The Death of Tony Hsieh: A Spiral of Alcohol, Drugs and Extreme Behavior
wsj.com
wsj.com
I came away from that tour with two distinct impressions: 1 - Zappos had an amazing company culture; everyone seemed to get along and really enjoy their work. 2 - Tony Hsieh had a surprisingly large collection of half-empty liquor bottles at his desk.
Tony's death is certainly a tragedy for his family and the communities he helped build. I hope even during this pandemic we can all maintain those key relationships in life that keep us in check.
Not just Tony.
My best friend used to work at Zappos. He used to brag to me that every employee/team gets their own mini-fridge, which is stocked with booze and liquor. He said that a common "bonding" experience for different teams in the company is to exchange different types of liquor. This was in early 2010s.
He said drinking on the job is common, but going overboard is discouraged (for obvious reasons). But even he admitted that Zappos clearly understood that in order to attract customer service people to the company (headquartered in Las Vegas), being able to drink on the job, i.e. during the day, would be a great recruitment tool.
I thought it was very cynical, although it obviously worked out well for them. Too bad about Tony though, I hear he was a great guy.
That being said, a mini-fridge of booze _per-employee_ is pretty unusual.
That's not startup normal. Maybe having beer and liquor bottles in the kitchen or snack room or whatever but half empty bottles littering the CEO's desk and every employee or even every team having their own mini-fridge is odd.
I've worked at startups with a "drinking culture" and startups with a "board game culture" and I'll take the board game culture every time. Doesn't mean you can't let loose and drink, too - but drinking as the central activity quickly turns a business into a frat house. I do have some great memories celebrating milestones, new hires, etc with early stage coworkers :D
Alcohol use among high school seniors in the US is on the decline, so is use of any “illicit” drug. [1]
I’m no square, but this should be encouraged.
Young people already deal with stress of fitting in at a high-velocity workplace.
Modeling conspicuous substance consumption at work seems pretty backward to me.
Perhaps the most irresponsible illustration of this is Elon Musk who has made his substance use so overt I think it wrongly and perhaps dangerously couples using to entrepreneurial success.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/26/the-concern...
Sounds wholesome, but is probably just the symptom of people going out and socializing less, resulting in increased isolation and loneliness.
oh come off it, what substance abuse? he toked on a blunt on JRE once (clearly barely inhaled and even then, so what) and has a few bourbons with his brother on yearly retreats? please provide more info about this, because i've never, ever taken musk to be that sort of guy.
It becomes less and less cool as you age and realize you really gotta be careful not to go the same route.
There are very different degrees of what and how much to drink, it can be a socially responsible and enjoyable activity, it's relaxing to let go from the whole super-professional office culture and have a beer and cheers with colleagues.
The world isn't black-and-white.
Clearly there is more to alcohol than just impairment. Alcohol is both a stimulant and a sedative. It's widely recognized as a social lubricant. All of these properties, in moderation, can be beneficial to many kinds of work.
The situation with Tsieh is really sad and probably not a result of him being an alcoholic or drinking at work or anything else. Depression rates have tripled during the pandemic, and deaths are way up from overdose caused by people coping with isolation.
[1] https://pando.com/2016/01/19/delivering-hopelessness-38-zapp...
[1] https://ktla.com/news/local-news/riverside-county-sheriff-sl...
Further, by advocating for aggressive enforcement, you are also advocating for the ultimate super spreader event: filling jails with people that don’t belong there, where the virus already runs rampant. Most of these people would be booked in, get the virus, and then bail out or be released by a judge a few days later. Then, they would take the virus out into the community and spread it further.
These restrictions are a fun exercise in virtue signaling, but are impractical and actually enforcing them would increase the spread of the virus.
I don't know if I'd describe it as passively as "getting lost". Very visible people have been talking about it, including the outgoing President, who mentioned the mental health costs of lockdown multiple times. Leaving aside the fact that even true things that Trump says are discounted due to his lunacy, most people are too dim to understand the concept of trade-offs, so anything that gives "aid and comfort to the enemy" is systematically downplayed among most of those that are pro-Covid-restrictions (I say all of this as someone who think that restrictions have tragic costs but are necessary).
That is to say, the problem isn't that no one has thought of factoring this into decisions, it's that the discourse upstream of policy is driven largely by the majority of voters that don't actually care about pandemic policy as anything other than another wedge issue to fight pre-existing cultural/religious wars over.
