Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic

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Hey, Yap fam!

I hope you enjoyed my interview with the father of biohacking Dave Asprey earlier this week.

Dave had some great tips on how to get smarter about your workout and self-care routine and how you can save time while getting even better results.

So be sure to listen to that episode if you haven't already.

But why stop there?

If you want more biohacking strategies from the master himself, then stay right where you are because in this yap classic episode, we are revisiting Dave Asprey's first time on the show back in 2022 in episode 149.

In this conversation, Dave told me how he became one of the world's most famous biohackers and how he went from hacking the internet to hacking his body.

He also shared some great diet and energy biohacks, as well as his thoughts on spontaneous meal skipping, why women and men fast differently, and why he thinks humans will start to live well into their hundreds in the future.

Dave also turned up to the interview with a blue tongue.

And of course, it turned out there was a pretty good reason for that too.

All right, folks, it's time once again to push the limits of human capability with Dave Asprey.

We like to start off with backgrounds and childhoods and things like that.

So in your own words, you were a fat kid growing up.

At one point, you were almost 300 pounds.

And it turns out you were sick and you didn't even know it.

So talk to us about your health journey and how you ended up starting this path on biohacking.

When I was a kid, I had all the behavioral problems that are common in entrepreneurs, what we would now call ADHD, but I also had Asperger's syndrome,

which is a neurological condition, and it's on the autism spectrum.

I don't present as someone with Asperger's anymore, and I, in fact, don't likely have it because it is a curable condition.

It's related to autoimmunity.

I was also overweight.

I had chronic fatigue syndrome, which was diagnosed by a couple of people, fibromyalgia, thyroid problems, lower testosterone than my mom in my 20s in labs, high risk of stroke and heart attack before I was 30, arthritis when I was 14.

So I think I was pretty much, you could say, biologically a shit show as a kid.

I don't know if I can say that on here.

You can beat me out or something, but not in a good place.

That said,

I did, let's see, I was at the top of my class in high school, but I was such a jerk that they wouldn't let me be valedictorian.

Oh my God.

That's not to say that I was doing that well in high school.

I was just at a school that wasn't that competitive.

Well, that's really cool.

I mean, some everybody knows you as Bulletproof, Dave Asprey.

You know, that's what we know you as.

But it turns out you had a whole super successful career before all of this.

You made $6 million by the time you were 26.

You had a very successful career.

And I actually did a bunch of research and found out that you were the first person to ever sell anything on the internet.

So talk to us about your whole background before being the father of biohacking.

Yeah, in fact, it seems to make people mad when I talk about that.

In the early days of the internet, I mean, early days before web browsers were created, it was entirely possible to know everything on the internet because it was something called Usenet was where most people communicated.

And you could follow all of the groups.

And these were kind of like Reddit forums today.

But imagine if Reddit only had 100 forums.

Okay, you could follow all those if you wanted to spend a good amount of time doing it.

So I did go out there.

I had a, let's just say it was a nine times increase in my tuition at the University of California.

When I was on Joe Rogan's show, I said it was 15 times.

I made a math error.

That was the only error that I had on that show.

So anyway,

I couldn't pay for it.

So I'm going to start a business here.

What can I do?

Well, I like caffeine.

So I emailed a caffeine scientist and said, tell me about the caffeine molecule.

And I'm, whatever, 19 or something.

And

he tells me a bunch of stuff.

So I made a t-shirt that said, caffeine, my drug of choice, with a picture of the caffeine molecule.

And I posted to the discussion group where we talked about coffee and said, you guys should buy this.

And then, oh, two weeks later, and I did really well.

I sold shirts in my first month to 16 countries.

And okay, I'm living in a shared one-bedroom apartment that I can barely afford.

Like, not the,

you know, college experience that someone who's having their college paid for would have.

And

I'm thinking, okay, now I can maybe make ends meet.

This is really good.

And then a Rutgers professor of marketing says, no one's ever going to make money on the internet.

So with a chip on my shoulders, an angry, mold-exposed kid, I wrote back and said, well, you may be at an Ivy League school, but I'm already making money on the internet.

So you're wrong.

Ha ha.

And the next day, the Miami Herald called and they wrote about my little business.

And pretty soon I'm an entrepreneur magazine with a picture of me in in a double extra large t-shirt talking about how you can make money on this inner something or another.

Two weeks after that, the first spam came out.

And I apologize because the people who did that read the article about me.

And in the article, I warned against marketing on the internet if you weren't a part of the community.

And so the first spammers on Earth were attorneys.

Their names were Cantor and Siegel.

And if you look back in the histories of the internet, that's how it was.

So, yeah, I was there.

I did it.

And I did it one day before the guys who currently run wine.com did it.

But at the time, it was literally checks in the mail, t-shirts sent back, trying to make ends meet, and also scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins.

I was just being scrappy.

It seemed obvious to me.

And this is why young entrepreneurs.

totally kick ass because you don't even know how cool what you're doing is until you look back on it because you don't have the life experience to go oh my god it's totally transformative by the time you can tell it's transformative you're probably too late yeah oh my gosh what a cool story and probably so many people tuning in had no idea that you were the first one to sell anything on the internet.

So you had this computer science background and you also had a love of coffee pretty early, which is, which is kind of funny looking at your career now and the fact that you created bulletproof coffee so many years later and it's all started with caffeine t-shirts.

It's kind of,

do you ever look back at that and think like, wow, like I was on to it already, like since back then?

Well, they always like to say, follow your passion.

And it's kind of true.

But here's the thing.

My passion really was, I want to change the world to make it better.

And coffee is a way to do that.

Your day is measurably better if you have coffee in the morning, if you're like 90% of people.

So if you're the other 10%, I'm sorry, you have bad genetics and you shouldn't reproduce.

Okay, just kidding.

