Speaker 1: Pushkin a warning before we start. This cautionary tale discusses
Speaker 1: death by suicide. If you're suffering emotional distress or you're
Speaker 1: having suicidal thoughts, support is available, for example, from the
Speaker 1: nine eight eight Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the US
Speaker 1: or the Samaritans in the UK. On the fourth of
Speaker 1: July twenty twenty, in Park City, Utah, two friends are
Speaker 1: drinking beer on the porch of the airbnb they've rented
Speaker 1: for the holidays. Happy fourth, They call out to a
Speaker 1: man walking past on the sidewalk. The passer by stops
Speaker 1: to chat. They notice he's not wearing any shoes, his
Speaker 1: clothes are tattered, and his eyes are glass Perhaps they
Speaker 1: shouldn't have attracted his attention. What do you do, the
Speaker 1: shoeless man asks them. The friends exchange a glance. One
Speaker 1: guardedly volunteers that he works in recruitment. Oh, says the
Speaker 1: shoeless man. I'm recruiting people to come and live here
Speaker 1: in Park City. I'm building a community. I can offer
Speaker 1: you a fee for everyone you bring in. Let me
Speaker 1: tell you my number. The friend politely takes down the number,
Speaker 1: then forgets all about it. The man seemed high and homeless.
Speaker 1: It obviously wasn't serious. The shoeless man might indeed have
Speaker 1: been high, but he wasn't homeless, and he was deadly serious.
Speaker 1: He was billionaire Tony Shay. This is the second of
Speaker 1: two cautionary tales about Tony Shay, who made his fortune
Speaker 1: with the online shoe retailer Zappos. If you haven't heard
Speaker 1: part one, you might want to do that. Now we
Speaker 1: heard how Tony wrote a best selling book about employee happiness,
Speaker 1: then imposed a management fad that many employees hated. Tony
Speaker 1: loved ideas, the kind that sound wise in a Ted talk,
Speaker 1: but work in practice only if you really think the
Speaker 1: details through. In this episode, we focus on one wise
Speaker 1: idea that Tony really didn't think through community. In his book,
Speaker 1: Tony links happiness to connectedness with others. He tried to
Speaker 1: build a community in Las Vegas. As we'll hear, that
Speaker 1: didn't go well. Now in Park City, he was trying again.
Speaker 1: He wanted to surround himself with people who'd make him
Speaker 1: feel connected and happy. Instead, his misjudgments led to his death.
Speaker 1: I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary Tales. Philip
Speaker 1: Prentice was delighted to be offered the job. The salary
Speaker 1: was over one hundred thousand dollars a year, pretty good
Speaker 1: for a newly qualified accountant in Las Vegas in October
Speaker 1: twenty twelve. In today's terms, that I'll be near a
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty thousand. He'd gets to options too.
Speaker 1: Prinice's new employer was a startup called Ecomom. As the
Speaker 1: name suggests, it sold a variety of eco friendly parent
Speaker 1: related products diapers, baby food, clothes, toys. It was doing well,
Speaker 1: or so it seemed. Its revenues were growing quickly. Just
Speaker 1: a few months earlier, it had raised millions in financing.
Speaker 1: One of those investments came with strings attached. The investor
Speaker 1: wanted Ecomom to move from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.
Speaker 1: There's something to do with building a community. Ecomom's founder,
Speaker 1: a forty seven year old man called Jody Sherman, agreed
Speaker 1: to relocate and asked his staff to come with him.
Speaker 1: It was tough for Sherman. His wife had commitments in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles that she couldn't easily break, so Sherman had
Speaker 1: to leave her behind for now, along with his network
Speaker 1: of friends. Philip Prentiss describes what kind of person. Jody
Speaker 1: Sherman was a great guy, outgoing, personable, enthusiastic, funny. I
Speaker 1: never heard him say a bad word to or about anyone.