Around the world, we’re talking about millions of grieving people who have lost parents, siblings, spouses, children, friends, coworkers, .... Millions more people who struggled to stay breathing and may now suffer severe long-term (or maybe permanent) symptoms. Health care workers around the world who will have PTSD from harrowing shifts treating an extremely high load of unbelievably sick people for month after month. Etc.
In places with significant community spread, people are rightfully afraid that anything they do around other people is exposing them to significant risk of severe illness or death. Even people who take every precaution sometimes turn up sick, and the sources can be hard to trace. Dealing with that for months is extremely stressful.
All while a significant part of the population continued to blithely party on as if their actions had no consequences, and “leaders” baldly lie about it day after day, month after month.
If we want people to return to normal life feeling free and safe, then controlling the virus must be the #1 priority. Indeed, in places where the virus was controlled via strong leadership and community solidarity, life is nearly back to normal; in places where leadership was absent, it will continue to be a horror show for many more months.
If it's the former, you should probably find some more reliable information sources. If it's the latter, truth and accuracy are a better counterpoint than taking the opposite extreme of misinformation.
Your response is a weird combination of vague and rude/patronizing. I’m not sure what your point is.
It will be hard to get a total estimate until at least a year or two after the pandemic is over, because even in developed countries death reporting can lag by up to a year (that’s leaving aside cause-of-death attribution). If you check back in a year or two WHO, CDC, etc. will have much better estimates for the total death toll in 2020, with (possibly wide) error bars you can largely trust.
Beyond that, this is weak pedantry about the definition of “millions”. People commonly use this plural to mean >1 million; we’re talking about the order of magnitude here, not the precise count.
Regular old respiratory infections are a frequent indirect cause of strokes and heart attacks, but we've never claimed before that common colds cause "millions" of deaths.
But, chances are that latter are more frequent. Covid tests are not done on all deaths precisely in places where situation is worst.
There is no such assumption. Read my post again: millions and millions of people died from the common cold before 2020. The media never reported those deaths as 'common cold deaths', though, even though it would have made just as much sense as reporting 'Covid deaths' does.
The official death toll in Germany from the 2017/2018 flu season is still higher than deaths from COVID-19 so far. And I suspect that if we used the same method for COVID-19 deaths that was used for the flu (indirect measurement), the flu of 2017/18 would surpass COVID-19 by far.
The method used to estimate flu deaths every year is far more expansive than the method used for confirmed Covid deaths.
One interesting thing to see is that the social reactions vs. Covid have radically reduced the amount of flu spread this year vs. previous years.
Two points:
a) 'Flu' is a different disease than respiratory viral diseases. (A.k.a. "common colds".) Covid is a kind of respiratory viral disease.
b) "Common colds" are also deadly and cause a huge number of deaths each year. They just get classified as deaths from stroke or heart attack, not the common cold: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=does%20the%20common%20...
So counting mortality rates is not a simple issue and depends a lot on cultural factors, political incentives, etc.
It'd really be halpful to frame with some kind of context. TB kills that many annually. To make matters worse, it's a curable disease, so these deaths are entirely unnecessary, but when was the last time you heard a peep about that? It's been raging for decades, and WHO is targeting 2030 as the end of it.
Thankfully all around the world people have taken significant steps to slow the virus down, and so hopefully the vaccine will arrive in time to save tens of millions.
I am happy to agree with you that humanity could do a whole lot more to prevent deaths from infectious diseases, including tuberculosis.
Your link estimates the Covid IFR in the USA to be about 0.6%, compared to e.g. 0.4% for China where the population skews younger or 0.8–1.1% for several European countries and Japan where the population skews older.
https://www.cdc.gov/library/covid19/images/november2020/1124...
I’m somewhat suspicious about the numbers for lower-income countries though. In Mexico for example Covid deaths have been grossly undercounted. These kind of high-level estimates are hard to do reliably when they are built on poor-quality low-level data.
I don’t know why you are pretending that “good medical care” (by which I mean, the average in a typical developed country with a well funded medical system that has not yet been completely overwhelmed; as compared to the “poor” level of care available in many developing countries or in places where hospitals are collapsing) is equivalent to “exceptional treatment”. I don’t know what you mean by “exceptional treatment”, but your link says nothing about it.
There have been a large number of estimates of IFR, and they consistently range from about 0.4% to about 1.5%, mostly toward the middle of that range. Judging by the best current science, the 0.5% number I used is probably a slight underestimate, but it is at at any rate in the right ballpark.
