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Choose from a great selection of digital coupons and use them up to five times in one transaction. Check our app for details. Ralph's. Fresh for Everyone. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in ten years or less.

My name is Josh Rasheeds. I am your host. Today I want to share with you a story. A story that is both inspirational and also devastatingly sad. The story is about Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos, and today there is a new book being released on his life. The book is entitled "Wonder Boy, Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley." From the book blurb on the promotional book blurb, we read, "In 1998, at the age of 24, Tony Hsieh sold his first company to Microsoft for $265 million.

In 2009, at the age of 35, he sold his e-commerce company, Zappos, to Amazon for $1.2 billion. In 2020, at the age of 46, he died. Tony Hsieh revolutionized both the tech world and corporate culture. He was a business visionary. He was also a man in search of happiness.

So why did it all go so wrong?" I have not yet read this book. I am planning on reading it very soon. But I wanted to share with you the text of an article that was released as part of the promotional tour. The article was released on Forbes in the last day or two.

Because I have found this saga of Tony Hsieh's life to be one of the most compelling and gripping of the modern day. In history, we go back and we study the stories of Howard Hughes and other weirdos who have amassed great wealth. But sometimes I find it hard to relate to them.

But in the modern day, we have an example of someone like Tony Hsieh. And this story, again, is incredible. Because Tony Hsieh's company that he built was amazing. I used to order from Zappos. I loved it. It was a wonderful place to shop for shoes. And when he sold it to Amazon, he became a billionaire practically overnight.

And yet, what happened after was quite, quite stunning. Let me read to you some portions from this article published in Forbes. This is an excerpt from the book Wonderboy, published as part of the promotional tour for the new book released today. "When Zappos' charismatic CEO died at 46 in 2020 after a mysterious fire, it was revealed by Forbes to be drug-related.

But his self-destructive spiral was evident months earlier in the utopian community he tried to build in Park City, Utah. In this exclusive excerpt from Wonderboy, Hsieh began paying millions of dollars to a sycophantic circle of acolytes in a desperate attempt to deliver him happiness during the last weeks of his life." Tony Hsieh's family had already come and gone by the time the 46-year-old Zappos CEO had bought a ranch in Park City, Utah.

After a manic episode and a subsequent hospital stay in June 2020, his parents had arrived in town with his two brothers, Dave and Andy. Despite their arrival, Tony spent little time with them and asked friends to ensure that he would never be left alone with them. In the moments Hsieh did spend with his family, he left them struggling to connect with him.

During one moment with his mother, Judy, he said he would be open with her if she would act like his friend. If she acted like a family member, then he would hide information from her. After Judy told him that he needed to see a therapist, he said he would, but only if, for every minute he was in therapy, she would sit in an ice bath.

When she pressed the therapy point once more, mentioning his issues with attention, Tony left the house in a rage. When it came time for the family to depart, Andy thought twice about leaving. Despite their distance over the years, seeing a swirl of new people he had never met before made him want to stay in Park City and keep an eye on his older brother.

Ten days later, he returned and quickly realized that he had entered an ecosystem where people were competing for Tony's money, pitching projects that didn't make sense and living in houses they would never be able to afford otherwise. And there was a rule that ominously dictated many behaviors in the Park City enclave.

Never tell Tony you were concerned about his behavior. To do so meant risking excommunication. One solution Andy came up with was to bring in people he could trust to watch after Tony. As it happened, Andy knew that his brother had wanted to work with their longtime friend Tony Lee for a while.

Lee had spearheaded Wells Fargo's loans to Zappos in 2003 when the company was close to bankruptcy. Since then, Lee had worked at a number of smaller banks before settling in Texas to manage the finances of the Bass family, the oil dynasty worth more than $5 billion. Lee and Andy had remained close friends over the years.

Andy had asked him to be the best man at his wedding before it was cancelled. Now, at a time when his brother's spending was spinning out of control, Andy figured they could benefit from a professional financial manager to conduct some due diligence. Lee was reluctant to entertain the idea of uprooting his life in Texas and to leave a comfortable job to join the mania of Tony Hsieh's world, but he agreed to a meeting.

