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Oct. 17, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:12
463 Economics and Frustration

Using economics to achieve peace of mind!

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Good morning, everybody. How are you doing?
It's Steph. It is the, I don't know, 17th of October.
It's a Tuesday, and it's 7.40 in the morning.
Oh, boy, I went to bed at 11 last night, fell asleep nicely, and it all worked out too beautifully, almost too beautifully for words.
Sorry to those who were watching or who have watched the podcast from yesterday.
I apologize the...
It was a little fuzzy, let's say, and I'd forgotten to adjust or something had happened to the focus and this, using Windows Movie Maker or whatever the hell it is, It doesn't give the camera.
It's supposed to be self-focusing, but apparently it doesn't work.
It's a Microsoft camera, so why would it work at a Microsoft program?
Who am I to complain? The Windows Movie Maker is free, and so I'm not going to fuss too much, but it sure would have been nice if I didn't have to remember to adjust the focus.
Sorry, that was a bit of an old fish tank podcast.
But that's okay, because sometimes we lose audio quality, and other times it's just video quality.
As long as there's a loss of quality in some way, hopefully not related to the actual content of the podcast, I must count myself relatively content.
As you can see from the outside, it is a deliciously dark and dismal morning here in California.
Toronto, Canada, nine degrees, which is fine.
One of the problems with podcasting is I try to, you know, for you, dear listeners, of course, I try to keep the...
Background noise to a minimum, which will generally mean no heating.
I'm in a 60s Volkswagen, basically, fundamentally.
So no heating in general.
And that means I have seat warmers, not because I asked for them.
They just happen to have a car with seat warmers that I bought.
And I have actually grown to quite appreciate them.
Aside from the slight feeling that you've peed yourself, it's really quite a wonderful feeling.
I'm glad that it's not too cold yet.
As the winter progresses, things will get more and more chilly for the BCF. Anyway, so...
I'd like to chat this morning.
Christina and I had a very interesting chat yesterday.
Christina is a wonderful mixture of all things delicious and amazing.
And one of the things that she has as a personal challenge we all have are things to outgrow.
And mine is sometimes irritation at traffic can put me in a bad mood for an hour or so.
And so I have to sort of just accept that, you know, the state is the state and the roads are the roads and so on.
But Christina has a slight tendency at times to get aggressive or snippy with people who are in the service industry.
Now, those of you who are in the service industry, of course, know nobody like this.
I think Christina is pretty much the only person that if something goes wrong or somebody makes a mistake, then She can get kind of testy.
Now, it's pursed lips kind of cold-eyed disapproval testy.
It's not sort of, you son of a wha!
Or anything like that.
I mean, she's got nothing but class.
But there is a little bit of sort of white-lipped middle-class coldness that occurs with her when she is in the process of dealing with somebody who's supplying our internet or the bank or...
Or there's somebody in the insurance area or something.
There's something that is going on that she feels that she's not getting good service.
Or if she feels that somebody's cutting corners or if she feels that somebody isn't listening or if she feels that something can be done, heaven forbid, the person who says that something can be done when it actually can't be done, oh, there is much woe in the land when it comes to that.
Alright, it's time for an elegant merge pause.
So, of course, for some reason, I've never quite figured this out.
As soon as the weather gets a little rainy, everybody just stops driving.
Three kilometers an hour.
Hang on one sec. So, we were talking about this last night, and we had a chat about it on the weekend, which came out of something that occurred.
And we've been trying to put some money on her mortgage, right?
And the first time, the bank made a complete cock-up of it, and then the second time, they transferred $800 less than we wanted on our mortgage, and so Christina had to call the bank back and go through it.
Now, the last time that Christina called, she accidentally hung up on the bank, and then she tried to get back, like, phone back right away, and was irritable because she couldn't get through to the woman Who she was dealing with, right?
They were right in the middle of one of these mega-complicated move-from-here, move-from-there transactions.
And Christina accidentally hung up and then was sort of annoyed that she couldn't get the woman back on the phone.
She knew the woman's name, but of course it was a big call center and there was no...
There was no... The woman didn't know the other woman by the first name or something like that, right?
So Christina got a little bit testy.
Not... You can please understand.
I mean, she's no raving lunatic.
I mean, she's very calm.
She never raises her voice.
She never, of course, uses any foul language because she's not a podcaster, but she does get testy.