If you e.g. guess the actual number of deaths in absence of any countermeasures would be more like 10–20 million instead of the range I gave of 15–50 million, that seems plausible enough (though I stand by my estimate). It’s a counterfactual in any case, since in practice extreme countermeasures were adopted in many parts of the world.
But, the way this control has been achieved is that the US and many other rich countries require anyone applying to immigrate (and many people not applying to immigrate, if they are from a risky country) to be screened for TB and be treated successfully before they are allowed to enter the country (with some waivers where treatment is unlikely to be available where they are). On top of all these border controls, at least $100 million is spent specifically on TB just inside the US every year, in order to keep the number of annual cases down somewhere around 10,000. Until 2019 healthcare professionals in the USA were required to be screened for TB every year. People in America who do contract active TB disease are required to take medication daily, personally supervised by a healthcare professional, for six months - to make sure they do it correctly.
And all this is only possible because TB takes a pretty significant amount of contact to spread, and there's a detectable latent stage (sometimes lasting an entire lifetime) of infection before it becomes contagious - neither of which is true with covid.
Show me the 3 million excess deaths, before you continue with the alarmism.
If you have let’s say two years left to life and COVID ends up finishing you off, that’s a death due to COVID.
And what if somebody has only one month to live, and dies with Covid, also a death from Covid? Maybe yes, but really worthy of hyperbole then?
My grandmother died from the flu, at 99 years old. I never felt I should blame her death on the flu pandemic, though.
If I remember right, the authors estimated the scenario as:
* Project 500K-750K excess deaths in the US until mass vaccine availability based on current public health practices (conservative/linear, ignoring exponentials involved)
* Someone dying generally has ~10 people close to them => half will experience ~depression for 1mo, 1 quarter for 2mo
* Something like 10-20% will have severe forms (major/ptsd/..)
* So something like 3 million people across all of above
That's a lot. Not quite as high as # of addicts in the US afaict, but up there. I could have easily got parts wrong, so worth going to the interview+article if you're truly interested.
They also have some articles on depression in elderly and other groups being especially impacted right now. Pretty real.
The load of sick people is also not exceptionally high, at least not in the intensive wards (don't have data for normal hospitalizations).
Here in Germany we have daily updates on the number of ICUs in use. It shows Covid is only a fraction of the patients, even now only 10% despite of soaring infection numbers.
https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/kartenansich...
If you can read German here is a source for Berlin: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/zu-viele-corona-patienten...
TLDR is only 85% of the beds are full, but there aren't enough nurses, so the emergency room will be closed. Several other hospitals in Berlin already stopped admitting new ICU patients.
https://www.welt.de/regionales/bayern/article161869919/Klini...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333785335_Managemen...
And if it is really such a limiting factor, the statistics should be adjusted accordingly.
I think it is just a wildcard argument without any specific numbers. You can imagine whatever you like. How many nurses are available? How many are sick, specifically?
Also, sick nurses tend to be well again after two weeks (if they have Covid).
Optimal rate depends on the country, but about 75% is typical.
In general it makes sense to use existing ICU beds at capacity (or slightly below), to, you know, make use of them.
Surely you could also still adjust by delaying surgical procedures that are not urgent, if things would get worse.
As for nurses working overtime, do you have any data for that? Quoting some individual hospital managers warning of "possible collapse" is not really evidence. They can also be politically motivated ("see, we really need more money for our ICU section"). You can also find individual hospital managers saying everything is fine.
If you live someplace like South Dakota with grossly irresponsible leaders at every level of government, this is probably true.
If you live somewhere with decisive and responsible leadership like South Korea, New Zealand, Finland (among many successful countries around the world, rich and poor), or Vermont, then probably not.
Notice that multiple effective vaccines are here. We just need to hold out through this winter, so that production can spin up enough to start getting a substantial proportion of the population vaccinated.
Empirically, SARS-CoV-2 mutates much more slowly than influenza viruses, and if a new strain eventually pops up that the vaccine and people’s antibodies do not work on, the current vaccines should be faster to modify than to recreate from scratch.
In my country there is no clear distinction of what type of people make up the crowd which is "still" socializing. While you get some pockets of conspiracy theorists, covid-deniers, mixed with conservative or right-wing elements, the left, or even politically abstinent are also there. It doesn't make them all abnormal people. There are some who I have perfectly communicated before the pandemic. But the pandemic has made many people mentally struggle (without a need to lump them all together into "abnormal").