But there are 10% of people who don't tolerate coffee.

But okay, that's one way.

Eating quality food makes the world a better place.

But at the time, having a digital nervous system for the planet so we could have the conversation we're having right now, I worked on the network engineering and protocols that do this.

When Google was two guys and two computers, the company that I helped to co-found a part of this company that held their servers and designed architecture for many of the biggest brands out there when it was the Facebook, that mattered because we were building a way for all of us to connect so that you and I could have this conversation.

Because if you go back 25 years, there was no way for us to know about each other, much less to meet each other and have a conversation.

So the world has become much better because of that.

And in the last two years, now that we've turned on government censorship, it's become actually maybe worse because of it.

So we've got to fix that, but that's a short-term blip.

Yeah.

So let's go back to, you said you got into Entrepreneur Magazine.

I think I read that you were 297 pounds when you were in that magazine.

So what made you decide like, you know what?

I've had it with computer science.

I want to kind of take what I learned with computer science and apply it to my body now because I'm almost 300 pounds.

But I'm going to make a bunch of people mad now, too.

I got tired of studying computer science because here I was, I had a web page.

I had started a business online and all of computer science was how do you do esoteric math on large computers?

I'm like, this isn't how, this doesn't match my view of where the world's going.

So I dropped out and I got a degree instead in something called information systems, which is how do you solve problems?

And my concentration was in a form of artificial intelligence.

There, how do I make a business work better?

How do I solve a problem using computers instead of how do I do science stuff in a lab somewhere?

And a lot of computer science still to this day is very esoteric and theory-based versus let's go out there and change something.

And as an entrepreneur-minded person, it hurts to not make things better.

And so that was why I went out.

But then I got to Silicon Valley.

And by the time I was 26, I did make $6 million.

I lost it when I was 28.

It's an important part of the journey.

This is about having a good mentorship, good advice, and being willing to take it.

But that whole path, I said, okay, I'm going to lose the weight.

I'll just work out an hour and a half a day, six days a week, go on a low-fat, low-calorie diet.

I will use my willpower.

And after 18 months of that, what I found was I could max out all but two of the machines at the gym.

I still had a 46-inch waist.

I still weighed 300 pounds.

And now I was tired.

So it didn't work.

And it it was sitting down

at Carl's Jr.

with some friends.

And I thought to myself, wait a minute, I'm having the chicken salad with no dressing and no chicken, right?

Because I'm the lowest calorie, low-fat thing.

My friends are eating double Western bacon cheeseburgers.

I work out more than all my friends combined, and I'm the fat one.

And I thought, it isn't that I'm doing something wrong.

I used to think it was a moral failing.

It was a weakness.

It was that I needed to eat less lettuce.

No, what I was doing wasn't working.

And I just said, wait a minute.

I just studied how to manage a complex system where you don't know what's going on.

Because that's what the internet is.

I teach classes at the University of California on how to do this.

And I can't do it to myself.

My doctor, when I went in and said, something's not right.

He said, maybe you should try to lose weight.

I'm like, no, really?

You think so?

Tell me how.

Eat healthy.

And I just fired the doctor.

I literally said, you're fired when he didn't know some very basic info about nutrition.

And I went off and said, I'm going to do it myself.

And so every night after I'd finished the building cloud computing phase of my career, I would go home and I would study biology because I didn't want to die and I was tired of feeling like crap.

So it was enlightened self-interest.

I started learning from people three times my age who ran an anti-aging nonprofit group who had more energy than I did.

And I hacked it.

And then I said, okay,

I'm a VP at a publicly traded

computer security company in charge of cloud security.

So I have some credibility in that space.

And

I started blogging.

I said, you know,

five people are going to read my blog, but it's going to prevent them from spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on recovering their health.

And I'm performing better than I ever have, better than I ever thought was possible, even when I was younger.

And so five people avoid my pain, avoid all the money that I spent.

I have done a solid for the world and I'm okay with that.

I wasn't starting a company.

I was sharing hard-earned knowledge through suffering.

And it turns out more than than five people liked what I had to say.

And pretty soon I said, I want to make coffee that doesn't make me crash.

So I said, this will be my first product.

The market size for functional coffee was zero.

It's a multiple hundred million dollar product.

I said, I want a protein powder that works.

I'm going to do the research and the work around collagen.

Today, collagen is a billion-dollar category.

It was not.

And I said, hmm.

MCT oil from the anti-aging world.

It's

an unknown thing.

It's now a billion-dollar category.

So what I started as a blog to help people not go through what I went through with all the brain fog and obesity and arthritis and just acting like a jerk because you have enough energy to be nice.

Well,

I wrote it not for heavy people.

I wrote it for entrepreneurs.

I wrote it for tech people because we are the ones who put the most mental energy in.

I don't care if I have dad bod.

Okay, I'm married.

I have kids.

I care about building companies.

I care about leading teams.

I care about innovating and creating.

And that requires energy.

And it turns out I grew abs as a side effect, not as the goal.

You can build abs and feel like crap, or you can build energy and abs grow.

And I wanted to teach that to my people, which were the geeks.

Pretty soon.

Go ahead.

I was just going to say, I love that.

I just love the story.

You go ahead.

Pretty soon, though, it wasn't just entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

It was Wall Street where it took off next.

Let's see.

These people are working 16, 18 hour days.

They never get a break.

They need their brains to work all the time.

My seed capital for what became bulletproof was actually an investment bank hiring me to fly around the world to meet with hedge fund managers to teach them how to be smarter.

And I did this so they could walk into the room with me, so their salespeople could come in because the hedge fund managers wouldn't take a meeting with a banker, but they would take a meeting with a brain hacker and a banker walking in with them.

So I was the booth babe, for lack of a better word, for hedge fund managers.

