I Performed Comedy for Tony Hsieh During a Pandemic, and Then He Died.
We got on a tour bus fit for a rock star on Friday night around 10pm, on October 9th, headed to Park City, Utah. A call from a fellow comedian earlier in the week asked if I wanted to do a comedy show at a millionaire’s house: he promised a huge tour bus would pick us up Friday, we’d drive overnight, get COVID tested, perform in a mansion on Saturday for a COVID negative audience, and then drive back Sunday. The gig paid $500, which seemed low for a millionaire but that didn’t surprise me as a comic.
Ali Macofsky and Brian Simpson came as well, and we excitedly hung out in the different areas of the bus. We bullshitted through the night about our careers and the general state of America. We talked about how the pandemic took from us what we loved most — performing in front of audiences in small packed rooms, making them laugh, projecting spit all over each other. It seems that our passion was perfectly designed to be destroyed by this specific disease. As broke comics, we watched with most of the country as our careers dwindled while the wealthy were getting much much richer, but here was one of those people giving us a taste of our old lives. Sure, wealth is evil, but sometimes a king pays you to be a jester and that’s just called a gig. None of us had any idea how insane this experience would be or that we were heading to Blizzy Ranch, the home and refuse of former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, who would die in a tragic house fire a mere few weeks later.
Sleeping on the bus, the beautiful waterfalls and foliage as we drove through Utah, it feels like a distant memory. Arriving in park city Saturday and getting situated at Tony’s guest house with a full kitchen staff at our disposal. Park City, a utopian paradise if you have the money, home to Sundance Film Festival, a commercial monolith that ironically claims to be the epicenter of independent cinema. We all joked that it was too nice, that something awful must be happening just under the surface. Our driver laughed in agreement. We didn’t know yet how correct that prophecy would be.
Arriving that day at Tony’s Ranch we were immediately COVID tested and shown around. A self playing piano serenaded our tour of the magnificent living room, complete with a gigantic iguana exhibit, leading to the balcony overlooking his lake. Then the basement, where our show would take place for those lucky enough to be in his circle. Lucky enough to be invited. That night we were served one of the best meals of our lives by Tony’s private chefs as we watched the sun set over his lake, but one thing was missing. Tony, himself.
Tony’s feeling sick, we’re told. He hopes to make it to the show tonight but he might not be able to. If he can’t make it, they’ll live stream the show on Twitch to his bedroom.
Exploring the property after dinner, I noticed other things: the mirrors everywhere. Outside the mansion, around the lake, there were mirrors that seemed to have been placed in specific angles. Post-it notes were a theme inside, at our guest house and at the ranch, post-it notes all over the walls with strange altruisms and ideas. I took these details in as the quirky behaviors of a visionary, even the name of the ranch, Blizzy Ranch, came from Tony’s dog, who was featured in pictures with celebrities all over the glass wall at the end of the dining room. The show itself was called Blizzy Ranch Comedy Club. There was a daily newspaper written specifically for Blizzy Ranch. Every single day, it was someone’s job to summarize the news of the day, global and local, and circulate it around this little community, self described as a happiness cult. We learned about Tony, how he was the “out there” brand of genius. Apparently, when Tony first toured this mansion he laid in the yard, shirtless, and asked the realtor what his commission would be if he bought it. The realtor told him, and he said he’d double it to be allowed to stay, then and there. Then he changed his mind, he’d just give the realtor one million dollars. That’s the day he moved in, and he walked around smoking cigarettes in every room to make sure the realtor couldn’t sell it to anyone else. These were the types of fun stories we were told about this man, who’s existence still felt almost like a myth.
That night, before the show, someone came into the green room and asked if we’d introduce ourselves to Tony on Twitch. He still wasn’t feeling well. So, we spoke to a phone and thanked this absent man for having us. We told him about ourselves. We tried to be funny. Tony never showed up that night, but the show was perfect. Wood floor panels turned an indoor pool into a small showroom with low ceilings and a capacity for about 60 people. Any stand up comedian reading this is probably salivating. The experience was of doing standup comedy, really doing it, not in front of cars or in a limited capacity club or outside, but in front of a packed little room. We missed it so much, and we could only speculate how expensive it was to recreate what we’d lost. Onstage I joked that I’ve never felt like a dog had such a higher social status than me. I joked that Park City felt evil, that we were obviously about to get murdered, that this had poorly written horror movie all over it. After the show we hung out and drank with Tony’s circle, a sweet and charismatic group of intelligent and talented folks. Our night was finally over, we went home to the guest house for bed.