Speaker 1: Prentiss loved coming into work. Morale was high, the staff
Speaker 1: were treated well. Prentiss was Ecomom's very first accountant. Up
Speaker 1: to now, Sherman had outsourced its payroll and invoices to
Speaker 1: an external provider. But the company had grown big enough
Speaker 1: to need someone full time in house, and something wasn't right.
Speaker 1: Sherman didn't know what wasn't right exactly, but somehow or other,
Speaker 1: the figure in Ecomom's bank account kept going down. Prentiss
Speaker 1: recalls that Sherman used to have heated discussions with his
Speaker 1: VP of marketing. What are you doing? Sherman would ask,
Speaker 1: where's the money? Sales are great? The VP of marketing
Speaker 1: would reply, We're on track to hit all our targets,
Speaker 1: but where's the money. Sherman grew increasingly exasperated. I'm not
Speaker 1: seeing the money in our bank. Jody Sherman was a
Speaker 1: great guy, said Prentiss, but he was not a numbers guy.
Speaker 1: Whenever Prentice tried to show him a sheet full of figures,
Speaker 1: he'd waved away, saying no one can understand this. He
Speaker 1: also approved everyone's spending requests with barely a glance Prentice noticed.
Speaker 1: Could this be the root of the problem. Prentice investigated. Nope,
Speaker 1: All the employees were honest. There were no inflated expenses claims,
Speaker 1: no dodgy looking in voices. And yet when Prentice pulled
Speaker 1: together the figures for October, they showed Ecomom had lost
Speaker 1: over half a million dollars. November would be better, right,
Speaker 1: The Black Friday sales were clearly going well. In the
Speaker 1: ecomom office, someone rang a bell after every one hundred order.
Speaker 1: The bell rang more and more frequently, and yet when
Speaker 1: Prentice did the sums at the end of the month,
Speaker 1: he found that in November Ecomom had lost nearly a
Speaker 1: million dollars. Higher sales, bigger losses. Prentice saw the problem.
Speaker 1: Ecomom had issued so many discounts and voucher codes that
Speaker 1: every sale was losing the money. An average order brought
Speaker 1: in sixty dollars but cost nearly ninety dollars to fulfill.
Speaker 1: It's not unusual for a startup to sell with a
Speaker 1: negative margin at first, but it's generally a conscious decision
Speaker 1: as part of a wider strategy for becoming profitable somewhere
Speaker 1: down the line. As far as Philip Prentiss could see,
Speaker 1: Ecomom had no such strategy. Jody Sherman called a high
Speaker 1: powered management meeting, and Prentice prepared an analysis. If Ecomom
Speaker 1: were to stop selling anything he worked out, and all
Speaker 1: the employees simply sat around and played ping pong all day,
Speaker 1: they'd have enough in the bank to pay themselves for
Speaker 1: two more years. But if sales kept growing, they'd run
Speaker 1: out of cash in just three months. The management meeting,
Speaker 1: recalls Prentice, was surreal. Nobody asked him to present any
Speaker 1: of the figures he had prepared. The only figure anyone
Speaker 1: presented was the year on year growth in sales, which
Speaker 1: looked amazing, as the VP of Marketing had said they
Speaker 1: were hitting all their targets. Still, Jody Sherman made it
Speaker 1: clear they had to do something better. But what the
Speaker 1: meeting discussed market strategies for selling the eco mom lifestyle,
Speaker 1: Prentice recalls it discussed expanding our email and customer base.
Speaker 1: It discussed expanding our marketing team. I can't remember exactly
Speaker 1: what else was discussed, but I can tell you for sure.
Speaker 1: The word margin and the word profit were never mentioned.
Speaker 1: In December, sales continued to go well, the number in
Speaker 1: the bank account kept on getting lower, and Jody Sherman
Speaker 1: became even more frantic. Prentice again tried to present his figures,
Speaker 1: and Sherman again waved them away. Phil. He said, just
Speaker 1: tell me how much we need to sell to break even.