She does get testy.
That, to me, is a very interesting phenomenon.
Now, of course, the purpose in life is never, "Don't get testy," right?
But if you have to do something, basically for me, like if you have to call the bank back and go through this issue with the $800 missing from what we want to transfer to our Yeah, it's going to take you 20 minutes and it's because somebody made a mistake.
Absolutely. No question.
No problem. But I'd like to apply economics to this question.
So this is why this is called economics and irritation.
Because economics can actually be quite helpful in alleviating irritation.
Really, it's only really hugely valuable in terms of alleviating irritation when you're talking about the private sector.
There's nothing, really, short of a frontal lobotomy or joining a political party that can alleviate irritation.
At state-run industries, right?
Because they're always going to screw you.
They're just absolutely not there for your convenience.
They're there for your convenience in the same way that the farmer is there for the cow's convenience, right?
Milk it and kill it, right?
But I did sort of want to talk about how economics can be a useful discipline to helping you reduce the amount of irritation in your life when dealing with the private sector and so on.
Of course, the banks in Canada are far from private sector institutions.
They're heavily regulated. They're heavily controlled.
It's a cartel, basically, but at least there are five or six major banks in Canada.
Overall, it's really quite competitive in that sense.
So, when Christina was talking about this issue with the call center, I sort of said, you know, I understand that it's irritating, right, because it's just a big call center and so on, and heaven forbid it may not even be in this country, but I mean, I think it is, but maybe it's not.
And I sort of said to her, well, How would you feel if the bank doubled their rates, doubled the service charges that they have for you to deal with your money?
She's like, oh, I'd be enraged, right?
I'd be upset or whatever.
And I said, well, you do realize that one of the reasons why we don't pay as much in interest rate, sorry, the reason that we don't pay as much in service charges and one of the reasons why our mortgage is ridiculously low is because the bank has cut costs, right? She's like, yeah.
She doesn't like where this is going in a way, but you know, she's always game for a chat about this stuff.
And I said, so one of the reasons that we have a ridiculously cheap mortgage and one of the reasons that the bank rates are fairly low is because they have things like call centers, right?
And they don't have, you know, I said theoretically, right, the bank could have someone sit in a spare room of ours or lodge in the basement, and anytime we had a question, that person would leap to help us, but that would raise our bank rates, you know, quite a bit.
And I said, so the bank, you know, forgetting for a moment that it's a cartel and remembering that there's some competition at least involved in it, the bank is trying to cut costs and it's trying to pass those costs along to consumers, right?
Especially banks are in these sort of weird situations.
It's not that weird, I mean, but it's an unusual situation wherein other than cars and maybe one or two other things, people are unbelievably price sensitive, right?
When you're buying a, you know, an expensive house or as all houses are these days, you're buying a house, right?
Then you will shop around very, very deeply and very, very aggressively to get the best rates because it's, you know, 15, 20, 25 years of your life and the interest payments as they accumulate, like every point is a ridiculous amount of money over the course of the mortgage, so and so and so.
And... Of course, they want to offer the cheapest rate to their customers, but of course they also don't want to offer no service to their customers, right?
You could get a mortgage at a fixed rate for 25 years that never allowed any top-ups, that never allowed any increased payments, or that was just mechanistically taking the same amount of money, and that would be a cheaper mortgage, but people would feel uncomfortable with that, and we know that because, of course, banks don't offer it, right?
So nobody wants that.
I certainly wouldn't. So...
If we sort of understand that this is where economics can be very helpful in these situations if we sort of understand that The decisions that are made to service us are made in the context of trying to get the right amount of value.
The right amount of value.
All companies say, you know, we're all about the customer, and that's not true at all.
I mean, that's just a kind of sentimental nonsense that advertisers cook up.
The customer is number one.
Well, of course, that's not true at all.
Business is an ecosystem.
Business is a very complicated thing in terms of how to get 3-5% profit out of a wide variety of investments and there's a lot of complicated things.
It's certainly true in the long run that customer is number one but you don't get to customer is number one by just saying everything the customer wants they get because customers want a wide variety of different things.
So there's lots of complicated stuff going on when it comes to Pleasing customers, right?
So I said, okay, they could get rid of their call center and they could have individual account reps and so on, but that would really raise the price of our mortgage and so on, right?
