Why Your Passion Shouldn't Pay Your Bills w/ Abel James

Jeff Albaum

Hmm. So what's what's something you do to quote unquote take care of your voice? Like how do you rest and recover so to speak?

Abel James

Working with a coach is really important, kind of like working with a personal trainer when you're first learning form. I think everyone should work with some sort of vocal or singing coach or speech coach or speaking to a room, public speaking type situation. It doesn't have to be tons and tons of training, but basically learning a few basic techniques and practices that you can do. And a lot of it is just like holding notes that are different vowels or going up and down the scale.

so you can learn how to both sing and speak throughout your register. And that's one of the things that helps you take care of your voice. Because when you're speaking in a monotone voice throughout the day, as many people do, and then raising it bit louder during cocktail hour or whatever, or later in the day, speaking with improper form, you can actually cause physical damage to your vocal cords. speaking is one of the hardest things on the voice. So.

Yeah, there are really simple exercises that people can do. They are not sexy or fun. They don't sound good to other people while you're doing them. But when you can run your voice through the natural rhythms and throughout the natural scale that's within your body and within your vocal cords, this is something that we all used to do. We all used to use our bodies and dance around, use our voices. And so it's...

I think it's a part of being human. And also another piece of this from the health side is that when you let your voice fatigue and when you don't properly exercise it and kind of maintain it and use technique, you lose that connection between your vocal cords and your body and the vagus nerve. And by singing with correct form and even humming and doing ohms, things like that, it strengthens the vagus nerve, which in fact leads to better cognition and

better nervous system states and all sorts of things. So one of the reasons to engage in some of this frivolous artistic or creative stuff is actually because it directly improves your brain and your performance in other areas.

Jeff Albaum

Hmm.

Dude, that's insane. I didn't, I mean, I always knew that your voice was kind of an instrument, so to speak, but I didn't think about taking care of it as if you, like, as it is a muscle or something similar, right? Like, and that makes total sense. Were you, was music kind of the first thing that you remember, like, kind of falling in love with as a kid? Was that your first, like, passion, do you think?

Abel James

Yeah

Yeah, but there were many sports was another one, not necessarily taking them super seriously competitively, but the play of that getting lost in the moment, that was definitely a big part of it, especially not just by myself, but with other kids, know, with other teams and friends and that sort of thing. But music was the other big one for sure, because it was a way that I felt like I could get emotions out or work through emotions that didn't really.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Abel James

come up in other ways. I have a tendency as many of us do, especially males, to really hold things in and say, oh no, I'm fine or whatever. And what music does is really just kind of breaks you out of that and puts you into a different hypnotic trance-like state in some cases, whether you're listening or playing. And so for me, it was really playing woodwinds for the first time. We goofed around with a little like.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Abel James

you know, $2 synthesizers from yard sales and stuff and like the do do do do. And I think that's an important part of just goofing around as a kid. So we kind of learned that you can touch something and make a sound and that's fun, right? That was before iPads kind of usurped that right in that wiring in people's brains when you have those first experiences, I think it's really formative in a lot of cases if that can be with something like music or an interactive toy that is musical like that, which

So we had a few of those, but really it was playing clarinet and then later saxophone with other people and hearing how it harmonized and turned into like a whole song that just, I could feel the notes in my body, right? Like when you're around that in person, you can actually feel the resonance. And I'm like, man, this is it. I've never felt anything like this.

Jeff Albaum

What I think is so cool about you as an individual is that, you know, I think a lot of people, like, I feel like you're a polymath a little bit. Like a lot of people that I know who are very musically gifted, that, like, I think music is really hard. Like for me personally, I am not musically gifted, right? So if you were musically gifted, like, that's amazing. But you also have, the, I don't know if it's the right side of your brain or the left side of your brain, I'm sure you could tell me. But then you also have, the neurochemistry, like, scientific health aspect.

that you kind of weave in. When did you first realize that you had both, so to speak? That you had interest in both?

Abel James

Yeah, pretty young. think it was just there. Once I became an adult and had some level of freedom, I asked myself, what would the eight year old version of me really want to do with this time? And the things that will never really get old or get boring to me are those. It's really the world of music and creativity and the world. And I include writing in that too.

in the world of like physical activity, sports, being outside, hiking, experiential learning, that whole side of things. And so that's always been there. But then, you know, I went to school and both things were a part of it. I didn't play sports seriously by the time I went to college. know, it was one of those things where I always wanted to keep it close. And as soon as I had some level of freedom over my career, or I took some level of agency over my career and started working entrepreneurially,

on my own terms, then it was a matter of choosing which things I could talk about or study or write about that would be there forever and never get boring. Or also that would always be your responsibility that you would have to keep on the radar. And so something like health and fitness is always gonna be there. There is always more to learn. And I've been doing it for so long. And there's just absolutely no end to the level of things that you can learn or the depth.

the breadth of it all. But I will say that there are many foundational principles and fundamentals that apply not just to the world of training in sports and athletics, but also those same sorts of foundational principles apply to training in the arts and creativity. Whether you're talking about discipline or how to think about consistency or interacting with other people or, you know, thinking and speaking on the fly or playing on the fly. So many of these things are so similar that

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Abel James

when I'm spending a lot of time studying health, fitness, performance, longevity, I find that most of it directly applies straight back to what I'm doing in those other spheres. So it's not like I'm stealing time from one to do the other as much as for the most part, I'm trying to make it an interdisciplinary type deal where both things can inform each other.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

And didn't you do that when you were in college, You like brought in multidisciplinary degrees to graduate?

