The Bulletproof Diet

Meet the tech bro on a noble quest to double his lifespan, improve his productivity and irritate his waitress. Support us: Hear bonus episodes on PatreonWatch Aubrey's documentaryBuy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreLinks! Mycotoxins Myth: The Truth About Mold in Coffee Guidance for Industry: Action Levels for Poisonous or Deleterious Substances in Human Food and Animal Feed You, Only BetterFTC letter to Dave AspreyA...

• 0:11Speaker 00

  It's also been clipping a little bit lately. Because I feel like

• 0:15Speaker 01

  On my end?

• 0:15Speaker 00

  I feel like you've been doing more bellowing than usual.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  You're like 6% more bellowy.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  That sounds like me.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  So maybe turn the gain down like 3% or something. I don't know.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hang on. Let me open up the settings.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  You can make things safe. Safe for bellowing.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Bello Safe?

• 0:32Speaker 01

  That's the Aubrey Gordon promise.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Patented Bello Safe technology. Don't they sell the microphone?

• 0:42Speaker 00

  For all your left-wing podcasting needs. You can shout "no" as much as you want.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  The package is just a line drawing of me giving the AOK and winking.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  Wait, so, okay, the reason I, one of the reasons I wanted to jump into this was because I actually have a tagline and it's actually kind of good.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, I can't wait, Michael.

• 1:03Speaker 00

  You're already bellowing.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  I am.

• 1:04Speaker 00

  Welcome to Mandy's Phase, the podcast that downs your uppers. Because that's what we're doing today, literally.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  We kind of are.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  We're drinking caffeine.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  We're cancelling coffee.

• 1:17Speaker 00

  This is also true of us emotionally. People come to us feeling good and then they listen to our show and they're like, oh, now I'm down.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  I'm also, Aubrey, I'm so, you said we have to record for like four hours for this one. I'm like, what are we going to talk about for four fucking hours?

• 1:33Speaker 01

  There's so much, Michael.

• 1:34Speaker 00

  I thought this was gonna be like 15 minutes long.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  I thought this was gonna be like a little light, easy one to be like, we're gonna get more episodes out. It'll be faster.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know, I know. But then it was us, but then this is us.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Starring Mandy Moore. And I surprised myself by learning that, oops, I picked out a 72-ounce steak of a topic.

• 1:53Speaker 00

  I'm so excited.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Michael.

• 1:54Speaker 00

  Aubrey.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  What do you know about bulletproof coffee? How did it make its way onto your radar? What have you heard? Do you know anybody who drank it or drinks it?

• 2:03Speaker 00

  This is just coffee with butter in it, no?

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  I have not like come across this in the wild. I do not like read Maxim. Magazine or like wherever the fuck people are getting this stuff.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Maxim magazine. How dare you?

• 2:15Speaker 00

  What are the metrosexuals reading these days?

• 2:17Speaker 01

  So the origin story is pretty straightforward. The creator of bulletproof coffee is a guy named Dave Asprey. He was hiking in Tibet when he tried a local drink.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  The local drink was tea with yak butter in it. That is a common drink in Tibet.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  He tried it and he said he felt absolutely incredible after drinking it and came back to the US to test out a version that he could make at home that made him feel the same way.

• 2:46Speaker 00

  This is like a person on vacation who's like, I feel great when I'm on vacation and then they want to replicate it when they're home.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. What if I moved to Jamaica? He says that as he was experimenting at home, he switched from tea to coffee because the flavor of the butter overwhelmed the tea.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  The recipe is pretty straightforward. What you're mixing together is two cups of piping hot brewed coffee.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Up to two tablespoons of grass fed butter.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  Oh, it has to be grass fed?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Sure. And up to two tablespoons of MCT oil.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  What the fuck is that?

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Multi-chain triglyceride oil.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  Dude, do you know what just happened to me?

• 3:28Speaker 01

  What?

• 3:28Speaker 00

  In my life. Cause we're, we're doing a taste test later. So I had to go to the store to look for bulletproof liquids. I went to the normal grocery store and they didn't have anything. So I went to Whole Foods. I had to ask the gentleman working there if they had any bulletproof stuff. I got like the coffee grounds and then he also guided me to like the supplements aisle.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  I was like, why is he taking me to the supplements aisle? And then he found a bottle of like, a bottle of liquid.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Brain octane? Was it brain octane, Michael?

• 3:54Speaker 00

  I don't, it said so many things on the bag. It was like Dr. Bronner's. There's like all these words coming at me and I was in a hurry because we were like late to record. So I was like, yeah, whatever. Fine, fine, fine. So I get the thing. I go to the checkout and it's like bloop, bloop. I start putting them in the bag and she goes, oh, it's a 75 60? I was like, wait, sorry. I thought you said $75. And then I looked at the little thing and the, it was a bottle of MCT oil.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 4:16Speaker 00

  Which was $54.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Jesus God.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  I mean, it was a Relatively large bottle, to be fair, but also I was like, no podcast is worth $54 a shot.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Oh, you dropped it?

• 4:26Speaker 00

  I'm not fucking paying $54.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  I was like, put this back. There's no fucking way I'm paying $54 for whatever this is. But I think that's because it was like the oil. It wasn't like the coffee, butter coffee thing.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  For bulletproof coffee true believers, you will hear a few key health claims about drinking the butter coffee. One, you will hear that bulletproof coffee, quote unquote, keeps you in a fasted state while filling you up.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Two, people will say that bulletproof coffee leads to, quote unquote, enhanced cognitive performance.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Three, you will hear that most coffee won't work in making bulletproof coffee because it contains mold.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  Mold?

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Which outweighs the nutritional benefits.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  I can't, where are we?

• 5:11Speaker 01

  The first claim is that bulletproof coffee keeps you in a fasted state. That's based on a ketogenic diet framework. The idea is that this is a meal replacement.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  We discussed this more in depth in our keto episode, but cardiologists are not fans of this approach.