Speaker 1: He did not understand margin, recalls Prentice. He did not
Speaker 1: understand that increased sales resulted in increased losses. Sherman tried
Speaker 1: desperately to raise more money from investors. He asked Prentice
Speaker 1: how much longer the money in their bank account would
Speaker 1: last if he sacked half the staff, some of whom
Speaker 1: he was all too aware, had uprooted their own lives
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles to follow him to Vegas. I feel
Speaker 1: terrible about this, he said, and those weren't empty words.
Speaker 1: Sherman was clearly feeling the pressure. He started saying things
Speaker 1: like I'm too old to start over. He handed a
Speaker 1: document to his secretary. That's my will, he said. He
Speaker 1: sent an email to other company founders in Las Vegas
Speaker 1: to propose a get together. Oftentimes, he wrote, I find
Speaker 1: myself with no one to talk to about the challenges
Speaker 1: I might be facing, the frustrations the stress. I thought, Hey,
Speaker 1: I know a bunch of founders who probably find themselves
Speaker 1: in similar situations. I should hang with them. A meeting
Speaker 1: was arranged, but Jody didn't make it. Police found his
Speaker 1: body in his car in the mountains outside Las Vegas.
Speaker 1: Jody had taken his own life. The investor who had
Speaker 1: required Jody Sherman to move from Los Angeles to Las
Speaker 1: Vegas was, of course, Tony Say. After Amazon bought Zappos
Speaker 1: and kept him on as CEO, Tony committed three hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty million dollars of his own money to the
Speaker 1: Downtown Project or DTP. He moved Zappos from its office
Speaker 1: in the suburbs to the old City Hall building in
Speaker 1: the heart of downtown. The area was ced and run down,
Speaker 1: but Tony was going to change that by buying up
Speaker 1: real estate and investing in businesses. He wouldn't measure the
Speaker 1: project's success through ROI, he explained, return on investment. He'd
Speaker 1: measure it through ROC return on community. He'd bring together
Speaker 1: entrepreneurs like Jody Sherman, and they'd former community. He wanted
Speaker 1: to turn downtown Las Vegas into the most community focused
Speaker 1: large city in the world. And yet somehow, what Jody
Speaker 1: Sherman had need he did so desperately had been a
Speaker 1: sense of community, but it hadn't been there for him.
Speaker 1: Cautionary tales will be back after the break. When Zappo's
Speaker 1: employee Rob Ponte returned home from work, he was surprised
Speaker 1: to find police tape across the door of his apartment. Inside,
Speaker 1: he saw that someone had been rummaging in his draws
Speaker 1: and poking around in his computer. He called the police
Speaker 1: department and asked what's going on. The police was surprised
Speaker 1: to hear from him. They said, we thought you were dead.
Speaker 1: They'd been in Ponte's apartment, they explained, looking for a
Speaker 1: suicide note and for details of his next of kin.
Speaker 1: Ponte later discovered they'd phoned his mum. Thankfully she didn't answer.
Speaker 1: Ponte and the police pieced together what had happened. Someone
Speaker 1: who looked like Rob Ponte had killed himself. The dead
Speaker 1: man turned out to be a young employee of Tony
Speaker 1: Shay's downtown project. Less than a year had passed since
Speaker 1: Jody Sherman's suicide. A few months after that, another entrepreneur
Speaker 1: who had taken funding from the Downtown project took his
Speaker 1: own life. The Downtown project wasn't that big, just a
Speaker 1: few hundred people, so three suicides seemed like a pattern.
Speaker 1: Were there underlying factors? What might they be? The journalist
Speaker 1: Nelly Bowles asked around. At an event. She sat down
Speaker 1: next to Tony and asked for his thoughts. Suicides happen anywhere.