So when you have to wait on the phone for 20 minutes to talk to a bank representative, there's two ways you can look at it, right?
And this is true for these kinds of service-oriented industries or industries where there's an aspect of service involved.
There's two ways that you can look at it.
You can either look at it like, oh man, this is really terrible service.
I can't believe they don't hire enough people to answer the phones.
This is terrible. I'm so angry.
I'm so upset. And then when it comes to talk to the person who you need to do or help you through a complicated financial transaction, you're already irritated.
That's sort of one way to look at it, right?
Now, another way to look at it that economically is equally valid, which I would sort of like to put out there as a way of reducing some of the stress and tension in your life if you're in these kinds of situations.
Another way to look at your interaction with the bank is in the following way.
I'm on hold for 20 minutes with my bank.
I am so glad that I am saving this much on my mortgage.
Because if I phoned the bank and someone picked up right away and said, oh, I'm so glad you called.
I was just watching my phone gather dust.
I would realize that I was horribly overpaying on my mortgage.
So every minute that you wait, and it's valid.
Economically, it's perfectly valid.
Every minute that you wait to talk to your representative at your bank is money that you're saving on your mortgage.
And she said, well, why don't they give out their extensions?
Why can't they just give out their extensions so that when I call, I get someone's extension, I can call back and always talk to them.
And I said, well, that's an excellent question.
And you can either jump to the conclusion and say it's because they want to torture me, which it certainly could be...
Maybe it's a massive, sadistic conspiracy and so on.
But this was sort of my guess, right?
You have to sort of assume that the bank is pretty good at running a bank, assuming it's not like, you know, International Soviet Bank of Monopoly capitalism.
But the bank is pretty good at being a bank.
And... I believe that I've never called the bank maybe once in my life if I called the bank and gotten through.
They're like tech support. They'll put you on hold for 20 minutes and then maybe you'll get someone.
Maybe you'll get cut off. But if you call the bank and somebody gives you an extension, well bank phone lines are always busy.
Someone's always calling the bank about some damn thing or another.
So if you're in a call center, you absolutely will end up in a situation where you put the phone down and it rings and you pick it up.
And you put the phone down and it rings and you pick it up and you put the phone down and you get the idea.
So my guess, and if anyone here is listening to this and runs a call center, please let me know.
When I was younger, I worked for a little while as a bill collector, like a nag.
Hey, how come you're not paying your bill kind of thing, right, while I was temping as a student.
And those, we were outbound calls.
And I also worked doing political interviews for a while.
Those were all outbound calls.
So I don't know what, but I'm assuming that they're not all taking perpetual 20-minute coffee breaks and only getting my phone call later.
So I said, you know, this is the problem that you're going to face if you're trying to run a call center.
If you let people hand out their extensions, then you're going to phone back and try and get someone at extension 221.
Now, the problem is that person at extension 221 is going to be always on the phone, right?
So every time you dial 221, you'll get voicemail.
Now, the person at extension 221 cannot conceivably manage how many people are going to call her on any given day.
It's a random spread, right?
It's another problem with call centers, right?
You can predict in a general sense what calls are going to be like, but there's lots of spikes and dips.
So if you call extension 221, you're going to go to voicemail all the time, and then she might have like 20 messages to return.
So she might not return your call until the next day.
And you don't know how long each of these calls are going to take.
So you're either not going to get through to the person, or it's going to be some indeterminate amount of time that she's going to have to spend returning her calls.
And that's going to make you like, she's going to call you then the next day, and you're going to say, oh, I don't have my paperwork with me.
This is really inconvenient.
Why didn't you call me back yesterday?
Because one of the basic things about human beings is that we're all about us, right?
I mean, we're all about, you know, it's been 18 hours since I left a message with you.
How come it takes you so long to call me back?
Rather than you're somewhere buried in someone's inbox and they're getting to you as quickly as they can.
And there's probably many other reasons.
Those are just a few that pop into my head.
Now, of course, you could say, well, you just hire more people to man the call center for incoming calls and then have other people.
But then that's a problem, too, right?
Because you're saying that you want a one-to-one relationship with the person you first call and then the person you call back.
So then again, your rates are going to have to go up to pay for the additional labor.
So anyway, there's all these sorts of issues, right?