• 5:31Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  I will absolutely never forget the doctor, uh, who we talked about in that episode, who described the ketogenic diet as the low carb, high coffin diet.

• 5:42Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  The other thing that this is sort of based on is not specific to bulletproof coffee. It's based on the purported benefits of MCT oil, multi-chain triglyceride oil. So, multi-chain triglycerides are just straightforwardly fats. They're shorter chains than other fats, which means they're quicker to convert to energy. There's less for your body to break down. So if you're on a keto or keto-style diet, the idea is you want to add some MCTs because that'll be your quickest way to get the kind of energy you would otherwise get from carbohydrates.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  The thing is, even if the health claims are true, Aubrey, if it's $54, I'm not interested.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Michael, it's not $54 because multi-chain triglycerides are naturally found in coconut.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Coconut oil and palm oil?

• 6:31Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  There has been some research into MCT oil and MCTs, but the benefits in that research are pretty modest and the strength of the evidence is just not great, right?

• 6:44Speaker 00

  I could just drink coconut milk. I can put that in my coffee. That'll probably taste better, honestly, than butter.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Claim number two is that it will enhance your cognitive performance. Dave Asprey says that he ran his own research comparing his bulletproof coffee beans to other coffee beans. So he makes a big show of this. He says that he registered with an IRB and that he worked with a Stanford researcher on his research design. He doesn't say who this person is, what they're credentialed in.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  He also doesn't like publish the results of the study anywhere.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Here is his paragraph describing the research design.

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  We asked 54 people recruited from the Bulletproof Executive Facebook page to conduct two batteries of cognitive function tests per day for four weeks while using different combinations of butter and coffee. Lab-tested upgraded coffee, black. Coffee made with beans from a local shop, black. Lab-tested upgraded coffee with butter, coffee made with beans from a local shop with butter. We did not test MCTs, short-chain C8 MCTs, or coconut oil because the test was already too long and dropout, people not completing the test, was a problem. Nonetheless, the results were conclusive.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  Love that.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  And we didn't test half of the recipe. A bunch of people dropped out, but it was conclusive. And we recruited through Facebook 54 people.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  Anyway, this is hella janky, but we've also reached sweeping conclusions. Love that. And then he concludes, "With or without butter, the coffee from a local coffee shop produced statistically significant lower scores on tests of cognitive function compared to lab-tested upgraded coffee beans." Yeah, I mean, this just has like no plausible explanation. That like your coffee beans are so different that it's enhancing cognitive function, but other coffee beans aren't like, yeah, I need to see, I need the tables.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  100%. I read- I had an interview with a university professor on the bulletproof diet. And her take was essentially something that like we've said on the show a number of times, which is that nutritional research is extremely difficult to do.

• 8:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, just really hard. Yeah.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  To research an individual ingredient or compound in someone's diet, you would have to have people eating identical diets aside from that one ingredient or compound for a sustained period of time. And you would have to know that they're not slipping off of the plan that you have provided for them.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. This is why we try not to like make fun of scientists or like seem snarky about scientists on this issue, just because it's so hard to study.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Michael, let's dig in on that third claim about moldy coffee.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, what is this? What's going on?

• 9:32Speaker 01

  I like interviewed coffee roasters and

• 9:35Speaker 00

  Did you really?

• 9:36Speaker 01

  strainers. I like, I went on such a fucking journey about this. It is true that coffee can develop mold. The forms of mold that we're talking about here are called mycotoxins. One, which is also what I call you when you're in a bad mood.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  That's all my, that's all my friends' New Year's resolutions.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Mycotoxins.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  Cutting mycotoxic out of my life. That's what my Irish friends call me when they're mad.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  So one of those types of mycotoxins that can grow in coffee is a known carcinogen. That's also true.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  However, in order to consume enough that it would like cause health concerns, you have to consume so much coffee.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  You have to, this is our old classic of the dose makes the poison, right? We are all exposed to low levels of this stuff all the time and not just through coffee. This particular mycotoxin, which is called aflatoxin B1, can be found in peanuts, pistachios, dried spices and corn, among other things. So this is in a lot of things in extremely low concentrations, right?

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Because of that, coffee growers and roasters take a number of measures to reduce mycotoxins. One is that they've developed a process called wet processing. That is, the way that most coffee beans are prepared at this point. It involves pulping, fermenting, and drying coffee beans. That's the way coffee is processed now.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  Wetly.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  After that process, they roast the beans, because roasting beans also kills mycotoxins. And then, after all of that, they discard any crops with unsafe levels as set by the FDA.

• 11:34Speaker 00

  So they're marketing something that is like a legal requirement. Like, we pay our taxes.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and to be fair, their argument is we have even fewer than other brands, right? To none at all. Like, that's sort of what they're saying. But here's the thing that broke my brain, Mike. Even if they didn't do any of those things, mycotoxins make coffee taste bad, so they can't sell it.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  Oh, okay. So it's already like a built-in incentive.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. So like, mycotoxins change the taste of coffee. They make it taste extremely bitter.

• 12:08Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  So it also just like, wouldn't be in their best interest to try and sell shit that people would then drink and be like, this is gross.

• 12:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Dave Asprey says that they don't actually screen well enough for mold, and that actually Bulletproof is the only one doing sort of some form of proprietary mold screening, but he doesn't really go into like, what are they doing?

• 12:31Speaker 00

  So he's not technically lying, or potentially he's not technically lying, but he's giving you the impression of something that isn't true.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  So, Michael, are you ready to taste test some goddamn Bulletproof coffee?

• 12:42Speaker 00

  I have not eaten breakfast yet today, so this is uh, it's gonna be me in a fasting state.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Oh, you're gonna do it correctly.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Listeners can weigh in on whether I seem smarter afterwards. Give me more feedback on my personality. I really like that.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  You and I both got the high achiever from Bulletproof, which is enhanced coffee. Coffee with added B vitamins, lion's mane and coffee berry.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  I am gonna send you the little recipe.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  And what you're supposed to do is blend it to emulsify it.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  Which I cannot do.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  You cannot do, I can do.