During a dinner in late July at a restaurant on Main Street, Hsieh told him that he was turning Park City into a community similar to the one he had built in downtown Las Vegas a few years earlier, but better. Lee's role would involve overseeing all finances in the Park City ventures.

As he had done with others, Hsieh offered to pay double Lee's current salary, which meant he would be earning $1.5 million a year. Sensing Lee's hesitancy, Hsieh turned to one of the people at the dinner and suggested that if he could convince Lee to stay, he would receive a 10% commission, or $150,000.

After dinner, Andy pulled Lee aside. Coming to Park City made sense for multiple reasons, he explained. With Lee overseeing the finances, he could also help weed out people who were taking advantage of his brother. Andy's request came with a sense of urgency, as funds had been hemorrhaging from Tony's accounts for many months.

If people had concerns about taking money from a man drifting further from reality due to excessive drug use and other erratic behavior, few had seemed to consider the Faustian bargain they were entering, an oversight that took vivid form when Hsieh found another destructive fascination. In the weeks following his release from the hospital, Hsieh had become focused on the study of biohacking to increase his personal output.

He became convinced that inhaling nitrous oxide was a way to heighten his blood oxygen levels and eliminate the need for sleep. Better known as "laughing gas" for its use at dental offices, nitrous oxide is commercially available as an everyday kitchen item. The cartridge is used in whipped cream machines, known as "whippets".

While it's illegal to "inhale" the gas, the practice has been popular for decades among teenagers who can't legally buy alcohol and festival revelers seeking a cheap, quick high. But the brain can only handle so much. Excessive nitrous oxide use can lead to brain damage, and some teenagers have died from chemical asphyxiation.

In between cigarettes, Hsieh was inhaling from "whippet" canisters like he was drinking water from a bottle. By one estimate, he was using more than 50 a day. His near-constant stream of nitrous oxide prompted strange behavior. One time, he stepped on glass, cut his foot, and walked around the Park City ranch leaving streaks of blood on the floor, a trail, he said, that would make it easy to find him.

On another occasion, he tried depriving himself of food and water to eliminate the need to use the bathroom. Over time, his physical appearance changed, and his weight fell below 100 pounds, leaving his frame looking skeletal. At one point, paranoia also took hold, and Hsieh was convinced one morning that a Zappos executive named Tyler Williams was in town, trying to stage an intervention.

The scare prompted him to hire a legion of black-clothed security guards to form a human perimeter around the ranch. Visitors who came to see Hsieh encountered guards in different wings of the property, as if they were entering a fortified estate. When Hsieh was initially seen at mealtimes and held meetings in various rooms of the ranch to discuss the stream of projects being pitched to him, he gradually started spending more time in his bedroom, and would hold court while sitting in bed, surrounded by nitrous oxide canisters.

"His room looked like a homeless shelter," his brother Andy said later. "There was feces on the ground, plants in his toilets, broken glass, broken plates all over the ground, rotten food under the bed, rotten food on the walls. It was disgusting." His spiral with nitrous oxide came at a time when people were finding new ways to spend his money, and Hsieh seemed all too willing to spend himself broke thanks to a nonsensical incentive scheme he had devised called 10X.

The first iteration of 10X launched with a noble goal—to help Park City reopen amid the pandemic. The plan was to walk around downtown and sell $10 memberships to people, granting them an all-you-can-eat-and-drink pass to local restaurants. Participants were given t-shirts and merchandise with a 10X logo. It might have sounded charitable, given that the venture made no financial sense, but the state of Utah took issue with running an open bar tab on an entire town and shut down the program after its second week.

But the philosophy of 10X remained and morphed into something else over the summer when Hsieh began demanding that everything be achieved in multiples of 10—10 times faster, 10 times bigger, 10 times more. In addition to offering new arrivals, double-your-best-salary deals, he vowed that anyone who spent his money would be entitled to a 10% commission on the amount they spent.

If someone booked out a restaurant and spent $1,000 on the tab, for example, they would earn $100. If they recruited someone to live in Park City, they would be entitled to a 10% commission on that person's annual salary. And if someone could source a real estate deal and spend $1,000,000 on the property, that person could earn $100,000.