Whereas if you have a call center that just everything gets rooted to a central switchboard and then people just pick up and try and, you know, And try and sort of pick up where the person left off if they accidentally hung up on them, which is not something you really plan for.
You don't run a call center with the basis of, okay, well, if 100 people today accidentally hang up, how are we going to deal with it when they call back, right?
You just assume that's going to be a random thing.
It's not like designing a database where the network might go down, right?
You have to design for that, but anyway.
So... That's just another way of looking at the process or the issue or sort of what's going on that's going to help reduce your irritation.
That it's not a really badly designed system that everybody's making lots of money and laughing at you when you try to get through to them.
And I'm not saying that's my wife's perspective.
I'm just saying that that's one way that you could look at it.
And that actual delays in getting a hold of a bank...
Are enormously beneficial.
Delays in getting hold of a bank are enormously beneficial.
Because it means that you're saving money on all the services that the bank provides.
So I'll give you another example.
I just finished paying off this lovely car, Volvo S7098. And...
I leased from a real hole-in-the-wall company.
I mean, it was like, you know, dogs barking at the back, one of these typical kind of Columbo offices where, you know, stacks of folders and papers sliding off all over the desks and everyone's desk can barely be seen because of all the paperwork and, you know, twitchy guys fresh out of prison manning the phones and so on.
I mean, it's a bit of an exaggeration, but it wasn't far off from that.
And then, I guess I leased with them for four years, and then I leased for another four years, or I ended up buying for another four years.
And just before everyone writes in and tells me how ridiculously expensive that is and so on, I understand.
But remember, all decisions in economics are equal.
Anyway, so...
I got to use the money for other things, and I had a lot more money to put as a down payment on my house, which saved me interest over 25 years rather than eight.
So yeah, I got it.
I got it. I got it. But I don't really care.
So this place, when it came up for eight years since I'd first bought the car, and I'd sort of finished paying it off.
And this place just didn't ever call me.
And then about a month after, I figured they'd just stop taking the money out of my account.
But they didn't, right? They took more money out of my account.
So I called them up and they're like, oh no, you have to come down.
You have to get a check because it's a transfer of ownership.
You have to get the government sort of certified safety check on the car and this and that.
And you have to come down and pay a transfer fee.
And I'm like, well, why did you guys tell me this?
It's like, oh, well, this is what you've got to do, right?
They completely avoided the question.
And, of course, Christina was incensed, right?
Christina was like, oh my god, I can't believe what kind of service that is, right?
That's so unbelievably bad for them not to phone you and not to tell you that when your car is coming up that this is what you've got to do and so on and so on and so on.
And I said, well, sure, it would be better if they did that.
But if they did that, I would have probably paid another percentage point interest on my car loan, which was ridiculously cheap.
And I'd rather have the hassle and the money.
Fundamentally, I'd rather have the hassle and the money.
Because in economics, there's no way that you get hassle.
If you get hassle and no money, you know you're dealing with the government.
If you get hassle and money, you know you're dealing with the free market.
If you get no hassle and money, I don't know, you're a mob boss or something.
I said, you know, yeah, it's a terrible service, absolutely.
But of course, if they had to hire someone to phone up people to go through everything that they needed to do with their lease...
Then they would end up having to charge me more for that.
And it wouldn't just be one guy for eight years.
That's not a very fun job.
I bet you they would have had like five guys in eight years.
So all the training costs and interviewing costs and hiring costs and all that.
So yeah, it would have been very expensive.
It would have added probably another percentage point.
So I'd rather have the couple of grand that I saved over eight years for having a cheaper job.
I'd rather have that money and then have the hassle of having to go down...
Well, I would have had to go down either way, but ask them to cut me a check for...
It turned out it was two months that was missing, right?
So I don't know. This stuff's not interesting.
It's just the way that I approach it, right?
So it's cheaper, right? I'll take the money.
I'll take the couple of grand with gratitude.
And I'm glad that they're incompetent because...
I don't know. If they weren't incompetent and they were really cheap, something really bizarre would be going on, right?
And who knows what would come out of that, right?
Like a criminal front or something, and I get swept up in some dragnet operation.
Anyway, so I went down and I got my car checked out for safety and all the government.
I got the emissions test and all this kind of crap.
And then I drove for like a million hours to go to this place.
And of course, in the middle of nowhere, right?
But of course, if it was convenient, it would be more expensive, right?
