Cultural inertia and startup costs

This article (h/t to Marginal Revolution) asks why Japanese style toilets ("washlets") haven't spread to the U.S. Most people in the U.S. know these as bidets. Steve Scheer, President of toilet startup Brondell, has his thoughts on why Americans haven't switched over to this superior cleansing technology:

“For Americans here in the US, the biggest issues are personal experience with these products and a major reluctance to discuss bathroom issues or change ingrained habits. You wouldn’t imagine how many people giggle nervously or say “gross” when we try to educate them about the advantages of the bidet seat, yet these are the same people that are still using paper – a much inferior way to cleanse oneself.”

We have a family gift exchange every Christmas, and one year I was assigned my dad. I asked what he wanted, and he and my stepmom combined to ask for one of these aftermarket toilet washlet seats that they could attach to their existing toilet. It cost about $400, and they still use and love it. Logically, you can't argue with the results. I've had to babysit and change a few babies in my day, and it's always funny to think about how much more meticulous we are about cleaning baby butts than adult ones. It's rare to downgrade our results on such daily processes as we shift from infant life to adulthood, but that's just what's happened on this front.

Two big obstacles exist. One, which Scheer hints at, is the cultural inertia. Plenty of superior technologies and habits, like eating habits, are ingrained by exposure during childhood. As another example, the Segway always seemed to me doomed by the simple fact that people looked so ridiculous riding them. If we'd all grown up riding those around, who knows?

But a second obstacle, as with the Segway, is the startup cost. Products that promise to save you money in the long run but cost you more up front always are a hard sell to consumers who cannot help but blanch at a big single payment.

Scheer probably knows this, but he'd have a better shot at getting his products installed by default in apartment complexes, much like DVR's took off after they switched from being stand-alone boxes to ones that came directly from cable and satellite providers.

In the meantime, there's always this hybrid technology with nearly universal acclaim among customers that can be had with much lower startup costs.

Louis C.K.

I saw Louis C.K. do a standup set at Louis Davies Symphony Hall tonight. This was a stop on the tour that earned some fame when Louis C.K. announced he'd sell tickets only off of his website, at a fixed price of $45 a ticket. No ticket brokers allowed, and scalping the tickets above face value would be grounds for having your tickets revoked.

I'm not sure how seats were assigned, but I did log in first thing when the tickets went on sale to snag some for his first date in San Francisco. Some time later, I received an email with a link to print out my tickets, and I set them aside for the interim months before the show date.

Marie went to the theater straight from work, and as I was waiting in a cab line to get myself to the venue, she sent me a text: "Nice seats".

I arrived at the Symphony Hall and was pleasantly surprised to find us sitting in the second row, dead center. Furtively, I took this quick pic with my iPhone near the end of his set. Sitting close to the stage doesn't always matter, but for some types of performances, it does, like opera or theater or standup comedy, where the facial expressions convey much of the emotional through line. Louis C.K. (I'll keep referring to him by his full name as writing simply Louis or C.K. feels odd) didn't have any projection screens behind him to blow up his face, so I was happy to be able to see his goofy impressions up close.

Obviously, he's riding a wave of momentum right now, from the standup special he sold off of his website for $5 to his critically acclaimed, amazing self-titled TV show. It's for those reasons I'd like to think he was so self-assured on stage tonight. No flop sweat, no nervous tics. In fact, I can't ever remember a comedian that seemed so utterly relaxed on stage. Some comedians, like Chris Rock, seem to be on cocaine during their performances, and that live wire energy is core to their persona.

Since Louis C.K. plays a version of himself on his TV show, and since he often builds both his TV show and standup material around his persona as a sad sack divorced, balding, overweight middle-aged man, it's easy to confuse Louis C.K. the actual real-life standup comedian with his TV persona.

So it was supremely satisfying in a "revenge of those once less fortunate" way to see him stroll on stage and then be in utter command of the audience and his material from start to finish. He never  had any nervous breaks, throat-clearing pauses, or moments of frustration with either himself or the audience. No sweat under the spotlight, no moments when he lost his way and had to go for a drink of water to collect himself. When he wandered off of a joke for a detour joke and forgot which way he'd come, he seemed almost amused and talked his way back to the main route. He tried a bit about Jews that he wasn't happy with and flipped it into a joke: "I'm going to add on some extra material at the end to make up for this Jewish bit, don't worry, it didn't really...yeah..."

The connection between a standup comedian and his audience is tighter than that between almost any performer and their audience. Every joke is a moment of judgment, to be adjudicated by the dispensation of either laughter or silence, and so a standup set is a series of dozens and dozens of judgments rendered one after the other in rapid succession. It's the reason why a comedian who flails on stage stirs up such sympathy discomfort in the audience. When comedians feels themselves struggling, the audience feels complicit in withholding laughter. It causes the audience to feel an odd mixture of guilt and disgust at having been put in such a situation, and some comedians react badly when things are going bad and turn on the audience, trying to shift all responsibility for the fiasco on the people sitting in the darkness.

Watching Louis C.K. tonight, I felt none of that nervous tension. He was so collected and controlled that the emotional wire connecting comedian and audience put us in a state of relaxed anticipation.

More than that, the audience was thoroughly on his side from the start. Given how he's forgone higher budgets to retain creative control over his TV show and how he's spent the past year offering up his great material for low prices (DRM-free in the case of downloadable content) through his website, Louis C.K. has become a beloved figure. He was admired before for being a great comedian (I have no hesitation in declaring him the best standup comedian working right now), but he has engendered a real deep affection from his fans now.

