Maintenance Phase - The Bulletproof Diet

Episode Date: March 26, 2025

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 AspreyAlternative medicine fans see RFK Jr. as a hero. The field’s skeptics worry. The Bulletproof Diet is everything wrong with eating in America Bulletproof Coffee: Debunking the Hot Buttered Hype Buttered Coffee Could Make You Invincible. And This Man Very RichThanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

It's also been clipping a little bit lately. Because you've I feel on my end, I feel like you've been doing more bellowing than usual. You're like 6% more bellowy. That sounds like me. So maybe turn the gain down like 3% or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hang on. Let me open up the settings.

You'd make things safe for bellowing. Bellow safe? That's the Aubrey Gordon promise. Patented bellow safe technology. That's how they sell the microphone. For all your left wing podcasting needs, you can shout no as much as you want. The package is just a line drawing of me giving the A-OK and winking.

Like, ding! 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. Oh my god, I can't wait, Michael! You're already bellowing. I am? Uh, welcome to Minions' Phase, the podcast that downs your uppers. Oh my God, I can't wait, Michael. You're already bellowing. I am? Welcome to Minions Phase, the podcast that downs your uppers.

Oh. Because that's what we're doing today, literally. We kind of are. We're drinking caffeine. We're canceling coffee. 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.

Yeah. I'm also, Aubrey, I'm so. Yeah. 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? I thought this one was going to be like 15 minutes long. I thought this was going to be like a little light, easy one to be like, we're going to get more episodes out. It'll be faster. But then it was us, but then this is us. Starring Mandy Moore.

And I surprised myself by learning that, oops, I picked out a 72 ounce steak of a topic. I'm so excited. Michael, 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? This is just coffee with butter in it, no?

Yes, yes. I have not come across this in the wild. I do not read Maxim magazine or wherever the fuck people are getting this stuff. Maxim magazine, how dare you? What are the Metro sexuals reading these days? 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. The local drink was tea with yak butter in it. That is a common drink in Tibet. He tried it and he said he felt absolutely incredible after drinking it and came back to the U.S. to test out a version that he could make at home that made him feel the same way.

This is like a person on vacation who's like, I feel great when I'm on vacation and they want to replicate it when they're home. 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. The recipe is pretty straightforward. What you're mixing together is two cups

of piping hot brewed coffee, up to two tablespoons of grass-fed butter. Oh, it has to be grass-fed. Sure. And up to two tablespoons of MCT oil. What the fuck is that? Multi-chain triglyceride oil. Dude, do you know what just happened to me? What? In my life. Because 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. Oh, sure. I got the coffee grounds, and then he also guided me to the supplements aisle. I was like, why is he taking me to the supplements aisle? And then he found a bottle of liquid. Brain octane, was it brain octane, Michael? It said so many things on the bag.

It was like Dr. Bronner, there's all these words coming at me. And I was in a hurry, because we were 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 bloop, bloop, I start putting them in the bag and she goes, oh, it's a 7560. I was like, wait, sorry, I thought you said $75. And then I looked

at the little thing and it was a bottle of MCT oil, which was $54. Jesus God. I mean, it was a relatively large bottle to be fair, but also I was like, no podcast is worth $54. I'm not fucking paying $54. I was like, no podcast is worth $54. I'm not fucking paying $54. 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. 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. Okay. Two, people will say that bulletproof coffee leads

to quote unquote enhanced cognitive performance. Oh yeah. Three, you will hear that most coffee won't work in making bulletproof coffee because it contains mold, which outweighs the nutritional benefits. Where are we? 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. We discussed this more in depth in our keto episode,

but cardiologists are not fans of this approach. I will absolutely never forget the doctor who we talked about in that episode who described the ketogenic diet as the low carb high coffin diet. 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. The thing is, even if the health claims are true, Aubrey, if it's $54, I'm not interested. Michael, it's not $54 because multichain triglycerides are naturally found in coconut oil and palm oil. Of course. 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? I could just drink coconut milk. I can put that in my coffee. That would probably taste better, honestly, than butter. modest and the strength of the evidence is just not great. Right. I could just drink coconut milk. I can put that in my coffee. They'll probably taste better honestly than butter. 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 their credentialed in. He also doesn't like publish the results of the study anywhere. Here is his paragraph describing the research design. 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. Love that. 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.

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. 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 give I need the tables.