The next day, expecting to leave, we got word that Tony had not only watched but LOVED the show. Even more exciting than that, he wanted to meet us. He had a business proposal, we were told, and that we shouldn’t say no. We could say no later, but not to his face. We excitedly went back to the ranch for a chance to actually meet Tony, to talk to the eccentric genius and experience his mind first hand. On the porch overlooking the lake, we were told that Tony said our show was the best Blizzy Ranch had ever seen. He wanted to give us all our own tour busses and pay us $50 an hour to livestream. We were told we could live stream 24 hours a day. I was confused, we all were. Live stream what? Anything, our lives. Point our phones at a fish bowl and the $2,400 a day was ours. But Tony was down to hear our ideas too, if we wanted to pitch them on Twitch to him right now.
Our experience suddenly became a reality show. We were talking at a phone again, held by an assistant, to a man who was in the same house as us. We pitched ideas to him, a podcast studio with 24 hour streaming that comedians could take shifts in, a comedy festival in Park City, anything other than his idea which seemed voyeuristic and strange. Then we were taken to the lake, where a pop up tent was set up with bean bags and plush chairs. We were served champagne, orange juice that had been squeezed in Florida that morning, and Blizzy Ranch brand granola. Once again we were still being live streamed to Tony, interviewed about the food we were eating, asked to rate everything we’ve experienced so far on a scale from 32 to 212, the freezing and boiling points of water. We played along, putting on a show, making jokes, enjoying ourselves as much as possible under the strange circumstances. Next, we’d eat brunch. The food was incredible of course, but all we could talk about was how weird things were getting. Where the experience had once been exciting, the bizarreness now clearly outweighed the pleasantries. What’s up with the constant streaming? What the fuck is going on here? How much money were we about to make? Before we could really talk it all out, to express our discomfort, it was time to meet Tony Hsieh.
What happened next would be all at once satisfying and horrifying — a mere 30 feet from where we performed the previous night — in the basement of the mansion, next to the pool, was Tony’s bedroom. The obstacles between us and Tony, previously just circumstance, were now physical. There was the wall of buckets before his bedroom, each filled to the brim with whip-it canisters, then the weird semi-wall blocking our entrance, which is hard to describe because the experience itself became so disorienting and absurd at this point that it all morphs into a dream-like memory. What I do remember clearly is the size of the bedroom: tiny. By far the smallest room in the house. I also remember the chaotic mess of post-it notes all over the wall, the writing on the wall around them, the melted candles lining the upper frame of his bedposts, having dripped all the way down them earlier, and the mirrors everywhere. This room was a disgusting mess. A Spiderman mask, a tray full of different juices on the bed, and the bathroom just to my left, with plants growing out of the toilet and melted candles everywhere. And then Tony himself, laying shirtless under his blanket, skinny and frail, next to his girlfriend who was holding the famous Blizzy. This was the big “reveal”, the scene in a movie where the mystery is solved and you become satisfied, but satisfaction wasn’t the feeling. This room was home to a drug addict, a person who was on a Fear and Loathing style bender. Suddenly this felt less like a billionaire’s happiness factory and more like a crack house, and here we were, finally, at the epicenter of the experience. This was the bedroom of the man who was funding our bizarre trip and his lack of sanity made everything click. We were under the control of a lost mind. There he was, Tony Hsieh, the modern equivalent of a pharaoh, holding his whip-it canister and talking to us, almost immediately, in insanity.
My friend Brian made a joke about peeing on the rocks in his toilet and it was on. Tony started talking about a product called piss rocks where you pee on a rock and send them all over the world, to your loved ones or anyone that wants your specific piss rock…we laughed until we weren’t sure if he was serious or not. We, three comedians, couldn’t quite tell. Either he was playing it real straight, playing a parody of himself, or he was insanely high.
You’re each getting your own tour bus, he told us. So you each get a tour bus, and two drivers who are on payroll all the time. We’ll park these busses in LA, not sure where yet, and you’ll have an additional tour bus that’s a communal space. They will all be parked in a square. So you have your own bus and I’m drawing up the paperwork now with my lawyers. He spoke like this into his computer, barely looking up at us except to make a joke. His girlfriend, on the bed next to him holding Blizzy, laughed like “Oh Tony”. You will each have unlimited bankroll, and you can get whatever you want. You want a private jet? Just find one and tell me how much it is and you can have it. Don’t worry about money, if you make any money, we’ll split it, but until then, don’t worry about money.
Make money? Doing what exactly? Live-streaming our lives for him specifically? Making content? We didn’t know. Nobody knew anything other than Tony’s power, how real it was, and how broke we were. We left that mansion with new iPhones, instructions on how to make our own Blizzy Ranch Twitch accounts, and a dark sense of confusion.
Heading back to LA on the same bus we arrived on, we spoke in disbelief about our weekend, arguing the ethics of live-streaming for Tony and letting everything sink in. Were our careers, once promising, now reduced to being a monkey in a millionaire’s grand experiment? We’re comedians, no strangers to sacrifice and humiliation, but is this expecting too much? I can’t be expected to entertain one person all day, but I also can’t turn down the money that would quite literally change my life. Money that would cure the loss of my career, money that could help my mom fight cancer. Money that comes from someone in the top one percent, the symbol of the inequality we’re all now so aware of. What’s a few tour busses and some life changing money to someone worth 840 million dollars?
