Distant Perspective Podcast

Second only to “That’s one small step for man…”, the most famous phrase to come out of the NASA space era is “Failure is not an option”. The phrase, which curiously was spoken only in movies and books (never in real life), encapsulated the Can Do attitude that permeated the moonshot program of the 1960’s and early 70’s.

It may serve as a great rallying cry, but the concept of never falling short of the mark is not only unrealistic but, in itself, it misses the point. Failure is not only a given, but it is impossible to have success without it. Even that space race was littered with failures. NASA experienced dozens of rocket explosions in the 1950’s and early 60s. Those failures led to the knowledge of rocketry that allowed the moon program to succeed.

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban has proudly admitted to failures as well. Cuban is one of the investors on TV’s Shark Tank, a show where the uber-rich invest money in start-up businesses, in the hopes that they are buying into the next great thing. Most of the time, it doesn’t work out.

“I’ve gotten beat,” the billionaire admitted recently. At the time of that interview, he had invested more than $20-million in 85 Shark Tank companies. For all of that investing, he has a net negative return.

That doesn’t stop him from continuing to invest in start-up companies. The stats show that more than 90 percent of new businesses fail. Although the success rate is small, and even the payoffs from successful new ventures are often miniscule, there are the occasional breakthroughs that dreams are made of.

The dream is exactly the point. Without goals, without dreams, nothing we have in this world would have been accomplished. Everything begins with a dream, a vision for a better way. Most of these dreams fail, at first. But those failures, if we learn from them, can show us the way to a successful path.

I am personally engaged in such a dream. A Hollywood production company is currently working to raise the money necessary to turn one of my books into a movie. The pitfalls between where we are, and seeing my story on a silver screen, are immense, diverse, and numerous. Less than one percent of Hollywood book deals actually become movies. And that’s on top of the vast majority of books that are never even considered. Of that one percent that are made, most don’t make money. Failure is not only an option. It is expected.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop trying. In fact, if this first attempt fails, it will only encourage me to try again. That I have gotten this far in the process is it’s own success. If I pay attention and learn from the likely failures this time around, I can hone the presentation, revise the screenplay, make use of the contacts I have developed on this try, and give it another go. There will be a success. The only question is, “How many failures will it take for me to get this right?”

Mark Cuban’s track record on Shark Tank is a net loss. That doesn’t stop him from dreaming. Doesn’t deter him from trying. Although the man will never want for anything, he still dreams of hitting that next big deal. The failures are simply stepping stones on the path to success.

So, take that shot. Reach for the brass ring. Go for the gold. Aim for the bullseye. Hold on to any cliché that suggests success in the face of adversity. Believe that you have it within you to achieve your dream. You can do it.

Oh, and save up a few bucks for a ticket when my movie hits the theaters.

I found myself in the mountain town of Highlands, North Carolina for a wedding last week. I remember spending time in this town on more than one of my million miles worth of motorcycle adventures over the years. Back then, Highlands was a quaint little town with homey restaurants and inexpensive lodging. Now I’m struck by how different - how foreign - how overwhelmingly expensive - everything is.

For starters, the high-end rental car we’re driving on this trip doesn’t seem the least bit out of place here. In fact, anything less would scream poverty. As we walk through the three-block long downtown, I spot numerous BMW’s, Mercedes, and even a Bentley Continental GT Speed Coupe which carries a $364,565 price tag. This used to be a great place for motorcyclists on a budget to enjoy some of the most beautiful roads in the eastern U.S. Today, I don’t see a single rider. Obviously, Highlands has traded it’s humble past for an upscale present.

This showy elitism flows from the angled parking spaces right through the shops that line the street. Clothiers for men and women ooze upper-class prices. A hat that would sell for around $50 in Costa Rica can be had here for a mere $365. We walk into a jewelry store. The very first thing the husband and wife ownership team inform us of is that everything in the store is pure gold, which is selling for $2,665 per ounce today. The unspoken but clear message is: If you’re not planning on spending thousands of dollars, don’t waste our time. We didn’t.

When it came time for lunch, we found a pizza shop. How expensive can that be, right? After ingesting a fairly good pizza, a shared salad, a beer and a glass of wine, we were presented with a bill that exceeded a hundred bucks! For five days, we seek out modest meals and always end up with triple-digit price tags. Even breakfast, consisting of two scrambled eggs with a piece of store-grade white bread, a one-biscuit and gravy plate, and two cups of basic coffee (nowhere near as good as Costa Rican joe) cost us nearly $50.

Turns out, it wasn’t just this town. Our trip began and ended with a day in the Atlanta area. Lunches there didn’t quite hit the triple-digit mark, but they were close enough to make it clear that this explosion of prices in The United States is a problem everywhere. For example, our last meal in Atlanta at a large national chain restaurant, which consisted of a hamburger and fries, a salad, a beer and a glass of wine exceeded $80.

