Tony Hsieh bankrolled his followers, who enabled his risky lifestyle

I was a founder of a VTF (downtown project VC) funded company. We had an exit. I can’t vouch for the rest of the companies but hard drinking wasn’t part of our culture. Careful painting all of us with that brush. I was around for the first Vegas Jelly, and was funded in 2012 so I would be part of the “surge” you defined.

Hey I'm from Vegas as well and I have a friend getting his MFA working on a story on the Downtown Project and it seems like he's coming to a lot of the conclusions you've come to. If it's possible I'd love to get you in touch with him to talk about your experience a bit.

I've seen quite a few people go out like this. Back in the late 1990's I founded a head shop that later gave birth to multiple locations and had family members and friends getting rich. Lost two family members (dead), can't speak to another one (my father), I ended up arrested as a consequence of my brother's withdrawal symptoms, a business partner went off the deep end smoking crack and meth while leading an entourage of prostitutes and flipping a vehicle or two while ditching his family of twenty years, and my father was doing nearly the same shit while secreting hookers at his elderly mother's house. He ended up in jail on serious drug charges.

This isn't even about half the shit that went down.

So yeah, success and money can really trash lives if people aren't ready or they have underlying issues, but a lot of times you don't see it coming.

Before that we ran a fairly uneventful chain of video rental stores and otherwise led a bog normal and happy middle class life.

Money can buy so many things that people crave, and in itself has always been a subject of craving.

When toxic or habit-forming materials are involved a craving can be observed which is the type very difficult to control.

But an excess or virtually unlimited supply of a craveable requires an unusual degree of control otherwise it often does not end well and more than just the excess is lost.

Cravers will be drawn like a magnet.

Toxic materials which affect decision-making and are accepted as eccentric within popular culture can give rise to some of the most volatile situations.

Young athletes seems to be another really big case of this. Lots of people with short careers but huge earnings who either cannot handle the money or hand their finances over to people who try to take advantage of them.

It's what I call the Michael Jackson Effect.

Someone surrounds themselves with people who are financially dependent on them, so they only tell them that they're great, and whatever they do is the best thing that has ever happened. The unchecked praise-money feedback loop eventually leads to the host's destruction.

See also: Silicon Valley.

Do you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=exzappos?

A teacher of mine once told us that "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." I think that's one of the paradoxes of life and we see this over and over again where a lot of good people try to do the right thing but the collective effects of their efforts end up being net negative. Rather than conspiracies, I think this paradox can explain some of the challenges we face today. Barbara Tuchman wrote a great book called "The March of Folly" that basically documents some famous cases of people unwittingly working against their own best interest, even if the individual steps themselves might have made sense.

You cannot forcibly make someone go to rehab. People are quick to blame his 'friends', but it appears that they hired a personal doctor, who gave doctorly advice. What more could they do?

Our lives and bodies are our own, to use, build, and destroy as we see fit.

It's one thing to help a friend avoid an accidental death, but this speaks to a months long pattern of behavior that was clearly a deliberate personal decision.

What's the point of wealth if not obtaining the basic freedom to live (and die) how we choose?

Ultimately everyone makes his own decisions, especially someone with essentially unlimited funds. We can go through the moves and end at the same conclusion.

I've been in tech in the Bay Area for 15 years, mostly in startups, and I can say that untreated mental health issues (myself included for many years) are a very real thing.

I wonder if this will be the new frontier of bio-hacking: attempting to replicate the symptoms of mania to get a "performance advantage".

> and, of course, thinking you can slightly toe the line towards a controled flirt with mania is classical bipolar anosognosia.

This is one of those amazingly insightful things sort of hiding in plain sight. There is some plain wisdom right here.

C.S. Lewis, Abolition of Man.

It's the epitome of unreasonable expectations: a self-fulfilling prophecy by setup. "Yes men" are terrible, especially if they're there to mooch rather than question or be more than good weather "friends."

Yeah, obvious for some time now. His wife looks ematiated and his kid is named with hieroglyphic symbols or some shit. This on top of the weird tweets and eccentric displays. He reminds me of a high functioning addict. Met quite a few business owner addicts in my time.

> With all due respect (and not saying these groups have overlap) there is a notable presence of people on Hacker News that minimize the danger of or encourage drug experimentation, if not regular drug use.

I think a better way of describing it is a continuum of belief around drugs. Most people aren't talking about caffeine or alcohol when they say "drug use" but those are indeed psychoactive drugs as well.

"All drugs are wrong, but some are useful." is perhaps a useful model for thinking about it? (Not that I think drugs are wrong, just that nothing, and I mean nothing, in life is without cost in a cost/benefit analysis.)

All substances we ingest, from distilled water, to table salt, to a cup of coffee, broccoli, a beer, a cheeseburger, morphine, or methamphetamine have various effects, long term and short, on our bodies, and we should understand those effects as best we can before we ingest any of them.

I've seen ketamine save people's lives, and I've seen it destroy people's lives. Same with firearms. Sharp tools are a good thing, on balance, in my opinion, but should be wielded with knowledge and understanding in order to be safe.

Are there really posts advocating similar behavior to this story? I think I've missed those.

That's unnecessarily cynical. Tony Hsieh was not just some random rich guy, particularly not to this community.

Whip-its have become pretty popular among the burning man crowd. I remember seeing piles in East Palo Alto parking lots and wondering if they were from bored kids or bored techies.

https://archive.is/I4O0E

It's not contributing much to the discussion to just say "This." but man I really just want to say, indeed as someone who isn't originally from an American culture but now resides in America: the observation you make is profound and so important, and I hope everyone considers this and thinks about this.

Because I know exactly what you're talking about and I'm struggling with this so much, about being supportive of our friends on various decisions they make sometimes even when we don't think deep down it's the right thing in some situations, but we're afraid to say it for an increasing amount of reasons: criticism from woke culture, being afraid of being seen as bossy, party-pooper, disagreeable, puritan. But friends are friends, give them honesty, show them the doubt you feel, tell them your gut feeling. Yeah it'll take some work to make it palatable, but do it, give the hard take that you really should.

There’s a Russian saying, “Your friends are the ones who can tell you ‘no.’”

>US-centric views of love have evolved more towards ‘if it feels right, do it’

Wikipedia on the early history of Saturday Night Live:

>Drugs were a major problem during the show's first five years. "The value system that was around there was, as long as people showed up on time, did their job, it was nobody's business what they did in their bedroom or in their lives. That value system turned out to be wrong", [Show creator Lorne] Michaels later said. [Original cast member Dan] Aykroyd said that "The cocaine was a problem. Not for me, it was never my favorite... but it was around a lot, and it was affecting the work, the performance, the quality of the scripts... wasting time, and that was bad".

The one exception among cast and crew:

>[Jane] Curtin remained on the show through the 1979–1980 season. Guest host Eric Idle said that Curtin was "very much a 'Let's come in, let's know our lines, let's do it properly, and go' ... She was very sensible, very focused", and disliked the drug culture in which many of the cast participated. Show writer Al Franken stated that she "was so steady. Had a really strong moral center, and as such was disgusted by much of the show and the people around it".

For Curtin to have made it through the first five years of SNL without succumbing to what almost destroyed the show and those who were a part of it—during the 1970s in NYC, the era of Studio 54, no less—is remarkable.

I don't know if you read the article. But there were people trying to intervene, namely his family, and people calling the police to check in on him. However, the people who were on his payroll made an effort to prevent this stuff, and Tony himself saw any kind of intervention as a kind of betrayal.

So generalizing this example and applying it to US culture is off base.

What's the point in disparaging the dead.

Congrats! Pure evil take!