By now, Tony Lee had assumed the role of financial overseer and had a front-row seat as money left his old friend's bank accounts. Unlike the mundane stock performance charts Lee had been overseeing for the Bass family, he was now staring at receipts for investments in gold and real estate properties, hot air balloons, and proposals for helicopter tour companies.

Lee could also see those vying for Hsieh's money beginning to fight for it, often motivated by the 10X program. Hsieh's longtime personal assistant, Mimi Pham, for example, had in recent years been paid a flat $9,000 a month salary from Hsieh, in addition to travel expenses. But after the Park City chapter began, she negotiated a pay raise and was now earning $30,000 a month, an amount that was soon dwarfed by the money she was scooping up in 10X commissions.

In total, through an LLC she controlled, Pham sent invoices for what amounted to more than $20,000,000. In one case, she "managed" a contractor who was being paid $83,333.33 a month for "assistance and management of various projects," earning her $8,333 every time he was paid. When Hsieh bought a fleet of buses and asked that Pham arrange for them to be retrofitted at a cost of $3.7 million, she took 10% of the fee.

Then there was the $7 million acquisition of the Big Moose Yacht Club, an event space on prime real estate at the foot of Park City's ski lifts, which entitled her to a $700,000 commission. In a twisted way, Hsieh's incentive structure was working the way he envisioned it. People were vying to execute his every whim.

When he had an idea to launch a film studio that produced documentaries, Pham took up the proposition. On a sticky note, she and Hsieh wrote up the terms of a contract to set up an LLC with $10 million to fund documentary film projects produced by an existing studio called XTR.

The LLC would be controlled by Hsieh, Pham, and her boyfriend, Roberto Grande, a former lawyer and aspiring film producer. As part of the agreement, Pham and Grande were entitled to 55% of the profit from the venture, despite not putting up their own money. And in line with 10X, Grande would be entitled to a $1 million commission for setting up the LLC.

Pham then charged Hsieh another 10% fee on the cost of hiring the lawyers to arrange the $1 million commission payment to Grande. Two months later, Grande told XTR that Hsieh had approved another $7.5 million for the venture. It's unclear if the money was wired, but soon afterward, the attorneys who had written up the terms for the $1 million commission payment to him amended the contract to state that he was now owed $1.75 million.

Pham's efforts often came into conflict with those of Susie Bailson, a friend of Hsieh's who had previously attended events with him as a plus-one, and was now overseeing multiple operations in his Park City world. At one point, Pham introduced a "Susie Penalty," which Hsieh agreed to. For every day Bailson was on one of his properties, Pham would fine him $30,000.

While it seemed outrageous, Hsieh racked up $1.83 million in fees under the scheme and received an invoice from Grande. He ended up paying $420,000. Another person Pham seemed to be feuding with was Andy Hsieh. Since Tony had met Paula Abdul earlier in the year, he had wanted her to come to Park City to do some shows, and because tours had been canceled as a result of the pandemic, she had spare time.

So, Hsieh proposed that Abdul perform 180 shows at a local event venue known as Yellowstone for a $9 million contract. Whoever could close the deal would get the $900,000 commission. Andy claimed that he had arranged it, while Pham argued that in fact she was entitled to the commission, but nothing ever came of the proposal.

In another dispute, Andy and Pham lobbied Tony about who they thought was entitled to the 10% commission on the $15 million ranch he was now living in. In the final frantic months before Hsieh's death from a fire in a storage shed, where he had barricaded himself surrounded by nitrous oxide canisters, candles, and a propane tank, Andy also tried to rally support among others to pursue deals with his brother's money.

At one point he urged another friend, Janice Lopez, to convince Hsieh to invest $10 million in an entity that would own a tequila company, eventually suggesting she ask for $50 million for the venture. But Lopez refused, and the deal went nowhere. Tony Lee, for his part, initially seemed to encourage Andy's pursuit of the 10x commission payments.

"You are welcomed to go broker a deal for me," Lee wrote in a text to Andy, referring to his salary contract. "Go talk to him." "Yeah, I'll talk to him," Andy replied. "Tell him I'm your broker." Lee seemed enthused. "You have to earn your commission now and make it happen, smiley face.

