Success these days seems to require deprivation. Steve Jobs, that god-pharaoh of innovation, went stretches eating only fruit. Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey says he eats a single meal each day. Tech execs from Phil Libin (former CEO of Evernote) to Daniel Gross (former partner at Y Combinator) prostrated themselves at the shrine of intermittent fasting. Zappos founder Tony Hsieh practiced a 26-day “alphabet diet”, eating only foods that started with a different letter each day. And then there’s Elizabeth Holmes.

In late 2014 journalist Ken Auletta profiled Holmes and her company Theranos in The New Yorker. This was before her epic downfall—before there was a book, documentary, and miniseries recounting how the Stanford dropout had gamed some of the loftiest names in government and venture capital. There are hints of the dodgy tactics that would eventually topple Holmes, yet the overwhelming impression is of her extraordinary nature. Auletta paints her as beyond human—more like a humanoid alien or the offspring of a human-ghost mating. She is “unnervingly serene.” She speaks in a “near-whisper.” She designed a time machine at the age of seven and read Moby-Dick at nine. She can quote Jane Austen by heart and completed three years of college Mandarin by the end of high school. She has, according to Henry Kissinger, “a sort of ethereal quality.”

Especially striking is her diet. Her fridge is practically empty, we are told. Instead she sips a spartan brew of kale, celery, spinach, parsley, cucumber, and romaine lettuce. This was—and continues to be—one of the most popular talking points about Holmes, attracting write-ups in HuffPost, Women’s Health, and Yahoo Lifestyle, many of them questioning how anyone can stay healthy on such nutritionally impoverished fare.

Though Holmes has fallen, Silicon Valley austerity continues to grow more extreme. By 2020 intermittent fasting was no longer enough, and dopamine fasting—an abstention not just from food but from any form of stimulation, including music, eye contact, and playing Magic: The Gathering—had taken off. These self-denial fads are often touted as biohacking innovations. Yet as an anthropologist who has studied austerity in some of the most remote regions of the world, I see them as part of a larger pattern: the self-shamanification of tech CEOs.

It was a sticky June day when I arrived at the shamans’ longhouse. The guide and translator who brought me there haggled with the family over reasonable compensation, and after helping me hang up my mosquito net, left. We decided he would return in three weeks.

Perched above a creek and surrounded by banana trees and muddy rainforest, the longhouse was home to fifteen people: a leathery matriarch, her two sons (the shamans), each of their wives, their two unmarried sisters, and eight children. The shamans and their sisters understood smatterings of Indonesian, but the household language was Mentawai, a tiny tongue limited to the Mentawai Archipelago in the Indian Ocean.

The next three weeks were hard. I spent most of each day burning coconut husks to avert mosquitoes. (My field notes for June 21, 2015, start out: “FUCK MOSQUITOES.”) I was forced to stay with rowdy preteens while their parents went off in search of meat and fish in the jungle. I spoke enough Mentawai to meet basic needs but remained silent and apart as they sat for hours each night swapping stories. I felt the shame of incompetence and the oppression of boredom like never before.

The food, however, was amazing. At home I waffle between vegetarianism and pescatarianism, but in the field I eat whatever’s put in front of me. And that summer, it was worth it. We had cassava leaves cooked in coconut milk, taro with mashed bananas, civet meat with sticks of sago. My absolute favorite was eel. The women caught big ones as long and thick as a human arm, and cooked them in bamboo. Unlike fatty pigs, bony chickens, and sinewy monkeys, eel meat was almost all soft skeletal muscle.

It was because I loved eel so much that I was surprised to see that my shaman hosts never ate it. When I asked why, I was met with a puzzled stare. Of course they can’t eat eel. They would die. Mentawai shamans, I was told, are not like the rest of us. Their bodies are special. During their initiation they go from simata, a word that refers both to non-shamans and uncooked food, to sikerei, those who have been transformed. For the rest of their lives following this transition, they must refrain not only from eels but also from flounders, gibbons, and white simakobu monkeys—as well as, quite often, sex. Engaging in any of these pleasures will contaminate a shaman’s hallowed body.

Intrigued, I rummaged through old anthropological books back at home. Deprivation, I realized, is far from limited to Mentawai shamans. Among the Yanomamö of Venezuela, “the induction of shamans involves drug-taking, fasting and meditation.” For the Ulithi of Micronesia, magical specialists “may not eat certain foods, touch a corpse, dig a grave, come into contact with a menstruating woman, or have sexual intercourse.” Analyzing an old dataset of 43 nonindustrial societies, I found that shamans in 81 percent of the societies observed prohibitions on food, sex, or social contact. Given that these data were collated from reports by travelers and anthropologists, they are probably an underestimate. Silicon Valley deprivation, it turns out, is less a strange, new development and more the most recent manifestation of a ubiquitous shamanic practice.

To understand why shamans—and modern tech executives—engage in self-denial, we need to first understand how shamanism works.

Shamans promise control over the uncertain. They emerge with a dogged persistence, appearing in most documented human societies, including among the vast majority of hunter-gatherers. Although many people consider shamanism a lost or declining practice, it persists the world over, from Russia to Korea, Sweden to the Colombian Amazon. People want their fevers to subside, their crops to grow, and their hunts to succeed. They want to know whether it will rain next week and whether their business will prosper. Shamans provide these magical services by claiming to engage with the invisible forces believed to oversee the unpredictable. They speak to rain goddesses, battle illness-causing witches, and channel ancestors who can glimpse the unthinkable.

Of course, if your next-door neighbor promised to stop a drought by bargaining with a rain goddess, you would be dubious. How could this regular Joe-folk possess such superpowers?