Abel James

Yes, I was was kind of done with doing typical classes. And thankfully, there were some programs as an undergrad at Dartmouth where I could apply to spend my basically a whole year instead of doing a senior year, I could do a fellowship, which was very competitive to apply for, I had to write a 40 page proposal and do all sorts of stuff. But once I did, it basically covered that that whole year and we didn't have money to like

pay for an Ivy League school and though I had some some help from scholarships and that sort of thing and took on some debt, it's still like, wasn't necessarily lining up. So part of that was like a fire under my butt to be like, man, what if I could get this paid for by working harder and kind of coming up with my own thing and kind of being the leader of project. And so I decided to do it about how popular song in the 1960s and 70s, especially, could

affect populations in the way that they think. so studying the music side of that and the kind of like even the socioeconomics of the musical equation and then the political dialogue and wars that are happening, right? Like what is the effect of someone on stage, like going on stage like Jimi Hendrix or the Doors and being rabidly anti-war during a time of war. It's like studying those things was absolutely fascinating. And also how does the music

affect people and change the way that they think or feel about different subjects. So all of that has definitely told me where to go with the latter parts of my career, both in music and just in spoken word.

Jeff Albaum

Dude, that's amazing. What? No, I feel like that could be a probably core. mean, you could get a degree in that, I'm sure. When did you have entrepreneurship come into it? like, have you always been entrepreneurial? Was it when you graduated? Like, when did that come into your life?

Abel James

It's what it's a wild subject.

For sure.

I have to give a lot of credit to my dad because he would though he took a couple of jobs during the harder times. He pretty much always worked for himself as a stonemason and a contractor and and just the ethos that he had that he had. It wasn't because he was stubborn necessarily or that he couldn't hold down job or wasn't a nice guy. He certainly was. It was more about

he wanted to make sure that he was there for the kids and the family when important things happen. So I remember, you know, a fourth grade soccer game when I scored a bunch of goals and I was just so psyched and like my parents could make it to those things. Not a hundred percent of the time, but like my mom was a nurse and a nurse practitioner and my dad is a stonemason kind of working for himself. They always made sure that at least one of them would be able to get us to the events.

and then show up and like really support. So I just want to say like, a lot of it does come from monkey see monkey do, right? Because when I saw that he was able to do that, and a lot of other people weren't who saw money as the main metric of how you measure life and your own success, it starts to complicate things when you see that those people who measured it that way actually have a disaster of a life, right? And as I kind of worked a typical career after

Jeff Albaum

Yeah.

Abel James

college to pay off my debt. worked in consulting as my first career strategy and management consulting and I did have a boss for a while and it actually worked out pretty well for the most part and I'm glad that I did it and learned how to work with other people and and what it's like to work a typical job and work with the government and big corporations and all that. But there was always an element of I'm here to pay off my debt and to learn and to get experience so that I can bring it.

somewhere else and do good with it. And so with that in mind, pretty much everything ever since has been entrepreneurial. After, you know, I essentially left my consulting job, once I was able to spin up different entrepreneurial projects that kind of got to about the same income level so I could pay bills or, or whatever, then it's just been a nonstop barrage of endless projects.

that were spinning up and spinning down over the last 15 plus years. my wife who I've been with for over 15 years now has been working with me as an absolutely critical part of the equation the entire time. So that's another big piece of it too is like she's very entrepreneurially minded as well.

Jeff Albaum

That's amazing, dude. Can you share the moment that it flipped for you? So when you said you left your kind traditional job, when you had enough kind of these projects you spun up to cover your income. A lot of this audience is entrepreneurial minded, so a lot of real estate investors, a lot of small business owners, people who want to get into entrepreneurship. So what were some of those things you were doing? then, walk up talk us through the mindset shift of going from steady paycheck to, oh crap, now it's on me.

Abel James

Yeah, it was really, in my experience, something where

I had thought that I was doing good with the work that I was doing with the government. basically, long story short, I was working on a project with the Department of Education to identify the best performing after school programs and school programs across the country and look at what they were doing to turn situations around for kids who generally weren't graduating or even coming to school and then turn them into, you know,

B students, A students, and even kids who continued on to go to college and pursue more education. our job for a year, we partnered with Harvard and some other academic institutions to basically research these schools, do site visits. So I met a bunch of the kids. I met the teachers, worked for over a year on this project. And I really, really proud of the work that we did and the presentation that we did. And basically when we...

when we gave it to the government or when we presented it to the government, they're like, thanks very much. Put it on a shelf. Don't ever talk about this again. Because the recommendations were that, well, I'm not going to share all of them. But a critical lever is that we needed to improve the food system within the schools, give them access to real food in the schools, and then they will come, they will perform better, yada, yada, yada. The government didn't want to hear that at the time, still doesn't want to hear that, right? But

In them shelving the report that we spent all of this time and heart and energy on for a year, I'm like, this can never happen again. I'm never going to waste a year of my life on something that I felt was important that just someone else can toss away and just can be erased or deleted. Like that's, that's insane. But it's also par for the course for corporate America and the federal government. So, you know, I, I learned a lesson there that

while you can try to work within the system and do change from the top down, maybe it's a better fit for me to try to do it grassroots from the bottom up, kind of on our own terms and, and capitalism, there are many pros and cons. but the entrepreneurial piece of capitalism is one of the best, ways that you can exercise your own freedom to create things for other people that hopefully ultimately serve them. Not easy, takes tons of work, but

you don't have that same risk, generally speaking, of someone just being able to take your work and delete it or make you do even worse, meaningless work all of the time. So I don't, I don't really have the patience to do that anymore or the constitution. And also the, the way that we choose our projects for the most part has always been, does it feel right in, your body, in your intuition? Is this exciting? Is this going to help people or is this just kind of

Jeff Albaum

Hmm.