100% I read an interview with a university professor on I did an interview with a university professor on the Bulletproof Diet, and her take was essentially something that we've said on the show a number of times, which is that nutritional research is extremely difficult to do. Yeah, it's just really hard, yeah. 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. Yeah, this is why we try not to like make fun of scientists or like seem snarky about scientists on this issue, just because it 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 Michael. Let's dig in on that third claim about moldy coffee. Yeah, what is this? What's going on? I like interviewed coffee roasters. It's really iners

I like what 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. That's all my that's all my friends New Year's resolutions. Mycotoxins. Cutting mycotoxic out of my life. That's what my Irish friends

call me when they're mad. So one of those types of mycotoxins that can grow in coffee is a known carcinogen. That's also true. Okay. However, in order to consume enough that it would like cause health concerns, you have to consume so much coffee.

Oh yeah. 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? 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. Wetly. Wetly.

After that process, they roast the beans because roasting beans also kills mycotrizens. And then, after all of that, they discard any crops with unsafe levels as set by the FDA. So they're marketing something that is like a legal requirement. Like we pay our taxes.

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, To be fair, their argument is we have even fewer than other brands, right? To none at all. 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.

Oh, okay. So they're already a built-in incentive. Yes, yes. So mycotoxins change the taste of coffee. They make it taste extremely bitter. Okay. 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 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. Right 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. So Michael are you ready to taste test some goddamn bulletproof coffee? Let's do it

I have not eaten breakfast yet today so this is so this is gonna be me in a fasting state. Oh, you're gonna do it correctly. Listeners can weigh in on whether I seem smarter afterwards. Give me more feedback on my personality. I really like that. You and I both got the high achiever from Bulletproof, which is enhanced coffee with added B vitamins, Lion's Mane, and Coffee Berry.

I am gonna send you the little recipe. Oh, OK. And what you're supposed to do is blend it to emulsify it. Which I cannot do. You cannot do. I can do. So two cups of coffee up to two tablespoons. I mean, I don't have grass fed butter. I feel like normal ass butter.

Can I read to you the description from the brain octane that you didn't buy? Oh, yeah. Do it. Crave less, do more. Oh, okay. Brain octane C8 MCT oil is no ordinary MCT oil. Sourced purely from coconuts, like coconut oil. Ordinary. It contains the most ketogenic MCT oil,

pure C8 caprylic acid, and easy to absorb high quality smart fat. Sure. That's me and easy to absorb high quality smart fat. Sure. That's me. I'm a high quality smart guy. Yeah. That rapidly converts into brain powering, fat burning, ketone energy. Brain octane C8 MCT oil helps control cravings, jump starts your metabolism, and improves cognitive performance to keep you sharp.

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 just people saying stuff. So, Mike, I'm curious about what your coffee looks like. Mine has been through a blender, yours has not. Mine, okay, there's, what 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. Then you taste it and it literally just tastes like someone took Breyer's ice cream and crushed a bunch of garlic in it. You're like, yep, that's garlic in some fucking vanilla ice cream. It was not more than the sum of its parts. I feel like this is the same thing where it looks like just coffee with a centimeter of butter floating on top of it. Then when you smell it, it smells like coffee and butter. There's not I mean, I don't know what I expected. Yeah, I was going to say mine smells exactly like coffee and exactly like butter.

It smells kind of like a diner. Yeah. I'm also glad you didn't get the oil because he does warn you about putting too much MCT oil in your coffee. Yeah, surely it's going to separate. Yeah. 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. Oh God, what?

Why do all these things involve pooping? Just give me a normal diet that doesn't change my poop. There's a new euphemism for shitting myself in my brain. Brought to you from the era of like amazeballs and awesome sauce. Please enjoy. Disaster pants. We have to do this very quickly.

The second I stop stirring, it's just like all the butter flows back to the top. You ready? Are we doing three, two, one? Sure. You count us down. Wait, you do the countdown. You do the countdown.

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

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, a lot of butter. So much butter. Do you feel smarter, Aubrey? Are we sharper? The appeal eludes me.

I really thought I was gonna be like, hey man, I gotta hand it to him. This tastes really good. Man. But it tastes just sort of like coffee, like a cup of drip coffee. So we endorse we wholeheartedly endorse bulletproof coffee. The rest of this episode will be a series of affiliate codes

where we tell you, Michael, if it tastes fine, all of the health claims are true. 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. He is also out here pretty constantly talking about how he intends to live to 180.