Hope Tony pays you." "I'll make it happen with Tony, and you make it happen with him that I'm your broker, smiley face," Andy replied. "The higher my number, whether 1.4 or 1.5 million dollars, you will get a bigger commission. Go fight for me now, smiley face." "Win-win," Andy wrote back.

"Mainly excited for you to be here, and we can hang out together." Lee later claimed he wasn't aware how ill Hsieh was until after he decided to take on the role. After he started working, he soon soured on Andy and came to believe that he was seeking to exploit his brother rather than protect him.

At one point, Lee claimed that Andy asked him to divert as much as 100 million dollars to an account he controlled to put aside for Tony's "retirement," which he refused to do, a claim Andy later denied. As for Andy's efforts to secure a 10% commission on Lee's salary worth more than $100,000, those fell by the wayside when Tony himself refused the proposal.

It didn't seem to matter, though, as Andy had already negotiated his own salary contract with his brother at $1 million a year. Thus concludes the article released in Forbes again. This is part of the promotional tour for the release of the new book called "Wonder Boy." Tony Hsieh's "Zappos and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley," released today, April 25, 2023.

I have just a few comments that occurred to me in passing. I'm not going to sermonize. I'm not going to point fingers at Tony Hsieh. The older I get, the more humbled I feel, and I just recognize there but for the grace of God go I. I hope that I would be able to handle great wealth differently than Tony Hsieh did, but better men than I have been brought down by it.

And so I'm not going to point fingers at him. But I think there are a few basic lessons that we need to learn. Number one, everybody has problems. All of us have problems. And the good thing about your problems is that you know what they are. The reason I chose to read this little excerpt of the book is because it opens up a world of problems that most of us have no experience with, both from the perspective of Hsieh and also of those around him.

First of all, think about the problems that Hsieh faced, and his psychology, and his character, and the way that he was seeking to manipulate those around him. But then imagine if you were one of those who was around him. I thought about that. If I've got a really rich guy who's got tons of money and wants to blow his money, would I have taken advantage of him?

I want to say that I would say, "No, Hsieh needs to go to the doctor," and I would try to do that, but that's probably not true. I probably would have tried to submit my invoices just like anybody else. I would have justified it in various ways. It's his money.

He can do what he wants. I'm not hiding anything from him. This is the scheme that he's come up with. Who am I to say to a crazy man that he can't spend his money how he wants to spend it? And after all, if I don't do it for him, someone else is going to do it.

And then I would probably flatter myself and say, "Well, I'm more likely to look out for his best interest and protect him than other people are." So at least if I'm the one who's scheming up these ridiculous schemes and charging him invoices for all this stuff, at least that keeps me near him so I can sort of protect him.

I probably would. I'm no more virtuous than anyone else. We all want to look out for our own self. And what an awful situation to be in. I can only imagine the guilt that all of those around him have dealt with for the past few years. I had no idea to the depth of this depravity.

But my point is just simply that if you think you've got problems, recognize that everybody's got problems. And what money does is it magnifies the size of your problems. I'm not saying that poverty is better than affluence. There is probably a sweet spot. There is an amount of money, and I don't know this exact number, but it's probably more than a million dollars.

It's probably in the range of somewhere from a few million dollars, two or three, how do you know exactly, up to the range of, I don't know, 30, 40, somewhere in that range, 30, 40 million dollars, where you can pretty well do anything that you want to do. There's no decision in life that you can't make.

You're totally financially free. But you haven't flipped over into the world of ridiculous excess where it's just a matter of consume, consume, consume, consume. Because that's what a guy like Shay faced, 1.2 billion dollars. How do you ever spend a billion dollars? The only way you can ever successfully spend the money is with insanity, with just absolute insanity.

And even doing that, it takes a long time to blow through huge amounts of money like that. And so when you have a net worth in the range of a few million dollars to, again, I'm making up numbers, 20 million, 30 million, somewhere in that range, you have total financial freedom.