Abel James

drudgery or doing it for the sake of business or whatever, like, cause it's cool to build businesses that make money. It's very cool at the beginning to do things like that. But even that gets quite old, quite quickly, or at least it just gets like blah or whatever. It has to mean something more. It has to come from a place of passion. If you want to do it forever, if you want to spin up businesses and just sell them off, that's totally cool. And it's a business model. But for us, a lot of this is more about like passion projects. And now how can you spend your time

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Abel James

really working within that passion and delivering value to people and also getting paid for your time or for your the production that you're creating, the products that you release, whatever that looks like, how can you align those things? And I'm just going to say right now, we do not always have the answer to that question. And it'll go up and down. as soon as we have something figured out, there's another rug pull, especially on the internet. So

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Abel James

There is some level of vigilance that you need to apply to all of this. And that can be very tiring and exhausting compared to the more predictable world of just kind of showing up and getting a paycheck. But to be honest, I think that world is going away and has already kind of gone away. Like even if you think you have security in a steady paycheck, we're learning pretty quick that you extrapolate that out to the future. And it's hard to say how long any of these careers really have within that model.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Totally, totally. Do you think that you've always known, because I think passion is a buzzword that I really like, but I think it's also really hard because yeah, it's prickly. Everyone says find your passion, okay, so how do you do that? How do you recommend people think about that or, yeah.

Abel James

to do.

Yeah.

It's a really excellent question and it's definitely different for everybody. But I think the problem for most people is that they've been kind of pushing down their passion and trying to avoid it or ignore it for so long that it's scary to try to come back to it. Because once you do that, say, you you're really into something as a kid and as a teenager and maybe during your early 20s or something.

But then life gets in the way. have the responsibilities, maybe a family, maybe sicknesses, curve balls in life and that whole thing. And then, so whatever that was, whether you were playing soccer or whether you were in an a cappella group or whether you played the flute or you used to be great at drawing your painting, you push that down for a while and you just attend to life. I think there's a fear of kind of dredging it back up because you know that you've been ignoring it for so long and you're going to be worse.

than you used to be. And so that prevents a lot of people from like getting back there because it's scary to be worse. And you know that you need to put in so much work to get back to where you were and keep going. But once you do, the body has this incredible muscle memory and this incredible memory of like the things that you used to love to do. They're in there. If you learned how to ride a bike when you were a kid,

you still might be a little rusty, but you know how to ride a bike. Like that's one of the most incredible things about being a human, I think, or being an animal in general is that like the same thing for dogs and animals, like they recognize things and can do things years later that they just had completely forgotten about. And so how do you identify that passion in the first place? I think it's really go back to that eight year old version of yourself or whatever age makes sense to you. When you can think of a moment where you

Jeff Albaum

Yeah.

Abel James

where you were just stoked on life and you were totally into an activity and in a state of flow. And I would imagine it's going to be some sort of play, sports, comedy, movies, skating. Like it could be anything, but think back to what that is and ask yourself if you've kind of been ignoring it for a while. For me, I used to love riding mountain bikes and I was like on a team riding them all the time for a while and just absolutely loved it. And then I didn't ride a bike for like

five or 10 years or something like that. And when I finally did, it took me breaking my foot and being unable to run. This is years ago, I'm fine, no worries. But it took me breaking my foot and recovering from that and being in a boot and being like, well, I guess I can't run, so I'll just hop on the bike. And then I just had the most fun since I was a kid being on this bike again, because I'm just like, how did I ever give this up? This is a blast. This is so much fun. Not that riding a bike is the thing for everybody, but it's like, everyone can hop.

Jeff Albaum

You

Abel James

back on their bike or play their instrument again or or draw again. And those skills come back within weeks. If you start doing the same sort of, know, you remember back to when you were in school and a lot of people are just like, it was easy to stay in shape when I was young. Well, that's because you had like two days in football practice. were like going to gym every day and you were showing up and you had to. And then life doesn't give that to you. So you can bring those things back, whether it's kind of like sports practice in your own life. You want to skill back up.

Jeff Albaum

Yeah.

Abel James

or with the arts, those passions, you don't have to choose one and you don't have to like totally commit to it forever. Even for me as a musician, it's like my first passion was really like saxophone and then it became guitar, then it became singing. And then during the pandemic, I'm like, guess I gotta finally sit down and learn piano to be a proper musician. So I ran scales for a couple of years and just learned the chords and learned how to do things properly.

