I dipped into a couple of the links. I can recommend The 'Shamanification' of the Tech CEO (https://www.wired.com/story/health-business-deprivation-tech...)

The author, an anthropologist, argues that the fads we see tech CEOs indulging in today (nootropics, intermittent fasting, weird diets) are similar to the practices used by shamans in hunter-gatherer societies to show how special they are, making them credible interfaces with the supernatural powers they claim to channel.

I've always thought of the intermittent fasting + "weird" diets as a way to extend life quality and reduce negative health exposures a la Peter Attia.

Nootropics coming from a combination of more readily available sources, community effort now that internet is available to share results and lack of scientific focus/studies + with I'm sure a healthy amount of marketing spend from nootropic manufacturers.

Yeah, but why do you need to extend your life? If you just wanna live long the stress of being a CEO will surely outweigh any benefits your creative dietary expression will deliver.

IMO many of the CEOs who do this do it more for social reasons than anything else.

> Yeah, but why do you need to extend your life?

There are two distinct concepts here - your life span and your health span. Your life span is the duration of your life, and you health span is the duration in which you are able bodied.

Some of us want to have a health span closer to our life span - and that is the goal of these "creative" behaviors. If you want to increase life span you have to get lucky, or find a way to stop the entropic degradation of your DNA.

> If you just wanna live long the stress of being a CEO will surely outweigh any benefits your creative dietary expression will deliver.

This is just a strawman.

> IMO many of the CEOs who do this do it more for social reasons than anything else.

You'll find that applies to literally any behavior.

> This is just a strawman.

It is not. Our career choices influence our life span. If your coal mining chain smoking friend told you they stop to smoke because they wanna live longer, you would rightfully think that if they wanna live longer they might want to switch careers as well.

Don't let the prestige connected to the CEO position blind you from the fact that leading that livestyle is not the healthiest choice you can make (mostly for stress reasons).

So if you as an CEO try esotheric and experimental health things the benefit those bring might be at odds with the rest of your life choices.

Many people in these circles do things like these more to create an interesting spleen (what I called "social reasons") which they can talk about with other peers or which can bring them into talk publicly.

Our coal miner that quits smoking does not do it for social reasons. He might have coughed up black stuff. and got legitimately scared for his chance of survival.

And I don't say this kind of contradictory (and therefore somewhat inconsequential) behaviour is bad or anything. Surely also a stressed out CEO should also look out for their own health. Surely quitting to smoke is always a good thing independent of your personal circumstances.

But if you use health choices to signal something to others you better make it consistent. If our coal worker chain smoker vehemently tried to convince his friends to go vegan "because it is healthier" we are not wrong to point out to him that this is at odds with his other life choices. How can we trust him that he cares for health if all other choices he made tell us otherwise?

If instead our friend wants us to become vegan because he thinks it is ethically wrong to kill animals, this would not be at odds with his other choices. You can lead an unhealth livestyle and think it is wrong to kill animals at the same time. No contradiction there.

If our friend goes vegan and doesn't tell anyone he is not doing it for social reasons. If a CEO makes odd experimental health choices and doesn't tell anyone the same is true.

Yeah, if you're a person who'd invest a big chunk of your life into a zero-to-one effort, you're more likely than usual to think the health establishment missed some opportunities, and that you have better than average judgement of the apparent opportunities and their risk-to-reward. This should explain such people trying such things, without shamanism. (OTOH yes, the startup-CEO population includes mimics of this type of person.)

You can come to this belief through either actual discernment or entrepreneur personality disorder. Me, I at least agree that there's a health establishment that could be a lot better at settling on truth, and that discernment is a quality that varies.

Skimming the Wired piece, the closest to the above that I saw was:

> So are CEO-shamans putting on a show? People everywhere intuit that self-denial and other shamanic practices cultivate power. Being human, tech executives presumably draw the same inferences. At least part of their decision to engage in shamanic practices, then, might stem from a sincere desire to be special.

Some of this stuff has some scientific support, but e.g. Elizabeth Holmes drinking only vegetable smoothies is obvious bullshit.