Lastly, he's clearly in a better place in his life, and his material reflected that. He admitted that he'd come into his own. He waved a selective circle over his entire body with his hand and said, "This doesn't work too great at age eighteen, but at 45, with some more income, this is not bad." He spoke with some satisfaction about his relationship with his ex-wife ("You know what's great about divorce? It's forever. Marriage is for as long as you can stand it, but divorce is forever. I'm not telling you not to get married, if you love someone you should go ahead and get married, but then get a divorce.") and his children ("I'm a great dad, very listening, kind, and you know why? I get to say goodbye to them every week.")

But don't mistake for this happy state of affairs for toothless comedy. The joy of his material is still how he manages to bring you to the border of what seems inappropriate and then make it feel logical and safe to just hop right over it with him, but it comes from a happier and more enlightened age. He spent time making fun of his own ridiculousness, like his incidences of road rage, and put it in some sociological context (as in Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment, being in an automobile changes us into homicidal assholes). He managed to counsel us to be more tolerant to each other (notably towards gays) while still making us laugh, like some folksy philosopher king. And he was able to wrap it up with a perfect little sequence he called "of course...but maybe...". It was the perfect encapsulation of his comedic ethos.

The best comedians are our keenest and most honest observers of the human condition, like Chris Rock on relations between the races or between men and women. Louis C.K., riding a wave of success, is heading not into a middle-age crisis but a middle-age coronation, and in doing so while continuing to put out so much great material, is showing us that one doesn't have to be an angry failure to dispense wisdom as the court jester.

Microblogging as therapy

We all have those friends who post too frequently to Facebook, in ways that feel like overly transparent grasps at affirmation.

Perhaps we should be showing them more empathy. A new research paper from researchers at Wharton (PDF) argues that less emotionally stable people use more emotional status updates or tweets to help regulate their emotional well-being.

The current research investigates both the causes and consequence of online social network use. Low emotionally stable individuals experience emotions more intensely and have difficulty regulating their emotions on their own. Consequently, we suggest that they use the microblogging feature on online social networks (e.g., Tweets or Facebook status updates) to help regulate their emotions. Accordingly, we find that less emotionally stable individuals microblog more frequently and share their emotions more when doing so, a tendency that is not observed offline. Further, such sharing, paired with the potential to receive social support, helps boost their well-being.

So the next time a friend posts a status update that feels like a plea for help, maybe that's exactly what it is, and maybe your LIke is a cheap form of therapy. Free consumer surplus! Maybe all of Anil Dash's favoriting should be seen as a social service.

When Obama wept

This video of Obama speaking to and thanking volunteers in Chicago yesterday is making the rounds because Obama tears up at the end. For someone who's always so calm and collected (he's often criticized by those who read it as an ironic detachment), it's a striking moment of emotion.

Though it's the first time I'd seem him cry, a few people sent me some other examples. 

This past Monday, the night before the election, Obama spoke in Iowa. He begins his speech as his usual controlled self, and what's moving about the moment he sheds his first tears is how he gets there. He tells the story of how Iowa was where many of the first youth volunteers helped launch his election campaign. And as he recalls stories of volunteers trying to stay warm because the heater was broken, or a volunteer painting a mural on one of the bare walls, he travels back to the roots of why he got into politics, and his tears seem to come from a real gratitude towards his volunteer corps. They say the greatest salesmen (or liars, if you're more cynical) are those who believe their own schtick, and it seems true of politicians, too.

This wasn't the first time he shed tears on the eve of an election. n the eve of the 2008 election, Obama learned that his grandmother Madeline had passed away. Early in this clip from the documentary By the People, you can see a closeup of Obama shedding more than a few tears as he recalls his grandmother and then transitions to his hope to bring change to the country.

If there's a common thread that runs through these three instances, it's that he seems to cry only in moments when he's speaking of why he got into politics to the people who worked on his behalf. Plenty will be too cynical to believe a politician's tears, but the body language has me convinced. It makes narrative sense, that got into politics as a community organizer and who believes in empowering people of all races to effect change would feel most emotionally vulnerable at those moments when he'd be confronted by thousands of them, many of whom had put in hundreds of hours on his behalf.

I volunteered on Obama's two Presidential campaign runs, doing a variety of things from canvassing to calling people. I can't lie, it's not fun or glamorous work. In fact, lots of it can be plain unpleasant. I can't think of two more uncomfortable things for someone of my personality to do than to knock on someone's door or cold call someone and speak to them about politics. The occasional crazy bigot who shouts the n-word at you is enough to leave you stirred and shaken with a variety of emotions, none of them positive.

It seems crazy to believe that anyone could rise out of a lifetime in politics without having their soul charred black with cynicism, but perhaps we have it all wrong, and it's only those who can retain some deep-seated idealism in the face of all evidence to the contrary that can survive that long in the game.

FOOTNOTE: On the topic of great moments in politicians crying, I can't leave out one for the pantheon, from the documentary The War Room, James Carville thanking the volunteer staff from Clinton's 1992 re-election campaign. The War Room is now available as a Criterion DVD, but you can also stream it in its entirety for free at Hulu. Carville's speech begins at around 1:13:45 in the Hulu stream. It's a short and wonderful speech.