• 13:12Speaker 00

  So two cups of coffee, up to two tablespoons. I mean, I don't have grass-fed butter. I have like a normal ass butter.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Can I read to you the description from the brain octane that you didn't buy?

• 13:22Speaker 00

  Ooh, yeah, yeah, do it.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Crave less, do more.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Brain octane C8 MCT oil is no ordinary MCT oil.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Sourced purely from coconuts.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Like coconut oil?

• 13:36Speaker 00

  No, not ordinary.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  It contains the most ketogenic MCT oil, pure C8 caprillic acid and easy to absorb, high-quality smart fat.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  So that's me. I'm a high-quality smart.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  That rapidly converts into brain powering, fat burning ketone energy.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Brain octane C8 MCT oil helps control cravings, jumpstarts your metabolism and improves cognitive performance to keep you sharp.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  It would be so funny if they said it's fortified with mycotoxins, this like special thing that actually like makes you smarter. Like, it's like any of these, like, mold is good for you, mold is bad for you. It's all, it's all just people saying stuff.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  So, Mike, I'm curious about what your coffee looks like. Mine has been through a blender, yours has not.

• 14:26Speaker 00

  Mine, there, okay, there's, when I was living in Berlin, there's like a restaurant in East Berlin that's like famous for like, it's like the garlic restaurant. That's like the theme. Every single thing on the menu has garlic in it, including the desserts. So they have famously garlic ice cream. And I was like, okay, whatever, I'll go there. I had like a normal spaghetti dinner and then I had, I was like, all right, fine, I'll try the garlic ice cream. And then you taste it and it literally just tastes like someone took Breyer's ice cream and like crushed a bunch of garlic in it. You're like, yep, that's garlic in some fucking vanilla ice cream. It was like not more than the sum of its parts. I feel like this is the same thing where like, it looks like just coffee with like a centimeter of butter floating on top of it. And then when you smell it, it's like, it smells like coffee and butter. There's not, I mean, I don't know what I expected.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, mine smells exactly like coffee and exactly like butter. It smells kind of like a diner.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  I'm also glad you didn't get the oil because he does warn you about putting too much MCT oil in your coffee.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, surely it's gonna separate, yeah.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  That's not what he's concerned with. He's concerned with a side effect that he refers to consistently throughout the book as disaster pants.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  Oh, god, what? Why do all these things involve pooping? Just give me a normal diet that doesn't change my poop. Now there's a new euphemism for shitting myself in my brain.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Brought to you from the era of like Amazeballs and Awesome Sauce. Please enjoy Disaster Pants.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  All right, we have to, we have to do this very quickly because the second I stop stirring, it just like all the butter flows back to the top.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  You ready?

• 15:56Speaker 00

  Are we doing three, two, one?

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Sure, you count us down.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  Wait, you, you can say, you do the countdowns.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Three, two, one, go.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  I'm not tasting the butter at all, actually. It just tastes like a fine cup of coffee.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  It's fascinating to me because like all of the celebrity coverage was like, it's the creamiest latte you've ever had. It's the best blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, no, it tastes like drip coffee.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  Which is kind of amazing because two tablespoons of butter is hella. I was noticing when I was putting it in, I was like, damn, what a butter.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  So much butter.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  Do you feel smarter, Aubrey? Do you, do you, are we sharper?

• 16:36Speaker 01

  The appeal eludes me. I really thought I was gonna be like, hey, man, I gotta hand it to him. This tastes really good.

• 16:41Speaker 00

  Man.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  But it tastes just sort of like coffee, like a cup of drip coffee.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  So we endorse, we wholeheartedly endorse bulletproof coffee. The rest of this episode will be a series of affiliate codes where we tell you,

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Michael!

• 16:52Speaker 00

  if it tastes fine, all of the health claims are true.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  So Bulletproof Coffee comes to us from a real character named Dave Asprey. He is a self-described biohacker. And the headlines about him often include that he has spent over a million dollars on his own biohacking.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  He is also out here pretty constantly talking about how he intends to live to 180.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Women do not talk about how much money they've spent on diets in the same way.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  No, and if you did, it would be with like such weird shame.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  It would be a bummer. You wouldn't be like, check me out.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Dave Asprey is a Gen X dude who spent his early career working in IT.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  On his website, it says, quote, "As a true pioneer, Dave was the first person to ever sell a product online."

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Oh, well, I mean, maybe.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Totally. Mike.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  How would you even determine that?

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Mike, Mike, the journey that I went on trying to disconfirm this, Michael, Michael, Michael, Michael. It's clear. So he did sell products online in 1994.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  That is the first year, like, when you look at, like, retrospectives on, like, the beginnings of e-commerce, they talk about 1994 being the first year that people were like figuring out how to sell things.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  On the internet. But when people tell that story, they tell a story of like a totally different dude, and then also a story of Pizza Hut.

• 18:30Speaker 00

  Oh, what?

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Figuring out some like online ordering through Pizza Hut in 1994.

• 18:35Speaker 00

  Oof, you were not getting that pizza. That pizza's coming on Wednesday.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  You had to wait an hour for the image of the website to download. So when the story gets told of the beginnings of e-commerce, no one is mentioning Dave Asprey. Dave Asprey is the one mentioning Dave Asprey.

• 18:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Can I tell you what the product he was selling was?

• 18:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, what is it?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  It was t-shirts with an illustration of the caffeine molecule.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  And the phrase, "Caffeine is my drug of choice."

• 19:08Speaker 00

  Oh my God, it was like bad, like boomer memes on a t-shirt?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  I cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food, right? Like, that's the, like, level that we're at here.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  I was selling cringe t-shirts on the internet when cringe t-shirts were but a glimmer in your eye. Wow, Dave, yes. You're like so cool, Dave.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Like most biohackers, he has an origin story that is sort of gussied up, but is ultimately an absolutely bog standard dieting origin story.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Essentially, he was fatter than he wanted to be and his mind wasn't as sharp as he wanted it to be.

