Some Personal Reflections Based on ‘Happy At Any Cost’

I just finished reading ‘Happy At Any Cost’ (Authors: Kirsten Grind & Katherine Sayre; Publisher: Simon & Schuster). It is an important book. It brings to the forefront our idolization of celebrities and how fame often does mask deeper problems. Because events leading up to the passing of Tony are described emotively the book has a visceral impact. The importance of healing and the responsibilities of organizations and societies to organize themselves to allow this will no doubt receive an important impetus from this book.

The style is gripping and I found myself wanting to get through it as quickly as possible. This was partly driven by the fact that I was acquainted with many characters mentioned in the book, and for the last 4 years of his life I continued to have sustained and meaningful interactions with Tony. Note, I too was interviewed for the book, and there is half a page outlining some light-based interaction with Tony, in Chapter 8. Because of my relative familiarity with some of the characters and with Tony, sometimes I found it difficult to go through the book. But I also feel compelled to offer a perspective that may be unique given the timing and nature of the relationship I did have with Tony.

The Nature of Our Relationship

When I became an employee at Zappos in April 2018, I lived in San Francisco and had arranged to continue to commute to Las Vegas on a weekly basis. At this time Tony invited me to stay in his Air Stream Park. I ended up staying there every week for a couple of years until the pandemic hit. But I need to backtrack three years to April 2015, to explain how I met Tony. I had begun contracting with Zappos to run the pricing group. About 1 year into this I witnessed the intricacies of how easily organizational structure could be changed under holacracy. Pricing used to sit under Merchandising. Due to the recommendations of some external consultants, however, it was decided that Pricing was of strategic importance given Zappos’ immediate goals, and the circle was moved to report directly to Arun Rajan, the COO at the time.

As a result, I ended up sitting on Monkey Row for the next two years, adjacent to Arun and Patrick Martin, Principal Strategist for Zappos. Patrick now also led Pricing Strategy, and I was to lead Pricing Operations. Sitting next to them meant more opportunities for various conversations unrelated to pricing, and as things developed, Arun ended up inviting me to present a simulation I had been working on to the GCC (the governing circle). In this simulation, I had linked the culture of Zappos to tangible business value. It was at this meeting that I first met Tony.

Note, I have never partied with Tony. In fact, decades ago while I was still in college, I decided that alcohol and any mind-altering drugs were simply not worth it. I hated the aftermath of having a diffused mind, and for over three decades have only had the occasional sip of wine. Nor did I ever accompany Tony on his bus or private jets on any of his extended trips. So, what was the nature of our relationship? I have written about this in Mathematical Encounters with an Exceptional CEO, where I also detail how our relationship developed following the initial presentation to the GCC.

But let me point out something important. Perhaps after our second or third meeting, there was a shift that marked our relationship through the remaining years. We were at Nacho Daddy having lunch and at first, he began treating me like an employee, perhaps expecting that I would capitulate to his thought. On the contrary from the first maneuver, I firmly pushed back — not emotionally nor willfully, but intellectually, from the level of thought — and continued to do so for the next one hour. I frankly did not care if I upset him. But by the end of our lunch meeting, he began to look at me differently. A different channel opened, where I was neither employee nor friend. I think he just came to value my opinion and my thoughts and from that point on our every interaction was marked by this dynamic.

And so now, after reading ‘Happy At Any Cost’, I offer a perspective from interactions with Tony both at Zappos and at Park City that maintain this essential nature. The last time I had a conversation with him was in early August 2020. But there had been several others in Park City over the summer.

My Experience of His Difference

Tony first invited me to Park City in June of 2020. He asked what I wanted to do, and having spent a lot of time developing a worldview articulated through 10 books that I called Cosmology of Light, I wanted to leverage a perception of Light as I had described in the cosmology, to create practical technologies to do with quantum computation, genetics, artificial intelligence, and transhumanism. We had some serious talks about this, just as we had talked seriously at Zappos.

In the stream of discussions, he disclosed, even before it was practical reality at Park City, his vision for the multi-tiered management structure that would organize the extended community he was planning to build. He was very clear on the tiers of operation and who would operate them, and that I would be in the second tier executing ideas I was deeply passionate about. A couple of people whom I knew well at Zappos were to be in the first tier. They were also at Park City at the time, and I shared this with them. They had not yet heard anything about this from Tony.

His clear vision at Park City executed to a tee was markedly different from how I had experienced him at Zappos.

Let me elaborate.

Over the years I had built a comprehensive team development software leveraging emotional intelligence (EQ). Earlier versions had previously been used by the Indian Armed Forces and by Stanford University Medical Center. The CHRO of Zappos, Hollie Delaney, who was my direct boss, had also endorsed it for use at Zappos, but in Zappos fashion, it had to be adopted organically and only by teams who wanted to use it. It turned out it was adopted organically. Gradually up to 50 circles/teams began to use it regularly.

