life. And I think that this is something that’s always going to be in balance, and we need to challenge ourselves to, you know, crush it here, but also shut that off and be here for the people who we really need to be. And it’s hard. Like, what is a distraction? What is a wedding that you don’t need to go to compared to, like, one that you definitely need to be there and you can’t miss? It’s gonna be a little bit different for all of us, but that’s what I would say. It’s finding that balance of like, how do you really meet your own goals and feel like you’re doing your thing, but also be there for others and maintain and nurture those long term relationships, because there’s nothing better than an old, great friend. You know, like having those long term relationships through multiple stages of life is such an incredible thing. I love that. Abel James

Unknown Speaker 1:17:00
love talking to you, man. This

Abel James 1:17:01
is likewise. This is a blast. I look forward to the next one. Yeah, where, where should people find you? If you want people to find you, sure, yeah, you can go to Abel, james.com A, B, E, L, james.com and I’ve got a bunch of books. The podcast is called the ABLE James show. And, you know, not being facetious, you can drop me a line and shoot me an email or a DM, wherever I’ll find it and get back. I

Unknown Speaker 1:17:23
love it, ma’am, till next time. Right on

Brad Weimert 1:17:26
All right, that’s a wrap for this episode. I’m supposed to tell you that you should subscribe to the show 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. You.