I took the money from that and I used it to buy my first round of coffee and to hire the first members of my team.

So that's how it got started.

And I started until I could replace my salary from a publicly traded company.

I worked as a VP and I grew bulletproof.

That is such an amazing story.

And it's so cool how just having good intentions will

almost always, when you're starting a business or starting something, having good intentions and just wanting to help people, eventually the money will come find you.

You know, you just wanted to put that information out there to the world.

And it all worked out because you were doing a service to others and having pure intentions with it.

I find that a lot with all the people that I talk with.

It's cool that you, you mentioned that.

When I was young, it was like, look, I'll do anything for money because money is going to make me happy.

And I really believe that.

And it motivated a lot of my decisions.

What taught me the two biggest lessons in my career is like money and fame are what people want.

We're told that that will make us happy since we're young.

Okay.

So here I'm 22, 23, whatever.

I'm in Entrepreneur Magazine, like full color photo, right?

And I got some phone calls and some emails from people.

And then two weeks later, okay, that was cool, but it didn't make me happy.

And I was like, what the heck?

I'm famous.

I should be happy.

I was happy for 10 minutes.

Right.

And

then I said, okay, a little while or money.

So I made a ton of money.

$6 million in 19, late 1990s dollars is $18 million in today dollars because of inflation driven by the government.

So

that should be enough, right?

I looked at a friend who all of us at this company, I mean, this was, let's see, our market cap hit $36 billion.

We split three times on one year on NASDAQ.

This is one of the most phenomenal companies that helped to build the first wave of internet companies.

It's called Exodus Communications for people who were around back then.

And

I looked at a friend and I said, I'll be happy happy when I have $10 million

because $6 million wasn't enough.

And if you are motivated by money, you will probably act like a jerk and you will never be happy.

And you will have what the Buddhists call hungry ghost syndrome.

And in the hungry ghost realm of hell, it's one of the many levels of hell Buddhists talk about.

This is where no matter what you eat, you're constantly hungry and you walk around with a distended belly and you can never be satisfied.

So if when I finally figured out, I'm going to start this thing as a, it's just a blog.

I just want to share things.

It makes me feel good to help people.

I didn't understand that flow states come from service to others because we didn't have the science for that.

So all of a sudden, I'm motivated to stay up late and write these blog posts and to share this knowledge and to start a podcast.

Before podcasts were really much of a thing, I've been blessed to be, I don't know if it's genetic or something, but I'm a futurist.

I can see what's coming.

And like podcasts, yeah, that's going to be, that's going to be a big thing.

And it's why I was successful in tech as well, because I could tell the direction of it.

If some people are good at telling the weather, that's what I do.

I tell the future.

And

so for this,

this just seemed like it mattered.

Yeah.

And I wanted to do it for no financial motivation whatsoever.

I just didn't want anyone to suffer the way I had.

No other motivation.

And now it's made me pretty successful.

That's super powerful.

So speaking of being a futurist, you think that people are going to start living a lot longer.

And you say that you think you're going to live to 180 years old.

Now, the average human...

Hold on a second, Eric.

You're trying to cut me short.

It's at least 180.

Oh, at least.

That's not the ceiling.

That's the floor.

Just so we're clear.

That's the floor.

Okay.

I didn't realize that.

So you think you're going to live to at least 180 years old.

I believe you.

I mean, I know that you spent hundreds of thousands of dollars biohacking your body.

and we can get into that later.

So I definitely believe you on this because humans are, you know,

living to be older.

And hopefully we figure out the science to do this.

But talk to us about why you think this is even possible because a lot of people are hearing that and you know the average lifespan is 80 years old and we're tacking on 100 years to that.

Why is that even possible in your opinion?

Here's why it's possible.

Do you know what the best we can do today is?

120 or something like that.

There you go.

It's about 120, 100 between two, maybe.

So our current best is 120.

If you were 120 years old today,

you were born around 1901.

We didn't have airplanes.

World War I would be fought largely on horseback.

We didn't have DNA because we couldn't spell it.

Actually, we had it.

We just didn't know about it.

We had no antibiotics.

We didn't have public sanitation.

And you still live to 120.

So if that's possible, and you probably drank and smoked every day, too.

Okay,

if you can do that, why can't we do 50%

better than our current best in the next hundred years?

Okay, because the next 100 years is going to be way different than the last hundred years, because the last hundred years, we did not have computers to make ourselves faster and better.

What we're doing now is every 18 months, we double our compute capacity.

That's Moore's Law, and it's held strong for ridiculous amounts of time.

What that means is that you and I are going to live longer because we have the technology to talk about living longer that we didn't have before.

And my company, 40 Years of Zen, that does neuroscience brain upgrades, has the ability to do machine learning on your brain waves.

One of the companies I'm an investor and advisor to, Viome, just discovered 10,000 new species of gut bacteria that didn't exist, that live in humans that we didn't know about.

And it's 20, 20, whatever it is today, right?

That is phenomenal.

So given all of that,

if a comet doesn't hit the planet, it is inevitable that we will improve only 50% on our current best in the next hundred years.

In fact, we'll do way better than that.

My job is to explain and make it real so that everyone knows this is possible and it is coming.

And so it becomes our expectation.

The same thing happened if you go back to when the Wright brothers were about to fly.

They're working on flying machines and everyone looks around and goes, those idiots.

Who do they think they are?

Don't they know men will never fly?

Literally, they were saying that a week before it happened.

And then all of a sudden it happens.

And then, oh, yeah, of course we can do that.

It's always been that way.

So every great change that is brought about usually by entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs in combination with crazy inventors, when they pair up, it's very, it's very powerful.

And when that happens, magically, suddenly it's obvious.

And we're at that stage right now with anti-aging.

When I started this, I was the only person under 30 attending a meeting, a nonprofit that was based next door to Stanford University called the Silicon Valley Health Institute.