This skepticism is the main obstacle for shamans, and around the world they have developed a toolkit of techniques to overcome it. They enter ecstatic trances. They claim to have died and come to life. They have other shamans surgically insert crystals into their bodies. In other words, they transform. In fact, these features—altered states, dramatic initiations, mythologies of fundamental difference—are what distinguish shamans from other magico-religious practitioners like priests. Just as Holmes’ serenity, near-whispers, and uncanny childhood abilities created the aura of an ethereal miracle worker, shamanic practices convince communities that specialists are more than human.

Self-denial is among the tools shamans use to look supernatural. In a study published in Evolutionary Human Sciences, I found that Mentawai people consider more austere shamans to be both more distinctive from everyday people and more supernaturally powerful. Shamans feel and understand this. A Japanese shaman told the British scholar Carmen Blacker that living off pine needles was “conducive to the development of second sight and clairaudient perception.” Other shamans told her that it was only when cold, hunger, and sleeplessness pushed them to the verge of collapse that they felt flooded with new strength. “With this access of power,” she wrote, “they feel themselves to be different people from those they had been in the past.”

Quirks of psychology predispose us to accept that people who deviate from normal humans more tenably have special powers. Shamans, not necessarily knowingly, hack this cognitive foible to convince people of their extraordinary abilities.

The shamanification of American CEOs is about more than just deprivation. It’s about meditation, psychedelic drugs, silent retreats, playa names, infrared heat lamps, DIY surgeons, and every other ancient or posthuman widget that CEOs and founders subject themselves to on the path to becoming, as one Vanity Fair writer put it, “some sort of doctrinal beings: saints with iPhones.”

“There’s a sort of cultural archetype against which leaders are both evaluating themselves and being evaluated,” said Rakesh Khurana, a Harvard sociologist and the dean of Harvard College. Khurana has studied how these archetypes change, both by tracking turnovers in historical datasets and through interviews with CEOs, search consultants, and boards of directors.

For decades, he explained, the archetypal CEO was “the organization man” (they were overwhelmingly men). Embodied in figures like Lew Platt of Hewlett-Packard or Michael Hawley of Gillette, the organization man was a conformer, a loyal subordinate who worked his way up in the company. A career bureaucrat, he rarely appeared on TV and never hired ghostwriters to write up his mythology. Many people in his company didn’t even recognize him.

By the 1980s and ’90s, organization men were dropping like poisoned cattle, replaced by shinier breeds. This was the era of Gates, Jobs, Welch, and Gerstner. Charisma became key. After Hewlett-Packard forced Lew Platt to resign in 1999, the head of the search committee explained to Khurana that they required something more elusive than Platt’s white-bread managerial skills: “tremendous leadership ability” and “the power to bring urgency to an organization.”

Why the shift from dependable gray suits to charisma? In his book Searching for a Corporate Savior, Khurana pointed to the issue of ownership. From the ’70s onwards, institutional investors like mutual funds and insurance companies started buying up major chunks of companies. At the same time, trading stocks became the new American pastime. These two changes meant that outsiders started to care about who was running companies—and those outsiders wanted flash.

“CEOs could afford to be bland and colorless when they were less visible in society,” wrote Khurana. But with the public owning their firms and monitoring their leaders, blandness was less of an option.

Charismatic performance has only grown more important in tech. “As a CEO, your job is to sell to all sorts of different people,” said a founder-CEO in Boston. “First and foremost, you need to convince people to join the company and buy into the mission. You also need to sell to customers.”

Especially important are investors. Many tech companies subsist on investment capital for years, making investors’ perceptions critical. “To do the role well, you do have to build a bit of a persona,” said a founder-CEO in San Francisco. “Investors are often attracted to founders that have some sort of unique charisma or personality—special, I think, is the word they would use.”

Although neither of them do restrictive diets, these founders understand the social pressures that compel such performances.

Intensifying the need to be special is the uncertainty and gigaton magnitude of potential rewards. Founders have to convince investors that, with time and dollars, their companies will metamorphose into fat, pearly unicorns. But they have little that sets them apart, especially early on. “There’s no revenue. There are no profits. There’s an idea, which I don’t want to discount,” said Khurana. “But that leaves you very little to evaluate, other than what school did the person go to, who do they know, where did they work.” Like shamans then, founders fall back on personal qualities to convince investors that they can do something near-miraculous.

While CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey talked about intermittent fasting on podcasts, in Twitter posts, and during an online Q&A hosted by WIRED. “Non-intuitive,” he tweeted, “but I find I have a lot more energy and focus, feel healthier and happier, and my sleep is much deeper.”

Perhaps. But if the scientific literature is any indication, his self-denial isn’t all laser-focus and cozy nights. Intermittent fasting seems promising for people with obesity or diabetes, but studies testing the short-term effects of fasting on sleep and cognitive function typically show either no change or deficits.

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.

But humans are also skillful performers. We pay close attention to which identities are esteemed and then craft ourselves to conform. We are guided by automatic, often selfish psychological processes and then delude ourselves with noble justifications. “All the world is not, of course, a stage,” wrote the sociologist Erving Goffman, “but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify.” If CEOs are anything like the rest of us, their personas (including the shamanic elements) are tweaked for acclaim and then rationalized afterward.

Whatever the motivation, the outcome is the same. Look past buzzwords like biohack and transhumanism and many tech executives look a lot like the trance-dancers and witch doctors of past societies. As long as people search for miracles, others will compete to look like miracle-workers, forever resurrecting ancient and time-tested techniques. Shamanism is neither lost wisdom nor superstition. Rather, it’s a reflection of human nature, a captivating tradition that develops everywhere as humans turn to each other to produce the extraordinary.

Updated 7/15/2022 9:15 am ET: This story has been updated to correct that Daniel Gross is a former partner at Y Combinator, not a current partner as previously stated.