Speaker 1: Tony said, look at the stats. Then he got up
Speaker 1: and moved to another chair. But others she spoke to
Speaker 1: did have some theories to share. In the last episode
Speaker 1: of Cautionary Tales, we met the idea of the profit
Speaker 1: seeking paradox. The economist John Kay points out that the
Speaker 1: most profitable companies tend not to be those that focus
Speaker 1: directly on profits. But this is only one example, says Kay,
Speaker 1: of a wider principle he calls obliquity. Many other goals
Speaker 1: in life are best pursued not directly but obliquely. Another
Speaker 1: example happiness. The more you try to be happy, the
Speaker 1: more elusive happiness seems to be. This isn't a new idea.
Speaker 1: One hundred and fifty years ago, the philosopher John Stuart
Speaker 1: Mill observed that the happiest people he knew have their
Speaker 1: minds fixed on some other object other than their own happiness,
Speaker 1: on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind,
Speaker 1: even on some art or pursuit followed not as a means,
Speaker 1: but as itself an ideal end aiming thus at something else,
Speaker 1: said Mill, they find happiness, by the way, But is
Speaker 1: this observation true? In twenty eleven, researchers devised an experiment
Speaker 1: to investigate. They got some subjects to read an article
Speaker 1: about how important it is to be happy, because happy
Speaker 1: people are more healthy and successful. Then they showed a
Speaker 1: video that should evoke feelings of happiness about a figure
Speaker 1: skater winning a medal and celebrating with her coach. Then
Speaker 1: they asked how happy do you feel? The subjects who
Speaker 1: had read the article on happiness were less happy than
Speaker 1: those in a control group who had watched the video
Speaker 1: but hadn't read the article first. It seemed that being
Speaker 1: prompted to think about the importance of happiness made people's
Speaker 1: second guests themselves that video should have made me happy.
Speaker 1: Why am I not happier? That's disappointing People who weren't
Speaker 1: thinking about the importance of happiness simply watched the video
Speaker 1: and felt happy under certain circumstances. The researchers conclude valuing
Speaker 1: happiness maybe self defeating. When he launched the Downtown project,
Speaker 1: Tony Shay had just published his best selling book on Happiness.
Speaker 1: He'd also be reading about what makes cities productive, including
Speaker 1: chance encounters between productive people, or what Tony called collisions.
Speaker 1: The bigger the city, the more of these serendipitous encounters
Speaker 1: you might expect. Tony decided that serendipity, like happiness, was
Speaker 1: a goal you could pursue directly. He invested in spaces
Speaker 1: where collisions could happen, such as bars. He wanted to
Speaker 1: institutionalize return on luck. He came up with a metric
Speaker 1: maximizing collisionable hours per acre per year. All this piled
Speaker 1: expectations on the entrepreneurs who had moved to Las Vegas
Speaker 1: to get an investment from Tony. There's a pressure to
Speaker 1: socialize and go out, one told the journalist Nelly Bowls.
Speaker 1: There's a pressure to party. Everyone at the party's would
Speaker 1: be either another entrepreneur or an investor. People felt the
Speaker 1: need to put on a mask. A counselor told Nelly
Speaker 1: Bowls and say everything's great. They knew they were supposed
Speaker 1: to be happy. If they weren't, they felt disappointed, even ashamed.