I ended up becoming chairman.

I'm learning from an 88-year-old and I'm 26.

And he had more energy than I did at the time.

What?

These guys were considered truly crazy.

And so did the people who talked about smart drugs.

Where we are now with nootropics, nootropics are a thing, and people know that they work.

And I played a hand at that as well.

I went on Nightline and said, guys, I've took a smart drug called modafinil for eight years, which is the limitless drug.

And it got me through Wharton Business School.

And I don't regret it one bit.

It was a beautiful thing.

I don't need it anymore because my brain's that fast without it.

By the way, have you noticed?

Your tongue is blue.

Yeah, your tongue is blue.

What's that about?

I kissed a smurf.

I a compound called methylene blue, which I've written about in a couple of my books that enhances mitochondrial function.

It's a nootropic.

It's just one that makes your tongue blue.

Well, it's super interesting, you know, what you're saying about how long we'll live.

Do you think that there's a max?

Yeah, ma'am.

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Limit to the human lifespan?

Like, what do you, I just want to like, pick your brain about the future of what humans will look like, in your opinion.

There is a maximum life,

absolutely.

Actually, there's two of them.

The longest one is the universe, as we understand it, will collapse in on itself.

Okay.

There's probably going to be a hard limit that's based on physics and stuff like that.

I'm less worried about that.

The real limit to human lifespan is curiosity.

As long as you have a reason to live, to be of service to others, to be curious about things, to be constantly learning and walking around with that childlike curiosity, going, I wonder why that works.

How is it that way?

How can I make that better?

If you have the biology so that when you're old, you look and feel like you do now.

We're not talking about the skin so thin you can see through it with tubes and monitors and diapers and not knowing your own name.

People think that's aging.

That is an aberration.

It has never existed in all of human history except for in the last maybe 40, 50 years.

And it's sick and wrong.

So we are on the path of returning to having our village elders the keepers of the knowledge and returning them to

what is right, which is a level of respect and veneration for our elders, because they will keep us from making mistakes.

And here's why this matters.

You look back to when I made that $6 million

or even better yet when I sold that first t-shirt online.

Now, I was exactly the same age as Mark Andreessen, who's a really famous investor, multi-multi-billionaire.

Now, Mark created the first web browser.

I did the first e-commerce.

Okay, very similar, about as similar as you can get.

In fact, I wrote an article as a journalist about his first web browser.

So, like, we're in the same thing.

He flew to Silicon Valley.

I would have had to drive.

I was 80 miles from Silicon Valley, but he flew to Silicon Valley and he found a guy 20 years older who ran one of the large tech companies and said, teach me.

And he did.

What did I do?

I said, I'll do it all myself.

I know everything.

Right.

I I had a big ego.

Right.

So I did not do that.

And at this point, Mark's a multi-billionaire and I'm not.

Okay.

I'm okay with that.

I'm doing quite well.

Thank you very much.

But it took me another 10 or 15 years to figure out the value of mentorship and to basically get control of my ego so that I could listen to and learn from others.

So I didn't have to make all the mistakes myself.

And that's a really, really big thing.

We can do that with aging.

We can do that with everything, but it comes down to curiosity and willingness to learn and we've we've just got to get that that's what keeps you young so once you're bored even if you have the biology

the real goal of anti-aging

you should die at a time and by a method of your choice when you're done you're done That is so interesting.

And it's so important.

I definitely want to drive this point home.

There's like 13 million people by, I think, 2050 are going to have Alzheimer's.

And I think the rate of Alzheimer's is at an all-time high.

It keeps increasing and there's so much dementia going on.

And like you said, when we think of older people, we think of children now instead of these wise people where we should be getting information from.

And it's so important that as we all grow older, that people actually have the mental capacity to tell the knowledge to everybody else so that we can learn from those people.

I love it that you brought up Alzheimer's.

My book, Headstrong, was on the New York Times Monthly science bestseller list sandwiched between Homo deuce and sapiens, two of my other favorite books.

I'm like, woo, I finally made the big list.

Yeah, look at me.

I'm a big deal.

But I was just sort of in awe, going, oh my God, I can't believe that happened.

I wasn't expecting it.

But that book is largely based on research around Alzheimer's.

And I've had Dale Bredesen on my podcast, who wrote The End of Alzheimer's.

And I was a couple years ago the largest donor to the women's Alzheimer's movement, which is Maria Schreiber's charity.

She's been on my show as well.

Women get Alzheimer's twice as much as men do.

And we don't talk about that nearly as much as we should.

Alzheimer's is preventable and avoidable.

It's not even that hard given what we know now.

But reversing it is a little bit more work.

And if you're a late stage, it might not be reversible.

But if you in your mind today listening to this are saying, oh, it's inevitable that I'm going to get cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer's, which are the big four killers that you have to avoid to live a long time, you're totally wrong.

These are metabolic diseases.

You can fix your metabolism.

In fact, my newest startup, the one where I'm CEO and fully focused now, is called Upgrade Labs.

And we're opening franchise locations across the U.S.

and Canada to start and soon the world, where you can come in and fix your metabolism in less time than you currently spend going to the gym.

So you get your cardio, get your strength, get your neurofeedback.

and fix your metabolism because we know how, because of machine learning, because of artificial intelligence, because of tech.

So you can do better than Caveman did.

And this is all necessary if you don't want to go down that path of slow degradation.

That is not natural.

Yeah.

I'm so happy that you're working on all this kind of stuff.

It's really important that you're doing this kind of work.

So a couple last questions before we move on to Fast This Way.

You're currently, I believe, 49 years old.

I'd love to know

48.

Here's the deal.

Okay.

It is ageist to talk about someone's age, right?

