Episode 189 Scott Adams: Some BlightAuthority.com Ideas and Tour of Scott’s Home

Date: 2018-08-20 | Duration: 40:36

Topics

The Blight Authority cleared the land…now what? Concepts for safe, social, high function neighborhoods Community concepts for affordable security and community services
Tour of Scott’s home, designed and built for practical functionality Whiteboard discussion, followed by home tour BlightAuthority.com

Transcript

[0:03]

Doo-doo-doo-doo pom pom pom. Hey everybody, I’ll let the people coming in catch up with us. We’re going to be talking about the Blight Authority. Some of you already know what that is, but it’s a nonprofit effort led by Bill Pulte, and I’m helping out, in which we’re trying to come up with some ideas—some creative ideas—for what to do with the blighted areas that the Blight Authority has already cleared and some that will be cleared.

So there will be spaces in urban areas that will be brought down to dirt, getting rid of all the blighted areas that essentially nobody owned anymore, so it makes the land almost free—almost. So what do you do with it? What do you do with it that would help the inner-city people? I’m not talking about building shopping malls and yuppie condos. I’m talking about what can you do with that land that helps the people in this city that addresses the low-income world.

[1:04]

I like to use as a standard that if you’re building homes that don’t work for a single parent, you haven’t gotten it right yet. If you’re building in an urban area, if you don’t have a way for a single parent to afford to live there and to thrive, you haven’t quite designed it right.

So I’m going to talk about some ideas and then I’m going to do a little tour of my house. Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Wait a minute, a rich guy’s house will teach us nothing about how to build for low-income people.” That’s mostly true—that’s about 80 percent true—but I’m going to use my house as partly a reason to get people to watch this, so it’s just really to attract eyeballs. But also, there are a number of things that will remind you of a concept when you see my house that would be useful for any kind of a house. So we’ll get to that after I talk

[2:04]

about a few ideas that are already coming through for the Blight Authority, and I’ve added some of my own ideas just to sort of pull it together in a package.

Here’s the idea: you’ve got a big patch of blank space in an urban area. In fact, there are lots of these, and there will be more of them as the blight that already exists is torn down in the future. A number of these already exist thanks to Bill Pulte’s good work with the Blight Authority, a nonprofit that works with cities. This is important: they work with the mayors, with the community. They really get the community involved to know what to do and get them excited about what’s happening. But the next phase after you tear stuff down is, what do you do with it? If you can’t figure out what to do with it that’s productive, well, then you’ve only taken it halfway. It’s a good half, but let’s see if we can get the other half.

[3:06]

Imagine, if you will, this block of land that’s in an inner city, and you’re trying to think what to do with it. Here are some ideas. For those of you new to watching my Periscope, any idea you see me present, you should assume it’s the bad version of the idea. In other words, I’m just trying to stimulate your thought, so don’t get too hung up on these ideas.

I’m going to comment first on the person who said “no socialism.” Keep in mind, first of all, that these are very small parts of the entire country, and nobody has to live there. We’re not talking about making the entire city this way. We’re talking about experiments—small experiments. Some of them might look something like this; some of them might have no socialism. Some might have some experiments of sharing things like tools or sharing rides, something like that. But I’m not going to call that socialism. I think that’s a great disservice to try

[4:07]

to label things away. Sometimes sharing works; sometimes it doesn’t. Maybe we can experiment and find out where it does or doesn’t.

That said, here are some ideas just to stimulate thought. The number one thing that I hear about improving urban areas is that you have to take care of security first. If you don’t do that, it doesn’t matter what you build, because nobody wants to live there. Nobody wants a business there. Nobody wants to shop there. Nobody wants to raise children there. So security has got to be your absolute base requirement.

Now, you also don’t want a police state. So how do you get to a gentle security where nobody is getting beaten up, there’s nothing abusive going on, you haven’t given up too much privacy, but you’ve still got a safe space? I’ll give you some ideas. Again, not the greatest ideas in the world necessarily, but they’ll get you thinking.

[5:08]

Imagine, if you will, that you put a ring of homes around the perimeter, and the houses act as part of the, let’s say, gated community. Normally you see a gated community for a wealthy neighborhood, but wealthy neighborhoods don’t have that much crime. It would be a lot more useful to put a little gate around an area that’s in an inner city. Now, of course, you’d have actual gates so that emergency exits and services can come through, but you’d have some security at the gates.