And so now I, as an adult, can also play piano. it's just, the thing is, when I'm dedicating all my time into playing saxophone, I'm getting worse at the other things. Or at least the technical skills might atrophy or get rusty a little bit. But also conceptually, and kind of the meta-mind is learning, like, when you can learn multiple instruments or you can learn multiple arts, they will start to make you better at the other ones. And it is...

a zero sum game, not everyone has unlimited time, but everyone has some time to apply to the things that they love the most. it's really another way you can identify is after you've done the thing, do you feel better or not? Right? And so like, that's a pretty rough question if you think about work, because like after you've done a thing, you don't always feel, you might feel good that it's done, but you don't feel better. After I play music, a lot of times what happens, I never want to go to rehearsal.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

You

Right.

Abel James

with anybody because I don't want to rehearse. I'd rather just play. But every time after I go to rehearsal, I feel 1000 % better because we just rocked out for two hours. You know, it's amazing. And so that's one way to identify is not necessarily how you feel before you do it. That's when the fear and anxiety really creeps in and all of just the you're in your head too much. Get into your body and after you've done it, ask yourself, how do I feel right now?

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

I love that. I love that. Did you identify that earlier? I know you've talked about music, you've talked about writing, and I think we'll get into some of the stuff that you've created from that. But did you just follow those intuitions throughout your life, and then it scaled up into what it is? Because someone can hear that and think, okay, well, I really like video games. I feel great after playing video games. But that doesn't necessarily...

Well, maybe some people can make money playing video games. Most people can't, right? So then how do you bridge the gap between something you love to do and you feel better after with also being able to earn a living?

Abel James

That's a great question. So this is a funny part. My wife actually her first career was as a professional video game player. She played Halo and first person shooters toured around the world and made money doing that. it's hey, it's ridiculous. She was practicing 14 hours a day, right? It's like she got good. She has

Jeff Albaum

RE-UPT!

Dude, that's epic. What? How? Who was, how did that work?

Abel James

many, many older brothers and had to learn how to beat them at something. So she got really good at Halo and really good at video games. But I'll say this too. So yes, most people who play video games never make any money doing it. Most musicians who play music never make any money from that either. Right? Like a lot of these things are, while you could make some money here or there, it's important to recognize that that there are certain work streams

that have a better chance of being a business. And there are other things to do in your life that are really good for you and the people around you. And those don't have to always be exactly the same things. In some ways, when I was working in consulting, I felt the most secure about playing music because I knew that it was by the time I was done with a work day, I could just be a musician and not care about money at all. The problem is

Once you're an entrepreneur and you're all on your own, it's like a zero sum game again. It's like if I'm playing music, that means I'm not like putting out large scale content with important people where there are going to be enough listeners to bring in sponsor interest and get the numbers and all that stuff. Right. So what I would encourage people to do is to find multiple projects and try a few and look for the ones that have the best chance of like maintaining your own

passion or energy where you don't have to sell yourself out, but there is that value exchange there where people are willing to pay for a product or a thing or a service and you can give that to them in integrity and feeling good about it on both ends of that transaction. Now that doesn't have to be your art and in many ways I think it's better if it's not. For me, really, while I make money from doing music sometimes,

I learned a long time ago that chasing the gigs or chasing the opportunities in music that had the most money is a bad plan. It might be a good business plan, even so I don't think so in most cases, but it's bad for your soul, right? Selling out for a musician is like the worst sin that you can commit according to some people, right? And so that's

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Abel James

Definitely a critical piece of this. I think in order to create honest and real and great art you need to delete the expectations of earning a living from it or paying your bills from it. You need to delete that away for the first few years and maybe forever because if you're doing it for the sake of money or if money's attached to it, I can just say that it'll take you in different directions. Like it'll take you in different directions than

than that eight year old child once again, who is just playing a little ditty that comes to his head. You need to be an open channel, whether you're writing or you're playing, like it comes through you. So you need to be open. And if your head is full of these ideas where I need to make $750 by the end of the night or whatever it is, that's in conflict with what you're actually doing. So yeah, I don't know if that completely is a satisfying answer to the question, but.

Jeff Albaum

Yeah.

Abel James

especially in the world that we're looking at, it's important that we do things that have a good chance of making money and are a business opportunity. And we look at it through that lens without emotion. And then do the other things that you just know are absolutely worth doing. And screw it if you make money or not, you know, because I'll be honest, the best gigs I've ever played, while some of them have been high paying, most of them are not most of the best gigs I've ever played I have done for free or I've done in service of others, or

have been paid okay, or whatever. And it was just a great night. You know, and so that's the thing is realizing that maybe max level I know a lot of bands, big time bands and a listers and that sort of thing. And it's like they're playing stadiums. And a lot of them don't like it because stadiums have terrible sound. And they have to play along with like a light show more than doing an improvisatory type gig where they can just kind of do their own thing and play with these different rhythms. No, no, it's a structured show.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Abel James

It's a theatrical type deal. And so maybe the sweet spot isn't bigger is always better, always looking for scale and growth for the sake of growth. No, maybe the sweet spot is when you have the most human connection and you can see the other people in the room and there's a group vibe going on, you know, so I encourage people to take a step back from like these Hollywood expectations or just kind of these stereotypes of what we think success looks like and then try to humanize it once more and be like,

what actually is a good vibe? What actually is a good way to spend time here? Because it's, there's a business case for a lot of things, but the reason that you do art, like the business is always the worst part of it.