So if I am allowed to specify the gender I identify as,

and I'm allowed to choose the race I identify as, I'll be damned if I'm not allowed to choose the age I identify as.

I'm 28% right now.

I'm 28% of my goal.

So I'm not 49, I'm not 48.

So I'm 28%.

And everyone listening, get this, pick a number that's your goal.

You are the percentage of that.

And if you believe in this whole, oh, identify with a calendar, no, screw the calendar.

The calendar is wrong.

If you measure my biology, I am measurably younger than my number of years.

So that's what I identify as.

That's That's exactly what I was going to ask you.

And by the way, I totally agree.

I look way younger than I am.

And I...

I feel like 24.

No, I'm not.

I'm in my early 30s and nobody believes.

And like, I look way younger.

And so I hate when people ask me because I'm like, no, I worked out my whole life.

I eat healthy.

And yeah, I look younger.

And I'm not, I don't feel my age.

And so I totally, I love that, like saying a percentage of your goal.

So how, what are you biologically?

How do you figure that out?

And the second part of the question is, how much money have you spent on this?

And what are the types of things that you do to reverse your aging?

All right.

Which measure of age you want to look at.

And right now, there isn't one accepted thing.

I just did a big show on this.

And one of the

probably more trustworthy tests is called True Age.

And this is one that looks at the types of sugar molecules that line your cells.

And it looks at DNA methylation.

Like actually, those are two different methods of looking at aging.

So you look at those things, and I am between five and eight years younger than my biological age right now.

And when I get the new tests, I would not be surprised if now it's going to be about 12 years because I just did some more interventions that are lengthening telomeres.

But telomere length, which is the old way of measuring aging, probably isn't as accurate as we hoped it would be.

So there's all sorts of discussions about it.

But the number one thing is, do you wake up and you have more energy than you did 20 years ago?

That's a pretty good sign that something's working, right?

And do you wake up and your body hurts?

That's a sign something's not working.

So like you,

you have an unfair advantage.

See, I started out with bad genetics and bad lifestyle that I thought was a good lifestyle, and I recovered from all that.

You are preventing the damage in the first place because you're in your 30s and we know more now than we did when I was in my 30s.

And you actually took action early in your life.

Most people are like, are you kidding?

Here's what I care about in my 20s.

I care about having enough money to make sure that I get laid.

Sorry, human development, all personal development right there.

People care about power and they care about reproduction, not because we choose to, but because our biology does that for us when we're not paying attention.

And then we're like, oh, why did I go on the date instead of the job interview?

You just blame yourself and you think you're a bad person.

No, it's because your biology told you to do that and your biology is in charge more than we like to think.

And this is the struggle of personal development.

So whatever you did, whatever your parents did that made you wise enough to take care of your hardware means that your rate of aging is going to be flat.

Whereas someone who says, I'm just going to go party and drink way more than I should and eat ramen all the time because it's cheap, their rate of aging is going to be really steep.

They just don't feel it until they're 35.

So kudos to you.

And I want everyone to not do what I did when I was 16 because I just didn't do it right.

Yeah.

Well, this has been so interesting.

I would love to move on to your book fast this way because there's so much.

Before we get there, I didn't answer your last question.

Yes, how much you spent.

Yes.

How much you spent?

And what are the types of things that you're spending your money on?

So I have spent, at this point, around $2 million.

on anti-aging, on upgrading my biology.

Part of that, I built a lab here at my house that has all of the gear that is now a part of Upgrade Labs.

So when you're able to go to an upgrade labs, or if you open an upgrade labs franchise in your neighborhood, a lot of the gear there, well, I bought all that gear and I've spent good, God knows how much on lab testing, on traveling around the world and trying all of the anti-aging technologies that billionaires are doing right now.

And that was the subject of Superhuman, which is my big anti-aging book that tells you all of the stuff that you can do now, including the free stuff.

Because the problem is that when you're young, you're not going to spend $100,000 on a stem cell treatment.

It doesn't even make sense because you don't need to because you have young stem cells, right?

So that's part of it.

But there are things you can do now that we know what's making you older.

The things you could do that are free, that give you the advantages so you can hold off on spending lots more money as you age in order to not age.

So the biggest one you can do that has the highest ROI is intermittent fasting, which is my latest book.

Love it.

So why don't, well, let me ask you one other thing.

What is, so you spent $2 million.

What would you say is the most effective thing that you've done so far?

Wow.

It's sort of like, okay, you have a car

and you want to keep your car running for a long time.

So what was more important, changing the oil or rotating the tires?

They're probably both important.

Like if you don't rotate the tires, you're going to have a blowout and flip the car and that's no good, right?

But if you don't change the oil, the engine's going to wear out before it's time.

So which one was more important?

It's really hard for me to say that, but I will tell you that having a healthy metabolism that makes energy very effectively from air plus food, if you can hack that system, everything else, including your cognition, your meditation, your personal development, your rate of aging, your DNA methylation, all of it will be better.

So fixing your metabolism would be the number one thing.

And of all the things I've done, which fixed it?

A lot.

Supplements are important.

You absolutely need to be taking supplements.

The reason is straightforward.

You'll never get all of your nutrients from food because that presupposes you get all of your toxins from mother nature.

You live in a world that is not the natural world.

You need to support the systems in your body for the world you live in.

That's why you use supplements.

The other thing is intermittent fasting, brief periods of exercise, not overexercising is also very important.

And so those are some of the very basic cheap things.

And frankly, sleeping, learning how to sleep.

When I was a young entrepreneur, if I sleep, why would I do that?

I could learn instead of sleep.

So, I would sleep five hours a night sometimes because I had work, because I had things to do.

The ROI on sleep is very high, but a new study came out literally two days before we recorded this that showed sleeping more than six and a half hours a night is related to negative changes neurologically.

