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Feb. 12, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

09:41

1581 Ipod Negotiations

Some useful suggestions for negotiating with geniuses...

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Time	Text
	Hey everybody, it's Steph. Hope you're doing well.
	February 10th, 2010.
	Finally! Oh my god!
	It's like a mastodon wailing back and forth to get out of a tar pit, sometimes getting to the gym.
	I'm trying to get there three times a week, but oh man, it's crazy.
	It's, you know, 10 minutes to drive there, 12 minutes to drive there, a couple of minutes to get into the gym area.
	I get 26 minutes on the treadmill, half hour of waits, a shower, a jacuzzi, and a home, and it's like two hours.
	It's two hours! I do that three times a week.
	That's like almost a full workday.
	Six hours. It's crazy.
	Health is nutty von nuttyville.
	But what are you going to do?
	It's either that or I try to get some sort of gym at home and that's not going to be the easiest thing in the world.
	So we shall continue.
	Plus, I mean, with the pool there in the summer, it's really, really nice.
	So, anyway, just minor grumbles about the challenges of getting to the gym and having a workout.
	It's not easy.
	Actually, you know what? It's more than...
	I do more than... I do about 40 minutes of weights and 26 minutes on the treadmill and a little bit of stretching and all that.
	It's just... Oh, man. So, it's like 8 o'clock, and so I leave, and by the time I come back...
	Well, it's 10pm and Isabella still hasn't gone to bed.
	She had a bit of a funny day.
	I took her to the library this morning.
	I was going to take her to our play center, but it was closed.
	And so I took her to the library this morning and we played for about an hour and a half.
	Then she had a poop and then came home and I went to the Apple iStore.
	That was nice. That was nice.
	I like me the apples.
	I had a problem with my iPod Touch.
	The volume control wasn't working anymore, the external volume control.
	So every time I needed to adjust the volume on the fly, I'd have to open up an application and adjust the volume and open up an audio program, adjust the volume, and go back to playing a game, whatever, anything.
	So it was a bit of a drag. So I went in.
	I'm like, hey, the volume control stopped working.
	He's like, any liquid damage?
	Nope. Any shock damage?
	I don't think so. I was dropped on the carpet a couple of times by my daughter, but I don't think so.
	So I had a case on it. I probably opened the case, and there's all these coffee stains on the case, all these coffee stains.
	I'm like, wow, and it smells.
	You can smell the coffee. He's like, hmm, that looks like water damaged me.
	And I'm like, you know, I really can't argue with you there.
	I'm not going to pretend that does not also look like water damage to me as well.
	So I said, I don't know.
	My wife didn't. I don't remember spilling coffee on it, but perhaps my daughter dunked it at some point when we weren't watching if there was a cup of coffee on the floor, sort of mostly empty or whatever.
	And he's like, well, you know, there's some corrosion on the jack to plug to the computer to recharge and transfer data.
	But he said there's a little...
	And this is interesting, at least for me.
	Electronics are so subject to water damage, and I get so many people try and pass off water damage as it never was in any water and so on, that companies have actually put sensors to detect water damage in their electronics so that when they get them back, they can say, no, no, no, the sensor you see says...
	That there was water damage, and so, so, so, and this and that and the other.
	So he said that in the headphone jack, there is a sensor for water damage, and of course, I guess that's where the water would go, perhaps the most deeply.
	And he said there was no indication of water damage there, but he could see a little bit of corrosion on another jack and so on.
	So I said, well, I'm not going to tell you that there was no water damage.
	I said, the one thing I will say is that I clearly am not trying to pretend that there wasn't, because otherwise I would have opened the case up and cleaned it and not left big stinking coffee stains all over the iPod and then said, I don't think there's any water damage.
	So, you know, clearly I wasn't anticipating that there was water damage and didn't know of any damage.
	I don't know whether that changes anything.
	And if there's anything you could do, I'd really appreciate it.
	So he's like, fine, I'll switch it for you.
	And it was really nice. And that is a very, very important thing.
	It's not a big principle here.
	It's just something I've sort of found useful.
	You know, if you come across, you know, you're chatty and you're pleasant and you're, you know, whatever.
	I mean, I think people kind of want to help you.
	They don't want to. There's a lot of power in that.
	And this isn't manipulative.
	I mean, if the guy had said, I'm not going to replace your iPod because there's water damage, I'd have said, well, I'm disappointed, but I'm not going to, you know, thank you for taking a look at it.
	I'm not going to have a problem with it because water damage is not covered by the warranty and clearly with coffee stains all over the iPod.
	It's tough to argue that there isn't any, so I would have accepted if he hadn't.
	But there's a real bonus in sort of niceness and so on.
	Like, I had a Sony camera.
	Oh, man. Never let me bore you with the woes of trying to find a good digital camera to replace an 8-year-old or 7-year-old Cybershot.
	No, 8-years-old. Almost 8-years-old, the Cybershot we have.
	So we've been looking for another camera, one that does better video, because the Cybershot that we have just does this crappy video.
	It's like 15 frames a second, grainy VGA. Although the pictures it takes are quite nice.
	They're only 3 megapixels, which sounds bad, but boy, they're really nice.
	Anyway, so we went to get a new camera...
