iHeartRadio Host (14:56)

Run a business and not thinking about radio, Think again. Cause more people are listening to the radio and iHeart today than they were 20 years ago. And only iHeart broadcast radio connects with more Americans than TV, digital, social, any other media, even twice as many teens than TikTok. And that reach means everything. Just think about the universal marketing formula. The number of consumers who hear your message times the response rate equals the results. Now let's get those results growing for your business. Radio's here now more than ever. And iheart's leading the way. Think radio can help your business. Think iHeart. Streaming, podcasting and radio where the reach is real. Let us show you@iheartadvertising.com that's iheartadvertising.com or call 844-844-Iheart one more time. Just call 844-844-iheart and get radio working for you.

Odoo Advertiser (15:55)

Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder? With a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. Before you know it, you are drowning in software. Instead of growing your business, this is where Odoo comes in. Odoo is the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all in one fully integrated platform that handles everything. CRM, accounting, inventory, E commerce, HR and more. No more app overload, no more juggling logins. Just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part, Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. It's built to grow with your business whether you are just starting out or already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable and designed to streamline every process so you can focus on what really matters running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you try Odoo for free@odoo.com that's o d o o dot com.

LinkedIn Jobs Advertiser (16:57)

If you've ever hired for your small business, you know how important it is to find the right person. That's why LinkedIn Jobs is stepping things up with their new AI assistant. So you can feel confident you're finding top talent that you can't find anywhere else. The best part is these great Candidates are already on LinkedIn. In fact, employees hired through LinkedIn are 30% more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. Given that every hire counts, 30% is a big deal. This is a subject that's pretty close to the heart Here at Pushkin. We're a small business. We do really complicated, collaborative, creative work. And making sure that anyone we bring in suits our culture and can fit in with our teams is really, really crucial. With LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant, you can skip the confusing steps and recruiting jargon. It filters through applicants based on criteria you've set for your role and surfaces only the best matches so you're not stuck sorting through a mountain of resumes. When you have a business to run, you don't have hours to spend on hiring. And you don't want to just wait around hoping the right person stumbles upon your job. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI assistant suggests 25 great fit candidates daily, so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free@LinkedIn.com Pushkin then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates. That's LinkedIn.com Pushkin to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

Tim Harford (18:49)