My guess is those who have already been (mentally) vulnerable are now even more so because the world around them is becoming even more depressive/depressed. It's not that there are only abnormal people left who to socialize with. It's because many just die because they were anyway hanging on to a bare minimum before. It doesn't require the presence of "abnormal" people to kill them. It's enough when a support structure that they previously had (a friend, a source of fund/support, etc) simply breaks away. it's not an addition that hurts them but something that is taken away. (so it's actually less complicated/complex/conspirational and more ugly/sad as to why this happens)
The point I'd meant to make is that some people have 60-70% of their connection to eccentrics, online communities, etc. But they typically also have some contacts with work, from seeing family, when traveling, or chit-chatting with people at the store. Suddenly all of these other contacts are gone or much less frequent.
And the "normal" people you talk to are, as you say, depressed and much less normal.
I'm certainly in this boat to some extent.
I think it would be arguably reasonable for someone like this to socialise right now. The risk is lower than the flu of any complications. The only reason you are being locked down right now is because we have decided governments need to enforce lockdowns on everyone, rather than individuals deciding what's responsible.
I don't think you need to be super crazy, or a covid denier, in the case above, to carry on living your normal life.
The other element of this that's highly questionable is the claim that "the risk is lower than the flu of any complications". I'm really not sure this is actually true; a significant portion of people seem to be COVID "long-haulers". Even if you're not, maybe some of those other people you're socializing with might turn out to have those risk factors.
...and how many new addicts and mental illnesses are being created
quarantine and flattening the curve is important imo, but the way governments go about it is not. there needs to be a parallel campaign educating people about the effects of quarantine - which are well researched. Also I highly recommend reading up on the psychological effects incarceration has on felons.
Quarantined people aren't prisoners but there are parallels due to effects of isolation. Every re-socializing attempt of a prisoner even in the most "progressive" manner, has at its core idea to _first_ rob that person of their own agency.
Isolation opens up minds to new ideas and to cause them question everything. What minds are being fed in such a state is absolutely crucial to how they're reorienting themselves and what they latch on-to. Isolation breaks everyone except the hardest psychopaths, which is why it's used in every society (since earliest civilizations) as an instrument of control.
This lancet research paper isn't talking about felons but there are some hard to ignore parallels, maybe this is why politicians avoid the subject.
Although we have some subset of the US population that rebels against being educated. And many others who simply don't have the time, or interest, or intellectual curiousity. We get our education from social media.
Until recently, I'd it was pretty clear that Sweden (no lock-downs) and the US (many lockdowns of varying length and enforcment) have suffered the same per capita fatality rate.
It's really not lost at all. Most people know about the secondary effects of the lockdown. Loss of jobs, loss of schooling, mental health effects. It's all front and center.
The math is simple. Without lockdowns, millions die, so we lockdown to some degree.
It's not that government officials are enacting lockdowns in a callous disregard of their negative effects, we simply have no other sane choice.
It is sad that Tony Hsieh didn’t get the help that he needed and instead tried to self medicate in order to get away from all that. This recurrent story where extremely intelligent people are battling mental health issues and cannot speak out because the stigma behind this issue is too damaging is why we need to normalize the discourse around mental health if we want to avoid this type of tragedies. I’m not actively suffering (and am not as bright as Tony) but had some bouts of depression and hypomania in the past and know how afraid I was to let anyone official (eg. at work, school) know about my suffering because once out it always trails you like a cloud and will always deem you inferior to others. Luckily I was able to escape the black hole and have been good and calm for about 10 years and learned to never slip into that again. But there’s a remnant fear of a possibility of going back to it. Along with that there is the fear of falling begind, loosing job, becoming isolated and homelessness. This fear is clearly exacerbated in the US where one or a few slip-ups turns everything into an ever accelerating down-spiral. Tony had so much more to loose as his cliff was much higher than an ordinary person. He could have seeked professional help and he probably did but too late in the game. Had we not have this stigma around, he and others could get the help early on when much more could be done.
Self-medication with drugs works temporarily but its abuse is clearly a quick path to compelte madness and early death. I personally stay away from drugs except from an ocasional puff of weed, the once a decade or two experience with LSD and the weekend bottle of beer.
Rest in peace Tony, you will be missed
Where exactly is the "stigma" of mental health in tech nowadays? We're blasted day and night to the point where apparently every other person is "battling mental health issues".
Maybe there's a deeper issue here than "stigma" and seeing overpriced therapists.
