Skydiving was never on my bucket list. In fact, I've never been a big fan of high-risk physical endeavors. As someone who's a consultant to high stakes sports gamblers, one might think I wouldn't be risk averse. But I am. Basically, my job for 45 years has been to cull 99.9% of all gambling opportunities and continually tell people, "No, that's a bad idea."
I never, as I said, had any interest in skydiving. As a student at Penn State's Pattee Library, I'd read quite a few skydiving magazines. The back pages were filled with listings of accidents, almost all of which had the tagline, "Death by impact."
My youngest brother drove an explosives truck for years, then helped manage a warehouse filled with blasting supplies. I never wanted either job.
Halo Effects
One thing about gambling is that if you're wearing a halo because you did something great, it can quickly become an albatross, and eventually a noose, if you're not committed to an unrelenting process of self-evaluation. This brings us to the heavy burden of being a billionaire or thereabouts. And I'm not kidding. It cannot be an easy thing to be a billionaire or flagship business commander and to grasp, as Harry Callahan famously says at the conclusion of Magnum Force, that "A man's got to know his limitations."
In one week, a collection of older gentlemen all died doing things I cannot understand. The Titan submersible implodes 12,000 feet down, filled with a crew of fearless, intelligent men who really should have known better. Meanwhile, billionaire James Crown, 70, died at a Woody Creek racetrack near Aspen, Colorado on Sunday, June 25. Driving solo, he crashed into an impact barrier. Yesterday, Paul Ehlen, founder of Precision Lens back in the '90s, died shortly after takeoff while solo piloting a vintage P-40E.
Why did these accomplished men make such high-risk behavioral decisions? As athletes and human beings, they are well past their physical and reaction-time primes. Why put at risk your responsibilities to the vast resources you've accrued? So you could play John Wayne?
Maybe nobody told them that these were really stupid, irresponsible things to do. Maybe that's the burden of being uber successful and in charge. People around you tend to not proclaim when you're doing dumb things.
Halo effects perceived by others have those dangers. The real and ultimate issue, however, may be when supermen fail to understand that being superhuman in the past or being superhuman at one task doesn't carry over into new decades or different endeavors. We degrade. And being great at one thing is no guarantee of being competent at something else. The uber accomplished often shoulder the additional problem of being insulated from frank criticism or call-outs. In a way, their accomplishments have earned them added danger.
In the world of gambling, halo effects have done the best of the best no favors. For Stu Ungar, poker savant, it was sports betting. For T.J. Cloutier, another great poker player, he liked the dice. For some famous successful sports handicappers like Tony Salinas and Mike Lee, the ponies kept calling. Why does everyone want to conquer the world?
What kind of a culture drives the best and brightest to try to exceed their limitations? Why is sound judgement not as valued as swashbuckling? The irony of the Titan, of course, is that the arrogant use of non-standard design, materials, and protocols was used to seek out the Titanic, itself a metaphor for technological arrogance. The irony of it all should have served as a blazing red alert.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, all of the accomplishments of these men likely carried the seeds of their own destruction.
Bob Dietz
June 28, 2023