When Zappo's employee, Rob Ponte returned home from work, he was surprised to find police tape across the door of his apartment. Inside, he saw that someone had been rummaging in his drawers and poking around in his computer. He called the police department and asked, what's going on? The police were surprised to hear from him. They said, we thought you were dead. They'd been in Ponte's apartment, they explained, looking for a suicide note and for details of his next of kin. Ponte later discovered they'd phoned his mum. Thankfully, she didn't answer. Ponte and the police pieced together what had happened. Someone who looked like Rob Ponte had killed himself. The dead man turned out to be a young employee of Tony Hsieh's Downtown project. Less than a year had passed since Jody Sherman's suicide. A few months after that, another entrepreneur who'd taken funding from the Downtown Project took his own life. The Downtown Project wasn't that big, just a few hundred people, so three suicides seemed like a pattern. Were there underlying factors? What might they be? The journalist Nelly Bowles asked around at an event. She sat down next to Tony and asked for his thoughts. Suicides happen anywhere, Tony said. Look at the stats. Then he got up and moved to another chair. But others she spoke to did have some theories to share. In the last episode of Cautionary Tales, we met the idea of the profit seeking paradox. The economist John Kay points out that the most profitable companies tend not to be those that focus directly on profits. But this is only one example, says Kay, of a wider principle he calls obliquity. Many other goals in life are best pursued not directly, but obliquely. Another example happiness. The more you try to be happy, the more elusive happiness seems to be. This isn't a new idea. 150 years ago, the philosopher John Stuart Mill observed that the happiest people he knew have their minds fixed on some other object other than their own happiness. On the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, said Mill. They find happiness, by the way. But is this Observation true? In 2011, researchers devised an experiment to investigate. They got some subjects to read an article about how important it is to be happy because happy people are more healthy and successful. Then they showed a video that should evoke feelings of happiness, about a figure skater winning a medal and celebrating with her coach. Then they asked, how happy do you feel? The subjects who'd read the article on happiness were less happy than those in a control group who'd watched the video but hadn't read the article first. It seemed that being prompted to think about the importance of happiness made people second guess themselves. That video should have made me happy. Why am I not happier? That's disappointing. People who weren't thinking about the importance of happiness simply watched the video and felt happy. Under certain circumstances, the researchers conclude, valuing happiness may be self defeating. When he launched the Downtown Project, Tony Hsieh had just published his best selling book on happiness. He'd also been reading about what makes cities productive, including chance encounters between productive people, or what Tony called collisions. The bigger the city, the more of these serendipitous encounters you might expect. Tony decided that serendipity, like happiness, was a goal you could pursue directly. He invested in spaces where collisions could happen, such as bars. He wanted to institutionalise return on luck. He came up with a metric maximizing collisionable hours per acre per year. All this piled expectations on the entrepreneurs who had moved to Las Vegas to get an investment from Tony. There's a pressure to socialise and go out, one told the journalist Nelly Bowles. There's a pressure to party. Everyone at the parties would be either another entrepreneur or an investor. People felt the need to put on a mask, a councillor told Nellie Bowles, and say everything's great. They knew they were supposed to be happy if they weren't. They felt disappointed, even ashamed. They had no one to confide in when they had a bad day. The focus on happiness, says the counsellor, was not psychologically healthy. The irony is that the entrepreneurs might have had people to confide in before they moved to Vegas. Jody Sherman, for example, had left behind his wife and friends in Los Angeles. In Vegas, he found himself with no one to talk to. Tony had seemed to think that you could simply bring entrepreneurs together in collisionable spaces and they'd form a community. But community can't be forced like happiness. You find it if you're lucky, while aiming at something else. Tony had launched the Downtown Project with big ambitions to turn Las Vegas into the most community focused large city in the world. As the project floundered, Tony changed his mind. He was going to stop using the word community. He'd learned that it gave people the wrong idea. People expect us to address and solve every single problem that exists in a city, he said. For example, mental health. We're not the government. Instead, Tony turned his attention to a different community, his own personal community that he curated around himself in his personal quest for happiness. Tony moved into an Airstream trailer in an empty lot in downtown Las Vegas and moved some of his closest friends into other trailers. Because Tony believed in work life integration, those close friends tended also to be either his employees or business partners. Having them live around him meant he could call them in for work meetings at any hour of the day. Airstream park had fire pits and a stage for musical performances, and shipping containers that housed laundry facilities and crates of Fernet Branca, Tony's favourite drink. It had chickens, dogs, cats and a pet alpaca called Marley. A journalist described his experience of a night at Airstream Park. A bearded man was doing a handstand. A high school girl sang and played guitar. I saw Tony pick up a tambourine. I gathered that this idyllic scene was typical of life in Tony Hsieh's magical kingdom. Not every employee friend of Tony wanted to live in his trailer park idyll, though. Tyler Williams, who we met in the last episode, had grown close to Tony through his work as the fungineer at Zappos, in charge of projects like the instant dance floor in the Zappos lobby. Push a button labelled Never push this button and the lobby would pulse to booming music. Disco lights and smoke from a smoke machine. Tyler was Tony's drinking buddy, but Tyler's wife said, no, we're not living in a trailer. Tony wondered if Tyler's wife might like to work for him like other residents of the trailer park. No, she said. When Tony started to experiment with ketamine and got Tyler to take it with him, Tyler's wife told him to stop. I don't like who you are when you take that drug, she told Tyler. You're not the same Tyler that I know. Ketamine seemed to be changing Tony, too. Tyler had access to Tony's Apple Watch data, and he could see that Tony hardly ever slept. Tony threw a party for a friend called Ryan, which involved Ryan being blindfolded, bundled into a car, handed a mysterious ice cold package, and driven around Las Vegas before arriving at the party venue. The mysterious package turned out to be a frozen Salm. This all apparently made perfect sense to Tony, but not to anyone else. As Ryan put it to a fellow guest. What the fuck is going on? An old flame visited. Tony was shocked by what she found and begged him to get some sleep. When he insisted he was fine, she began to cry. The next morning, Tony showed her a wall of post it notes in his trailer. Each note had the name of a friend and a number from plus to minus three. You were a plus two till last night, Tony told her. Now you are negative 1.5. You were judging me, and I don't like to be judged. Tony needed help, but it was hard to tell him that while remaining positive on his post it wall, Ryan of the Frozen Salmon had a try. You're CEO of Zappos, he reminded Tony. And Zappos is owned by Amazon. You might think you can handle the drugs, but what if Amazon disagree? They could fire you. You don't want that. There's a rehab place in Park City. You like it there. You go to the Sundance Film Festival every year. Ryan was persistent and persuasive. Tony checked himself into rehab, but after less than two weeks, he checked himself out again. This was, he decided, perfectly fine. But perhaps he'd overlooked something. He asked Tyler to compile a list of the things that had made some of his friends think he needed rehab, as we heard last time, like his ambition to become 7ft tall, recycle his urine inside his body and solve world peace. He saw nothing on Tyler's list to worry about, but he decided that he wasn't going back to Vegas. Things hadn't been working out there and he'd learned lessons. He would apply those lessons to build a new community in Park City. Cautionary tales will be back in a moment.