HR is often a great example of how fucked it all is. (Good humane HR is rare)
I mean hell, it’s tough enough being sentient and dealing with mortality, throw in social issues, politics, propaganda, conspiracies, lack of health care, lack of social safety nets, caring for dependents, dating, paying bills, social media, “Instagram culture,” and a god damn pandemic. It’s rough out there.
It’s like, “I can’t pay my mortgage and I don’t where my family will live, but Grandpa was a POW in Nam, so no worries!”
Modern society is the easiest society that has ever existed. And that's true nearly world-wide. People have never been better off or worked fewer hours at the median. In modern - affluent - society, it's that people have become soft, weak, fragile. The times are not harder, they're easier. People in affluent nations have never been more coddled and protected.
What demands are you talking about? Influencers pressuring people to have whiter smiles on Instagram or better abs on TikTok? Someone getting their feelings hurt on Facebook?
In the US things were dramatically worse for the bottom 1/2 as recently as the 1970s and earlier. Look up the poverty and hunger rates/issues in the US across the century from 1870-1970. It was barbaric compared to now. The same is true for violent crime, homelessness, and so on. The past 30-40 years have been amazing compared to the past and that holds true for the most of the world. In affluent nations you have a vast number of exceptionally spoiled people that have known very little suffering.
>What demands are you talking about? Influencers pressuring people to have whiter smiles on Instagram or better abs on TikTok? Someone getting their feelings hurt on Facebook?
Getting a college degree is stressful and many people quit. Choosing the right one is also a challenge in it's own right. If you fail at this you will be in debt and lost an opportunity to join the workforce early. Current monetary policies are basically extremely pro business at the expense of workers (current first world economies are fundamentally flawed and 2008 just made it obvious). A lot of people have poor employment options through no fault of their own. They are simply declared unneeded because of how the economy is structured.
It's easier to survive but it's much harder to stay sane.
This isn't a mental health crisis. Westerners are just babies.
I tend to agree that the issue isn’t discourse, but that Discourse alone won’t fix the problem.
You seem to have a particularly skeptical view though doubting stigma and casting doubt into therapy as well. Your comment is actually a perfect example of stigma.
I’ve struggled with anxiety before and saw a therapist for a while and benefited greatly from it. It was expensive, sure, but not over priced. Less hourly than I make.
I didn’t really talk about it much at work, but I am open about it now.
On top of that, there are less stigma towards certain aspects of mental health and more towards others. I believe anxiety, like I mentioned for myself, is becoming a more commonly discussed topic, but depression or bipolar, for example, still carry stigma that push people into facing these things alone.
I think the help that may be missing is friends who are "lovingly firm" with him sooner. But it's easy to assume a billionaire is going to be fine and "tony is just being tony".
I read his book "Delivering Happiness" after I heard about his death and before reading this article about mental health problems. As I read it I saw some interesting stories and ideas about the businesses that he built but I also read stories which put way too much focus (imho) on various nights and parties which don't really relate to entrepreneurship or business. The first thing that popped into my mind is depression, drugs and alcohol overuse.
To some extend, but startup events generally combine exactly those things (without the drugs, depending on where it is).
“Work hard, party hard” is an extremely common aspect of startup culture. I personally suspect that startups tend to draw in risk takers, which explains the prevalence of over-drinking in many (but not all) startups.
I mean, I avoided drinking near to some specific individuals (I am woman), but I perceived those individuals to be unsafe. Drinking itself did not constituted risk taking for me.
I mean, some of abstinents who are strongly against alcohol sometimes do. As an attempt to make others stop drinking. And given that the drinking is normalized, they are small minority. I mean, they are small minority of abstinent too. Most abstinents are kind of content when no one is trying to force them to drink.
Drinking is normal in your culture —> drinking is not risky in your culture ?
This is patently false; drinking carries risks in any context, perhaps even moreso in environments which fail to recognize its potential for harm
It does not really matter how much risk it "objectively" puts you through. It attracts risk takers only if people consider it risky.
Also, I’m an American, and I’m largely commenting on both American culture and American startup culture; both of which I’ve participated in. My observations about this are relevant for Zappos, a startup based out of Las Vegas, but might not be relevant for say EPAM in Minsk.
It's risk taking because over-drinking is by definition going over your limits with alcohol and I assume we all know the behaviours that this can bring with.
Same. A shadow story that eclipses the text.