Imagine if you will that there are external cameras on both sides of the homes, on all of the public areas, plus the homeowner has an option that comes with the house. This is important: the video security comes with the house. You don’t have an option of not getting it. It’s just a cheap camera; it goes to the internet. You can look at it on your phone. Now, I just saw a commercial for Ring.com.

[6:11]

I’m not doing a commercial for them; I have no interest in their company. But they just showed an upgrade that allows you to alert your neighbors on your phone if you see something fishy in your camera. So if you see somebody suspicious at your front door, you’ve got an option to alert the neighbors, and they get ping-ping-ping. Then everybody can look through their own cameras, can look out the window, can alert the police, whatever they need to do. That would be amazing. I think that would really make a difference.

Here’s another idea—again, just ideas. Imagine if you said, “We’re going to build this community, and then we’re going to reserve some of the units that have a good view of things for people who are either current police workers or ex-police.” People who are trained to identify problems and to know what to do if they come up. Now, if this police officer moves, it’s still a designated unit—it might be a first responder

[7:13]

designated for a first responder or police, but somebody who’s trained. So you make sure that you’ve got a few of them in key areas because if their app goes off, they know what to do. You want somebody who’s got a legal right to own a weapon and knows when to use it and when not in your community. Very helpful. I’ve got a neighbor who was in the police force down the road, and I gotta tell you, I felt a lot safer knowing him personally and knowing that he was in the neighborhood. It makes a big difference.

Then the next thing you want to do, if you’ve got your security right, is you want to get your transportation right. You could have a lot of stuff here that doesn’t require you to leave home. So if you have an app-based community, things you need you can order on your apps. If you need an Uber, you can order it on your app. Maybe you don’t even have private cars. One of the experiments might be: let’s build a community where nobody has a car, but you still need to

[8:13]

get places. So let’s say there’s a bus that takes you to mass transit on a regular basis, and let’s say that you can see where the bus is on your app, so you don’t even have to go outside until the bus is approaching.

But better yet, let’s say the bus driver has the app too, and the bus driver can see all the people who are converging on the bus. So you pull up in your bus, people get on—normally you wouldn’t know if there’s somebody around the corner who’s almost there, and you pull off. But if you’re looking at your app, you’re like, “Oh, there’s Bob. Bob’s right around the corner. I’ll wait for ten more seconds. There’s Bob.” So suddenly, just adding an app to a shuttle to mass transit makes it a whole friendlier situation, much the way Uber did.

You could add a shared garage, possibly, so that maybe some people had private cars, or maybe there were your own private rental Uber-type situation just for the neighbors. You can see if that worked; that would be another experiment. And maybe there were some

[9:15]

shared tools as well, so you don’t need a garage. If you can go borrow a tool—everybody knows who has it, you borrow it on your app, you make sure that it’s there before you go borrow it. “Oh yeah, I need one of those.” So you could have a shared tool thing; people do that already. I don’t know if it works well or not.

Then imagine—again, for those just joining, these are not the best ideas in the world, I’m just trying to stimulate thought—imagine if each of these residences had built into it a storefront or office on the street side with a separate entrance and a separate bathroom. If you are living here and you owned both the residence and the storefront—and when I say storefront, I don’t mean a big box, I’m talking about one room the size of a small one-person office with a bathroom for guests and for yourself—and if you had a

[10:17]

business to go into there, well, you’ve already got your job. So your job and your home become the same place. And if we’ve done a good job in construction and brought the cost way down, and the cost of the land was almost free, well, you could run a little shop here.

Now, suppose you don’t want to run the shop. You don’t have a home business; you don’t want anything to do with the business, but you like living here. You could rent it out. So if you could rent the front of the shop to somebody from the outside—they can’t get in your house, they’re just running their little business there—suddenly you’re a landlord. So you’ve gone from a person who can’t afford a house to a person who’s a landlord in one move. You already have a job. Now, that wouldn’t be enough necessarily to pay for your home; you might need to do more. But if you were a person who had a good job outside of the community, you could take your bus there, somebody’s working in your home, you’ve got two incomes.

[11:19]

And I’m also imagining some kind of a way that if people have pets, they don’t need to be home all day to walk them. Maybe there’s a little area that your dog has a dog door, and they can do their business in a place that isn’t too bad for other people to look at, easy to clean up. Artificial lawn is the best; I’ll show you mine in a little bit.