One thing we all agreed on was that we were witness to something very dark — a man with ultimate power paying everyone around him to pretend he was fine — to pretend he was just being regular eccentric brilliant genius Tony. His ideas, once innovative and heartfelt, were now being projected through a thick fog of Nitrous Oxide. The small mirrors we had seen had a purpose, they were placed to reflect sunlight from the yard into his bedroom, so he could function with sunlight instead of electricity. Someone was paid handsomely to help him do that. Actually, everyone around him was being paid double their best salary, to simply BE there. To ignore the reality — that their boss needed serious help. This seems to be the real symbol of his power, that he had enough wealth to pay people to watch him suffer, to not say “this is enough”. We became very sad, and wondered if we were ready to become complicit.
My friend who set this whole thing up, a former drug addict himself, felt the most depressed seeing Tony in that state. Brian, formerly homeless, was already planning out his livestream routine — he’d mostly let Tony watch his cat, but definitely give a show. Ali, more weary than us, had a calm demeanor. This is basically what it’s like to be a girl in hollywood, she told us, men in power promising you unspecific generosity in return for unspecific favors. We were all experiencing what it feels like to be a woman for the first time, and it showed.
I was live streaming in my apartment most days over the next week, when it didn’t feel too creepy. The other two male comics were live streaming too. 24 hours a day. Ali was over it. While I streamed, mostly nothing, mostly pointing my new phone at the wall and going about my business, there was always exactly one person watching. Sometimes I’d talk to the stream, telling Tony what I was up to, and how broke I am. We couldn’t get in touch with anyone at Blizzy Ranch for a while, then did. We were told to stop streaming, that Tony hadn’t been in his right mind when we met him. We’d get paid for the first week of streaming but the busses weren’t coming. The dream was over. I would joke about how he probably just wanted to watch me and my girlfriend have sex. I would talk to my friends about how my weekend at Blizzy Ranch would be a great beginning to a horror movie. In the movie, of course, Tony would pay us extra if we had sex on camera, or even murdered someone. We were animals in his little experiment. It became a story, something to laugh about. We moved on, and then the real horror happened.
Tony Hsieh died on November 27th, and I immediately got phone calls and texts from everyone I had shared this story with. My friends mostly expressed disbelief at how brilliant and put together Tony seemed in the tributes, how starkly different this was than the Tony Hsieh of my experience. I began to feel sick about it, guilty even. I wondered if someone killed him. Why was the description of his death so vague? “injuries in a November house fire”. Then I’d think about him, a man that high on whip-its, surrounding himself with candles, it sounded like an obvious accident. But then, later, a Forbes article suggested Tony may have killed himself by locking himself in a storage area during the fire. As I read more about Tony one thing was consistent across the board: how he seemed to sincerely love people. How he was a giving soul who touched and influenced so many, a visionary whose philosophy on happiness was inspiring: true happiness being the moment when you want to give everything away. Then I read about his struggle with addiction, his partying, and his friends who ultimately loved him and wanted to save him. Where were they? Maybe I could’ve helped him, I could’ve left that ranch and called someone, written an email to his people, done something. Was his wealth, ultimately, what prevented me from truly caring?
We resent the wealthy, and the imbalance of wealth justifies it in a very real way. The unfairness of their power is painful to us, and we can’t help but resent it. It seems that a man like Tony, with enough power to save us all, should be doing that. I surely would, given the circumstances, right? Flint Michigan would have clean water, the homeless in LA would be sheltered, etc. But here I was, grandstanding in the shower of my studio apartment, reminding myself that I couldn’t even turn down the money of a sick millionaire. How great of a person could I possibly be? But, shit, I gotta eat.
I try to imagine the loneliness that Tony experienced, how he spent so much time and money trying to generate happiness and forgot completely about himself. How the pandemic must’ve left him, once occupied with projects and events and parties, left to truly face himself and what he had been running from. I wonder if his proposition was an attempt to watch us live our lives, to watch us be happy and enjoy what he gave us. Maybe his ranch and his generosity were all tools to make those around him feel the happiness he had somewhere, somehow, completely lost.
Before Tony died I was paid for one week of live streaming. We never saw those buses and we never fulfilled his dream for us. I landed a gig helping Santa Clauses around the country meet with children on Zoom, being IT for around 36 jolly old men who just need a little guidance with their green screens, a somewhat similar but much less absurd job than the one Tony offered me. I wonder if even now, with all this reflection, would I take another opportunity like the one I took? I hope this is more than a story, a close encounter with the other. I hope I can move forward with the ultimate lesson to take care of the people around me. I hope I can do stand up again, but without wanting the wealth which destroys us, the wealth we’re all told we can’t live without.