"Delivering Happiness" is explicitly about delivering happiness. The subtext or implicit story is about someone who could not find happiness for himself. It's worth re-reading in the context of his passing. RIP.
“When you look around and realize that every single person around you is on your payroll, then you are in trouble." [1]
Not only in this particular tragedy, these are words to live by in general. We all need some neutral people around to provide an unbiased perspective so that we can make informed decisions.
[1] https://people.com/music/jewel-wrote-to-tony-hsieh-before-hi...
I'm curious if this was an intentional choice or a sign the website has been on cruise control since the acquisition. It certainly makes me wonder what Hsieh was doing as CEO as late as this summer either way, which is to say while he was certainly a pioneer in the 2000s I'm not sure what about Zappos in the 10+ years post-acquisition feels cutting edge.
He was probably happy to stay at Zappos as long as it made him feel good. He didn't actually need to be good at business anymore because Amazon was running the show. After leaving, he decamped to Park City and paid former colleagues to join him there, to continue the party, because that is what Zappos leadership had become by that point: a party free from the daily duties and concerns of running a company that needed to succeed in the market in order to survive.
One of my friends has been spiraling out of control for the past few months. I have tried and tried to help them. I'm going to keep trying.
"A nitrous oxide engine is an internal combustion engine in which oxygen for burning the fuel comes from the decomposition of nitrous oxide, N2O, rather than air. The system increases the engine's power output by allowing fuel to be burned at a higher-than-normal rate, because of the higher partial pressure of oxygen injected with the fuel mixture."
N2O is typically used with a normally aspirated gasoline engine. It's just another way to get more oxygen into the combustion chamber.
Does mean you have to refill a water tank too, but it also lets you get more power without producing any more NOx, which are bad for both the environment and people.
https://www.villagevoice.com/2010/07/06/inside-the-nitrous-m...
But that’s much harder to come by for most people.
The small whippets cartridges... you’re paying for the steel, getting a gas in there and markups. If they filled it with room air, it would cost the same.
Do I understand: if you're on a whippet bender you have to do a thing every 30 seconds ?
It seems like that would interrupt and greatly diminish whatever pleasurable effects the substance was giving you ... in fact, it sounds somewhat stressful ...
This has probably saved a lot of lives, tbh. It's hard to suffocate yourself if doing so requires motor skills.
The idea is that the patient can self-administer, but if they over do it, they get too messed up to operate the thing until it wears off again.
Glad you're still with us.
Steve-O Demise & Rise [MTV Special]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1ulzP2XUOg
While that was in a clinical setting, it can be quick if you’re already at risk.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
She's pretty credible.
It’s terrible that someone who seemed like a genuinely kind person ended up surrounded by sycophants taking advantage of his wealth and encouraging his drug issues.
"I am going to be blunt," she wrote in the letter, obtained by Forbes. "I need to tell you that I don’t think you are well and in your right mind. I think you are taking too many drugs that cause you to disassociate.
“Jewel reportedly told Hsieh in the note that "people you are surrounding yourself with are either ignorant or willing to be complicit in you killing yourself.
“When you look around and realize that every single person around you is on your payroll, then you are in trouble," Jewel wrote, according to Forbes.
“You are in trouble, Tony.”
She was right.
A lot of us I imagine wanted to be in Tony's position, yet would you still want to be him with how it all went down? His mega-wealth and fame of wealth seem to be his un-doing.
Yes. A lot of people who don't have this type of success like to discredit the lives of those that do in order to protect their self-image. On average, wealth and status increase your quality of life.
I do think there's a lesson to be learned here about the problems that come with wealth and status. To dismiss the net benefits of wealth and status is the wrong lesson.
I was captivated when she described hearing Tony describe his vision for Holocracy, I finally understood what he was aiming for.
I'll never forget at my first friend's funeral when his mother said during the eulogy "My son was a drug addict." It was so heartbreaking but so important to speak the truth and be open about it in order to pay respect to him and call out for action so that more mom's don't have to make that speech.
She did not bury the truth and "wait out of respect", she confronted it head on. If she can do that and do it in a positive way then I think an Internet forum could do it too. The truth is it seems if it weren't for a few of Tony's friends sharing the whole story, the truth may have been buried and many more may have gone down that path.
EDIT: and usual hint, the most reliable way to get an answer from dang is emailing him.