Speaker 1: They had no one to confide in when they had
Speaker 1: a bad day. The focus on happiness, says the counselor
Speaker 1: was not psychologically healthy. The irony is that the entrepreneurs
Speaker 1: might have had people to confide in before they moved
Speaker 1: to Vegas. Jody Sherman, for example, had left behind his
Speaker 1: wife and friends in Los Angeles. In Vegas, he found
Speaker 1: himself with no one to talk to. Tony had seemed to
Speaker 1: think that you could simply bring entrepreneurs together in collisionable
Speaker 1: spaces and their former community. But community can't be forced,
Speaker 1: like happiness. You find it if you're lucky. While aiming
Speaker 1: at something else, Tony had launched the Downtown Project with
Speaker 1: big ambitions to turn Las Vegas into the most community
Speaker 1: focused large city in the world. As the project floundered,
Speaker 1: Tony changed his mind. He was going to stop using
Speaker 1: the word community. He'd learned that it gave people the
Speaker 1: wrong idea. People expect us to address and solve every
Speaker 1: single problem that exists in a city, he said, for example,
Speaker 1: mental health. We're not the government. Instead Tony turned his
Speaker 1: attention to a different community, his own personal community that
Speaker 1: he curated around himself. In his personal quest for happiness,
Speaker 1: Tony moved into an airstream trailer in an empty lot
Speaker 1: in downtown Las Vegas and moved some of his closest
Speaker 1: friends into other trailers. Because Tony believed in work life integration,
Speaker 1: those close friends tended also to be either his employees
Speaker 1: or business partners. Having them live around him meant he
Speaker 1: could call them in for work meetings at any hour
Speaker 1: of the day. Airstream park had fire pits and a
Speaker 1: stage for musical performances, and shipping containers that housed laundry
Speaker 1: facilities and crates of Fernet branca, Tony's favorite drink. It
Speaker 1: had chickens, dogs, cats, and a pet alpaca called Marley.
Speaker 1: A journalist described his experience of a night at airstream park.
Speaker 1: A bearded man was doing a handstand, A high school
Speaker 1: girl earl sang and played guitar. I saw Tony pick
Speaker 1: up a tambourine. I gathered that this idyllic scene was
Speaker 1: typical of life in Tony Shay's magical kingdom. Not every
Speaker 1: employee friend of Tony wanted to live in his trailer
Speaker 1: park id. Although Tyler Williams, who we met in the
Speaker 1: last episode, had grown close to Tony through his work
Speaker 1: as the fungineer at Zappo's, in charge of projects like
Speaker 1: the instant dance floor in the Zappo's lobby. Push a
Speaker 1: button labeled never push this button, and the lobby would
Speaker 1: pulster booming music, disco lights, and smoke from a smoke machine.
Speaker 1: Tyler was Tony's drinking buddy, but Tyler's wife said, no,
Speaker 1: We're not living in a trailer Tony wondered if Tyler's
Speaker 1: wife might like to work for him like other residents
Speaker 1: of the trailer park. No. Said. When Tony started to
Speaker 1: experiment with ketimin and got Tyler to take it with him,
Speaker 1: Tyler's wife told him to stop. I don't like who
Speaker 1: you are when you take that drug. She told Tyler,
Speaker 1: You're not the same Tyler that I know. Ketimin seemed
Speaker 1: to be changing Tony too. Tyler had access to Tony's
Speaker 1: Apple watchdata, and he could see that Tony hardly ever slept.
Speaker 1: Tony threw a party for a friend called Ryan, which
Speaker 1: involved Ryan being blindfolded bundled into a car handed a
Speaker 1: mysterious ice cold package and driven around Las Vegas before
Speaker 1: arriving at the party venue. The mysterious package turned out
Speaker 1: to be a frozen salmon. This all apparently made perfect
Speaker 1: sense to Tony, but not to anyone else. As Ryan
Speaker 1: put it to a fellow, guessed what the fuck is
Speaker 1: going on? An old flame visited Tony was shocked by
Speaker 1: what she found and begged him to get some sleep.
Speaker 1: When he insisted he was fine, she began to cry.
Speaker 1: The next morning, Tony showed her a wall of post
Speaker 1: it notes in his trailer. Each note had the name
Speaker 1: of a friend and a number from plus to minus three.
Speaker 1: You were a plus two till last night, Tony told her.
Speaker 1: Now you were a negative one point five. You were
Speaker 1: judging me, and I don't like to be judged. Tony
Speaker 1: needed help, but it was hard to tell him that.
Speaker 1: While remaining positive on his post it wall, Ryan of
Speaker 1: the Frozen Salmon had a try your CEO of Zappo's,
Speaker 1: he reminded Tony, and Zappos is owned by Amazon. You
Speaker 1: might think you can handle the drugs, but what if
Speaker 1: Amazon disagree? They could fire you. You don't want that.