Jeff Albaum

That makes total sense and I think that kind of jives with what's that Jim Carrey quote where he's like, I wish everyone could be rich and famous so they realize how much it sucks to rich and famous.

Abel James

Exactly. Or it's like, he said, that's not it. So they can know that that's not it or something, right? Because it's not like whenever every time I bumped up against the top of something and rub shoulders with the other muckety mucks, it's like, oh, this isn't it. They are struggling just as hard as everyone else just in different ways like that, that aren't immediately obvious from the outside in. But it doesn't matter who you're talking about or how successful they are. They're all 100 % real people going through

Jeff Albaum

Right, right, right, right.

Right.

Right.

Abel James

real stuff that you don't know about and that you wouldn't want. Like for the most part, I've never really met another person at the top like that where I'm like, I want to be in their shoes, right? The older you get, the more experience you get and the more stories you hear, you're like, oh, that's not what I thought it was, you know? I'm glad, I'm much happier to have my life and what it looks like than what that is. Because I thought it was this, but it's definitely not that.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Right, right. And I'm sure too, because I mean, through your podcast, the Able James Show, you've interviewed, mean, basically like the top people in the health and longevity space, right? Like you've interviewed everybody. It's unbelievable. like of the people that you've, well, as I say, of the people that you've interviewed, who has been someone that like, you look at them and you're like, obviously, you know, not everyone's a different person. So there's not going to be a single person. You're like, I want to be exactly like them. But someone you look at and you're like,

Abel James

Almost.

Jeff Albaum

Holistically, I want to be more like you than not like you. Like has there been anybody who, sorry? I've heard the name. I don't think I can tell you who he is.

Abel James

Rob Wolf. Rob Wolf. Do you know Rob Wolf?

He's one of the original paleo guys, was in Lauren Cordain's lab as a biochemist way back in the day, but also just a monster athlete and started one of the first popular CrossFit gyms, went on to write books in ancestral health, made documentaries, he's been on Rogan a bunch of times, lives up in Montana close to Yellowstone and

Jeff Albaum

Okay.

Abel James

You know, he's one of the founders of element as well, the electrolytes company just has all these different various projects. But but more than that, he's a very humble guy and a very good friend, just like solid dude, you know. And though he's had an extraordinary amount of success and struggle. Only some of which I know about the amount of cool factor that I get when we hang out and see each other and when I see him do a thing like he's.

He's a guy who like takes risks and says things, unpopular things, not conspiracies and just like hype or whatever, but he just like has ideas about things and is a very well thought out smart dude and he says them and he's not worried about like the blowback for the most part or at least from what I can see. that gives, every time someone who you respect does that, it gives you a little bit more oomph and juice and mojo to say what you really mean.

And I think in a world now where everything could be AI and we don't know if real is fake or fake is real, it's going to be really important that we don't hold back too much and that we do express like actual ideas and we have courage to speak our minds regardless of the blowback or censorship or shadow banning or whatever that happens on the internet. Like this is how humans work through stuff. It's by asking questions, examining ideas, playing devil's advocate.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Abel James

and never claiming to have all of the answers and always evolving. So I think he's a great example of that. And there are many more, but Rob's a good one.

Jeff Albaum

That's so cool. How did you, what made you start the podcast initially? Cause you were one of the first people to do podcasting. Like you did it before, way before it was cool.

Abel James

Yeah, podcasting was kind of around, but it took off big time when the iPhone came out. And so, yeah, when I came up, I had been writing about health already for like a year or two, probably six months more seriously, I'd started up a blog and started getting like this, this early RSS reader base. And so had a lot of subscribers with RSS, which I used to love that technology and way of reading things, but

It was actually, you know, going and I was a speaker at one of the first conferences around ancestral health in Austin. And that was the first time that I met Rob Wolf and Mark Sisson and Terry Walls and Jack Cruz and so many others. And it was such an incredible experience. And one of the guys there was just like, dude, you're a musician. You should have a podcast. And I was like, what's what's that? You know,

Because at that time you still like most what that meant is people had an iPod and they would have to like download an episode to their computer Loaded on their iPod and then listen to it I mean it sounds like so crazy old-fashioned now But that was as I said just right at the time that like I people were really starting to get into iPhones And so I decided to launch a podcast interviewing people who had achieved

abnormal results. like people who had lost 100 pounds and kept it off for five years or people who were shredded in their 60s and people who had, you know, completed these incredible endurance events. You know, I was running a lot of marathons at the time and doing a lot of endurance stuff. So I was really interested in running, but for the most part for me, the reason that I started it, started writing and doubling down into health was because,

I had been following the wrong advice when I was a consultant and had really good health insurance. I listened to my doctor and based upon family history and all this stuff, he's like, well, you should eat no dietary cholesterol, get rid of red meat, do all these other things, keep running. And so I did that and I followed his advice. And after 18 months, I'd gained 30 pounds. My triglycerides went.

to the roof, my blood pressure was up, all these problems that we had been trying to prevent had been caused by me following his advice essentially and he had me on four five different prescription meds, including an anti-depressant, not because I was depressed, but to help me sleep, it was just off label and it's just like so completely absurd. But in middle of all that, I came home one night and lost everything in an apartment fire. My entire life was just up in flames. Thankfully everyone got out.