• 19:47Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  I'm gonna send you a quote. This is from a New York Times profile of Dave Asprey from 2015, and it really sort of encapsulates that little origin story.

• 19:59Speaker 00

  It says, "After his failed low-calorie diet, he tried others: the zone, Atkins, raw veganism, high protein, and intermittent fasting. At the same time, he went to extreme lengths to collect additional data on his body's performance. He had adrenal testing done to better understand how his hormones worked. Extensive blood work led him monitor his glucose and albumin levels. He got DNA tests to look for genes that might cause immunodeficiency and sent out samples of his feces to learn about the microbes in his digestive tract. He bought an electroencephalogram, or EEG, machine, to monitor his brainwaves. Once, in 2006, hoping to treat gut problems, he placed an order online for a shipment of parasites called porcine whipworm. The eggs arrived from Thailand a few days later in a saline solution.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  He drank the whole thing, hoping they would trigger an anti-inflammatory reaction in his gut. They didn't." That's what the early internet was, is grift. That's the only thing you could get on the early internet, was cute t-shirts and worms.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Dave Asprey is not himself a scientist.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  But he credentials himself very frequently by talking about how he comes from a family of quote-unquote "hard" science.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  Oh, what, what does that mean?

• 21:12Speaker 01

  I'm not a doctor, but my wife is an MD.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Who, not for nothing, impress very frequently. They like make little notes that are like, "His wife disagrees."

• 21:25Speaker 00

  Oh, so he's using her as a credential, but also she says he's full of shit?

• 21:29Speaker 01

  She's like, "That's not right."

• 21:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. Also, my dad is a dentist, and I am not qualified to give you advice about your teeth.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  100%! Like, my dad is a pilot, but I can't fly a plane?

• 21:38Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Part of the stolen valor is my wife is an MD, and part of the stolen valor is my grandparents were scientists.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  Grandparents?

• 21:48Speaker 01

  And when you go, "Oh, what kind of science were your grandparents practicing?" He says, "My grandparents worked on the Manhattan Project."

• 21:57Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  To which I say, that's not the flex you think it is, sir.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  That sounds so fucking weird because it's not anything to do with nutrition. And also, it's your grandparents, not even your parents.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Right. They didn't pass that knowledge down to you genetically.

• 22:12Speaker 00

  My credentials are impeccable. My wife disagrees with me and she keeps doctors. And my grandparents did one of the most infamously bad things of the last hundred years.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  So he defines biohacking for himself as, quote, "the art and science of changing the environment around you or inside you so that you have full control of your own biology." Now, clue number one, that he is maybe not a scientist himself,

• 22:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  is the phrase, "so that you have full control of your own biology."

• 22:51Speaker 00

  I kind of appreciate the fact that it's so just like openly fulfilling a psychological need.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  100%.

• 22:56Speaker 00

  He's like, "This is the way that you can take back control of your body, which you lost control of." It's like, "Yeah, we're all getting older, man."

• 23:01Speaker 01

  But also, it feels like this weird combo of like, men having nowhere to put any feelings that are not like rage or victory, right?

• 23:13Speaker 00

  Right.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  And men not being able to take a single fucking L, even one as standard, as just like, "Oh, you have a human body that's aging."

• 23:22Speaker 00

  Right. It's like, "But have you considered that I don't want to die?"

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Totally. And there's like this class overlay, right?

• 23:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Where like, Dave Asprey is talking about spending a million dollars. Brian Johnson is talking about spending multiple millions of dollars. And there is like this class layer that is like, "I'm gonna buy the thing that other people, the one thing that other people can't have, which is aversion of immortality."

• 23:47Speaker 00

  Their only solution to problems is throwing money at them.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  So you would think this would be a guy with a lot of systemic critiques of like, environmental safety, of regulation, of a bunch of stuff. And I will say, it does not tilt in the direction of good healthcare for all.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  Right, of course not. It never does, yeah.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  I'm sending you a quote from a Forbes Profile of Asprey.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  Asprey dreams of a world where, instead of deferring to medical experts and profit-seeking drug companies, we become experts in our own systems and experiment on them at will. Unsurprisingly, this has made Asprey suspicious of regulation. "Regulation got us the food pyramid that causes heart disease, cancer, and diabetes in unprecedented numbers of people," he told me. "It got us an incredibly slow-to-innovate medical system that's now being disrupted. It is anti-human to tell someone that they do not have the choice to put whatever they want into their bodies. It's basic human freedom. I think it's unethical that I need to spend $150 and an hour of my life to get a permission slip to take a substance. There is no, no reason for that." Parenthesis, Asprey's wife disagrees.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  Dude, so he's just like kind of an asshole with these kind of like quasi, not quite right-wing beliefs, but like on-ramp to right-wing beliefs.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:01Speaker 00

  Or at least like the kind of just like brain-dead anti-system stuff that we saw in the Blue Zones documentary where he's like, "You're not gonna find the truth in some Petri dish."

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Except Asprey is like lovingly gazing into the reflecting pool of a thousand Petri dishes. He's so happy with the Petri dish, right? Like, oh, narcissus in the Petri dish. Yeah, I mean, I think like, he does have systemic critiques, right?

• 25:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  But the systemic critiques are like, "Too much red tape! Get out of here! Doctor! Who needs a doctor?" Right? They're bad. They're bad systemic critiques.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  As Bulletproof Coffee sort of broke through, Bulletproof Coffee is getting more and more popular, and while that's happening, Dave Asprey is busy building a business, right?

• 25:46Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  He's selling Bulletproof's own coffee, which he calls quote-unquote "upgraded coffee," which they say is low-mold and some of which has additives like adaptogens and that sort of thing, right? B vitamins, that kind of thing. They also sell a Bulletproof powdered creamer for your Bulletproof coffee. So he's gone straight from like, "Make coffee with these ingredients you can get anywhere" to "Make coffee with these ingredients you can only be 100% sure of if you buy them from me."