Women do not talk about how much money they've spent on diets in the same way. No, and if you did, it would be with such weird shame. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It would be a bummer. You wouldn't be like, check me out. Dave Asprey is a Gen X dude who spent his early career working in IT.

On his website, it says, quote, as a true pioneer, Dave was the first person to ever sell a product online. Oh, well, I mean, maybe. Totally. Mike, how would you even determine that? 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. 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 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. Oh, what? Figuring out some like online ordering through Pizza Hut in 1994. Oof, you were not getting that pizza.

That pizza's coming on Wednesday. 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. Yeah. Can I tell you what the product he was selling was? Yeah. What is it? It was T-shirts with an illustration of the caffeine molecule.

OK. And the phrase caffeine is my drug of choice. Oh my God, it was like bad, like boomer memes on a t-shirt? I cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food. Right, like that's the like level that we're at here. 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 so cool, Dave. Like most biohackers, he has an origin story that is sort of gussied up but is ultimately an absolutely bog standard dieting origin story. Essentially, he was fatter than he wanted to be and his mind wasn't as sharp as he wanted it to be. I'm going to 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. 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 let 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 brain waves. 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.

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 grifts. That's the only thing you could get on the early internet was cute t-shirts and worms. Dave Asprey is not himself a scientist, but he credentials himself very frequently by talking about how he comes from

a family of quote unquote hard science. Oh, what does that mean? I'm not a doctor, but my wife is an MD, who not for nothing, in press, very frequently, they like make little notes that are like, his wife disagrees. Oh, so he's using her as a credential, but also she says he's full of shit. She's like, that's not right. Yeah. Also, my dad is a dentist and I am not qualified to give you advice about

100 percent. Like my dad is a pilot, but I can't fly a plane. Exactly. Part of the stolen valor is my wife is an MD and part of the stolen valor is my grandparents were scientists grandparents and when you go Oh what kind of science were your grandparents practicing he says my grandparents worked on the Manhattan Project Oh to which I say that's not the flex you think it is so fucking weird because it's not anything to do with nutrition and also it's your grandparents, not even your parents.

Right, they didn't pass that knowledge down to you. What the fuck? Genetically. My credentials are impeccable. My wife disagrees with me and she's a doctor. And my grandparents did one of the most infamously bad things for the last hundred years. 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 is the phrase so that you have full control of your own The clue number one that he is maybe not a scientist himself is the phrase, so that you have full control of your own biology. I kind of appreciate the fact that it's so just like openly fulfilling a psychological need.

100%. 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. 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? 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.

Right, but have you considered that I don't want to die? Totally. And there's like this class overlay, right? Yeah. 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 going to buy the thing that other people, the one thing that other people can have, which is a version of immortality.

Their only solution to problems is throwing money at them. 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 health care for all. Right. Of course not. It never does, yeah. I'm sending you a quote from a Forbes profile of Aspry. Aspry 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 Aspry 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 in an hour of my life to get a permission slip to take a substance. There is no, no reason for that." Parentheses, Asprey's wife disagrees. 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. 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 going to find the truth in some Petri dish. 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?

But the systemic critiques are like too much red tape. Get out of here. Who needs a doctor? Right, they're bad. They're bad systemic critiques. 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? He's selling Bulletproof's is getting more and more popular. And while that's happening, Dave Asprey is busy building a business, right? 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. Also, yeah, wait a minute. This just occurred to me because I don't put milk in my coffee,

but like, what's the difference between putting butter in your coffee and putting cream in your coffee? Not much. Isn't that something thousands, like millions of people do all the time? How did this just occur to me now? 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 biohacked. This did. He also starts selling protein bars with collagen. He starts selling supplements like melatonin gummies and apple cider vinegar gummies and like greens powder. Oh god. He has a vision supplement called eye armor. Just say this is for your dick. It's all dick juice. Your dick will get bigger if you drink this shit. Please don't say dick juice. I beg to differ.

Don't call it dick juice. Men just need to be told that everything is like, you're a gladiator. You're not taking a supplement. 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 Jay Wortham. And I think the thing that is really notable to me here is that the coverage of Dave Asprey is like a resounding no. We love that.

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

I was waiting for this chapter. What do you think? Tell me what you, what's your guess of what the FTC is citing him on? 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. That letter, here's my other clue to you. That letter was sent in June 2020.

