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

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26:13Young end profiters. I know there's so many people tuning in right now that end their workday wondering why certain tasks take forever, why they're procrastinating certain things, why they don't feel confident in their work, why they feel drained and frustrated and unfulfilled. But here's the thing you need to know. It's not a character flaw that you're feeling this way. It's actually your natural wiring. And here's the thing. When it comes to burnout, it's really about the type of work that you're doing. Some work gives you energy and some work simply drains you. So it's key to understand your six types of working genius.

26:47The working genius assessment or the six types of working genius framework was created by Patrick Lencioni, and he's a business influencer and author. And the working genius framework helps you identify what you're actually built for and the work that you're not. Now, let me tell you a story. Before I uncovered my working genius, which is galvanizing and invention. So I like to rally people and I like to invent new things. I used to be really shameful and had a lot of guilt around the fact that I didn't like enablement, which is one of my working frustrations. So I actually don't like to support people one-on-one.

27:19I don't like it when people slow me down. I don't like hand-holding. I like to move fast, invent, rally people, inspire. But what I do need to do is ensure that somebody else can fill the enablement role, which I do have, Kate, on my team. So Working Genius helps you uncover these genius gaps, helps you work better with your team, helps you reduce friction, helps you collaborate better, understand why people are the way that they are. It's helped me restructure my team, put people in the spots that they're going to really excel. And it's also helped me in hiring. Working Genius is absolutely amazing.

27:48I'm obsessed with this model. So if you guys want to take the Working Genius assessment and get 20 % off, you can use code profiting. Go to workinggenius.com. Again, that's workinggenius.com. Stop guessing. Start working in your genius. 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. So 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.

28:23I'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, 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.

28:58And 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, but 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.

29:39In fact, I wrote an article as a, 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 knew everything. Right. 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.

30:24So I'd have to make all the mistakes myself. 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 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.

31:05It keeps increasing and there's so much dementia going on. And like you said, when we think of 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 Deus and Sapiens, two of my other favorite books. I'm like, oh, I finally made the big list.

31:40I 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 of years ago, the largest donor to the women's Alzheimer's movement, which is Maria Shriver'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.

32:16And if you're a late stage, it might not be reversible. But if you and your mind today listening to this 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 US and Canada to start and soon the world where you can come in and fix your metabolism in less time than And you currently spend going to the gym.

32:49So 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 cavemen 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 48. Here's the deal.

33:26OK, 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 percent 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 the 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.

34:04That'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 hate 24. No, I'm not. I'm in my early 30. and nobody believed. 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 and 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 you're aging.

34:41All right. Well, it depends on 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 TrueAge. And this is one that looks at the types of sugar molecules that line your cells. And it looks at DNA methylation. Actually, So 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.

35:25But 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 that 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.

35:59And 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 twenties. 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 when you think you're a bad person.

36:30No, 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.

37:02Yeah. 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. You wonder how much I spent. 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.

37:39And I've spent 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.

38:10The 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, 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.

38:56Like 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 is 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.

39:27And 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 over exercising is also very important. And so those are some of the very basic cheap things.

40:01And frankly, sleeping, learning how to sleep. When I was a young entrepreneur, I think 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.

40:38Sorry. 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 20 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.

41:14Okay. 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 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.

41:55It'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 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 for me.

42:39So 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 hypoglybitchy, 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 wins. And the book is actually based on the psychology of fasting plus the physiology of fasting. And I just tell you, here's how to fast without pain.

43:13So 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.

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47:33Learn how you can get more out of your.com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com slash profiting for 30 % off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's 30 % off in 2026. Again, that's framer.com slash profiting for 30 % off framer.com slash profiting. Rules and restrictions apply. 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.

48:15So 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. Maybe you worked out the day before too. 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. 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.

48:54So 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. Earlier dinners are better. So have dinner at five. Let's say you're done eating at six. if you if you don't eat snacks and dessert after that and you wake up at 6 a.m you already fasted 12 hours you just wait two more hours you did a 14 hour fast so you have breakfast at eight it's not that big of a deal but that midnight snack ruins you biologically and if you're saying okay i didn't i can go past eight i'm just gonna wait you know have some breakfasty kind of thing at 10 And well, you just did a 16 hour fast.

49:50You wait till noon. Oh my God, you did an 18 hour fast, 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.

50:22Eventually, 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 adapted. We 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.

50:54And it's so much, it's just easier that way. Because 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 could 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 fastestway.com, I'll stick that in my show notes.

51:28So when people think about fasting, I think the big buzzword is ketosis. Everybody knows about ketosis and that's what they 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.

52:09What 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 100 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.

52:48So 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.

53:27If 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.

53:59If 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 many 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 a reduction in Alzheimer's.

54:35And 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'm the least religious person ever. Ramadan. Yeah. And so like I was tortured being fasted, fasting during Ramadan. And And it was so hard because you're not even allowed to drink water. And I think spiritually, I respect it.

55:14I 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... When I was getting my MBA, I was like, I won't get a 4.0 if 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 7 or 8 when the sun goes down and they'll probably eat all night.

55:48And 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.

56:32So 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.

57:12So 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. Okay. It makes water. That's why camels store fat in their homes. No, they store fat in their homes, 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.

57:47And 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 to Oman and 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, 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.

58:19Connect 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.

58:55Let's do a quick fire segment. I'm going to rattle off some ways that 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 16-8 fast. 16-8 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, 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.

59:34In fact, if during Ramadan, you were to say, I'm just going to eat breakfast right before 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 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.

1:00:12And 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 have 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.

1:00:54Okay. 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.

1:01:28Women hit the fasting trap before men do usually in about six weeks of over, of over fasting men. It's usually closer to eight or even 12 weeks. Here's what it looks like for women. When you over fast, you get that fasting trap. And over fasting 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.

1:02:04If we're over fasting, number one, we don't sleep as well. If you're monitoring your sleep, you see changes or you just wake up and feel 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. Now 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.

1:02:40So this is why for women, 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.

1:03:15Guys, I have to say Fastest 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 profits a side effect. Love it. And where can our listeners go to learn more about you and everything that you do? Go to Dave Asprey.com. There's 3000 articles, a thousand hours of video.

1:03:54There's a vibrant learning community called the upgrade collective. And there are free challenges where I just teach you all my books for free. Cause 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.