So again, this is like, it's a long drive, but I'm just like, every dollar...
Every kilometer is $100, right, of savings, right?
So good. I'm glad that they're in an industrial park on the moon, right?
That's fantastic. So I go in there, and the woman hands me a check, and it's short.
I look at it, and I'm like, I don't know the exact, I can't remember the exact sum, because my wife does all the finances and has for the last couple of years.
I couldn't remember the exact sum.
But for sure, that was short, right?
So I sort of faced a choice, right?
I said, okay, well, I could either say this check is no good, And they'd say, well, it'll take us a couple of days.
We'll mail it to you, right?
But given the amount of competence I'd seen displayed at this company already, I was not entirely sure that I would ever end up getting the money.
And when people forget to send you money, they often get kind of defensive and they get kind of aggressive and it gets tense, right?
So I was like, okay, bird in the hand, two in the bush.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to take this check and cash it and then I'm going to phone them and ask them to send me the difference.
And so I did.
I went and cashed the check because it wasn't that much short, just a little bit.
And then I phoned them and I said, you know, hey, I just got to remind you, somebody cut me a check for the basic amount, but not the tax.
At least I think that was a difference.
So if you could send me that, that would be great.
And I said, it's not that I don't enjoy giving the government all of my money, but just in this particular case, I might choose not to.
And she laughed, right? So hopefully the laughter sort of helps her motivate or whatever, right?
So, I thought that was just a very interesting sort of situation wherein, yeah, I could have been really irritated that I didn't get the best service in the world, but I got the best rate in the world.
I mean, economics is about trade-offs.
You can't really ask for the best rate and the best service.
Those two things don't make any sense, right?
It's like buying a Honda Civic and then trying to enter it in the Indianapolis 500 and wondering why you get lapped three times before you've made it around the first bend, right?
Those cars cost like a million bucks and a Honda Civic you can get for the change in your glove box.
We are enjoying the thunderous rain now.
There's very few big trucks on this private highway because big trucks, of course, do an enormous amount of damage to a highway.
They really chew it up. And they charge them savagely on this highway.
They actually charge the carrier costs of using the highway so the large trucks Which really use up the resources of the road, chew up the road.
They get charged an enormous amount to drive on the road.
So the one thing that's great about this private road is that there aren't a lot of trucks on it.
And the reason that that's great as well is because trucks start and stop more slowly.
So they really grind traffic to an atomically still halt.
It turns the Brownian motion of traffic into zero Kelvin.
Ooh, there's a geeky scientific joke for those in the know.
But, um... Oh!
Oh! Oh!
A slightly dropped thread!
Oh god, where was I now?
Oh, don't panic! Don't panic, the brain will help you out!
Oh, brain of mine, help me!
So, uh...
So yeah, so I might never get the change, right?
They shortchanged me like 90 bucks, right?
I might never get that. But I'm still up a couple of thousand bucks from my lease as a whole, right?
And that's money that's going to sit in my account and is going to grow and is available.
And I put down on my mortgage for my house, which saves me 25 years of interest and so on.
So, you know, we're all happy about that, and that's good stuff, right?
The worst service, as long as you're getting good price, right?
Bad service. You don't go to the dollar store and look for an engagement ring, right?
I mean, you would if men designed the world, but, you know, it's the women's world.
We just live in it. So, I thought that is just another way of looking at these kinds of issues that may occur within your life.
And just recognizing that, yeah, you can get frustrated, but you're only going to get frustrated if you're a bad economist.
Because a bad economist just looks at, or an amateur economist, or just a plain old economic fool who's untutored but thinks he knows something.
This is going to look at a particular transaction.
We've raised the minimum wage, and they're going to pick some guy whose wage has gone up and said, see how beneficial this is?
Look, it's wonderful. We've got all these people who are now making more money than they were before, and it's all happy and wonderful and charming.
And they're not going to go and dig out all of the people who lost their jobs and are now unemployable and turn to welfare or a life of crime in order to support themselves.
They don't look at those people, right?
They just look at one side, right?
So again, just take another example, which we're all familiar with.
If I take my $300 million grant that came from the government, everyone says, well, look at all these jobs that were saved, and nobody says, well, what jobs would have been created that were more sustainable and less politically desperate and less, frankly, corrupt and violent?