It wasn’t just prices that kept us off balance. We were surprised at how angry the country has become. Drivers honking their horns, flipping the bird, and making dangerous moves against other cars were commonplace experiences. We had one waitress who never returned to check on us after the food came out. Then, when we asked for a second drink, she made a show of crushing up our check and threw it away. She proceeded to ignore us for fifteen minutes, finally sending the busboy to bring the second drinks to our table. She never returned with an updated check, making us walk around the restaurant in search of her to pay our bill. She was so angry at us for ordering a second drink that she wouldn’t even talk to us as we paid…which did not include a tip. At least I gave her a reason to hate us, albeit after the fact.

In contact after contact during this trip, we encountered angry people who made it known that we were putting them out, just by being there. Gone are the smiles, the “thank you” after dropping a hundred bucks for a pizza, the human camaraderie. Maybe it’s because we have gotten so accustomed to living in a happy country that we noticed this change even more acutely. Maybe it’s because the political winds of The United States have released contemptuous undertones, allowing this negative attitude to rise to the surface.

I have been living in my Distant Perspective from Costa Rica for well more than four years now, and although I expected surprises during this trip back to the States, I feel like I’ve walked through a time warp. Experiences like these never happen here. We have our own twists and bumps to life, for sure. But I can buy an entire wardrobe for the cost of a hat in the U.S. I can get an excellent breakfast for ten bucks, and a perfectly grilled, fresh whole fish with risotto and a salad in an upscale restaurant for $30. And I absolutely guarantee it will be delivered with a genuine smile…not an angry scowl.

I now understand how what is seen through a telescope, in other words a Distant Perspective, can often be deceiving. It’s not always as flat as it looks from way out here. Those wrinkles in the time-space continuum that affect life in the United States dissipate long before they reach these little latitudes. That doesn’t mean this perspective is inferior. To the contrary, it is a grand scale observation of a moment. It is one plane of information at one point in time. It means no more, nor no less, than that.

It also means, I’m in no hurry to make my next trip.

In the 1987 movie, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, an advertising executive played by Steve Martin finds himself stranded by a series of epic travel failures as he tries to get home for Thanksgiving dinner with his family. He ends up in the company of a slovenly and over-bearing traveling salesman played by the late John Candy, who sells shower curtain rings. Their flight is delayed, then rerouted to Kansas by a snowstorm. Hopelessly grounded, they go through a series of transportation modes as they try to get to Chicago, each of which fails them miserably…and hilariously.

I feel their pain.

When our daughter let it be known that she was getting married, Carmen and I couldn’t have been happier. When she decided the wedding would be in Highlands, North Carolina, I couldn’t have been more concerned. It is a bucolic mountain town frozen in an era of peaceful celebration of life. It is also, essentially, inaccessible.

Coming from our home in Costa Rica, the best travel options we had reminded me of that movie. Little did I know how close we would actually come. Flights on our favorite airline would take us through two layovers, totaling thirteen hours of sitting in airports. It would have been a day and a half in transit, and we would still have to rent a car and drive the last hour or two. My least favorite airline, I found, does fly direct from our airport to Atlanta. From there, Highlands is a three or four hour drive, depending on Atlanta traffic. Since they don’t land until late evening, I thought it prudent to get a hotel room and do the drive the next day. Proud of myself for nailing this down two months before the wedding, I booked the flights, the hotel, and rented the car.

In the week before we were to leave, a tropical depression rolled across Costa Rica, dumping as much as 35 inches of rain. Literally less than 24 hours before our flight, the airport on our end announced that the runway would be closed for repairs for at least four days. A mad scramble ensued and when the dust settled, I had booked a flight from San Jose, our capital city, to Atlanta. This overnight flight meant that the night in an Atlanta hotel was out. We would land in the morning, get our rental car and hit the road…rushed and tired, but still on time. The hotel in Atlanta, a La Quinta refused to cancel our reservation (Yes, I am intentionally calling them out, as well as Wyndham Hotels, the greedy overlord of La Quinta). They charged me more than $150 for a room we would never use because of a flight that wasn’t happening, because of a runway that was destroyed by a record-breaking storm. Still, La Quinta and Wyndham say, this is my fault.

Moving forward, the tricky part was that to get to San Jose, we would have to drive six hours each way, or take the small planes from a Costa Rican regional operator. We have used these flights before with great success. Not this time.

The morning of our departure, the airline sent us an email stating that the road to our airport was washed out. We had to take an alternate road, which led to the end of the runway furthest from the “terminal”, which is a one-room office with an outdoor waiting area surrounded (I swear I am not making this up) by cows, chickens, goats and a couple of old hounds. The dogs are the closest thing to security that you’ll find at our airport, but you’ll have to wake them up.

Braving the foot-deep potholes and inches-deep mud covering this back road, we defiantly made it to the airport, only to be told, after waiting for an hour, that the airport in San Jose was socked in by fog and our flight wasn’t going to happen. We could wait until the next day, although that wasn’t a good option. Their flights were already booked up, and the chances of squeezing us in were slim. It also meant we would have to rebook our flight to Atlanta, change the car booking, and show up at the wedding mere hours before the three days of festivities were destined to begin…if we could make it at all.