Speaker 1: There's a rehab place in Park City. You like it there,
Speaker 1: You go to the Sundance Film Festival every year. Ryan
Speaker 1: was persistent and persuasive. Tony checked himself into rehab, but
Speaker 1: after less than two weeks he checked himself out again.
Speaker 1: This was, he decided, perfectly fine, but perhaps he had
Speaker 1: overlooked something. He asked Tyler to compile a list of
Speaker 1: the things that had made some of his friends think
Speaker 1: he needed rehab as we heard last time, like his
Speaker 1: ambition to become seven feet tall, recycle his urine inside
Speaker 1: his body, and solve world peace. He saw nothing on
Speaker 1: Tyler's list to worry about, but he decided that he
Speaker 1: wasn't going back to Vegas. Things hadn't been working out there,
Speaker 1: and he'd learned lessons. He would apply those lessons to
Speaker 1: build a new community in Park City. Cautionary tales will
Speaker 1: be back in a moment. Tony invited some of his
Speaker 1: friends to join him in Park City, not all of them,
Speaker 1: though not Frozen Salmon Ryan, for example, Ryan had manipulated
Speaker 1: him into going to rehab when there'd been nothing wrong
Speaker 1: with him. One lesson he had learned from Las Vegas
Speaker 1: was to cut off the people who tried to hold
Speaker 1: him back, Ryan was no longer welcome. It was early
Speaker 1: spring twenty twenty when Tony left rehab in the COVID lockdown.
Speaker 1: He seemed to thrive. He was drinking less. He seemed
Speaker 1: to be off the ketamin and the psychedelic mushrooms. He
Speaker 1: took long hikes in the mountains outside Park City. He
Speaker 1: looked fit and healthy, but he wasn't always making sense.
Speaker 1: He asked executives at Zappo's to abolish organizational calendars and
Speaker 1: instead get all employees into a collective state of flow.
Speaker 1: If they were all in the same flow state, he explained,
Speaker 1: they wouldn't need calendars. They just know where and when
Speaker 1: to turn up for meetings. As the lockdown east and
Speaker 1: restaurants reopened, Tony came up with a new idea called
Speaker 1: ten X. Participating restaurants in Park City would give members
Speaker 1: of the ten X scheme unlimited food and drink on Sundays.
Speaker 1: Tony would put the bill. Membership of ten X would
Speaker 1: cost just ten dollars. How could this possibly work for Tony?
Speaker 1: Everyone shrugged. He was a billionaire. He'd probably thought it through.
Speaker 1: Ten became Tony's watchword from his experience in Vegas. Tony
Speaker 1: had drawn the lesson that he hadn't been ambitious enough.
Speaker 1: Everything in Park City would be ten times bigger and
Speaker 1: happened ten times faster. Tony offered members of his entourage
Speaker 1: a ten percent commission for spending his money in the
Speaker 1: ways he asked. He started buying property in Park City.
Speaker 1: Whoever closed the deals for him got ten percent of
Speaker 1: the price. He started recruiting people to join his community,
Speaker 1: offering them a salary to well to do whatever they wanted,
Speaker 1: pretty much as long as they agreed to be happy.
Speaker 1: Whoever recruited these new community members would get ten percent
Speaker 1: of the salary Tony paid them. Tony bought a fleet
Speaker 1: of buses and asked an assistant to arrange a luxury makeover.