The correct amount of time for high-performance, healthy people who are not under undue stress is about six and a half hours a night.

I went from five hours, sorry, I went from five minutes of deep sleep and five minutes of REM sleep in a six and a half hour period 15 years ago to getting an hour and a half to two hours of deep sleep and an hour and a half to two hours of REM sleep.

That is more sleep than a 20-year-old gets in eight hours.

I'm getting as a 48-year-old who identifies as a 28-year-old

in six and a half hours.

So less sleep, but more quality.

That in and of itself is your biggest anti-aging strategy right now.

So, learn how to sleep and learn how to skip breakfast.

Those two things are going to buy you 20 years, even if you don't spend any money on it.

Okay, well, this is a great segue into your new book that came out last January called Fast This Way.

So, I thought the best way to kick this off is to get your definition of fasting because it's not only about food.

Fasting means to go without.

That's it.

And people say, well, fasting means you can have no calories.

You can only have water.

Because that's what Mice did in a study.

Like, well,

I hate to tell you, there's something called dry fasting.

That's when you fast without water too.

So which is the real fasting?

Right.

Well, there is no real definition other than the one I just gave, which is to go without.

You can fast from alcohol.

It's called abstaining.

You can fast from sex.

It's called chastity or celibacy, whatever you want to call it.

And you can fast from hate, which is called compassion meditation.

It's called forgiveness.

All of those are practices of fasting, saying, I am not going to do X for some period of time.

And it turns out when fasting from food, it's not even fasting from calories.

It's fasting from specific types of calories that cause the metabolic changes you don't want.

So I wrote the first book, which is about fasting for performance, a working fast, versus fasting for a spiritual fast.

And I fasted in a cave for four days led by a shaman who was remote from me.

So I'm all by myself because I knew that if I didn't eat, this was going back to 2008, if I didn't eat six meals a day, I would go into starvation mode, which is not a real thing.

And then that would make me fat and some bizarre mental gymnastics taught to me by big food.

I also knew that I would get hypoglibitchy, which meant that if I didn't eat, often, I would yell at everyone around me because I would get cranky.

So I'm like, put me in a cave.

No food, no one to yell at.

Everybody went.

And the book is actually based on the psychology of fasting plus the physiology of fasting.

And I say, here's how to fast without pain.

So you work better than you did before and you save money and time in the morning.

And then here's what to do on a weekend or when you want to do a spiritual fast.

And to date, 70,000 people have done the free fasting training, the challenge that comes with the book.

Fastthisway.com is where that is.

And I just want people to learn if you skip breakfast the right way, you're nicer to the people around you.

You're more focused than you were before.

Your metabolism gets better.

You're less likely to get diabetes and cancer and Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease.

And you save money and time.

Like it's the best, highest return on investment hack there is.

So let's stick on that since you brought it up.

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Skipping breakfast.

I think it's you got to wait six hours.

I think in your book, you said six hours after you wake up is when you should first,

you know, break your fast, I guess, or eat your lunch.

Is that true?

It's not true.

Okay.

And the reason the book is called Fast This Way is that there isn't one way.

It's biologically unique.

So let's just suppose that last night you went out and you maybe had a few drinks with friends and you stayed up till midnight, right?

And then you woke up this morning and said, I'm going to fast.

You already blew out your biology.

You messed with your sleep.

You had alcohol.

You probably ate way late.

You're, or maybe you worked out the day before too.

Okay.

So you're already at a point of biological stress.

Adding fasting as a stressor on top of a stressed body isn't going to work very well.

Have some breakfast.

It's okay.

Right.

And then let's say that another day you went to bed on time, you didn't have a late dinner and you didn't have a bright TV in your eyes and whatever.

So you wake up and you're just fully charged and you're ready to go.

Maybe you should fast for more than six hours.

The evidence shows at least a 12-hour fast, three days a week.

This is in women over 40 specifically, creates metabolic benefits.

So for most people, most days, at least 14 hours without food is a good idea.

However, 14 hours, I would starve.

No, when you're asleep counts.

It's like have dinner.

Early your dinners are better.

So have dinner at five.

Let's say you're done eating at six.

If you don't eat snacks and dessert after that and you wake up at 6 a.m.,

you already fasted 12 hours.

You could just wait two more hours and you did a 14-hour fast.

So you have breakfast at 8.

It's not that big of a deal.

But that midnight snack ruins you biologically.

And if you're saying, okay,

I can go past eight.

I'm just going to wait, you know, have some breakfasty kind of thing at 10.

Well, you just did.

a 16 hour fast.

You wait till noon.

Oh my God, you did an 18 hour fast and an 18 six fast.

That's what all the paleo people do.

It's not that hard.

But here's when it's hard.

And I say this as a guy who was obese for much of my life.

If when you wake up, you have a gnawing hunger and all you can do is think about food and you go into the office and someone has a plate of donuts there, the donut's going to win.

It's going to say, eat me.

And you're going to say, no.

And it's going to say, eat me.

And you're going to say, no.

And the conversation gets more and more shrill.

And it's like arguing with the two-year-old.

Eventually, they're just going to wear you down and you go, fine, I'll eat half.

And you have just a bite of donut.

And then you go, God damn it, why am I such a bad person?

I'm so weak.

No, biology dictates that this will happen to you, especially when you're not fat adaptive, when you don't have a flexible metabolism.

So what I teach people to do in the fasting challenge or by reading the book, but the fasting challenge is free, fastthisway.com.

It's look, there are things you can do that turn off hunger so that in the morning, I just don't care about food.

The donuts are in front of you and there is no voice telling you to eat it because you're like, I don't want it.

And it's so much, it's just easier that way because what, what happens is your willpower is a finite resource.

And if you spend all of your willpower saying no to donuts, no to your biology, it just keeps asking you because your biology doesn't have what it needs, you're probably not going to have enough left over to be nice to the people around you, to be focused at work, to do what you want to do.