• 26:14Speaker 00

  Also, yeah, wait a minute. This just occurred to me, because I don't put milk in my coffee, but like- What's it mean putting butter in your coffee and putting cream in your coffee?

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Not much.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  Isn't that something thousands, like millions of people do all the time? How did this just occur to me now?

• 26:25Speaker 01

  I think as far as his thinking appears to go on that front is, well, I used to drink coffee with cream in it, and that didn't make me feel amazing and bio hacked.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  This did.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  Right.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  He also starts selling protein bars with collagen. He starts selling supplements like melatonin gummies and apple cider vinegar gummies and like a greens powder.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Oh, God.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  He has a vision supplement called Eye Armor.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  Just say this is for your dick. Just, it's all dick juice. Your dick, your dick will get bigger if you drink this shit.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Please don't say dick juice. I beg to differ. Don't call it dick juice.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  Men just like need to be told that everything is like you're, you're a gladiator. You're not taking a supplement.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  From there, he starts working on a diet book, The Bulletproof Diet, which is published in 2014. As part of the book rollout, Dave Asprey got a really significant amount of mainstream coverage. He gets this profile in Forbes, he gets a profile in Men's Health, he gets covered in the New York Times, in a stellar profile from J. Wertham. And I think the thing that is really notable to me here is that the coverage of Dave Asprey is like a resounding no.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  We love that. Yeah.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  It's a rare moment where we get to go, hey, good job, media. This is like actually the level of skepticism that you should be bringing to any number of miracle health claims.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  The other dust-up that he has is, as it turns out, with the FTC.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Of course!

• 28:08Speaker 00

  I was waiting for this chapter.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  What do you think? Can I, uh, tell me what you, what's your guess of what the FTC is citing him on?

• 28:14Speaker 00

  It's gotta be false claims, right? It's gotta be selling products with, like, this boosts your immunity or something. Like, that's what they got Lucky Charms for.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  That letter, here's my other clue to you. That letter was sent in June 2020.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  Oh, I was just gonna say, what kind of COVID grifting was he doing? Is he a certified importer of Pete Evans's like red light that cures COVID?

• 28:35Speaker 01

  The letter that they sent him is about a specific blog post on his website. The title of that blog post is, "What I Do to Protect Myself From Coronavirus And How I Plan to Kick It If I Get It." In this post, he describes COVID as being primarily about inflammation.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  And then lists a bunch of things he does and consumes to reduce inflammation. What he's referring to is sage, oregano, bay leaf, olive oil, vitamin D, zinc, magnesium, CoQ10, L-glutamine, Bulletproof's unfair advantage supplement, omega-3 fatty acids, and all of those, my good man, are Amazon affiliate links.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  We didn't even know anything about the virus. Like, actual scientists did not know terribly much about the virus in June of 2020.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Right. People are wiping down Doritos bags.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  With Clorox wipes. Yeah.

• 29:37Speaker 00

  These guys are already promising they know the secret.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Dave Asprey has also been back in the news again in the last few months. The Washington Post quoted him in a piece just a couple of months ago in January, and I am sending you that quote.

• 29:56Speaker 00

  It says, "Dave Asprey, an author, podcaster, and self-professed founder of the biohacking movement, says he believes Kennedy's influence would even the playing field with big pharmaceutical corporations and allow companies such as his to make broader claims about health benefits. The FDA requires positive results in rigorous clinical trials before drugs and products can be declared cures or designated to treat certain conditions. This is the dawning of a new age of biohacking because Bobby Kennedy is going to remove the use of regulations that prevent competition," said Asprey.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  So he's like, "Hooray, we're not gonna have to warn people anymore about the side of..." Like, it's so nuts to say that shit. Out loud to a reporter from the Washington Post.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  These guys are basically like, they're openly saying, "The FDA won't let us lie to you."

• 30:44Speaker 01

  There are so many layers to what is going on and every product that he sells have like five or six factual claims in the marketing materials and like, blah, blah, blah. So it's just like, uh, an app, just a thicket of fact checking.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  And also, it feels almost perfunctory because it's like, every single thing that comes out of his mouth is like

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. But it's cool, my wife is a doctor and my grandparents had something to do with the atomic bomb.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Okay, so, Mike, from here, we are gonna go ahead and dive into the actual text of the actual Bulletproof Diet.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  Fuck, yes.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  That's where we're going next.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  Is the name of the book, "This Time, Baby, I'll Be..."

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Bulletproof, good job, good job.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  I'm actually very curious about this, because what else is there? It's butter and coffee, it's like, one item. And then you have to build like, a whole lifestyle around it somehow.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  I'm actually gonna send you a quote from the introduction to the Bulletproof Diet that is a really tight little encapsulation of sort of like, all of the promises that it is making.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  Oh, I wanna mispronounce those words so bad to troll people, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do it correctly. We already had too many fucking emails, okay, I'm gonna say it right, I'm gonna say it right.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  I'm gonna do the Peter thing and start complaining about people complaining to me.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  Okay, "This may seem like hyperbole, but your diet is the foundation behind not only your weight, but also your IQ, stress levels, risk of disease, physical performance, aging, and even willpower. You are what you eat. What would it feel like to improve in all of these areas simply by making better choices about what you put on your plate? When you begin following the Bulletproof Diet, you'll know the answer within only two weeks, while losing up to a pound a day and never feeling deprived or hungry." Oh, sweetie, this is the bullshit they've been selling women for like, decades.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  Just starve yourself, lose a ton of weight, but like, you won't feel hungry, bestie.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Totally, but it's from a dude and a CEO and a pioneer of online commerce.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's, and he's, he's doing this whole like reducing your stress levels and like high performance, like it's male coded.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  But it's basically somehow like to lose a pound a day, we're talking about essentially not eating or barely eating. So the idea that you can not eat and also perform well and not feel hungry, like I'm sorry that this just is not going to happen.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  He claims that he personally increased his IQ. Are you following?