I think that's the interesting part of it -- that there is a lack of definitive scientific work being done so people are experimenting with it. My feeling is Peter Attia seems to come at it with robustness though all of this stuff is so custom and I'm sure there's a world of COI in the background.

I think the author's point is, there is another way to interpret this behavior.

Basically, proposing an alternate theory and seeing if it fits the data.

And, it is reasonable to argue that *the motivation of the behavior is irrelevant* if said behavior also produces said effect.

That said I have to read the article ; )

Honestly I think the best negative signal of a tech ceo/vc is the amount they post on Twitter.

I do intermittent fasting for health reasons, not to impress people (that is what Archlinux is for). When I do it, headaches go away and I lose excess fat.

Breakfast was glorified in order to sell more cereal at the beginning of the industrial age, so perhaps what they call "intermittent fasting" is more like "returning to normal" in a society where everything is coated with dangerous amounts of sugar and salt. So I'd say take those anthropology generalizations with a grain of salt.

My dad was an old school bumpkin. Doesn't predate the industrial age, but lived like they'd never heard of it.

Anyways, he told me they didn't have a breakfast, but instead a big meal called dinner... apparently what we now call lunch. Then a midday snack, then a late supper that was lighter than dinner. As confusing as that was, he always called lunch dinner into the modern age.

They were much more active so didn't really get fat, so I agree sofar as to say the modern diet is likely too much. I may agree they helped push the 'breakfast' idea, but not people eating more often.

> As confusing as that was, he always called lunch dinner into the modern age.

This is still a thing in parts of the UK (and possibly other places):

"The divide between different meanings of "dinner" is not cut-and-dried based on either geography or socioeconomic class. The term for the midday meal is most commonly used by working-class people, especially in the English Midlands, North of England and the central belt of Scotland."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinner#Modern

> Breakfast was glorified in order to sell more cereal

> "intermittent fasting" is more like "returning to normal"

Careful extrapolating what works for you to all of humanity. I agree that avoiding excess sugar is good, so I do really well with a light breakfast. That's not "abnormal" or a conspiracy by Big Cereal.

So which one is it? Are intermittent fasting people posers or conspiracy theorists? Or both?

Nobody argued that there are only these possibilities, they only said that you should be careful to extrapolate to everyone.

How about you? Do you think I should be careful because I called skipping breakfast "a return to normal"? What happens when I fail to be careful about expressing my observations? Get jumped by people who urge you not to make normative statements because the possibility of you getting anecdoted to oblivion gives them anxiety?

I think "careful" here is an idiom, it's not that there is some danger. You are not giving people anxiety.

I was merely trying to remind you that healthy people's food habits are varied. So that you remember it for yourself.

I'm not claiming to be right either. I've definitely been guilty of pushing my own stuff on others. We all do that. It's easy to do. So, humility is a good thing.

Careful is not an idiom. Patronizing is. And it is getting tiresome.

I think you might have some kind of hangup, sir. You're reading hostility where it doesn't exist. I've been there too. If it's tiresome, I hope you manage to get some rest.

I think there's room for both motivations, either in different people or the same person.

People seem to go crazy in healthy food discussions. I think one takeaway I get is that different people get by with different methods. People get very preachy about their own method, without realizing how unique it is to them.

Okay, I hope nobody's sensibilities were disturbed by evil conspiracist fasters because they like their morning bread.

How do we know that the practices did not indeed contribute to the original shamans’ perception and access to supernatural powers?

We know that they don’t for the CEOs but the shamans?

I know this is a slight tangent but I can personally vouch for the effectiveness of (certain) nootropics. If stacked correctly, the cognitive benefits are great.

I _llooovveee_ these end of year lists of yours and read them every year, thanks for posting them!!

EDIT: And to anyone else who might consider writing one, especially if it has a Books or long-form article list, do it!

The Hill of Dreams is a great recommendation, it doesn't get mentioned often enough (or at all :-) I think. I think his The Three Impostors is even better.

If you like this sort of weird early 1900's mystic book, be sure to also check out David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Voyage_to_Arcturus).