Speaker 1: It cost three point six eight million dollars. The assistant
Speaker 1: pocketed three hundred and sixty eight thousand dollars. In June,
Speaker 1: Tony invited some friends to go on a road trip
Speaker 1: in one of his luxury buses. Among them was Tyler Williams,
Speaker 1: who was still living in Las Vegas and working as
Speaker 1: the Zappo's fungineer. When Tyler arrived in Park City, he
Speaker 1: realized that he didn't know many of the people who
Speaker 1: now surrounded Tony. One of them, he learned, had only
Speaker 1: just met Tony and had immediately offered her ten million
Speaker 1: dollars to start a business, any business she liked. Tony
Speaker 1: got on the bus for the road trip wearing pajamas
Speaker 1: and carrying a box of crayons. He took a shower
Speaker 1: and stayed there till the water tank ran dry. He
Speaker 1: explained that they were all trapped in an Ai simulation
Speaker 1: and proposed that he breaked them free by setting fire
Speaker 1: to the bus with everyone inside. Then he asked for
Speaker 1: more mushrooms. After the bus trip, Tyler messaged Tony's dealer.
Speaker 1: Please don't sell Tony more drugs. He wrote, I know
Speaker 1: I can't match whatever Tony is offering, but I'll give
Speaker 1: you everything I have in this life. Tyler's phone pinged
Speaker 1: It was Tony, with a screen grab of Tyler's message
Speaker 1: to the dealer. The dealer had shared it with him.
Speaker 1: You went behind my back, said Tony. Tyler never heard
Speaker 1: from Tony again. In August twenty twenty, Tony invited the
Speaker 1: focusing a duel to visit his ranch in Park City.
Speaker 1: Tony had met Jewel a few years earlier at a
Speaker 1: retreat on the entrepreneur Richard Branson's private island. They'd become friends.
Speaker 1: Jewel found that Tony's ranch was filthy. Old food and
Speaker 1: dog feces littered the floor. Signs said not to clean up.
Speaker 1: Tony thought it was natural to leave trash lying around.
Speaker 1: Candles burned everywhere, dripping wax onto carpets and countertops. Tony
Speaker 1: had become fascinated by fire. All the taps were running
Speaker 1: in all the bathrooms. Tony liked the sound of running water.
Speaker 1: A surfboard was propped up against the window to Tony's room.
Speaker 1: Tony didn't like using doors. Jewel had met some of
Speaker 1: Tony's other friends in Las Vegas, but she didn't recognize
Speaker 1: anyone here. These people were new. Tony's doing great things.
Speaker 1: The new people told her, Tony's going through a creative metamorphosis.
Speaker 1: He's finding himself. Tony's a genius. Jewel found Tony sitting
Speaker 1: in underpants, surrounded by empty canisters of nitrous oxide. He
Speaker 1: looked thin and gaunt. He showed Jewel a post it
Speaker 1: note on which had scribbled some numbers. This, he said,
Speaker 1: is the algorithm for world peace. Jewel tried gently to
Speaker 1: engage Tony in conversation about a project she was working
Speaker 1: on a project about addiction. Tony told her, I'm the
Speaker 1: one percent of people people that can use these substances
Speaker 1: and they become good, they become a skill. He added,
Speaker 1: I've gotten rid of anybody who doubts what I'm doing.
Speaker 1: Jewel began to subtly interrogate everyone on Tony's ranch. What's
Speaker 1: your purpose here? Somebody assumed that Jewel must be after
Speaker 1: Tony's money and helpfully explained how to get it. Just
Speaker 1: write your project and a dollar amount on a post
Speaker 1: it note and ask Tony to sign it. Not too
Speaker 1: much or his lawyers might raise questions. Anything up to
Speaker 1: a couple of millions should be fine. Others took Jewel
Speaker 1: to a quiet corner and whispered, I want to help,
Speaker 1: but I don't know how I saw what happened to
Speaker 1: Ryan and to Tyler. Jewel had agreed to sing some
Speaker 1: of her hit songs for Tony and his guests. Who
Speaker 1: save your soul? She sang, if you won't save your own?
Speaker 1: Tony wasn't there to hear her. He'd stayed in his
Speaker 1: darkened room surrounded by candles. After her visit, Jewel couldn't
Speaker 1: get Tony to return her calls, so she wrote him
Speaker 1: a letter. She addressed it to someone at the ranch
Speaker 1: who she thought would make sure that Tony read it.
