Digital Social Hour
Short vs. Long Form Content: The Truth About Engagement | Abel James DSH #1314
10 Apr 2025
Chapter 1: Why does Abel James favor simple health solutions?
It's one of those things where it's like, it's obvious now that you don't need to spend a small fortune or a large fortune biohacking yourself or doing all of these crazy extraneous things to get these results. You actually just need to do the simple stuff and find a way when life gets hard to keep doing that simple stuff and stay on point, you know? All right, guys. Abel James, a.k.a.
The Fat Burning Man, one of the podcast OGs. Thanks for coming on today, man. Thanks for having me, Sean. I'm stoked. 14 years in the space, man. Impressive. It's been a minute, even longer if you include the blogosphere before all the podcasting started.
But being early had a lot of benefits and made a lot of connections with people who have continued to be out there and do incredible things with their careers. Yeah. It's been a great experience kind of getting in early and seeing where everything goes. Yeah, there's been a lot of shifts in the industry. Now I feel like it's shifting towards clips. Definitely. Short form content. Definitely.
That's where I see a majority of views and engagement these days. Yeah, for better or worse, but you can also measure engagement in different ways. It's like, if you want to get out there and be seen, then clips are obviously fantastic.
But if you really want to affect someone, I don't think there's anything better than a long form conversation, you know, like really going deep and seeing why people are saying these things or why the message came out that way is so important. especially for people who are out there kind of getting caught up in the tendency to just scroll all the time.
The best way to learn, I think, is to really sit down and listen to a legit conversation with people who aren't just, you know, saying whatever and hanging out, but actually, you know, talking about their area of interest or expertise. And hopefully, you know, they've gone down their rabbit hole and can come back with some gold to share with other folks because it's so easy to waste our time.
Oh, yeah. Now when we're trying to consume, it's just entertainment instead of education. And I think it's important that we double down on the educational side of this because, I mean, the opportunities to learn today are absolutely insane. Agreed. I feel like I'm learning more now than I did in school just because of content. Yeah. Like way more. Likewise. Every day.
Like I'm either pumping on a audio book or a podcast. I'm just baffled by what I'm learning at the speed of it. Cause now you can control the speed. So I'm looking at two X speed and it's just like, I'm absorbing so much. Right. So drink it from the fire hose. If you can handle it is a fantastic thing to do in short bursts. And I like to do that around interests, right?
Like, so if you go into one domain, say like a near infrared or red light therapy, that sort of thing. Then going down that rabbit hole and learning everything about it for a while is fantastic, but you don't want to be talking about it for 15 years, right?
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Chapter 2: What are the benefits of long form content over short form clips?
And you can certainly draw a line and see the similarities between fattening a cow and fattening a human. The reason that we have so many fat humans is the same reason that we have so many fat cows. And we fatten the cows on purpose by feeding them GMO corn or soy or other food. Well, it's cheaper because of subsidies. So that's another whole giant problem. It's like
Grass that grows out in a field that comes from the natural process of sunlight, photosynthesis, the water that falls from the sky is a heck of a lot cheaper in certain countries than it is in the States. Wow. You know, and so...
That's something that we also need to get back in line and in balance because right now we're subsidizing the wrong foods, which enables this entire big food system so that all the kids are eating goldfish and all the adults are eating Subway sandwiches and this stuff that kind of resembles food and looks like food. But as you know, when you eat it, it rips you up and you lose your health.
And we have some serious problems. It's like... If we're talking about longevity and biohacking and all of that, it's more about subtraction than it is addition. We need to get rid of the stuff that's obviously not working.
All of us who are just, the toxic burden that we're taking on, even if we're eating all the right foods, is so insane that I don't think we have the margin to play with of eating the crap anymore. Maybe a generation or two ago, if you look back at family pictures, I don't know about you, but it's like,
Pretty much everyone in every family has put on 20, 30, 50 plus pounds on average, you know, in the past generation or two. And so it's like, we're doing a lot of things wrong that we need to clean up before we start doing all this newfangled stuff and eating lab-grown meat and trying this soy-based protein.
It's like, there's an obvious incentive for large corporations and the marketing arm of these corporations to... float these things out there and test them out. You know, for a while there, they're trying to get us to eat bugs, you know, cricket protein, that sort of thing.
And thankfully, a lot of times they'll shop, they'll trot this stuff out and people will try it and be like, that one didn't stay. I don't think so, man. You know, it's like I had the opportunity to invest in some of those companies early and try their products. And I was like, I don't think so. I'm going to stick with beef. Consumers talk with their dollars, right?
Even the plant-based meat companies are struggling right now, what I hear. Yeah, they are. And rightfully so, because their products suck. I mean, there's seed oils in the product. It makes no sense for a meat to have seed oils. No, and it's completely unnecessary. And it's also just like trying to get around something that's a natural part of the ecosystem.
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