iHeartRadio Host (31:48)

Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers are into true crime, sports, comedy, culture, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. And all this reach means everything. Just think about the universal marketing formula. The number of consumers who hear your message times the response rate equals the results. Now let's get those results growing for you. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart streaming radio and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com that's iHeartadvertising.com or call 844-844 iHeart. One more time, call 844-844-IHEART and get podcasting Working for you Foreign.

Odoo Advertiser (32:49)

Is hard enough, so why make it harder? With a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other, One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. Before you know it, you are drowning in software. Instead of growing your business, this is where Odoo comes in. Odoo is the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all in one fully integrated platform that handles everything CRM, accounting, inventory, e commerce, HR and more. No more app overload, no more juggling logins. Just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. It's built to grow with your business, whether you are just starting out or already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable and designed to streamline every process so you can focus on what really matters running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you try Odoo for free@odoo.com that's o d o o.com if.

LinkedIn Jobs Advertiser (33:50)

You'Ve ever hired for your small business, you know how important it is to find the right person. That's why LinkedIn Jobs is stepping things up with your new AI assistant, so you can feel confident you're finding top talent that you can't find anywhere else. The best part is these great candidates are already on LinkedIn. In fact, employees hired through LinkedIn are 30% more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. Given that every hire counts, 30% is a big deal. This is a subject that's pretty close to the heart. Here at Pushkin, we're a small business. We do really complicated, collaborative, creative work. And making sure that anyone we bring in suits our culture and can fit in with our teams is really, really crucial. With LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant, you can skip the confusing steps and recruiting jargon. It filters through applicants based on criteria you've set for your role and surfaces only the best matches so you're not stuck sorting through a mountain of resumes. When you have a business to run, you don't have hours to spend on hiring and you don't want to just wait around hoping the right person stumbles upon your job. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI assistant suggests 25 great fit candidates daily, so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time, post your job for free@LinkedIn.com Pushkin then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs new AI assistant, making it easier and and faster to find top candidates. That's LinkedIn.com Pushkin to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

Tim Harford (35:37)