• 33:17Speaker 00

  How did I not even mention that? I was like, we don't have time to get into the IQ stuff.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  The bulletproof diet includes either nods to or prescriptions to the keto diet, intermittent fasting, sleep hygiene, grounding mats, collagen peptides, raw milk, animal fats, high intensity interval training, anti-inflammatory diets, and lots of references to your quote unquote lizard brain.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  Oh, good stuff, God.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  It is just a sludge of 2010's wellness trends.

• 33:55Speaker 00

  This is one of those oftentimes people will ask us, like, hey, is there an episode that I can like send my mom? Cause she's like getting really into intermittent fasting or something. With this, it's like, I'm sorry, you just have to listen to the entire corpus of the show.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  A little bit.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  Listen to 130 episodes.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  I'm so sorry.

• 34:10Speaker 00

  That we've like addressed in various places, but it's, it's sort of all the same brand of like grift.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  The functional core of the diet is a mix of keto and intermittent fasting. But it has this overlay of extraordinarily Byzantine guidance.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  According to the bulletproof diet, quote unquote, healthy fats should make up 50 to 70% of your calories for the day.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  The guidance around protein is a little bit squishier. He says that you should aim for, quote, "between .325 and .75 grams of protein a day per pound of body weight."

• 34:55Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Michael, it's time for my favorite game.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. I was about to...I didn't want to be the one to ask. Like, what does this mean for you, Audrey?

• 35:03Speaker 01

  All right, Michael, we're doing it. .325 to .75 grams of protein a day per pound of body weight. I am currently in the neighborhood of 330 pounds. According to this, I need to eat between 107 and 248 grams of protein per day.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  How much, uh, dried cod is that? You're on like the rock diet.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Another way of looking at it is in eggs, 17 to 41 eggs per day.

• 35:31Speaker 00

  That's not even a diet issue. I'm worried about your finances.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  So that's your protein guidance, and that's only supposed to make up 20% of the calories that you eat for the day.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  So I should be eating 41 eggs and then five times that many calories of something else.

• 35:49Speaker 00

  And then like a side of carb-free hash browns, but like 41 of them.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  All of that happens within a six-hour, quote-unquote, "feeding window." This is the intermittent fasting.

• 35:59Speaker 00

  Oh, it's like an intermittent fasting thing, okay.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  On top of all of that, there are specific schedules for protein fasting and carb refeeding.

• 36:09Speaker 00

  Okay. It always has to be so weirdly specific.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sending you a little quote.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  Once a week, on days six and 13, you'll get to try out bulletproof protein fasting. To get a thorough scrub down of your cells that will make you feel, look, and think like a much younger person, it's important to stick to the program on these days and limit your protein intake by eating the recommended meals. Oh, so you're overeating protein on some days and undereating protein on other days?

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Yep, totally.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  This is also your opportunity to refeed on carbohydrates, and I focused the meal plan for those days to include the most beneficial, bulletproof, high-carb, low-protein meals. Why, oh, he's just like making... Things harder than they have to be.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  100%.

• 36:51Speaker 00

  This is also something we've talked about. The pattern is you make the diet as arcane and complicated as possible so that that way, when people fail, you can always say, oh, it's your fault for not following this like deranged set of rules.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Well, and I think in this case, right, he's selling this as sort of a cutting edge, scientific kind of approach. And I think there's something about having a lot of really complicated, intricate steps to follow.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  That gives the impression that it's been really rigorously tested, so you have to do it this way. And not that the rigorous testing was like Facebook recruitment.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  This honestly sounds like he's like my Wario. Like he's on Google Scholar, reading the abstract and then like concluding a bunch of things.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  So he creates categories to describe what I would call like red light, yellow light and green light foods. Okay, here. So describe to me, Michael, what you're seeing here.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  Uh, it's like a spectrum of foods. And then at the bottom, it's kryptonite. So it's the worst foods. And then at the top, it's bulletproof foods. And so at the top, the most bulletproof starches are pumpkin, butternut squash, sweet potato, the Mike lifestyle, yams and carrots. And then at the bottom, the worst starches are wheat, corn, millet, other grains, potato starch, cornstarch, gluten free powders. And then in between, he's got various other, yeah, like black rice, wild rice, potatoes. They're all at kind of like different levels of the spectrum. This seems fine to me, Aubrey. I think foods, I think foods are inherently good or bad.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  We can place them all on a spectrum.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And quinoa is one of the worst.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  Oh, quinoa's the second worst. Buckwheat, oats, quinoa, coming for oats.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Also, interestingly, white rice is the second to the best tier, right? Second closest to bulletproof.

• 38:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  But black rice, wild rice and brown rice are like dead center.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's weird because usually people are like brown rice is way better than white rice because of the extra fiber.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  That's the level of like granularity we're talking about here.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  He has another one of fruits and he's like, "The best fruits you can have are blackberries and raspberries and coconut, but blueberries are not very good."

• 39:09Speaker 00

  What?

• 39:09Speaker 01

  And cantaloupe is the worst for you.

• 39:12Speaker 00

  Wait, what is he basing this on?

• 39:13Speaker 01

  He's basing this on like a bizarre little pastiche that he has developed in his brain of weird little straggly bits of research from different places. Some of this is ranked based on mold, some of it is ranked based on anti-nutrients, some of it is ranked based on how it personally makes Dave Asprey feel.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  And he's not really telling you where the sources of each of those rankings are coming from.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  There are studies in this book that have an N of 2.

• 39:43Speaker 00

  Oh, really? Nice.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  One of the studies that I looked at had an N of 2.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  It would be very funny to like, as a flex, be like, "Oh, you're basing your health advice on an anecdote? Mine's twice as good as that." Mine's based on two anecdotes, actually.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  The guidance beyond specific foods is very, very strange. He has specific guidance on cooking meat. He's like, "The most bulletproof way to cook meat is to cook it as little as possible."

• 40:11Speaker 00

  Why are these guys like this?