The early 1900s mystical fiction is a rabbit hole for sure. Voyage to Arcturus is a very good recommendation! Others in this vein include, but are not limited to:

Armed with Madness by Mary Butts

The Golem by Gustav Meyrink

Flower Phantoms by Ronald Fraser

The Stone Dragon by R. Murray Gilchrist

and so many more.

> The Golem by Gustav Meyrink

I read this more than 20 years ago, and it still comes to my mind frequently. It’s haunting. Keep trying to read it again.

Great suggestions thanks! This is a great podcast that covers some of these and other interesting obscure works: http://www.holdfastnetwork.com/sherdspodcast/

> ZX81 Goes Nuclear – Controlling a Nuclear Power Plant

I'm going to have to read that one and very carefully. The ZX81 may the single most unstable thing I've ever come across.

My resounding childhood recollection was that if someone sneezed in the next town the connection to the 16Kb RAM Pack (required to do anything) would shift and everything would be lost.

Even Sir Clive's suggestion of using a "small piece of Blu Tack" couldn't save it.

I had a specific book of the exact thickness required to support the back of the RAM pack to keep it from wobbling. I remember how proud I was of this solution and it might just be the first real issue I ever had to troubleshoot on my own as I had no idea why my little programs were getting obliterated.

Edit: he briefly addresses RAM pack wobble in the video - "extra blue tack", haha.

Every year I become less and less interested in "verifying" what I can learn from each of this "best" things from Fogus. Hooray for me! Perhaps I'm starting to tame my FOMO?

This is not to rate or devalue the efforts of Fogus in publishing these lists.

A different way of saying the same thing: I wish the first time I saw these lists, it was prefixed by something like:

"The main value of these lists is not for the general public, but for myself. Don't be afraid to have your own favorite things of the last year. Build your own lists! Go crazy. Creating is complementary to consuming and both are necessary for growth. Be Happy!"

This is my interpretation, but I'm pretty confident in this conclusion. Prove me wrong in replies! Or agree with me! Both kinds of reactions should be fun to engage with :-).

Every year the list is prefaced: "Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2022. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new."

Maybe you skipped that or misinterpreted it, but he's explicit about it being just a dump of stuff he likes. But the main benefit _is_ for an audience of some sort, maybe not the general public, but certainly more than himself.

Extremely miscellaneous lists like these could sometimes do more harm than help to the general public, or for extremely "breadth first search" oriented people like me, I think. I think of this like: don't ban power drills or knives or whatnot because it could kill people, but teach people how to use the tools correctly, etc. Hope you get what I mean!

Perhaps you are right, perhaps only now I understand this, and I did not really paid that much attention to the disclaimer at the top of the site, EVER, until now.

I still think the main benefit of a list like this is for its creator. The way I know is because, even if no lists like this existed, I have been building my own list of "best things" of ... forever!

We tend to do things yearly because of society, culture, etc etc... there's no reason we should have "end of year resolutions" or "best of last year". I think lists like these encourage breadth first search and distract us from the fact that curation should be a continuous process, not necessarily something we do at end of year.

Again, I'm not criticizing or attacking Fogus in any way. In fact, I will probably take a deeper look at this list soon! But I will also try to produce more and consume less. And I will do my own research!

Serious gratitude journaling here, love it.

Everyone should make a point to read "Don Quixote".

Very nice little list, thanks for posting!

One complaint I do have is that I didn't like Birth of Violence at all. Chelsea's other music sounds so much better to me. BoV was the same sounds from other albums re-hashed and it felt very bland.

I still have the Magic Realm board game. I never worked out how to play it as a kid but I loved reading the manual and playing with the board and game pieces. Very atmospheric.

It's a great time to dive into board games. There are so many great ones available these days. There's also a renewed focus on solitair board games which have replaced some of my leasure reading as a nice calming activity. Highly recommended hobby :)

I look forward to this every year.

Cool to see quite a few ex-DevelopMentor folks on the list of "Who Inspired me this year"!

His Scifi reading list is great, though very much lacking at the end.

Agree, but keep in mind that the sf list was posted in 2012.

A Fire Upon the Deep was astoundingly good. Highest of recommendations.

this is so weird page, wtf isn't it on facebook, twitter, tiktok or something else.

Why shouldn't the open web still be a thing?

i'm struggling to understand the question.