Now, one day at the Air Stream Park I showed Tony the software and the picture of Zappos that was emerging for different parts of the organization through the automatic aggregation of the data. I suggested that it would be good to use this for the leadership team. He liked the idea, and I was invited to be a regular attendee at the GCC. For a few minutes at every meeting, all the leaders would anonymously enter emotions they were experiencing, along with the reasons for them. The software would aggregate the data in real-time and surface several metrics, such as the ability of the team to change negative to positive emotions, the level of trust in the team, the entropy or level of disorganization in the team, among others. The measurement of entropy was of particular interest to Tony because it is considered a key metric in gauging the health of a complex adaptive system, which is what Tony wanted Zappos to be. Note, I reported the use of this technology and approach in a Forbes article, Building EQ and Adaptability in Teams, which may be of interest to some readers.

I met him a few times to go over the trends, anonymous comments that people had entered, and the metrics that were being surfaced. There was a certain circular reality that seemed to animate the GCC, in that issues would tend to be repeated. I pointed this out to Tony and asked him directly why he did not exercise more executive power in shaping what happened at the company. He would always come back with the same answer — he wanted people to organically get, that things needed to be changed, and he was not going to intervene.

Further, in Park City, there was a practice in place, to invite all first-time visitors for an evening and dinner with Tony at his Empire Avenue house where he was residing at the time. These apparently happened every few evenings, and when I attended there were many people present. Tony assigned several of us a role and asked us to come up with a solution to an issue. He also checked in a few times and intervened to redirect. This again was different from how I had experienced him at Zappos.

To some, this may have been unusual and out of character. But to me, it felt that something different was surfacing: something of a stronger executive nature that would potentially augment the abilities that he had already internalized and exercised in building Zappos.

A Fractal Pattern

At the end of that first trip, Tony suggested I join him in Park City right away. He wanted me to focus on my interest in light, and in particular, begin by streaming talks and presentations on some of my work related to a cosmology of light. As a practice session he and I even free flowed on a discussion around quantum physics and light. But I had a pressing commitment under a ‘Forbes Leadership through Organizational Sciences Certification Program’ I had co-designed with Forbes that was just starting and that would continue till mid-September.

Now my first trip to Park City was over. I made my way to Salt Lake City from where I was to catch a flight back to San Francisco. It was midday. I always get a window seat when I fly, because I like natural light, and I derive an inordinate amount of pleasure from looking at the earth below. When we took off, I, therefore, had my window open. Suddenly, I felt an arm reaching in front of me (even though no one was sitting next to me) to close the window. I opened it again, and the man, who it turned out was double my size got very upset and began shouting at me. He was sitting across the aisle. He reached out again and closed it, and I told him I needed the window open and opened it. He then got up and threatened me. Surprisingly no flight attendants intervened.

Being a “systems” consultant steeped in complex adaptive systems theory, chaos theory, fractals, and such similar concepts it is easy for me to read or explore the nature of situations by small and even seemingly unrelated signs. Perhaps this is what a fortune teller does by looking at tea leaves. Or what a message in a fortune cookie may indicate. These are fractals — patterns that may signify other similar patterns repeated on different scales and in a slightly different way — and if perceived as such may offer possibilities into the nature of circumstance.

The message surfacing from this event suggested a struggle between light and darkness. It struck me that this was not about me or my interest in light, but it was a gestalt to do with the trip I had just undertaken: ergo, about Tony’s project at Park City. There were forces that would be strong to want to shut it down.

Mind Alteration & Healing

It was only in reading Happy At Any Cost, that an idea of how this may have occurred became clearer to me in retrospect.

The use of drugs is a tricky affair. Even when one arrives at a mystical experience through avenues such as introspection and meditation there is a high degree of discrimination required to not be led by false lights. To arrive at a “mystical” experience by having veils lifted suddenly and without adequate preparation through mind-altering drugs would therefore require a much higher degree of discrimination. It becomes more difficult to distinguish between helpful and unhelpful influences, and it becomes easier to make mistakes. A high level of Grace would be required to emerge successfully from such a potential process of metamorphosis. The chances that a caterpillar will remain in its cocoon forever, or emerge as something other than a vibrant, transformed butterfly, are much higher than that of the miraculous butterfly emerging.

There are no shortcuts, and if these are taken, there is often a high cost to pay. Severed relationships nurtured over years are an example of such a cost, as highlighted in Happy At Any Cost. For example, action due to lack of discrimination had to do with the ex-communication of Tyler who, for a fact, was very close to Tony. In their interaction, he would want nothing but the best for Tony, and while I had heard one side of the story while at Park City about Tyler being ex-communicated for apparently marginalizing Tony’s extensive generosity, it was not until I read Happy At Any Cost that I got the other unspoken side of the story. That the first tier or those closest to Tony at that time could not influence or change that narrative is unfortunate. For Tony to have around him a mix of people with different perspectives, and with whom he had shared previous experiences, might have been helpful.