What jobs would have been created if the $300 million had been left for somebody else to invest in?
So when you only look at one side, as economists will constantly tell you, if you look at only the visible positives in a transaction but not the hidden negatives, you're not an economist, right?
It's like a weatherman who says, I don't know what the weather is, let me have a look outside.
Oh, it seems to be raining, right?
That's not a really particular skill.
That's just stating the obvious, right?
And there's no intellectual discipline where stating the obvious is considered to be a virtue.
So, that to me is just, you know, you wouldn't need any intellectual discipline, as I talked about in the intro to philosophy series.
You wouldn't need such a thing as intellectual discipline if you could state the obvious and consider yourself a smart guy, right?
So, clearly, there is hidden benefits, hidden losses to government programs, which are always ignored by the mainstream press.
And this, of course, Phi, right, the Foundation for Economic Education, believes, as do some libertarians quite strongly, that the problem why people aren't free is because they lack economic education.
So if they had economic education, they would see the hidden costs of government programs, and they would realize how bad it was, and then we would become free, and I think that's a pleasing kind of nonsense.
I really think that's quite funny, right?
Because economic education will simply make people cynical.
It won't make them...
And of course, if economic education made people free, then every economist would be a free market economist.
And there are lots of Marxist economies, lots of socialist economists, excuse me, And I just think that's a very optimistic idea, right?
I mean, it's back to the old mystery, which we'll get to one day.
Why do people choose bad things, right?
Why would people choose to do bad things, right?
Socrates thought it was just a matter of education, or at least Plato's version of Socrates thought that, that nobody would do bad things if they honestly understood the sort of moral and spiritual consequences of doing those bad things.
Nobody would do those bad things.
And I don't find that to be the case at all, but it's another question.
Basically, I believe that people do bad things to pretend that their families were good.
That's sort of my fundamental. Dealing with your family is very painful.
Dealing with family histories is painful.
And people do bad things to normalize their childhoods.
And we don't have to get into it right now, but that's a long way from, you know, if we teach people about, you know, Say's Law and the supply-demand curve and the hidden liabilities of economic transactions, they'll decide to do good things and to support good things.
I think that's fairly optimistic, at least from my viewpoint, that people do bad things in order to shield themselves from the pain of their own childhood.
I was beaten. I'm going to beat people.
I was ignored.
I'm going to exploit people.
I was taken from. I'm going to steal.
All of these things, you just normalize your childhood experience and you say, that wasn't a horrible and agonizing deviation from a better situation for me.
It was just, this is the way the world is and that's how you operate and you do that to cover up your past so that you don't have to deal with the agony of whatever happened to you.
And that's a long way from, let's put Econ 101 into the public school system and then we'll end up with freedom.
I think that's absurd.
And, of course, only people who've had over-intellectualized and cold childhoods would imagine that with knowledge comes virtue.
With knowledge alone, right?
I mean, of course, you need some degree of knowledge for virtue, but there's lots of very smart people who know a lot who are totally and utterly corrupt, right?
I mean, the lobbyists we were talking about yesterday, so...
That's just a by-the-by observation.
I hope that you don't mind.
I think that's the first tangent in about 10 minutes, I guess.
This way of looking at things can be enormously helpful, I think, when you recognize that Looking at the hidden drawbacks of a particular economic transaction is very important.
It's like, hey, free heroin!
That's great! What a generous guy!
What a generous pusher! How wonderful is that?
You can't get any better than free heroin.
That's looking at the positives of an economic transaction and not so much getting the hang of the negatives of said economic transaction.
And similarly, though, I think that one of the ways to remove or at least to reduce the tendency towards frustration in your own life, of course we know about looking at the hidden economic negatives of a transaction, but how about looking at the hidden economic positives of a transaction?
Wouldn't that be a fun thing to do as well in terms of making you, you know, like a happier person?
So again, when I got bad service from the leasing company, I looked at the hidden, or at least not obvious, positives.
The immediate stimuli was, oh man, how ridiculous.
I have to go down and get this money. I have to do this, that, and the other.
And then when they hand me a check, I mean, it's almost funny, right?
It's like, yeah, well, of course, if they're not going to phone you and say, here's what you need to do, and they're going to keep taking money out of your account, then...
And by the way, this is the same company that when I went into Renew, they said, oh, last year, you skipped a payment because there was something, something with your account was moving around or something, so if you could pay up now, that'd be great.