No one died, but like I was left with literally nothing that I owned except for the clothes on my body and looked at myself in the mirror over the next few days and weeks and just saw like honestly how overweight and unhealthy and inflamed I was. Had a serious conversation with myself and just said like, listen, Bob, the rest of your life is clearly completely out of control.

let's try to work on this one, because what you're doing is not working. And I was, in fact, following the wrong advice so hard that it was making me sick pretty fast. And all my friends who were just going out a happy hour and having a good time and not caring were still in their 20s in relatively good shape. Another factor, though, was that I was just working super, super hard under artificial light and not outside enough, really, during that time. And so...

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Abel James

I had found a few different resources about cyclic ketogenic dieting and these like underground bodybuilding manuals and all this stuff. And I never messed around with any sort of exogenous substances or even testosterone or anything like that. But I learned a lot about alternative health and kind of like bodybuilding circles and how people actually lean down. If you have to make weight for the crew team, what does the process look like?

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Abel James

And so I learned about that, did some of that and basically like dropped 30 or 40 pounds so fast that it made me really, really mad. Cause I got down to like single percentage body fat, you know, it's like maybe eight or 9 % body fat within a couple of months. I was hitting all these personal bests in my races because I was a lower weight and it was easier to hit it. And I did that by doing the opposite of what my doctor told me, by doing the thing

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Abel James

that my doctor said would stop my heart and make all my numbers worse. And so I was so pissed that I was following, spending all this money and following this fancy pants doctor trying to do the right thing, getting the worst results that I felt like everyone deserved to know this, you know, not because I'm important, but because my story is just like everyone else's. Like they're trying to do the right thing too, following the doctor's advice and getting terrible results. So they should at least know that there are alternatives to this. And that's, that was really the impetus behind

why I started it, which is interesting because like now that I've been doing it for 15 years, the question is like, well, why do you keep doing it with all of the work that it takes and all of the attention and sometimes it can be relatively thankless on the economic side, right? Not always, but you really have to have your ducks in a row to make it all work out. And so that question I don't always have an answer to. It's certainly not the same answer as when I started because I started because I was so pissed.

And that gave me a lot of oomph for a while. But thankfully, you know, I feel like I've outgrown the chip on my shoulder and some of the fire under my butt because of that is not there in the same way that it used to be. So if you're going to start something like this, like a podcasting is a life sentence, right? It's like you got to do you got to be ready to do this forever. And so the way that I keep doing it forever is by expanding the conversation and not talking about the same stuff over and over again, because that is something I just

wouldn't be able to do. But talking to interesting people uninterrupted for an hour plus, like, that's the best. I love that. I love deep conversation. I love being able to jam with people and just ask questions and answer questions. That's what it's all about. And also that hardly ever happens uninterrupted in the real world because of phones and just because of life. So regardless of the economic scenario, I think podcasting is once again, one of those incredible things for people to do.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Abel James

pretty much everyone, I would encourage to work on becoming a better speaker, work on becoming just like comfortable with speaking, whether it's being recorded and speaking on camera, in front of a room, even more so. Like for me, out of all the skills I've built over the course of my life, that's the one that I would want other people to learn the most, is just like, if you can become someone who can actually get up there and speak, what a superpower that.

that turns into compared to the alternative.

Jeff Albaum

That's probably sage advice, because both you and Warren Buffett say the same thing. That's probably a pretty good one. All right, this is going to be kind of a broad question, and I don't mean it to be as such, but when you think about health and longevity, I feel like there's so much noise, right? You can hear whatever something's, whatever.

Abel James

Interesting

Yeah.

Jeff Albaum

something someone says, you can hear the complete opposite and they're both gonna give you science and data to back it up and all this stuff. So from your perspective, if you were coaching your niece or nephew and given them like the 80-20 of health and longevity, what are you telling people? Like what are the things that are your non-negotiables?

Abel James

So yeah, there there's an 80 20 to all of this. And I'll start with the 20%, which is just all of the hype, all of the saunas and the the testosterone and the peptides and all of this stuff that's going back and forth and the vegan and the carnivore. The 80 % is showing up and doing the hard work day after day, especially when you don't want to.

The thing is about this hard work is that it's only hard at the beginning. It's hard to kind of like get these habits in there.

And it's one of those things where it's like to get into shape when you're out of shape. That's hard. It takes effort. It really does. But to stay in shape once you're in shape is actually kind of fun. It doesn't take that much effort and your workouts are there. You know, it's just like, you know what you're going to do and your body can do it. And that's fun. And then after you're like in shape, you realize, I can do other stuff too. You know, I can play with my nieces and nephews and play the games and actually like play soccer with them.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Abel James

or whatever, instead of just sitting there being old on the side. And so learning that consistency is the thing that really makes the difference instead of willpower. A lot of people who don't have the results think that willpower is going to get them there. But it's really habit change through systems design almost of your own life where or maybe I should just say like setting up your calendar.

in less gibberish terms, unless corporate speak, it's just like, look at your calendar and make sure every day around the time you wake up, you're hydrating with a bunch of water, right? You go for a little walk around mealtime, preferably a couple times a day, and it doesn't have to be insane. But basically, the more walking you can do, the better you don't have to run, you don't have to do anything insane. But like, just those things and then challenging your body. I like to do it in kind of a way, especially now.