And then you're going to beat yourself up and think it was you.

So fast this way is about the mindset and the physical tools to make yourself never hungry when you're fasting.

And then it's just easy.

So fastisway.com, I'll stick that in my show notes.

So, when people think about fasting, I think the big buzzword is ketosis.

Everybody knows about ketosis, and that's what they want to enter into a state of ketosis.

But then there's also another important world called autophagy.

Phagy, autophagy, autophagy, autophagy.

Sorry, I read it.

I didn't hear it.

Autophagy, right?

So, tell us about the difference between ketosis and autophagy.

People who read my first big book called The Bulletproof Diet, that's probably more than half a million copies now, 16 languages, and people have lost more than a million pounds on the Bulletproof Diet.

It was probably the first modern keto book, except it wasn't just about keto.

What ketosis is, is something that happens when you fast or when you only eat fat, or maybe very, very small amounts of carbs and protein and all, but it's when your body says, I've got no carbs and no protein to burn.

What will I do?

I guess I should burn fat.

This is a major part of how I lost the hundred pounds of fat that I lost.

The only problem is that in the bulletproof diet, I teach people: here's how to use ketosis for a brief period and then how to switch out of it and then go back in.

And if you're saying I'm only going to eat peanut butter and margarine, you're not going to have the same results as if you eat the stuff that I talk about, actually, grass-fed butter instead of peanut butter.

So the type of things you eat when you're doing ketosis matters greatly.

But essentially, it's fat-burning mode, and we're all capable of it.

And if you go into ketosis, even briefly, it has a side effect that no one talks about that's so important.

When I weighed 300 pounds, there were many times I would lose 30 or 40 pounds, and it would come roaring back plus 10.

It happens to anyone who's been fat.

And right now, it's like 60, 70% of the U.S.

is overweight and struggling with exactly what I went through and what I don't ever think about now.

And when you go into ketosis, it resets your body's hunger to that of your current body weight.

If instead you go, oh, I'm going to do what those 1970s people online say, oh, you just have to work out more and eat less and you'll lose weight.

No, I tried that.

I beat myself up.

I gave myself an autoimmune condition doing that.

It does not work.

You might lose weight for a little bit of time, but it will come back.

So what happens there?

You go in ketosis and all of a sudden, if I weighed 300 pounds, I lost 50 pounds with ketosis.

I'm still going to have the hunger of a 300-year-old unless I use ketosis, right?

So that's why it matters so much so that's keto and autophagy is a totally different thing if you think about las vegas all those lights everywhere before they turned to leds there were teams hundreds of people their job was to go out and find the dim bulbs and the bulbs that were out and go up on a ladder and take out that bulb and put in a new one so that you didn't have any bulbs out well your body has quadrillions of little power plants and some of them are weaker than others.

When you fast, your body goes through and says, what are the weakest ones?

Let me get rid of those, break them down and use them as building blocks to make new, healthy, young mitochondria.

So when you fast, you get the benefits of ketosis, weight loss, and mental function, and the reduction in Alzheimer's.

And you get the benefits of autophagy, which is replacing older power plants with younger ones.

Oh, and how much did it cost?

You actually got paid to do it because you didn't spend money on breakfast and you didn't spend time on breakfast.

It is the simplest thing to just go, oh, this makes sense.

It is so, so interesting.

You know, I was always never a fan of fasting because I grew up Muslim, right?

I, I'm the least religious person ever.

Ramadan.

Yeah.

And so like, I was tortured being fasted, fasting during Ramadan.

And it was so hard because you're not even allowed to drink water.

And I think spiritually I respect it.

You know, I don't, I haven't fasted since high school because I decided that it made me sluggish and that I couldn't compete.

I wasn't going to, you know, when I was getting my MBA, I was like, I won't get a 4.0 if I I fast.

When I was in corporate, I won't be competitive.

Now I'm an entrepreneur.

Same thing.

I feel like I can't be competitive if I'm fasting for a month.

And then plus, I feel like it's kind of an unhealthy way to do it.

So you only eat when it's dark outside.

And a lot of people usually wake up at 4 a.m., they eat, then they wake up, then they'll eat again at like seven or eight when the sun goes down, and they'll probably eat all night.

And then you can't have water or coffee during the day.

So what do you think about this kind of fasting?

It can't be good for you.

Well, it turns out a lot of the studies I reference in Fast This Way are using Ramadan, which is one of our biggest studies of a certain style of fasting.

And it's intermittent dry fasting, right?

It turns out there are health benefits to Ramadan, which are built in.

And a lot of the ancient nutritional practices that you'll find through whatever culture you're looking at are around health.

For instance, the don't eat pork that you find in multiple religions.

It's because pork usually had parasites in it, and pork that is not refrigerated properly has high levels of histamine, which is inflammatory.

So if you were making rules for your population, you'd be like, don't eat that stuff because it causes problems a lot of times.

However, if it's preserved properly and it's fed properly, it has different effects, but they didn't have the technology or the abilities there.

So they're like, just don't do it, right?

Which makes sense.

Now,

What I would say is that it actually is healthy.

And there are many, many people who practice Ramadan.

And the last thing they have before they go into Ramadan, right before the sun comes up, is a huge cup of bulletproof coffee.

And they do that because in Fast This Way, I talk about the mechanisms of butter and specifically the MCT oil and coffee itself.

to turn off hunger for long periods of time.

So at that point, their ketone levels spike and the ketones suppress hunger.

So then they don't think about hunger all day long.

And get this.

When your body is burning fat, guess what a side effect of burning fat is?

I don't know, losing weight.

Water.

Water, okay.

It makes water.

That's why camels store fat in their homes.

No, they store fat in their humps, but it's water.