Tony invited some of his friends to join him in Park City. Not all of them, though. Not Frozen Salmon Ryan, for example. Ryan had manipulated him into going to rehab when there'd been nothing wrong with him. One lesson he had learned from Las Vegas was to cut off the people who tried to hold him back. Ryan was no longer welcome. It was early spring 2020 when Tony left rehab. In the COVID lockdown, he seemed to thrive. He was drinking less. He seemed to be off the ketamine and the psychedelic mushrooms. He took long hikes in the mountains outside Park City. He looked fit and healthy, but he wasn't always making sense. He asked executives at Zappos to abolish organisational calendars and instead get all employees into a collective state of flow. If they were all in the same flow state, he explained, they wouldn't need calendars. There'd just know where and when to turn up for meetings. As the lockdown eased and restaurants reopened, Tony came up with a new idea called 10X. Participating restaurants in Park City would give members of the 10x scheme Unlimited food and drink on Sundays. Tony would foot the bill. Membership of 10x would cost just $10. How could this possibly work for Tony? Everyone shrugged. He was a billionaire. He'd probably thought it through. 10 became Tony's watchword. From his experience in Vegas, Tony had drawn the lesson that he hadn't been ambitious enough. Everything in park city would be 10 times bigger. And happened 10 times faster. Tony offered members of his entourage a 10% commission for spending his money in the ways he asked. He started buying property in Park City. Whoever closed the deals for him got 10% of the price. He started recruiting people to join his community, offering them a salary to, well, to do whatever they wanted, pretty much as long as they agreed to be happy. Whoever recruited these new community members would get 10% of the salary Tony paid them. Tony bought a fleet of buses and asked an assistant to arrange a luxury makeover. It cost $3.68 million. The assistant pocketed 360. In June, Tony invited some friends to go on a road trip in one of his luxury buses. Among them was Tyler Williams, who was still living in Las Vegas and working as the Zappos Fungineer. When Tyler arrived in Park City, he realised that he didn't know many of the people who now surrounded Tony. One of them, he learned, had only just met Tony, and he'd immediately offered her $10 million to start a business. Any business she liked. Tony got on the bus for the road trip wearing pyjamas and carrying a box of crayons. He took a shower and stayed there till the water tank ran dry. He explained that they were all trapped in an AI simulation and proposed that he he break them free by setting fire to the bus with everyone inside. Then he asked for more mushrooms. After the bus trip, Tyler messaged Tony's dealer. Please don't sell Tony more drugs, he wrote. I know I can't match whatever Tony is offering, but I'll give you everything I have in this life. Tyler's phone pinged. It was Tony, with a screen grab of Tyler's message to the dealer. The dealer had shared it with him. You went behind my back, said Tony. Tyler never heard from Tony again. In August 2020, Tony invited the folk singer Jewel to visit his ranch in Park City. Tony had met Jewel a few years earlier at a retreat on the entrepreneur Richard Branson's private island. They'd become friends. Jewel found that Tony's ranch was filthy. Old food and dog feces littered the floor. Signs said not to clean up. Tony thought it was natural to leave trash lying around. Candles burned everywhere, dripping wax onto carpets and countertops. Tony had become fascinated by fire. All the taps were running in all the bathrooms. Tony liked the sound of running water. A surfboard was propped up against the window to Tony's room. Tony didn't like using Dr. Jewel had met some of Tony's other friends in Las Vegas, but she didn't Recognize anyone here? These people were new. Tony's doing great things, the new people told her. Tony's going through a creative metamorphosis. He's finding himself. Tony's a genius. Jewel found Tony sitting in underpants surrounded by empty canisters of nitrous oxide. He looked thin and gaunt. He showed Jewel a Post it note on which he'd scribbled some numbers. This, he said, is the algorithm for world peace. Jewel tried gently to engage Tony in conversation about a project she was working on. A project about addiction. Tony told her, I'm the 1% of people that can use these substances and they become good. They become a skill. He added, I've gotten rid of anybody who doubts what I'm doing. Jewell began to subtly interrogate everyone on Tony's ranch. What's your purpose here? Somebody assumed that Jool must be after Tony's money and helpfully explained how to get it. Just write your project and a dollar amount on a Post it note and ask Tony to sign it. Not too much or his lawyers might raise questions. Anything up to a couple of million should be fine. Others took Jool to a quiet corner and whispered, I want to help, but I don't know how. I saw what happened to Ryan and to Tyler. Jewell had agreed to sing some of her hit songs for Tony and his guests. Who will save your soul? She sang, if you won't save your own. Tony wasn't