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Quote, "Grass-fed animal products are much less likely to contain parasites, pathogens, and toxins than those from grain-fed animals, so I think it's safe to eat them on the rare side." He says this a number of times.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  Because food safety comes from the handling of it after it's been killed. It's not the diet of the animal.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Right. When he talks about grass-fed meat, he talks about it in opposition not reliably to grain-fed meat, but to factory farming.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  But also, grass-fed meat is also made at like a large scale by large corporations.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Fucking totally!

• 40:45Speaker 00

  It's not just like Jeff, the farmer down the street, is producing all of like the grass-fed stuff. This is, I think so much of this stuff does fulfill a kind of psychological need because it feels like he's telling himself, "If I eat the right foods, I won't get food poisoning."

• 40:59Speaker 01

  It is self-talk made real.

• 41:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  He says that if you do have to cook meat, you should... Boil it?

• 41:08Speaker 00

  Oh, what?

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Quote, "Boiling water prevents oxidation of fats and proteins because it displaces most of the oxygen. Boiled meat often isn't particularly flavorful, but it's fine for soups and shredded meat dishes. Boiled vegetables are healthy and the extra water you drain away may remove unwanted anti-nutrients."

• 41:29Speaker 00

  Oh, my god, "may."

• 41:30Speaker 01

  "May is doing some heavy lifting in that one."

• 41:33Speaker 00

  That's why International Workers' Day is in May, because it does so much work. This is somehow more offensive to me than like the misinformation, because I'm like, "This is gonna taste like shit, Dave. Boiled meat sucks."

• 41:45Speaker 01

  He also has guidance on what to do when you're going out to eat at a restaurant.

• 41:51Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Dave Asprey writes that when he goes out to eat, he brings some things with him. He brings a stick of grass-fed butter. He brings a container of brain octane.

• 42:04Speaker 00

  Dude.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  MCT oil, and he brings some sea salt.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  Dude, that's so passive aggressive to go to a fucking restaurant with your own food.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Sometimes, he says he also brings an avocado. That way, he says, he can order something basic and, quote, "pump it up to meet your new standards."

• 42:23Speaker 00

  I guarantee there's an entire Discord server of waitresses who've had to serve him at a restaurant. Like, "Did you get the weird butter stick guy?"

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Just this guy came in with wraparound blue blocker sunglasses and his own MCT oil.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  He's like, "Oh, just a water, please."

• 42:39Speaker 01

  Do you want to know what his breakfast order is when he goes out to eat?

• 42:42Speaker 00

  Uh, just the waitress's phone number.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  He says that he orders poached eggs and then melts his grass-fed butter on top and pours MCT oil.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  At a restaurant, Dave!

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Are you going into a restaurant with a stick of room temp butter in your pocket?

• 43:02Speaker 00

  Fuck. This is, it's like, it's like having like a toddler where you have to explain, like, "No, no, no, this is where we go and other people make food. We don't bring our own food to the restaurant." It's like, so weird.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  He says, quote, "I've even done this in four-star hotel restaurants. If the chef notices, we always have an interesting conversation."

• 43:24Speaker 00

  Again, a load-bearing word in that sentence. Interesting conversation. What the fuck is wrong with you, bro?

• 43:31Speaker 01

  And listen, there are people who have dietary restrictions, who have severe food allergies, and then you got these guys with their optional ass, like, "I gotta live to 180 shit."

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Like, I just read this whole section about going out to eat, and I was like, "You are the reason for the no substitutions signs."

• 43:53Speaker 00

  Instead of having fries on the side, do you mind if I just have this overripe avocado that I brought from my home?

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Now I have a quote for you that's just funny. I just read it, and it was extremely funny, so I'm sending it to you because it's funny.

• 44:05Speaker 00

  You may not know it, but you've always been on the bulletproof diet. You may have just made poorer choices in the past and eaten more kryptonite than you have been for the past two weeks, but that's because you didn't have a roadmap or a tool to help you navigate it.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  You were always on this diet, you've just been fucking it up.

• 44:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, you've just been terrible. Haven't you always been drinking butter in your coffee? You just haven't been putting butter in your coffee.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  I did not mention to you that Dave Asprey has a very specific look to him.

• 44:33Speaker 00

  Let's make fun of his looks, please, Aubrey. Just once on this show, you know what? We deserve a treat. Let's do it, head to toe. Let's start with the ears.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  Damn it.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  He is in a constant state of wearing these very funny-looking-to-me wraparound glasses with, like, orange-yellow tinted lenses.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  Does he drive a Cybertruck?

• 44:56Speaker 01

  I mean, I wouldn't be surprised.

• 44:57Speaker 00

  Okay, he has Cybertruck energy.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Uh, no, you know what he has? It's not Cybertruck, it's Segway.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, oh, yeah. They're gonna take over, we're all gonna be on these things in another couple of months. Yes.

• 45:11Speaker 00

  That is the meanest thing you've ever said about anyone on this show. That is the deepest dig on anyone. That's worse than making fun of his looks. You're like, "This motherfucker would have been into Segways."

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Oh, no, Michael.

• 45:24Speaker 00

  I've never seen you like this, Aubrey. Wow.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  She's a monster.

• 45:28Speaker 00

  Let's just sit in silence and like, think about what we've done. Some cold shit.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  So, I wanted to close this out by talking about some of the core tactics that he is using here because I think it's a really interesting window into the kinds of tactics that get deployed in diets that are predominantly marketed toward men. A big part of this book is that he has tons and tons and tons of footnotes. Dave Asprey is citing his studies. He's doing it.

• 46:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  What he's not doing is telling you how hard he is cherry picking.

• 46:10Speaker 00

  This is the thing that people often say. They're like, "The left is criticizing my book for being unrigorous, but I have 74 pages of footnotes." It obviously is the quality of the footnotes and whether you're like accurately describing what's in the footnotes.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And the majority of his citations that I like checked into are for rat studies.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 46:32Speaker 01

  One of the studies was about rats with kidney disease and he's like, "That's why humans need to eat this way for the rest of your life."

