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