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

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-affiliately. We didn't even know anything about the virus. Like actual scientists did not know terribly much

about the virus in June of 2020. Right, people are wiping down Doritos bags. No. With Clorox wipes, yeah. These guys are already promising they know the secret. 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 months ago in January, and I am sending you that quote.

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. So he's like, hooray, we're not going to 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. These guys are basically like, they're openly saying the FDA won't let us lie to you. 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, so it's just like an app, just a thicket of fact checking. And also it feels almost perfunctory because it's like every single thing that comes out of his mouth is like 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. Okay so Mike from here we are going to go ahead and dive into the actual text of the actual bulletproof diet. Fuck yes. That's where we're going next.

Is the name of the book, this time, baby, I'll be bulletproof. Good job, good job. 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 a whole lifestyle around it somehow.

I'm actually going to 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. Oh, I want to mispronounce this word so bad to troll people, but I'm gonna do it correctly. We already had too many fucking emails. Okay, I'm gonna say it right.

I'm gonna do the Peter thing and start complaining about people complaining to me. Yes! 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. Totally. Just starve yourself, lose a ton of weight, but like you won't feel hungry bestie. Totally. But it's from a dude and a CEO and a pioneer of online commerce. Yeah. And he's doing this whole like, reducing your stress levels and like high performance, like it's male coded. Yeah. 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. He claims that he personally increased his IQ. How did I not even mention that? I was like, we don't tie into the IQs go. 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. Oh good stuff. It is just a sludge of 2010s wellness trends. This is something that oftentimes people will ask us like hey is there an episode that I can like send my mom because 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. You have to listen to 130 episodes. Because all of this stuff is shit that we've like addressed in various places, but it's sort of all the same brand of like grift.

The functional core of the diet is a mix of keto and intermittent fasting, But it has this overlay of extraordinarily Byzantine guidance. According to the Bulletproof Diet, quote unquote healthy fats should make up 50 to 70% of your calories for the day. The guidance around protein is a little bit squishier. He says that you should aim for, quote,

between point three to five and point seven five grams of protein a day per pound of body weight. OK, Michael, it's time for my favorite game. Yeah. I was about to. I didn't want to be the one to ask. What does this mean for you? All right, Michael, we're doing it. 0.325 to 0.75 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. How much dried cod is that? You're on the rock diet. Another way of looking at it is in eggs, 17 to 41 eggs per day. That's not even a diet issue. I'm worried about your finances.

So that's your protein guidance and that's only supposed to make up 20% of the calories that you eat for the day. So I should be eating 41 eggs and then five times that many calories of something else. And then like a side of carb-free hash browns, but like 41 of them. All of that happens within a six hour quote unquote feeding window. This is the intermittent fasting thing.

On top of all of that, there are specific schedules for protein fasting and carb re-feeding. It always has to be so weirdly specific. I'm sending you a little quote. Once a week, on days 6 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 others days?

Yep, totally. 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 just like making things harder than they have to be 100% 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 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 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. 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.

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 Uh, it's like a spectrum of foods and then at the bottom it's kryptonite So it's the worst foods and at the top it's bulletproof foods And so at the top the most bulletproof starches are pumpkin butternut squash sweet potato 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, corn starch, 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 are inherently good or bad. We can place them all on a spectrum. Absolutely, and quinoa is one of the worst. Oh quinoa is the second worst. Buckwheat, oats, quinoa. Coming for oats. Also interestingly, white rice is the second to the best tier, right? Second closest to bulletproof. But black rice, wild rice, and brown rice are like dead center. Yeah, that's weird, because usually people are like,

brown rice is way better than white rice because of the extra fiber. That's the level of like granularity we're talking about here. 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. What cantaloupe is the worst for you?

Wait, what is he basing this on? he's basing this on like a bizarre little pastiche that he 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. And he's not really telling you where the sources of each of those rankings are coming from.

There are studies in this book that have an N of two. Oh really, nice. One of the studies that I looked at had an N of two. It would be very funny too, 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.

