7 Warning Signs Of Advertising Disguised As Articles

The article's introduction accepts more crazy bullshit than Arkham's vegetable garden. Bulletproof Coffee founder Dave Asprey apparently found an ancient Taoist formula for how many days men should wait between orgasms ("age minus 7, divided by 4"). Later he casually states that fruit is Kryptonite and must be avoided. Gordy doesn't ask a single question about either, at least not that he reports on. Sweet Seshat, Gordy, that sort of lunacy is why we send humans instead of speech-recognition software. C-3PO would call bullshit on those, and he's a robot slave designed only to pass on messages while not eating or having genitals.

If a man says apples are my enemy and that I need to wait a week between orgasms, I need to know why he thinks that. And whether he's allowed outside on his own. Does he have knives? That sort of thing. A writer who'd ignore insanity like that would report on an alien invasion by asking the Xenomorphs if they had any hot new products for a shinier carapace. If Gordy were hired to profile a teenage boy, he'd report them as a self-described "Sex Monster" and breathlessly gush on how many girls from out of town he'd totally touched on the boob and the butt.

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"This hot new talent has slept with 'loads' of people! WADDA SCOOP!"

The article opens in awe of Asprey guzzling a score of pills first thing in the morning and hailing him as a biohacking genius. Maybe if his anti-orgasm intellect would let him eat some Earth food he wouldn't have to Pac-Man his breakfast.

From this point, the piece is presented as a "profile" of the new product's inventor, in the same way the national anthem is a "profile" of a country. The article gushes all over Asprey like they've just had 20 oysters, two bottles of wine, and an hour of vigorously lubricated sex. Asprey is a genius. Asprey is well-traveled and wise. Other people who just happen to be in the room when the writer walks in can't help but chime in about Asprey's wonderful nature. If Captain Kirk beamed down to offer an orgy with Spock and the Greek myth of Narcissus, it would still be less of an adoring fantasy. The primary research in this article was investigating if it's possible to write about a man with your mouth full.

But the article conjures those magical minions of the superfood sorcerer, the insidious "toxins." Toxins are to modern media as devils were to the Medieval Church -- invisibly everywhere, and to blame for all the things really caused by human laziness and stupidity. So you'd better give them money and rearrange your life around their beliefs.

Asprey explains that most coffee beans contain mold and that mold is toxic. That, uh, that really was his entire point. But everything is toxic. Anything can act as a poison, because anything can interfere with your cells' operations. Your own cell products can interfere with your cell operations. Water can poison you if you drink enough, and people have managed it. The important point isn't the poison but the dosage. When someone says something is toxic without mentioning the dosage, it's because the only dose you're getting is one of bullshit.

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"No, getting a headache when you try to spell the chemical DOESN'T mean
it's giving you 'mind cancer.'"

Which doesn't stop Asprey expounding on how only he bothers to filter out these filthy fungal poisons. Neatly implying that every other coffee chain on the planet is a cheapskate servant of the fungal Mi-go, distributing poisons that haven't had any effect on anyone anywhere for decades but are clearly just waiting for their chance to strike.

But Asprey's already dashing down the mountain, maddened by the cosmic insight of a foreign refreshment break, because everything foreign is automatically wise and great. Their eatery was his epiphany. We're lucky he didn't go a bit further east and end up deciding anime was everything. And now he says it works even better when you put the butter in coffee. Apparently a hungover comedy character trying to make breakfast was the key to discovering the super-soldier serum.

The only medical study presented to support Asprey's ideas was printed in 2014, long after he came up with those ideas, because Asprey replaces research with retrosearch (aka "Googling journals to find things that sort of agree with what you've already decided"). Professor Christopher Gardner of the Stanford University School Of Medicine said, "That study has been shredded." Not just peer reviewed or retracted but academically annihilated. In a world where research articles are called papers, he used the verb for utterly destroying paper.

How's this presented in the article? "But he's up against the medical establishment." Not only is he fighting a poisonous coffee conspiracy, he's up against every doctor in the world. He's persecuted by so many shadowy groups he's at serious risk of being played by Nicolas Cage.

Another quote from the article: "Although he has no medical training, Asprey likes to argue with doctors." Asprey is the incarnation of the Internexpert. Arguing with professionals, the computing riches, being wildly over-impressed by foreign snacks -- it's like the Internet congealed into a single person and still didn't become self-aware. He's such a solidification of online bullshit he has an online feud where he accuses a rival diet of killing Steve Jobs. This is the person who's being allowed to talk over doctors.

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"I ... I don't think Hippocratic is the kind of oath I want to use right now."

Listen, if you want to butter your coffee, go for it! I've eaten and drunk worse and enjoyed it. By all accounts it's pretty nice. But don't try to justify your cholesteroccino by writing medical fan fiction.

"Kids' brains are developing, and the fat helps their cells grow." That's why he gives his 5- and 7-year-old kids an espresso shot in the morning. So how does he justify ignoring everything every doctor has ever said about nutrition? "I have years of my own bloodwork ... and if I start to die, I'll know it's not working." It really is the perfect summary of his ideas. He's a vortex of rich privilege. As long as he's OK, everything's fine. He's trying to redefine the human diet, and the idea that other people might be different hasn't even occurred to him. No wonder he argues with doctors: If he thinks biology is this simple, he must think medical textbooks are mainly about coloring in all the the organs.

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"Hand me the red; I'm practicing a quadruple bypass."

The payoff is quite literal. "Our coffee goes through extensive lab testing to make sure it doesn't contain toxins" -- once more implying that everyone else is sweeping coffee grounds from the floors of mercury-processing plants with their sore-covered bare hands. Which is why "Bulletproof Coffee" will cost twice as much as every other coffee. Even in Hollywood.

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"We would have let a cat shit them out first, but somebody else
thought of that. So we rely on Asprey."

The fact that nutrition experts dismiss the whole thing as utter bullshit is presented as a window-dressing detail, rather than the demolition of everything Asprey and the author just spent 2,000 words pitching. And, make no mistake, this is a pitch. Parroting what someone else says without comment isn't objectivity, it's advertising. If you don't examine what you're writing you're automatically on your subject's side.

This idea of a neutral reporter is nonsense, especially when they're "neutrally" reporting advertising copy verbatim in the article's text. The only thing more tragic than these writers selling themselves as shills is that most of them aren't even getting paid extra for the work. As for Asprey: I'm genuinely glad you finally found something that makes you happy. But you haven't discovered that the key to happiness is buttering coffee. You've proved that the key to happiness is having enough millions of dollars to do whatever stupid bullshit you like.

Thanks to Ed Zitron, who uses every part of the Public Relations, for the Bullshit Alert. Luke's favorite coffee is still the Black Blood Of The Earth.

Defend yourself from more online bullshit with 8 Obvious Signs Statistics Are Lying To You, or enjoy Coffee Cocktails For Improved Productivity.

Luke has his own Caffeinated Immortality Formula, tumbles, and responds to every single tweet.