So, I mean, they didn't phone me to say, by the way...
You've skipped a payment, right?
They just said, oh, you know, pay us now and, you know, we don't care about interest or whatever, right?
So this is, you know, it's kind of a hobby for them, a hobby with lots of paperwork.
So it's, you know, this is the kind of people they are.
Of course, if they're always incompetent to their own fiscal advantage, right, then they're not going to get a lot of repeat business, right?
This is another thing to understand, right?
Banks and leasing companies and so on, they're all about the repeat business, right?
And if they're not getting any repeat business, their costs are going to have to go up because the cost of getting new customers is a whole lot more than the cost of milking your existing customer base, right?
So they're not going to get a whole lot of repeat business, which means that their costs are going to go up and so on.
So they're very friendly, right?
They're very nice and friendly. They're just, you know, not the most competent people in the world.
For me, it's very important to, or one of the things that gives me a lot more happiness and peace of mind in my life, is to look at the hidden economic benefits of a particular transaction.
Yeah, it's annoying that they got this wrong, but that annoyance, I've been well paid for.
Like, I've been well paid for.
Like, if somebody said, I'm going to give you 3,000 tax-free dollars, I don't know what the math is.
Let's say $1,000. I'm going to give you $1,000 tax-free dollars, free and clear, for you to spend as you please.
And what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to spend an hour on the phone.
$1,000 an hour on the phone.
Would you think that was a decent offer?
Would you think that would be something that you might want to take up?
Well, I would imagine that it is a decent offer.
I think it's a decent offer. And it's something that I would certainly be interested in taking up.
So... That's the thing to remember when you're in a situation where you're getting bad service.
And there's millions of ways that you can do this.
So for Christina to look at when she's on hold, when you're on hold for tech support and all that, all that is the reason why your computer is so cheap.
So I am perfectly aware, and I've begun to sort of change my mind about this now as I get older, just because my time is getting more valuable.
But, you know, whenever I've bought the million or so computers that I've bought in my life, I go to, you know, frankly, hyper-oriental holes in the wall because I know what I'm doing and I know what I need to buy.
So I go to these, you know, grungy hole-in-the-wall things, right?
And I don't pay...
Well, there used to be a tax here, I think, that I can't remember if I pay or not.
No, I don't pay the GST. And...
I negotiate cash-only transactions, and I get almost no service, right?
But I save, like, 40% off the price of my computer.
And what I'm doing is I'm saying, well, I'm such a geek.
I've already figured out how to fix computers and set up my networks and all this kind of stuff.
I'm such a total geek that I've already invested this time, so why on earth would I need a Dell technician?
Like, if it's a problem I can't solve, there's no way in hell a Dell technician is going to solve it, you know, frankly.
There was one exception when I bought my last computer.
It turned out I was trying to get an AGP into a PCI Express slot.
I didn't even know. It was a new thing, right?
But I think that's sort of an important thing to understand that I've already invested the time, but it doesn't save me any time.
Sorry, it doesn't save me time to get a cheap computer and to get no service.
It just means that I'm making a little bit of money back for the time that I've already invested In learning how computers work so that I can fix them myself.
And the service really wouldn't be that helpful for me to get from some technician because I know a fair amount and I can get stuff from the internet and user groups and so on.
And so if I have to go to a technician, then it's a total problem for me, right?
There's absolutely nothing that is going to help, right?
So I don't know. I have this Radeon 9800 Pro.
Who knows if you're interested at all in these things.
But if you have a Radeon 9800 Pro video card, which is great, and I just upgraded from that for the PCI because it was an AGP, And I was playing Oblivion, and Oblivion kept crashing, like freezing, and it turned out that I had to switch my motherboard settings from 8x to 4x AGP, and it worked fine, and I didn't really lose any frame rates, and I just thought that was kind of like, but what technician is going to know that, right?
I even went to boards, posted questions, nobody had any clue, I just tried it for the hell of it.
Ah, a little bit of coffee.
That's the tough thing with holding this mic.
I used to just hold my coffee, but now I hold my mic.
So... That's just, I think it's important to understand that there is hidden economic benefits.
Yes, there are times when it would be helpful to call up a technician and so on, and I, you know, call these guys whose English isn't the best and who don't want to talk to me because they have no budget, unless they're bored, right?