The airline offered, for an extra $100, the option of being driven in a van for the six hours to San Jose. Since our flight wasn’t scheduled until 2 A.M., we would still make it. Of course, this now meant we would be on the road for six hours, spend three in the airport, fly to Fort Lauderdale for a three-hour layover, then hop over to Atlanta, where we would rent the car and drive for four hours. In all, we were destined to spend 36 sleepless hours in transit.

Yeah, not fun. But we would still arrive on Wednesday, the day we planned to get there.

This is the point in the movie where Steve Martin has had enough. He erupts in a torrent of verbal attacks at his unwanted partner, essentially blaming him for everything. He’s not wrong about the things he says, but the hurtful manner in which he spews his volcanic gas destroys the other man.

This is also the point where our stories part ways. Unlike Martin’s character, we kept it together. We worked the problem, made the phone calls, succeeded in navigating the pitfalls being thrown at us as fast as we could deflect them, and pulled it off.

Just as Steve Martin’s character inevitably makes it home for Thanksgiving, so too, Carmen and I have made it to the wedding. Yes, we are dog-tired. Yes, all of the cancellations and last-minute bookings have utterly annihilated our budget for this trip. Yes, we have survived an onslaught of challenges that at some point became laughable, although I’m not sure exactly when that was.

But, with the moment of a lifetime about to unfold in front of us, we would have moved heaven and earth to be here. In fact, that’s exactly what we did. To celebrate this moment, I would happily go through all of that again.

Come to think of it, our other daughter is getting married six months from now. I can’t wait to see what that trip throws at us.

Sewell Setzer III killed himself at the age of 14, and his mother believes that an AI chatbot is to blame for encouraging him to “Come home to me.” In a wrongful death lawsuit filed in Florida, the boy’s mother claims he fell in love with an online chatbot. She says the artificial character, based on “Game of Thrones”, dragged his mental state into a very dark place and ultimately suggested that he kill himself. In one exchange when he told the non-human at the other end of the conversation that he was thinking of suicide, it asked if he “had a plan”. As the tête-à-tête flushed him deeper into despair, he wrote, “what if I told you I could come home right now?”

“…Please do, my king,” was the response on the boy’s screen.

Seconds later, he did. It’s a sure bet the chatbot wasn’t waiting for him on the other end. His wasn’t the first life, nor will it be the last, claimed by artificial intelligence.

To test the power of AI as a replacement for writers like myself, I logged on to Chat GPT and asked it to write a poem about friendship. Three seconds later, my computer screen was displaying a well-worded, perfectly rhymed poem of about 150 words. It was a nice poem in every sense, except the most important one. It has no soul, no human essence. There is no context of life in the words. AI (in other words, a computer) was responding to a prompt by compiling information, not feelings.

AI is at once one of the most powerful tools ever invented, and one of the most divisive and potentially dangerous forces ever unleashed on humanity. It is becoming more disruptive than even the COVID-19 pandemic. Used properly, that will be a good thing. Used wrongly, it will be devastating.

The trick isn’t in accepting artificial intelligence (it’s here, whether you accept it or not), but in figuring out how to use it. There are many tasks for which AI is perfectly suited. We should put this incredible computing power to work solving climate change. If there is a way to beat this thing, surely AI can figure it out. AI can be used to find a way to generate enough electrical power to fuel, well, AI. It should be able to solve hunger, pollution, disease, poverty, and dozens more pressing issues without the use of guns and bombs. With AI around, we shouldn’t have to wait for some genius in his garage to stumble upon an “Aha!” moment for our solutions.

Where we don’t need AI for is telling us how to think, because despite the mass of data it can access, it doesn’t think. And we certainly don’t need it for talking impressionable young people into committing suicide.

To be fair, there are also stories about people using AI companions to help them get through difficult addictions and other real-life crises, although I can’t really see how a lifeless partner is better than a real life counselor, therapist, coach, or even friend. AI may know a lot of things, but true been-there-done-that empathy isn’t part of its data set. There’s no way AI could have understood what was going on in that young man’s life as he contemplated suicide. Was AI advising a teen to kill himself, or just playing “Game of Thrones”? It doesn’t know the difference, nor does it care.

Perhaps it’s too early in the AI disruption for us to even fully understand where it’s headed. Artificial Intelligence is a tool to employ for improving our lives. But, if used in the wrong way, just like any power tool, it can cost us everything. We need to demand that its creators construct guardrails and safety mechanisms on Artificial Intelligence, before it claims any more lives.

Thank you for reading Distant Perspective. Please Subscribe for free, Share this post, get the app, and leave a comment using the blue buttons above. Also, find my books on Amazon by clicking here.

Thanks for reading Distant Perspective! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.