I don't have any special insight, but FWIW: situations like this are inevitably messy. People want different things (e.g. the social standard about not speaking ill of the dead vs. curiosity to know the truth or share inside information) and they do different things (e.g. use of throwaway accounts to share sensitive true information vs. to post rumors or lies). How all that adds up is impossible to be certain about, and people will strongly disagree. It's intrinsically conflictual and I don't think we can impose simple rules on it. For example: HN is a watercooler site and it's natural for people to wonder what really happened and want to talk about it; and at the same time, that sort of internet thread can run amok and do harm surprisingly quickly.
In my experience, that sort of throwaway account (but there are many sorts—let's not overgeneralize) is usually reporting something true, though perhaps biased. But "usually" is still far from certain. If we'd known that it was likely false we'd have left the comment flagkilled, but in this case it felt likely true, so I unkilled it, but left [flagged] on as a marker of community discontent. To anyone who objects "who the hell are you to make calls about 'feels', 'likely', 'true' or 'false'", I can only completely agree.
p.s. Here's what I replied to a user who emailed about it a few days ago:
"I've unkilled the comment but left it [flagged]. I think that's the right balance.
Posts like that are usually authentic, in my experience. Not to say that people don't make shit up on the internet—they certainly do—but one can usually 'smell' the difference somehow.
Of course the fact that it's true doesn't make it an appropriate comment, but I think [flagged] is enough of a marker to indicate that, and to let people decide for themselves.
It's a tragic story in any case."
If you look at the academic research on rumors, most rumors are apparently fairly accurate. That's why they spread so quickly. E.g.: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/009102609001900...
As far as I can tell, they were correct but not credible: they did not provide sources in the comment, and it was basically left to be evaluated in a vacuum.
(For context: I did not down vote or flag that comment.)
You just compared an Internet forum to a grieving mother.
Not the right comparison by a longshot.
Allowing a publication run by professional journalists ( they follow a code of ethics) to share news is slightly better than internet forum participants to share their opinions on such a sensitive topic.
But that being said, I agree there are lots of bad ways to handle this sort of thing on public forums (see numerous Reddit failures). But there’s gotta be something better and more positive than to bury the truth.
They were not sharing opinions they were sharing the facts.
And I guarantee you way more people were alerted to the truth in those well-researched and deeply reported articles than ever would have learned from a throwaway account on HN.
If the family had actively tried to halt publication of the articles or if there hadn’t been reporting into the cause of death, I would agree with you. But that isn’t what happened. Moreover, the reporting that did come out, even from the tabloid, added a lot more context and insight into the situation than what the burner account did. And even better, plenty of people were willing to put their name to their words (though you had people who were quoted anonymously too, which isn’t uncommon).
I got downvoted for calling that commenter and his comment gross - and I’ll probably get downvoted for this comment too — but the fact that unsubstantiated gossip happened to be true (which I personally didn’t so much doubt to begin with as much as it was I didn’t trust it without substantiation; my objection was how that information was shared) doesn’t change the other fact that the way it was presented was in poor form.
I’m in complete favor of being open and honest about the fact that people who we admire and respect or hold up as successful can struggle with addiction or mental illness. I think it is incredibly important to lessen the stigma around these areas.
But it is incredibly different for a mother to bravely and honestly declare that her son was an addict at his funeral then it is for a burner account to say “bro blew himself up while he was high on nitrous” (that’s a paraphrase, the original comment wasn’t as blasé but it certainly wasn’t full of either details or compassion). People are going to gossip and speculate on Internet forums, I get it. I’ve also definitely participated in it. But I don’t think it is too much to ask that as a community, HN be held to a higher standard of spreading anonymous gossip, than a place like Twitter or Reddit.
I was called "lazy" for much of my life. Then I was diagnosed with a genetic disorder and people finally understood I wasn't lazy. I just didn't have the energy other people had.
Everyone knows addiction is extremely hard to quit, yet being an addict remains stigmatizing and the addict is routinely treated in a blamey way for their failure to quit.
Specific outcomes also tend to have a circumstancial component. When a family has a "badly behaving" teenager, they typically blame the teen. But family therapists typically see a misbehaving minor as the presenting problem and wonder what is going on in the social fabric of the individual that is creating this outcome.
None of us entirely has control over our own lives and our own actions. We have some input, but we always have constraints on us.
Explanations that fall inside the Overton Window will be latched onto quickly. This can boil down to victim blaming rather than trying to understand with some compassion how and why things went wrong.
I'm all for personal responsibility, but that really has nothing to do with my point at all.