	I picked up one, and the edges were kind of blurry, and it wasn't that great, and even though it was 12 megapixels, the pictures didn't look quite as good as the old 7-year-old Cybershot, and so we took that one back, and we got another, I think, a Canon, which was, like, really expensive, like $200.
	The first one we got was, like, $150 with tripod and case and blah, blah, blah.
	And then we got one that was like $280, and that was really bad.
	Although the video was great.
	High def was great. So we took that one back, and then we got a Sony, because we thought, well, the last one was a Sony Cybershot.
	Let's get a Sony Cybershot. And we tried it out in the store.
	It looked pretty good. But then, you know, we got it home, took the pictures, and no matter what settings we tried, the pictures were always blurry.
	Always just a little soft.
	I guess not really blurry, but soft.
	Although the high def that it took was gorgeous.
	Anyway, so we just ended up going back to the original camera.
	Which by then had come down quite a bit in price.
	So that was nice. So anyway, when we had the Sony, they come with their own tiny little memory sticks.
	And I cleverly took the memory stick out and forgot, because most cameras that come with those little memory cards, you can unplug the memory cards and put it into a computer and just read it directly off the computer, which is a lot easier and faster than plugging in the USB and all that, right?
	So I took the little memory card out of the...
	And I put it into the computer, but it was too small to fit in.
	And I thought, oh, well, you know, maybe it's one of these ones that's got like a little...
	You push it a little further and it clicks in because it's got sort of two sizes.
	There's a smaller one with little grooves or something.
	And I kept pushing it in and it's like, echo, echo.
	It just disappeared from view.
	And I was like, oh, man, you know.
	And I'm like, I kept...
	I thought, well, I can either get tweezers and try and pull it out or I can just keep pushing it in and hope it clicks somewhere down there and pushes itself back out.
	But it didn't.
	So... I ended up taking it to Tiger Direct.
	I introduced myself to the guy, and normally they'd charge you like 50 bucks to open up your computer and do stuff, right?
	And I said, hey, you know, you get this story every day of the guy who's been the most idiot with his electronics.
	I'd like to put myself forward as a contender for that award today.
	And he laughed, and he's like, what happened?
	He's like, well, you know, deep in there you can just see the tip of a little memory card and so on.
	Because we wanted to return the Sony, and the memory card would be like 50 bucks, and I wanted to be able to return the memory card.
	I can't return it if it's actually in another computer, so I kind of wanted it back.
	And I didn't want to pay, you know, the 50 bucks to have them pull it out.
	Anyway, so I just joked around with the guy and asked him how his day was and was sort of friendly and positive.
	And he said he'd have a look at it.
	And then he just gave it back to me like no charge.
	And I just, I mean, you don't have to be sort of idiot, bad stand-up guy like I am with silly jokes or anything.
	But I think if you just go in sort of friendly and positive and like, you know, if there's anything you could do, I'd really appreciate it.
	I think as an anarchist, that's an important thing to do.
	And I think you'd be surprised at how many people will actually try and help you.
	And do something nice for you.
	And as I said to the guy at the Apple store, I said, well, I really appreciate that.
	And just so you feel better, I do have a video of my daughter on YouTube saying the word iPod is one for first wood.
	So hopefully that's a good commercial for you guys.
	And I was, you know, now, and of course, I feel really good about Apple.
	And I'll, you know, go back and buy stuff from them if I have a choice.
	So I just sort of wanted to point out there's a lot of really sort of a positive way that you can interact with people that will get you a lot of the things that you want.
	And it's not exploitive, for me, at least, at all.
	I mean, there's no force of fraud involved.
	I genuinely do feel like an idiot, and there genuinely is water damage, but I'm still going to ask if there's anything that the guy can do.
	And if he says, listen, no, I mean, we have a policy, like, if there's water damage, there's water damage, right?
	I'll be like, hey, okay, well, I'll just survive without the volume controls, and, you know, it'll get stickier and stickier over time, and I'll try not to put it in a latte blender again.
	So it's not, you know, it's not manipulative, because there's no backup strategy.
	It's not like, I'll be nice, and then if I don't get what I want, I'll get surly.
	It's not that at all, and I think people sense that, and it's sort of more friendly.
	But try that, you know, just try going in and saying, oh man, I'm, you know, doofus alert.
	I'm afraid I've just something really retarded.
	I hit that fork in the road where I could either try and pull the memory chip out or continue to push it into the bottomless moor of the Toshiba.
	And I went with the latter.
	And whoa, oh, much whoa, it's me.
	And I just have no way to get it.
	And the guy, he spent like 20 minutes working on it, opened up the computer case, got the thing out.
	And he's like, oh, no charge, whatever, right?
	And I thought that was really nice.
	He offered to pay and all that stuff.
	So, I just highly recommend that as an approach.
	It's worked for me on many, many different occasions.
	And, you know, in sort of a karmic thing, if people do it to me, I try to be as sort of friendly and positive and accommodating as possible as well.
	This is another thing. This is sort of positive economics, right?
	Rather than sort of threats and negativity, positivity and friendliness.
	I have just found gets a lot more accomplished, and that really is sort of at the root, I think, of a lot of the approaches that I take philosophically.
	Oh, look at that! Tied it into a show about philosophy.

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