So they burn the fat in the hump to make water so they don't need to drink water.

So if you are in Ramadan and you have ketosis going on, you are hydrating yourselves through burning fat and you're not hungry because you're burning fat.

And then it's a much less painful fast.

Now, eating after dark is just not good for you, but that's traditional in the Middle East.

I've spent a lot of time in Dubai, been been to oman and i have investors in my companies from that part of the world and i do have a hard time i have dinner at 10 o'clock at night i don't sleep as well but that's because of the intense sun during the day so you got to adjust what you do for where you live yeah so uh well that's all really helpful i guess you gave me a little bit of motivation to figure out how i could do it

I do this.

Next time it's Ramadan.

You haven't done this in a long time.

Connect to your roots.

Try it for just a week.

Just a week, not the whole month, and see if instead of being sluggish, tired, slow, the reason you're sluggish and tired and slow is because what you eat at night is full of sugar and carbs and stuff like that.

But when people say, Oh, I'm going to practice Ramadan, but I'm going to eat foods that don't cause hunger all day long, suddenly they just, it's like rocket fuel and it's totally sustainable for a month.

That's that's super interesting.

So let's talk about uh, I know we're running a little short on time.

So actually, I'm going to skip to something else let's do a quick fire segment i'm going to rattle off some ways that uh you can fast and why don't you tell us quickly what they are and the good and the bad with each one so let's start with the 16 eight fast

16 eight fast means that you don't eat for 16 hours and you eat whatever you want during that eight hours this is what works for most people most of the time as long as you don't do too much of it and it gives you most of the benefits of intermittent fasting which can be slightly longer or slightly less long.

Okay.

Let's do OMAD, one meal a day.

One meal a day means what it says.

So it's a 24-hour fast every day.

In fact, if during Ramadan, you were to say, I'm just going to eat breakfast right before the sun comes up, you'd be doing OMAD.

OMAD is fantastic.

It gives you more autophagy.

However, most people I find who do OMAD every single day for more than especially about five days, their sleep quality goes down women's before men's because women and men actually actually do fast differently.

That's part of the teachings in fast this way.

The five two fast.

Five two fasts, that's a fast where for two days of the week, you either eat very low calories or no calories, and five days you eat whatever the heck you want, whenever the heck you want.

And there's plenty of evidence that says that works.

I find it's much less sustainable for long periods of time.

Probably doesn't work as well as just skipping breakfast most days.

Okay, spontaneous meal skipping.

Spontaneous meal skipping just says, oh, I don't feel like eating.

I'm not going to eat.

You should always do that.

But here's the deal.

If you want to eat within four hours of a meal, your last meal was built wrong.

You had that kale salad you thought was healthy.

No, it wasn't healthy.

It just made you hungry.

So if you just don't feel like eating, don't eat.

The problem is that skipping meals doesn't really make it fasting.

Unless you're skipping breakfast or you're skipping dinner, because you just aren't getting that 12-hour plus window of having no food.

Okay.

So let's go back to, you just mentioned something that I want to touch on.

You said that women and men fast differently.

Why is that?

There is something I call the fasting trap.

And it's the same as the exercise trap.

It's the same as the keto trap.

It's the same as the vegan trap.

If you think something is good and you got results, more of it must be better.

It's just basic human thinking.

The problem with fasting is that when you fast too much, then bad things start to happen, but you're convinced that fasting works for you.

So then you fast even more and you end up making yourself sick.

Women hit the fasting trap before men do, usually in about six weeks of

overfasting.

Men, it's usually closer to eight or even 12 weeks.

Here's what it looks like for women when you overfast.

You get that fasting trap.

And overfasting means just fasting for too long, too many days in a row.

Number one, you wake up and you feel like you didn't sleep.

Your sleep quality goes down.

Number two,

your hormones start not working right.

Your cycle is less regular.

You have more symptoms.

I don't normally get that.

And then number three is hair thinning.

And with guys, it hits us a couple of weeks later if we're overfasting.

Number one, we don't sleep as well.

If you're monitoring your sleep, you see changes or you just wake up and feel, God, I'm just not well rested today.

Maybe I'll just have more coffee and fast extra today.

Not a good idea.

Second thing, guys, experience is you wake up without a kickstand.

And the third thing is you're looking at me like you don't know what I'm talking about, but you know what I'm talking about.

No, I just got it.

Now I got it.

It took me a minute.

I was like, kickstand.

And then the third one is, see, I didn't trigger any warnings there.

The third one for guys is also hair thinning.

So this is why for women, men, it's different.

And women are more susceptible to over fasting.

And it isn't true for all women.

This is why fast this way.

You must fast based on your current biological state, your current readiness.

So, there are also changes that occur at different times of the month where you are in your cycle, right?

So, for some women, when you're menstruating, like, okay, I really do great fasting.

Other women, I need to eat because my blood sugar is unstable, but you got to figure out what it is so that you feel good and you're not overdoing it.

And I talk about the techniques in the book for that, guys.

I have to say, Fast This Way has so much information.

There's so many things we didn't get to talk about, really, like sleep related to fasting, exercise related to fasting.

You guys can get all that information in Dave's book.

Dave, the last question I ask all my guests is, what is your secret to profiting in life?

My secret to profiting in life is don't worry about profiting in life.

That's not what you're here to do.

You should evolve in life and profit's a side effect.

Love it.

And where can our listeners go to learn more about you and everything that you do?

Go to daveasprey.com.

There's 3,000 articles, 1,000 hours of video.

There's a vibrant learning community called the Upgrade Collective, and there are free challenges where I just teach you all my books for free because I just want you to have the knowledge.

Because, well, if you have that knowledge, then you won't suffer the way I did, and everybody wins.

Amazing.

Thank you so much.

I love this conversation.

It was so good.

It was fun.