I could take the computer, if I want, if I take the computer down, things get a little bit better, right?
But when I bought my Radio 9800 Pro a couple of years ago, again, I bought it from one of these hole-in-the-wall places, and it was a total mess because the first one didn't work, and they didn't believe me, right?
They were pretty aggressive.
I brought the computer video card home, and it had these horizontal lines, and then it would lock up, and there were these problems, right?
So, of course, they don't want to return it, right?
Because I don't know where they get these things from, but they sure as heck didn't want it returned.
So they said, oh, it's your drivers, you know, oh, it's your computer, oh, it's your motherboard, right?
And I'm like, you know, I got to tell you, I don't think so, right?
I put my old video card in, everything works fine.
So that was, you know, that was not a good transaction, right?
Because I had to spend a couple of hours, I had to drive back, and the money that I saved by going to these guys was not a positive thing in the end, right?
So... These guys, that wasn't good, but that's just the risk you take, right?
There's been many, many times where when I had an Atari 800, oh gosh, 20 or more years ago, I upgraded the princely 16k RAM to 48k RAM. I went down to get a 32k memory card, which was an amazing amount of money.
I just bought 512 gigs for less.
Actually, it was about the same price.
Less now with inflation.
But... I went down and bought it from a guy named Luigi who was working out of a little hole in the wall.
And it was really cheap relative to what I would have had to pay if I had gone.
Now, of course, if there had been a problem, I don't know what would have happened, but most times there isn't, right?
So, you know, you save all this money, and then when there is a problem, you have to spend more time because you don't have the kind of service, right?
It's the old question when you go to FutureShop, do you buy or Best Buy or whatever, do you buy that extended warranty plan?
Well, I didn't used to. Right?
Because with my Rio...
Sorry, with my...
Yeah, with my Rio 500 or whatever, my old MP3 player, I didn't buy that extended warranty plan because I'm like, eh, I'll fix it.
And I had no problems, right?
So I saved myself like 70 bucks there, right?
Which is great. And everything that I bought, I have not bought that extended warranty plan for.
But now, I do buy the extended warranty plans...
Because I want to just be able to hand it back and get another one.
I don't want to have to wrap it up like I had to return a Creative Labs Zen Vision Extra.
Great product, and it wasn't really their fault, but I dropped it anyway.
So I just thought I'd give it a shot with the warranty, and they agreed to replace it.
But I had to get an RMA number.
I had to sort of ship it back in the original packaging.
I had to make a trip to the post office.
I had to get insurance. It was a couple of hours, right?
And now that I'm getting older and my time is more valuable, you know, a couple of hours is not inconsequential.
So for me now, yeah, when I bought my creative Zen Vision Extra, great product, yeah, I'm all about, yeah, take my 70 bucks.
I'll get my... My three years warranty, and if I ever have any problem, I'll just toodle over a five-minute drive, hand it in, and get another one.
So, with the irritation that comes from the Zen Vision Extra, well, I bought it from a place in Quebec online, which didn't charge...
One of the taxes that's here in Canada didn't have to be charged.
So, you know, I saved some money, right?
I saved like $40 or $50.
And then I didn't buy their extended warranty or whatever.
And so I saved myself another, you know, whatever.
So, yeah, it didn't turn out to be that great a transaction because I saved like $100 or $120.
But I had to spend like three hours.
And, of course, I had to back everything up on it and all that kind of stuff, right?
So that didn't turn out to be the best transaction in the world, but that's okay because there's been countless other times where I... So, anyway, I think you sort of get the idea.
I don't want to labor the point. At least, you know, one podcast in 363 might as well be one that doesn't labor the point.
But I just sort of wanted to point out that there is this hidden upside to economic transactions that is well worth having a think about because it really can save you a lot of aggravation and frustration by remembering that you're being well paid for the inconvenience.
And thank you so much.
I had a wonderful donation day yesterday.
I really, really appreciate the donations that came through.
And thank you in particular, obviously, since I mentioned it in song yesterday.
Thank you to the generous donators.
Thank you so much to those who've signed up for the subscription payment.
I really appreciate that.
If I can get a certain number of people signed up to the subscription payment, then I can do this stuff full-time, which I think will do quite a bit of good for the world.
And I thank you so much for all of that.
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