Entertainment Diet: Tony Hsieh

If you live in Las Vegas, the name Tony Hsieh is a familiar one.

A Harvard educated entrepreneur, Hsieh is the CEO of Zappos. Through the Downtown Project, he’s helped revitalize downtown Las Vegas, investing in a number of businesses along the Fremont East corridor, from Container Park to The Market to the Gold Spike, in addition to attracting a great deal of national attention with the annual Life is Beautiful festival.

We recently caught up with the 42-year-old Hsieh and asked him what his Entertainment Diet consists of these days. Not surprisingly, he consumes a heaping helping of all things downtown.

BOOKS

Hsieh is currently reading a number of books, including “Originals” by Adam Grant — “it’s a great book about creativity and comes with a lot of counterintuitive insights” — and “Getting Things Done” (the 2015 edition) — “it’s a productivity book, but it’s also about freeing your mind from stress so that you can be more present.”

MUSIC

Playing Pandora stations tends to be Hsieh’s primary mode of listening to music.

“Even though I recognize songs when I hear them, I’m pretty bad at knowing the names of the songs or the names of the bands or DJs. That’s what I love about the Life is Beautiful festival that’s happening September 23-25 this year. It’s a fun and easy way to be exposed to lots of different musical artists just by walking around and through word of mouth.

MOVIES

“I’ve been watching ‘Man in the High Castle’ on Amazon Prime, and enjoyed it. ‘Halt and Catch Fire’ has been a great TV series that I’ve really enjoyed as well.”

DINNER

Hsieh has a list of local restaurants that he enjoys, including PublicUs (“the food there is both delicious and beautiful”); Natalie Young’s restaurants Eat (where he “highly recommends the truffled egg sandwich”) and Chow; and the Container Park spots bin702 (where he typically orders the deconstructed reuben sandwich) and Perch (“their burger with fried green tomato is amazing”).

DRINKS

When it comes to grabbing drinks and hanging out, Hsieh prefers to stay close to “Llamapolis,” the 1-acre trailer park on Fremont Street where he lives in an Airstream trailer.

Of the places he frequents, Nacho Daddy is a “great, casual hangout place, good for drinking, lunch, or casual business meetings,” while Atomic Liquors, “Vegas’ oldest free-standing bar,” he notes, is “a pretty regular hangout and meeting spot for me.”

And then a few blocks down sits the Bunkhouse, a space owned by Hsieh’s Downtown Project. “The Killers just played a surprise midnight show there two weeks ago, where tickets were only $10. It was amazing.”

Read more from Dave Herrera at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at dherrera@reviewjournal.com and follow @rjmusicdh on Twitter.