there to hear her. He'd stayed in his darkened room surrounded by candles. After her visit, Jewell couldn't get Tony to return her calls, so she wrote him a letter. She addressed it to someone at the ranch who she thought would make sure that Tony read it. He did. I am going to be blunt, jewell wrote. I don't think you're well and in your right mind. The people you're surrounding yourself with are either ignorant or willing to be complicit in you killing yourself. If the world could see how you're living, they would not see you as a tech visionary. They would see you as a drug addicted man who's a cliche. Please get sober. I say this with love and as possibly the only person in your circle who is not on your payroll. It's a long letter, but Jewell could have summed it up in a line. Who will save your soul if you won't save your own? Tony died three months later in November 2020, in a fire. He was 46 years old. It's not completely clear what happened. He'd locked himself in a shed with nitrous oxide candles, Post it notes, and a propane heater. By the time the fire brigade got the door down, Tony had inhaled too much smoke. Tony was killed by his addiction, but also by his ideas about community, connectedness and happiness. He'd thought he could make a community by gathering entrepreneurs in collisionable spaces. Then he'd thought he could pay people to surround him in Park City and feel connectedness that would make him happy. He hadn't understood that genuine connections arise obliquely. You could only put yourself in situations where that might happen and recognise if it does. Tony didn't recognize which kind of connections to cherish, the kind where you can speak the truth and hear the truth. The kind of connections Jody Sherman tried to find too late when he emailed other founders in Las Vegas. I find myself with no one to talk to about the challenges I might be facing or the kind of connection Tyler Williams had with his wife when she told him, I don't like who you are on ketamine. You're not the same Tyler that I know. And he listened and stopped. She knows who I am, tyler later recalled, and she will check me. Tony had people who knew who he was and tried to check him, like Jewel and Ryan and Tyler himself. Tyler later said that he often wonders if he hadn't had that connection with his wife, who would I be? Perhaps like like Tony, a drug addicted cliche. We all need someone who knows who we are, but they can only save our soul if we let them. Key sources for this episode were Happy at Any Cost the Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh by Katherine Sayre and Kirsten Grind and Wonder Tony Hsieh, Zappos and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley by Angel O. Young and David Jeans. For a full list of sources, see the show notes@timharford.com Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fiennes and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Ben Nadaff Haffrey edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Melanie Gutteridge, Genevieve Gaunt, Stella Harford, Macea Monroe, Jamal Westman and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brodie, Christina Sullivan, Keira Posey and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It really does make a difference to us. And if you want to hear it ad free and receive a bonus audio episode, video episode and members only newsletter every month, why not join the Cautionary club? To sign up, head to patreon.com cautionaryclub that's patreon P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com cautionaryclub.

Political Radio Advertiser (49:10)

Running for office means having something important to say. Radio is the most personal medium out there. Voters hear the real you exactly the way you want to be heard. No filters, no AI. Just your voice, your message. And it's 1/10 the time and cost of video. Don't just campaign, connect with millions all over the country, even thousands in the smallest communities with radio. Call now and be on the air in just 48 hours. 844-844 iHeart that's 844-844 iHeart the new.

LifeLock Advertiser (49:41)

Year brings new health goals and wealth goals. Protecting your identity is an important step. Your info is in endless places that could expose you to identity theft leading to lost funds. LifeLock monitors millions of data points per second. If your identity is stolen, Lifelock's restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Resolve to make identity, health and wealth part of your New Year's goals with Lifelock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com iheart Terms apply Jenice Torres.

Jim (50:14)

Here and I'm Austin Hankwitz. We host the podcast Mind the Business Small Business Success Stories, produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Intuit QuickBooks.

iHeartRadio Host (50:22)

We're back for season four to talk to some incredible small business owners.

Jim (50:26)

The big thing about working at tech is that it's ever evolving, ever changing. Everyone's a rookie. That's how fast the industry is changing. So what I'm really excited about is to be part of that change. So listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

iHeartRadio Host (50:41)

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.