Jeff Albaum

Hmm

Abel James

used to be really heavy compound lifts and stuff like that. These days, it's more like calisthenics, just simple bodyweight exercises like push ups, pull ups, I'll do some sprints, lots of walks, but getting those things in there most days and not killing yourself. So you need tons of days to just like sit down and be sore and do nothing. Like that the other risk is when people are trying to get into shape and they're doing these basement beast programs or these like super intense things, which like

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Abel James

But you know, good on you for taking that on, but don't hurt yourself. The biggest risk is like hurting yourself at the beginning. And when you punish yourself with these like really intense workouts, you're hurt and laid out for like a couple of days. You're just sore, right? And so you can avoid that soreness by doing just consistent body weight exercises, air squats, you know, for men and women forever. Just like get down into all of these positions, spend time on the floor, you know,

Jeff Albaum

Dude, so hard.

Abel James

spend time in chairs that don't have backs on them, spend time standing instead of sitting, just all of these things. And then also I mentioned this a little bit before, but re-examining your relationship with the sun and sunlight and making sure that you're as close to possible as getting out there and seeing the sunrise and seeing the sunset and seeing, and when I say seeing, not just your eyes, but your whole body, your skin needs to be exposed to the sun to know what time it is.

to dial in your circadian rhythm. And one of the reasons I got so sick in my early twenties is because I was working in artificial light all day, sometimes in windowless rooms. And then I would program at night under more blue light. And then on the weekends, I would play gigs in the middle of the night with artificial lights. And that really takes a toll on me. It ruins sleep and it does that for everybody. So re-examining your relationship with

getting outside, getting into the sun. Like some of these things overlap, getting up, drinking that glass of water and then going for a walk outside in the sun. It's like you can start to check a lot of these boxes without it being totally painful, without it taking all this willpower. It does take a little bit of time, but it's the type of thing that pays you back more in energy than the time that it takes to do it.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm. So is that kind of your schedule your daily routine currently? Like you wake up, hydrate, go for a walk, and then like what does the rest of your day look like? I mean you're doing, you're a very high output individual. Like you create a ton. So like how do you, what does a typical Tuesday look like for you? Like is it structured, is it different, is every day kind of different? Like how do you manage it all?

Abel James

Yeah, it is very different. But can be super similar. So right now, I'm doing an insane amount of things, largely dictated by external timelines that I wouldn't have set myself. So what I mean by that is like, I'm narrating an audio book for a friend of mine, and he's a military veteran. And the story is multiple characters.

high stakes wartime scenes. I'm completely above my pay grade here. Like I'm just an ignorant civilian. I'm not a character actor. Like I've narrated a couple of audio books, but it's like books that I wrote in my voice. So now I'm like doing the voices for men, women, people from the middle East, the veteran himself. And it's just absolutely insane. So that's taking a ton of pre-production right now. And we're going to be recording that soon in a studio in Austin. was just in Nashville.

laying down tracks for my new album of original music and got down almost all of the album there. But I also play, you know, saxophone and clarinet when I practiced it back up and background vocals and guitar. I'm adding just like a few things here and there to finish out the songs and all of that. And that deadline is coming up because the guy I'm, I'm working with as my producer and my friend, he's going on tour with one of those a list groups.

in just a couple of weeks. So I need to bang all this stuff out, get my armature back on the clarinet and the sax, write all of these arrangements and parts for the different like, essentially orchestra or little big band that I'm setting up and trying to play myself. Also recording podcasts, right? I've got a bunch of shows coming up. We've got to move out of this place in two weeks. We're putting all of our stuff into storage. We got an RV. So we're going to take the summer and drive around, visit family.

I'm also an angel investor and there are a ton of deals that just like come in and out. And sometimes it's really annoying work where you just need to something drops in your inbox and you have, you know, 48 hours to review 300 pages of legalese to see if some company is screwing you out of your shares by signing some document or whatever. So there's that. And then I don't know, what are all of the yeah, I'm writing a book.

It's absolutely insane. It makes no sense. And that's just about half the thing. So the way that I get around that is by not trying to do all these things at the same time, right? Having certain weeks or times of the day that are dedicated to batching out that type of work. And also, because I'm doing all this other stuff under deadline for like this month and with a move, I'm not actively writing the book right now. I'm carrying around a notebook and any ideas that come to me or like an interesting piece of research I'm writing down.

But I'll deal with that later. I'm not like trying to ship the book right now. I'm trying to ship the album though. I'm trying to get that done as quickly as possible. And with the audiobook, we're dealing on an external timeline. So it's, I gotta be on their timeline. I can't just say like, nope. Because I'm kind of the guy, I'll hold back the whole project. I didn't choose the timing of some of this, but I do leave a lot of my calendar open and flexible so that when those opportunities come up where someone's just like, hey,

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Abel James

Can you shoot a music video with this Nashville artist on Thursday? I can be like, yeah, that sounds cool. Instead of being like, nope, sorry, I'm booked up doing all this stuff. Of course, I have to say no to a lot of stuff, but I try to keep, even during the times when I'm super busy, try to keep it somewhat flexible and open to those energy generating opportunities. And so some of this stuff, I kind of classify it in multiple ways.