• 46:39Speaker 00

  Right? Right.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  The human studies that he cites often have vanishingly small sample sizes. He cites a number of studies that sound like rock solid and he presents them with a great deal of confidence. And only through some pretty extensive like Googling around about the researchers and the topic and who are the voices in the field, do you realize that he's citing a study that has been pretty widely discredited?

• 47:06Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  He also draws on studies about people with specific health conditions, but doesn't disclose that in the narrative. So, for example, he'll tell you about findings about like blood sugar and mortality, but he doesn't tell you that that study was looking at people with diabetes, right?

• 47:25Speaker 00

  Oh, right.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  He does this with like kidney stuff. He does it with a number of health conditions where he acts as if the findings are general.

• 47:33Speaker 00

  I did not read the text of this book, obviously, but I do think it would be very funny if he's like, "You should drink MCT oil." And then there's an asterisk and you follow the asterisk and it says, "If you are a rat with diabetes."

• 47:44Speaker 01

  I would love it if the asterisk just said, "No, you shouldn't."

• 47:50Speaker 00

  This is fake, but I'm saying it anyway.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  The last thing I will say in this sort of category is that he really does straightforwardly ignore counter evidence. He never really acknowledges the weaknesses in his own interpretation. He never really says, "Hey, if you want to do this with me, come on down," but definitely, like, proceed at your own risk.

• 48:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  So it sounds like what he's describing is scientific consensus.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  But that's just because he's not really bothered with having a broader, more contextualized, more grounded and accurate conversation.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  I want to say it's weird to me, but it's not that weird, but it's frustrating that over and over again, people refuse to spread the actual scientific consensus, which is that, like, we just don't know that there's a specific lifestyle that is going to produce health for every single person. I don't find this all that difficult to, like, acknowledge and that I can, like, I love riding my bike. I don't think everybody should ride their bike. Some people don't like biking. It's fine.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  I mean, I think in some ways that kind of evangelism comes from, like, a really human place of like...

• 48:55Speaker 00

  Oh, totally, yeah.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  "I discovered a thing. I really like it, and I used to feel bad, but now I feel better."

• 49:00Speaker 00

  Totally, totally.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  "And I want for other people to also feel better."

• 49:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  And my assumption is, if it worked for me, then it works for everyone. This is where we all reveal ourselves to be, like, a little more self-centered than we think of ourselves as being, right?

• 49:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  He also, throughout the book, plays both sides of the same argument. I think this is sort of a human fallibility thing that sometimes we'll say that something, like, it's a benefit that something is really inexpensive, and other times, something being really inexpensive makes it suspect, right?

• 49:30Speaker 00

  I would never suspect anything for being inexpensive, but yes.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  He frequently talks about things that he positions as being on the cutting edge because there are only animal studies about it, or because it's under-researched in some other way. He finds ways to make a lack of research evidence something that is, like, good.

• 49:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  But also, when he's talking about things he does not like...

• 49:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  He's like, "It's really scary how little data there is here."

• 49:57Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  In his section about... Artificial sweeteners, he writes, quote, "There have been very few studies on the safety of the artificial sweetener Ace K in humans, and researchers are concerned about it. This is scary, and my personal experiences with Ace K are even scarier. I developed benign nodules on my thyroid from consuming high amounts of Ace K in the late 90s when on an Atkins-style diet."

• 50:25Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  So you're like, "Well, you had a bad experience and you don't trust this thing."

• 50:30Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Ergo, you're like, "The lack of research is really concerning."

• 50:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  But you tried another thing and it made you personally feel better, so you're like, "The lack of research just means they don't want you to know."

• 50:40Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Or "The lack of research just means it's like too new and cutting-edge."

• 50:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Again, it's a tough one because it is like a human thing. You and I have talked about this offline. I think it's part of the reason that I find arguments about people being hypocrites, like, not very effective or moving, because we're kind of all doing that all the time.

• 51:01Speaker 00

  Completely, yes. I'm not going to pretend I have these, like, content-neutral standards for doing science either. Like, I'm a biased human being, just like everybody else, completely.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  So it's a tough one to be like, "Look out for this thing that humans sort of just do." But like, do look out for this thing that humans just sort of do, right?

• 51:17Speaker 00

  Because like, there are hazards in the world that have not been studied adequately, and like, maybe it will turn out that there are food additives or something that are causing real harm, but also you can't just say, "This is harmful because there's no research," and this other thing, "This is good because there's no research."

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And also, again, you have to be willing to trust that Dave Asprey is giving you the correct citations here, and the right numbers, and that he's citing them correctly, and that they're like, you know, from like, the NIH and not from like, Movie Phone or whatever. You know what I mean?

• 51:52Speaker 01

  Like, you have to be willing to trust him.

• 51:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  But when it's presented in this package of a book that is, you know, several hundred pages long and has a ton of footnotes and is flooding you with information that sounds really technical and is being presented by someone who has an immense amount of confidence in his own analysis, it's really easy for this kind of stuff to slip under the radar just because you're getting overwhelmed with so much

• 52:21Speaker 00

  Right.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  of what looks like information.

• 52:23Speaker 00

  Right.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  His approach doesn't immediately present as a grift in part because of all of that sort of like scientific veneer that goes over the top of it. But also because he believes it. Like, I think he really is a true believer, right? So it doesn't strike you as inauthentic, which means it often will strike people as being true, right?

• 52:45Speaker 00

  I really want one of his citations to be to like, "Snap a lid." 1997.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  That's it for the show notes, my guy.

• 52:52Speaker 00

  Ayyyy.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Ayyyy, we did it. How you feeling?

• 52:57Speaker 00

  Uh, good. What do we, what do we want to conclude?

• 53:00Speaker 01

  I'd just like to remind all of our listeners that you've always been on the bulletproof diet. You've just been fucking it up.

• 53:07Speaker 00

  You've, uh, you've already been there, done that, messed around.