You can live where you want to live. You can live how you want to live. But you haven't lost your grip on reality. You haven't become a Howard Hughes or a Tony Hsieh sitting in a shed somewhere, drugged out on nitrous oxide canisters, killing yourself with a stupid fire.

You haven't created this force field around you. You haven't attracted international attention. They're not making articles about you as well. So there is a sweet spot. And I think that if it's not that earning more or having more than that is probably a bad thing, but it means it's a much harder responsibility.

If you doubt that, just think about how hard it would be to manage 500 million dollars or a billion dollars. What would you do with the money? How do you give it away? Every decision that you make can wind up being destructive in some way. We all admire great philanthropists who successfully give away hundreds of millions of dollars.

Sometimes I wonder if it's not better for them just to consume it in a wild orgy of stupidity, the way that Hsieh was doing. Maybe it's less destructive to do that than some of the projects that people have come up with to employ their hundreds of millions of dollars.

Now, if you ever face it or if I ever face it, I pray that we would have the wisdom and be able to find the wise counsel and speak to those experience, et cetera, in order to know how to handle it. But I wouldn't want to trade my problems for Hsieh's problems.

It might seem attractive, but remember, it all comes with it. And this is something that I think it was Charlie Munger who says, "Here's how you know you live a pretty privileged life." It's that if you could imagine a giant jar with 8 billion marbles in it, and you had the choice to take your marble and toss it into the jar and reach in and grab anybody else's life out, what would you take?

And even knowing that I could wake up in Tony Hsieh's life or Elon Musk's life or anybody, I wouldn't take anybody else's marble. My problems are big, but I've lived with them for a long time and I know what they are. And I know what the blessings of my life are, the peace, the contentment, the satisfaction, et cetera, that I can enjoy that's different from what some of these guys have to face in their life.

So just use it and recognize that your problems, as big as they are and as frustrating as they are, if you had the chance to toss your marble into that jar and grab another one out at random, you'd probably not... you'd prefer to keep that deal. We all would.

I think the other lesson of this is be diligent as best as we can. You and I both. I'm preaching to me. Just trying to learn a few lessons from this staggering story. Let us be diligent to do our very best to cultivate our virtue and our self-discipline and our good, strong moral character today while it's easy so that if and when it becomes magnified by wealth, we don't face the kind of problems that other people face.

If you have any addiction in your life of any kind, work at it. Work at eliminating it completely, getting it out. Even if it's something that's small and seemingly harmless, because an addictive personality can lead to destruction. Shay was... I don't know, maybe he was using other drugs, but you say, "Oh, it sounds fairly innocuous to use nitrous oxide canisters.

No problem." Yeah, but look where that goes. So if you're addicted to coffee, cut it out. Not because coffee is bad for you. Just simply do it as an exercise in discipline. Cut coffee for six months. Go a year with no coffee. Go a month with no coffee. If you're addicted to fine foods, cut it out.

Eat very basically for a time, fast for a time, as an exercise in personal discipline. Develop the thrill. If you're addicted to fine clothing, cut it out. Dress poorly. Dress simply for a time. Don't be a slave to your passions. A man who is enslaved to his passions has no freedom.

The highest and ultimate form of freedom is exactly the same as the first form of freedom. That freedom is spiritual freedom. The man who is spiritually free can walk through life savoring every day, regardless of his external circumstances. It's the starting plate, and it's the ultimate. Go back to my Rings of Freedom series, where I started with it.

If you know spiritual freedom in your life, then every day can be a blessed experience. And you're able to take what comes, and you know how to be abased, and you know how to abound. You know how to be content with little, and you know how to be content with a lot.

That starts inside, and it starts today. You don't have to wait to sell a company for a billion dollars to try working on it, because by then you probably won't achieve it. Spiritual freedom can be achieved today. It's the starting point, and it's the ultimate freedom. There's more that can be said.

I look forward to reading the book, but I think that's enough for today. Thank you for listening. I'll be back with you very soon. The holidays start here at Ralph's, with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new. Whether you're making a traditional roasted turkey, or spicy turkey tacos, your go-to shrimp cocktail, or your first Cajun risotto, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace your traditions.

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