Iterable CEO Justin Zhu ousted for taking LSD at work | Hacker News Reader

Iterable CEO Justin Zhu ousted for taking LSD at work

smh.com.au

38 pointsMayzie21 comments

It's ok to use caffeine at work. It's ok to have a beer at lunch and go back to work. People take various prescribed drugs while at work, including opiates. I suspect micro dosing LSD is a scapegoat for some other issue that got him fired.

Except when it becomes a "thing", in the workplace, in executive circles, down the business chain: people are talking about this; the board has heard about Zhu and LSD from people outside the company; an employee caught him "doing it" and mentioned it to HR who brought it to the board's attention. Someone said he sounded "funny" in the last board meeting. Etc. When it's a "thing", and this "thing" is, after all, illegal, it cannot be ignored because ignoring it becomes an active decision to condone or even collude.

This feels like a flimsy excuse to fire the CEO for an incident in 2019. What was he really fired for?

I wonder how the board found found out, given that the event occurred in 2019 and they are firing him in 2021.

I also wonder how much equity the board and investors clawed back by the firing.

He must have been really out of it. It's pretty hard to get caught doing it. No evidence. And usually people will forgive you.

Personally I don't get it, though. No microdose has worked for me.

I’m guessing he said something about it that alerted the board, or someone always knew and decided they wanted him gone now

I find it hilarious that inbetween Alex Jones' schizophrenic rants he seemed to have touched on a nugget of wisdom by saying that the government is giving LSD to people in order to get in touch with higher entities (for technological ideas and so on). I mean that's most likely not what's happening but LSD does seem to make me much more creative at problem solving, and it ties to the idea that most of your useful ideas come when you drop your ego and thinking and just sleep on the problem.

Steve Jobs emphasized the importance of LSD, it makes sense it'd help to think outside the box.

> Zhu said he was experimenting by taking a limited amount of the drug, or microdosing, in an effort to boost his focus.

/facepalm

Microdosing is not a thing. It has never been a thing. There is no science backing it. Any benefits are at best due to the placebo effect. Stop with this tech bro culture nonsense already.

I don't know anything about micro dosing, but how do we know this?

Research had lots of problems with placebo control in the past due to the illegal status of psychedelics. There are only a few studies that are properly placebo-controlled just yet. See my comment above. The commenter might not be right at what he's claiming.

We don’t. OP is displaying scientific arrogance.

> There is no science backing it. Any benefits are at best due to the placebo effect. Stop with this bro culture nonsense already.

Good that you're not a scientist and the research is ongoing ;)

Some stuff to read: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924977X2... https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2054/aop/article-10.155...

I'm not advocating microdosing btw, especially just for "focus" to be better at your job.

Stop with this bro culture nonsense already.

There's probably something to this part though. I was just listening to a podcast about therapeutic uses of hallucinogens. But there is a subculture of "bio hackers" or people attempting to improve mental capacity.

- Implanted a magnet into my finger. - Implanted CC chip under my skin. - Look I'm micro dosing without any doctor supervision. - Look at the stick of grass fed butter I put into my coffee.

We have, even today, unless something came out yesterday - NO scientific model for what psychadelics do to the brain. We do know that they can cause the contents of the brain to become permanently damaged. We suspect they may have some beneficial effects in unclear scenarios to specific brains. Thats it.

> We do know that they can cause the contents of the brain to become permanently damaged.

We do? Which psychedelics? How do they permanently damage the contents of the brain?

I wouldn't agree with the notion of brain damage at all (sounds like propaganda) but what I can think of is HPPD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep...

Right, but there is some real research going on, which was what the podcast was about.

As opposed to some dude doing it because he heard about it on the internet.

You forgot nootropics and polyphasic sleep!

Placebo or not, it works

Could you please not post in the flamewar style like this, regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are? It degrades discussion, and we're trying for the opposite direction here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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