But there is also the flip side of how another dark influence could be setting in. Paradoxically this was through getting freaked out by Tony’s words or even blocking off completely what he was trying to say. I saw this happen in some close to him even in Park City, let alone those who visited for a day or two and quickly exited, as described in Happy At Any Cost.

Let me give a couple of examples.

The first one is centered around his desire for World Peace. When I heard him speak about it, it was easy to focus on the style rather than the content in the delivery. I caught myself and then began listening to the voice behind the voice, inspired by an age-old dream of humanity wanting to do something for its realization. Here is what it said: First, there needs to be a deep connection between individual people and collectivities. Second, there needs to be a deep connection with Nature. Third, there needs to be a sense of timelessness. That was the essential message and in itself it is sound. But in the enthusiastic energy which often accompanied it, the sense of time had been distorted, and Tony continued to express that this massive endeavor would be achieved in a few months.

Now it is possible to hear the energy and the part about the timing only and get freaked out as a result and easily write him off. But if those who reacted in such a way, instead were able to discriminate between the two aspects, the validation of the meaningful part may instead have served to ground Tony more in that, than the other.

When I heard him and heard the reaction of some around him who seemed confused I decided to put thought and structure into the idea, while at the same time leveraging and extending my thesis to do with light.

To begin with, I set up a simple phased plan that extended into multiple years which I began to socialize with Tony’s then inner circle. I also began to do some deeper thinking and structured my ongoing posts on Cosmology of Light to focus on what it would take to achieve World Peace. In my estimation this required working on several levels simultaneously — the people level, of course, which was central, but also the ecosystem services level, the cellular level on one side, and equally, the cultural level, and the national level on the other side. I describe this in the post, World Peace: Back Story on the Paper Presented at IAMOT 2021, where I also describe work on a 20-year simulation to show how the five interpenetrating layers can come together to affect peace. The natural outcome of the simulations emphasizes the lack of world peace as more likely. But under certain conditions, 20 years could be enough to achieve stable World Peace. The results of the detailed simulations are captured in the conference paper, “Simulations of Necessary Conditions of World Peace Leveraging a Quaternary-Based, Quintuple-Layered Complex Adaptive Systems Model”.

The second example is centered around some of the scribblings of Tony, and his even showing a formula for World Peace to Jewel as described in Happy At Any Cost. Again, one must be able to separate the baby from the bathwater and not get freaked out by the apparent way that something may come across. The great physicist Feynman, for example, is known to have said of another great physicist Schrodinger, that there is no way that Schrodinger’s Wave Equation could be derived. It came straight out of the head of Schrodinger. And I am adding here: perhaps even as some initial scribbling.

Further, Euler, one of the greatest mathematicians arrived at what is called the most beautiful equation in the world because it elegantly connects five fundamental concepts in mathematics. But this simple formula, easily scribbled onto a tiny piece of paper, can in fact when seen as central to a persistent process of quantum-level computation, as I have suggested in the IEEE paper, A Light-based Interpretation of Euler’s Identity with Implications on Quantum Computation, be leveraged to “quantum compute” World Peace into existence.

Healing of mental and emotional capacities, from a system’s point of view, is not just about giving tools to a person or facilitating the use of tools to accelerate a process of healing. Equally, it is about the responsibility of those around — key components of the system — to learn to “see” and “will” people as healthy. Tony was headed to Hawaii for healing on the fateful day where he instead ingested a lethal dose of fumes. I am not sure what kind of healing he was going to receive. But I know of a very powerful healing process that is Hawaiian — that of Ho’oponopono. In my understanding and even experience of it, it is about a practitioner “seeing” and “willing” a person into health by creating in his or herself, a series of emotional states such as ownership, gratitude, love, forgiveness, while focusing on the one to be healed.

Some Summary Thoughts

No doubt several things might have gone differently. The inducement of altered states shadowing discrimination might have been reduced. Jewel’s warning signs attuned perhaps to the recognition of growing darkness might have been heeded. Old friends such as Tyler might have continued to be accepted. Quick and immediate reactions and judgments on the part of those around Tony might have been curtailed. People might have willed and seen healing take place. But these are much easier to say in retrospect than to achieve at the time when it is most needed. This remains a core ongoing challenge and hopefully, the energy imparted by Happy At Any Cost will encourage the development of such comprehensive programs at the organizational level.

On my last visit to Park City toward the end of October, the active workspace had shifted away from the Ranch to a series of buses arranged in a rectangle. I happened to be working at Tony’s bus. Unexpectedly he entered. It had been almost 3 months since we had last met and he looked so different. His hair was longer than I had seen it before, and he had a beard. I saw that same familiar glint in his eye that I had always seen, and he gave me a timeless hug. We never exchanged any words.

That image of him, different, changing, holding other possibilities, expressing himself differently, even mysterious, is the one that continues to arise for me.