Speaker 1: He did. I am going to be blunt, Jewel wrote,
Speaker 1: I don't think you're well and in your right mind.
Speaker 1: The people you're surrounding yourself with are either ignorant or
Speaker 1: willing to be complicit in you killing yourself. If the
Speaker 1: world could see how you're living, they would not see
Speaker 1: you as a tech visionary. They would see you as
Speaker 1: a drug addicted man who's a cliche. Please get it's sober.
Speaker 1: I say this with love and as possibly the only
Speaker 1: person in your circle who is not on your payroll.
Speaker 1: It's a long letter, but Jewel could have summed it
Speaker 1: up in a line, who will save your soul if
Speaker 1: you won't save your own. Tony died three months later
Speaker 1: in November twenty twenty, in a fire. He was forty
Speaker 1: six years old. It's not completely clear what happened. He'd
Speaker 1: locked himself in a shed with nitrous oxide candles, post
Speaker 1: it notes, and a propane heater. By the time the
Speaker 1: fire brigade got the door down, Tony had inhaled too
Speaker 1: much smoke. Tony was killed by his addiction, but also
Speaker 1: by his ideas about community, connectedness and happiness. He'd thought
Speaker 1: he could make a community by gathering entrepreneurs in collisionable spaces.
Speaker 1: Then he'd thought he could pay people to surround him
Speaker 1: in Park City and feel connectedness that would make him happy.
Speaker 1: He hadn't understood that genuine connections arise obliquely. You could
Speaker 1: only put yourself in situations where that might happen and
Speaker 1: recognize if it does. Tony didn't recognize which kind of
Speaker 1: connections to cherish. The kind where you can speak the
Speaker 1: truth and hear the truth. The kind of connections Jody
Speaker 1: Sherman tried to find too late when he emailed other
Speaker 1: founders in Las Vegas. I find myself with no one
Speaker 1: to talk to about the challenges I might be facing,
Speaker 1: or the kind of connection Tyler Williams had with his
Speaker 1: wife when she told him, I don't like who you
Speaker 1: are on Ketamin. You're not the same Tyler that I know.
Speaker 1: And he listened and stopped. She knows who I am,
Speaker 1: Tyler later recalled, and she will check me. Tony had
Speaker 1: people who knew who he was and tried to check
Speaker 1: him like Jewel and Ryan and Tyler himself. Tyler later
Speaker 1: said that he often wonders if he hadn't had that
Speaker 1: connection with his wife, who would I be? Perhaps like
Speaker 1: Tony a drug addicted cliche. We all need someone who
Speaker 1: knows who we are, but they can only save our
Speaker 1: soul if we let them. Key sources for this episode
Speaker 1: were Happy at Any Cost, The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal
Speaker 1: Quest of Zappo's CEO Tony Shay by Katherine Sayre and
Speaker 1: Kurston grind and wander Boy Tony Shay, Zappo's and the
Speaker 1: Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley by angel O Young
Speaker 1: and David Janes. For a full list of sources, see
Speaker 1: the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is
Speaker 1: written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines,
Speaker 1: and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust.
Speaker 1: The sound design and original music are the work of
Speaker 1: Pascal Wise. Bend A. D Afhaffrey edited the scripts. It
Speaker 1: features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Genevieve Gaunt, Stella Harford,
Speaker 1: Messea Munroe, Jamal Westman, and rufus Wright. The show also
Speaker 1: wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
Speaker 1: Greta Cohne, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey,
Speaker 1: and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: If you like the show, please remember to share, rate,
Speaker 1: and review. It really does make a difference to us
Speaker 1: and if you want to hear it, add free and
Speaker 1: receive a bonus audio episode, video episode, and members only
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Speaker 1: sign up, head to patreon dot com slash Cautionary Club.
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