The things that take a lot of energy, like podcasting, it's a show, you've gotta be on. I try to batch those on the same day. Because if I have one that day, the rest of my day is trashed, I'm distracted, I'm not gonna be in flow kinda getting a whole thing done. I might be able to reply to texts or do some errands here and there, but it's a garbage day because the whole thing that's happening in my mind and in my heart and emotional body or.

is the show that's gonna be happening later. And that's the same is true as if it's a podcast or if it's a music show. So on days like that, the similar streams of work, batch them together. Same thing with writing. It's like hard to get into the flow to write a paragraph or to write a small piece or certainly to write a book. If you're just dipping in, putting 15 minutes in here or there, that's not how it works. You gotta get these like two to three hour uninterrupted chunks where you're just saying, all right, it's Wednesday, let's go.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Abel James

So one of the ways that I do that is like the days that are, it's Wednesday, let's go, it's a recording day, are generally like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And then it's like the shows that are in person in the physical world tend to be more on the Fridays, the weekends and that sort of thing. And so it does sound completely insane to adults, but the way that I think of it is like,

Jeff Albaum

Got it.

Abel James

being back in school, I was one of those overachievers playing all the sports and then the clubs and the bands and in the theater performances and all that. And life was absolutely insane back then. And I was just a kid. So if I could do it then, why can't you do it now? Right? Like that's kind of how I see it. we shouldn't, I just had this conversation the other day with a couple of entrepreneurial buddies who've done very, very well, but now they're kind of just like golfing and like going to lunch.

doing all these things, they meet up with me and they're like, dude, you're working hard. Why are you working so hard? I'm like, why are you guys not working so hard? Like this, this is fun. It's a challenge. It's frustrating. And I get low on energy sometimes. But what one piece of like advice, I don't even know where it came from. I think it was like a jazz producer or something like that, or a music producer said, momentum doesn't come from clarity. Clarity comes from momentum.

Jeff Albaum

Right.

Abel James

And when I heard that, clarity comes from momentum. You have to think about it a little bit, but it's like, I'm not going to just like sit on my butt and try to come up with all these plans. That's not how things actually get done. Things get done by taking on those little tasks and breaking them down, just taking them on and getting that momentum and letting that momentum carry you through to the next day. Because all of the things that you said that I do and things that I said that I do are overwhelming and way too much all at once.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Right, right, right, right.

Abel James

That's the way that we think of it. But in actual life, it's just these tiny little things. Like yesterday, I recorded some background vocals on one of the songs. I recorded some claps and snaps and a little bit of clarinet or whatever. And I got ready for a pre-production meeting and did some research for the podcast and did some booking and all the rest of that, but still walked the dog and did a little workout and all those other things. So there are ways to fit all this stuff into your schedule. You just need to find a way to like,

honor your own energy and the way that you that I that I achieve it without completely burning myself out. Most of the time I do burn myself out sometimes, but most of the time is by taking breaks and those breaks are outside. It's not just like taking a break and stopping something and being in some stuffy room and just like listening to crappy background music. It's like going outside and letting my eyes just adjust to the trees, the light, the silence or the sound of nature or noise or whatever.

And just let yourself reset and be refreshed a little bit. And when you can do that and recognize those moments as well, this is one thing I'm really happy about, like early in my career working in consulting was like a lot of people would just do, it was called FaceTime. It's nothing to do with Apple. You just had to show up at work and show your face. That was a thing, right? And the more you were at work, the more you were rewarded because they thought you were a hard worker.

Jeff Albaum

Yeah.

Abel James

We learned pretty quick that wasn't that was the way they said it worked. That was not the way that it worked because the people who got the best work done didn't really matter how much they were there if the best work and the best results and the best contracts and the best business kept coming in because of them. So that's what I learned back then was like get into flow. Do that extraordinarily productive chunk of work and then get out of there. As soon as you're staring at the screen blinking being like, rereading paragraphs over and over again. It's like you're done anyway.

You got to take a break. And as soon as you do, you take that break, you refresh, then you can come back and do it again.

Jeff Albaum

Dude, that's amazing. You're prolific. You're a prolific man. Dude, just like Google yourself. It's undeniable. It's an objective fact. Where do you want to point people to? Are you focusing on growing, or where do you want people to find you? Musically on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, your podcast is on all those platforms, but where can people find more about you?

Abel James

I appreciate you saying that. I don't always feel that way. That's for sure.

Yeah, I appreciate that. My website is abeljames.com, also have a sub stack. Instagram is abeljams. then I also, you know, for the music that's coming out, you can find Swamp Thing, my album on a number of the platforms and I'm working on a new one and I'm not sure exactly what that release is going to look like. we also have, based on the 15 years of coaching and many, many things that we've done over the years, we just launched a new app in a community.

And that's all at wildrx.com. And that's about getting people together basically in like longevity circles and health and fitness circles so that the people around you, if you're gonna become the average of the five people around you, you might as well kind of align yourself with other groups of people who are looking to level up in health and fitness outcomes and that sort of thing. So that's what we're trying to build, both online and hopefully some in-person events, get some retreats coming up and that sort of thing.

Jeff Albaum

Mm-hmm.

Abel James

That's all at wildRx.com. And dude, Jeff, thank you so much for having me on. This is a really fun conversation for sure. I love your questions.

Jeff Albaum

Thank you, man. I appreciate you and thank you again for coming on, man. This is super fun and talk about energy giving. I'm pretty fired up right now. Thanks, man. All right. Bye, everybody.

Abel James

Right on, anytime.