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. Why are these guys like this? 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. Because food safety comes from the handling of it after it's been killed It's not the diet of the animal. Right when he talks about grass-fed meat He talks about it in opposition not reliably to grain fed meat, but to factory farming But also grass-fed meat is also made at like a large scale by large corporations. It's not as if like Jeff the farmer down the street is producing all of like the grass-fed stuff. This is I think so much of the 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. It is self-talk made real. Yeah yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He says that if you do have to cook meat,

you should boil it. Oh, what? 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. Oh my God, May. May is doing some heavy lifting in that one. That's why International Workers Day is in May because it does so much work. This is somehow more offensive to me than the misinformation, because I'm like, this is gonna taste like shit, Dave.

Boiled meat sucks. He also has guidance on what to do when you're going out to eat at a restaurant. 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, MCT oil, and he brings some sea salt.

Dude, that's so passive aggressive to go to a fucking restaurant with your own food. 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. I guarantee there's an entire Discord server of waitresses who've had to serve him. Did you get the weird butter stick guy? Just this guy came in with wraparound blue blocker sunglasses and his own NCT oil.

He's like, oh, just a water, please. Do you want to know what his breakfast order is when he goes out to eat? Just the waitress's phone number. He says that he orders poached eggs and then melts his grass-fed butter on top and pours MCT oil. At a restaurant, Dave! Are you going into a restaurant with a stick of room temp butter in your pocket? Like, fuck.

It's like having 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. He says, quote, I've even done this in four star hotel restaurants. If the chef notices, we always have an interesting conversation. Again, a load bearing word in that sentence. Interesting conversation.

What the fuck is wrong with you, bro? 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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. Uh, instead of having fries on the side, do you mind if I just have, uh, this overripe avocado that I brought from my home? Now I have a quote for you that's just funny. I just read it, and it was extremely funny. So I'm sending to you, because it's funny. 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. You were always on this diet. You've just been fucking it up.

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. I did not mention to you that Dave Asprey has a very specific look to him. Let's make fun of his looks, please. No, no, no, no, no. Aubrey, just once on this show, you know what?

We deserve a treat. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let's do it, head to toe. Let's start with the ears. No, no, no. Damn it. He is in a constant state of wearing these very funny looking to me

wraparound glasses with like orange yellow tinted lenses. Does he drive a cyber truck? I mean, I wouldn't be surprised. Okay, he has cyber truck energy. No, you know what he has. It's not cyber truck. It's Segway. Yeah. Oh, yeah. They're going to take over. We're all going to be on these things in another couple of months. Yes. 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. Oh, no, Michael. I've never seen you like this, Aub this. Wow. She's a monster. Let's just sit in silence and think about what we've done. Some cold shit. 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. What he's not doing is telling you how hard he is cherry picking. 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. Absolutely, and the majority of his citations that I checked into are for rat studies. Oh, really?

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 their life, right? Right. 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? Oh, okay. 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? Oh, right 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 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

I would love it if the asterisk and it says, if you are a rat with diabetes. I would love it if the asterisk just said, no, you shouldn't. This is fake, but I'm saying it anyway. 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 wanna do this with me, come on down, but definitely like proceed at your own risk. So it sounds like what he's describing

is scientific consensus, but that's just because he's not really bothered with having a broader, more contextualized, more grounded and accurate conversation. 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 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 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 I mean I think in some ways that kind of evangelism comes from like a really human place of like Oh totally I discovered a thing. I really like it and I used to feel bad But now I feel better and I want for other people to also feel better Yeah, 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? Yeah, totally. 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? I would never suspect anything for being inexpensive, but yes. 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But also when he's talking about things he does not like,

he's like, it's really scary how little data there is here. In his section about artificial sweeteners, he writes, quote, There have been very few studies on the safety of the artificial sweetener K and 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 nineties when on an Atkins style diet. Okay. So you're like, well, you had a bad experience and you don't trust this thing. Ergo, you're like, the lack of research is really concerning. 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. Or lack of research just means it's like too new and cutting edge. Right. 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. Completely. Yes. I'm not going to pretend I have these like content neutral standards for doing science either. I'm a biased human being just like everybody else, completely, yeah. So it's a tough one to be like, look out for this thing that humans sort of just do. But do look out for this thing

that humans just sort of do, right? Because there are hazards in the world that have not been studied adequately, and 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. 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?

Like, you have to be willing to trust him. 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 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 of what looks like information. 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? I really want one of his citations to be to like, snap a lid.

1997. That's it for the show notes, my guy. Hey, we did it. How you feeling? Good. What do we what do we want to conclude? 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. You've already been there, done that, messed around. Thanks for watching!