Sorry to be daft ... in the prior HN discussion, which you linked to, people spoke of "nitrous ... and a candle obsession" ... candles are mentioned several times ...
Is that a euphemism ? Or is there some connection in nitrous usage ?
Or is it, simply, he really liked burning literal candles ?
I also met someone who grew up with him, he said that Tony was always looking at everything with an entrepreneurial eye. Anything and everything would be a business, even bringing in a grill to sell burgers to his class mates at lunch.
Big loss of a visionary.
See:
> it's ok [...] to help other users do so.
In which category does an archive.is link fall more, complaint or help?
But I also find that I get taken to a blank screen after solving captcha and need to submit the link I’m trying to archive and won’t get the captcha again.
Maybe archive.is is forwarding us the captcha that is being requesting by the site to-be-archived and can’t do it as a seamless workflow?
The reason I am saying this is because I worked in a startup which tried posturing like Zappos- flat hierarchy, no cabins, boozing, chilling et al, while being run by a cynic CEO. The startup failed badly so this cool culture never got the limelight but my hunch is that if they had raised enough money and survived another 5 years somebody would have included them in their book or dissertation.
I don’t know the financials pre-acquisition but I remember reading they had an excellent repeat purchase rate. Just the fact that they made shoe selling work online, in the first place, was also success as those were not considered viable ECommerce products in the first few years of Zappos’ existence.
Disclaimer- Nothing against Tony Hsieh. I am sure he is a good person as I have rarely heard anything other than nice stuff about him.
"“Ultimately happiness is really just about enjoying life,” he wrote in the 2010 book..."
This is often what you hear from someone who has doesn't have much of a sense of higher calling, or doesn't quite know what to do with his capabilities other than go for satisfaction in the short term. And leaves you feeling empty and unsure of what your life should be when work evaporates as your sense of self?
Having come from a similar background, where the childhood abuse was real and looking back on my life I realize how much of my stress to succeed and achieve was really an attempt to appease/show up my parents. Addiction to work and "bad" habits was all a part of the response to that childhood abuse.
Like I wrote in one of my tweets [1], Gabor Mate's work has helped me to see and work towards reworking my relationship to stress.
It's unfortunate that Gabor Mate's work isn't part of our conversion around addiction, stress, crime and suicide.
Think of all the new things you'd try to fill out days where you don't know many foods that start with that letter. And the days that are mostly fasting (e.g. Z) aren't too common.
Plenty of us are a little weird. I guess something to think about is where do you know the "little weird" is treading towards excessive danger.
This is way beyond that. People don't huff nitrous oxide 12 times a day, every day, unless something is very wrong.
I guess they could have been a particularly overzealous cakemaker.
I'm just jesting. But more seriously, I think a lot of people think I'm pretty weird. And if I'd developed a nitrous habit they'd not necessarily know. How does my family differentiate between my normal eccentricity and if I go off the deep end one day?
You could eat ziti with zucchini!
Options I hadn't heard of before -- Slavic savories
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapiekanka
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zakuski
and Italian desserts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zabaione
And yes, it seems there are a lot of Z options :D
What about all the other 'driven' founders who have the means to enable their self-destructive behaviour? What about everybody else? What can and should be done?
Do we want to get something done at all? The forces that made him build Zappos and motivated him to clean up down-town Las Vegas, aren't they the same as the ones that let to his sad ending? Are deaths like this the price for civilization to thrive?
Yeah, uhhh, I’m sure a lot of us here could benefit from a digital detox, but unless the plan also includes “go to australia”, this doesn’t seem like the right year for this advice.
If you were online you could order anything you want.
We never found it.
He was locked in an external shed that caught on fire, not sure "house fire" is an appropriate description?
Sounds like he was rebelling hardcore against an overly restrictive, maybe typical (?), 1st generation immigrant parent background?
"Ultimately happiness is really just about enjoying life,” he wrote in the 2010 book..."
This is often what you hear from someone who has doesn't have much of a sense of higher calling, or doesn't quite know what to do with his capabilities other than go for satisfaction in the short term. And leaves you feeling empty and unsure of what your life should be when work evaporates as your sense of self?
Some may argue that doing so will result in "positive change" for others but the same is possible without attaching the identity of a person that died by alcohol, drugs and extreme behaviour as the title puts it.
People oddly value anonymity & privacy but disregard it when a person dies.
edit: ah yes, the downvotes without comments for why you disagree is the evolution of hackernews (another echo chamber).