Now, there are a number of ideas that we’re receiving on BlightAuthority.com, which is where there’s a forum where you can suggest things that you could do in places like this, and we’re hoping that we can stimulate some more ideas. But people said things like—well, just go through the list—suppose you had a central food source just for the residents, and it could be simply like a Togo’s. It could be just sandwiches and salads—keep it simple. That doesn’t mean you can’t just buy your own food anywhere you want. You can still do anything you want, but if your kid gets

[12:19]

home before you do and they need a sandwich, wouldn’t it be great if your 12-year-old could look at the app, and if approved by the parent, they can say, “Yeah, it’s after school and I want a ham sandwich,” and they just hit it? Maybe the ham sandwich is dropped in a dropbox at your house.

Imagine building these homes so that they’re optimized for drones. Maybe there’s a place on the roof for a drone to land. Maybe there’s a hot box for a hot meal if somebody’s dropping off that—once it’s dropped off, nobody can get into it. Maybe there’s a cold box for your milk. So those are some ideas. You might have a simple place.

Now, the beauty of this is also that a number of these things I’m going to talk about would provide first jobs—in some cases real jobs, but at least teenager or first jobs for a lot of people—without leaving the community. So if you’ve got an app to find a babysitter or an app to find a

[13:21]

pet walker and an app to find somebody who does various services, you could have a lot of jobs that exist just within here.

Now, I’m guessing that the size of this might be more like a hundred homes, but there’s probably some optimal size—a size where you could support a school of some sort, a gym, some shared business services and such. You wouldn’t want it so big that nobody knows their neighbors, and you don’t want it so small that you don’t get the advantages of scale.

Let me tell you why scale is important. Depending on where you put this, you might have a lot of expenses for heating or cooling. If you start with blank land, which is what the blight has been torn down to, you can trench it more easily for lots of houses, and then you can put in geothermal heating. Now, geothermal takes advantage of the fact

[14:22]

that the earth is about a constant 56 degrees once you go down—I think 10 feet, whatever it is. So you run pipes under the ground, and those pipes, I think with water in them, pick up the temperature of the earth and then bring that up above. So if you’re trying to heat your house from what it would be, which is zero in the winter, to what you want it to be, that’s maybe 68, the first 56 degrees are free because you’re just using the heat from the earth. Likewise, if you’re trying to cool it from 100 down to 75, the 56 degrees that you’re taking from the earth is going to help a lot.

But it’s far more economical if you do it in the first place; it’s not as economical if you’re doing it for one house. So you want it big enough to get the economies and not too big that you have other problems. I say “school,” but I don’t think we have the right ideas about school. I don’t love the

[15:22]

idea of school the way it exists, so I’m not necessarily thinking of a public school. Maybe it’s a place you go to do homework and maybe that’s all. Maybe it’s a place for homeschooling. Maybe it’s an experiment in video schooling. Maybe there’s a remote school. So there’s a lot of creativity that could be tried out here for training.

But at the very least, you want a place that’s quiet that kids can go to, to study and have some help, maybe with a tutor. You want some training facilities. Imagine that you start this community by training people to build it. If you’ve seen a video—it’s on the Blight Authority right now—of these insulated concrete forms, ICFs. There’s big blocks that one human can pick up without too much trouble, and they fit together like

[16:24]

Legos. You can see videos of people building an entire house in one day once you have the foundation. So once you have the foundation, it’s just boop boop boop.

Imagine some different ways that people could build their homes in a modular fashion. Suppose instead of painting the interior of the house, you could take modular little blocks and just stick them onto the wall, and if you want to change them out, you just take out the blocks you have, reuse them, or resell them to somebody else who likes that color. Put up some new blocks; make it interesting. Your house doesn’t have to be one color; it could be different blocks, whatever you want. Imagine all those possibilities.

Somebody suggested shared business services for all of the home businesses in the area or anybody who wants to start a business anywhere. That’s a great idea, especially if there are mentors that can help you find funding. It turns out there’s tons of government funding if you know how to

[17:25]

get it, but it’s not easy. You’d have to know how to get it, and you’d have to know which of the many government programs fits you. You have to know how to fill out the forms; it’s hard. So suppose this community comes with its own business experts—they could be on-site, it could be an association of people just sharing ideas.

We’re in business; you could have external people, you can have apps that connect you to experts. Some people suggested food farms and indoor farms basically. It might be, depending on the climate, indoor or outdoor. Indoor farming is probably not as economical as it needs to be for an inner-city situation, but it’s getting close. There may be some companies—I listed a few at BlightAuthority.com in the forums—some that look like they’re getting close. You can see those names in there. I’ve invested in one of them

[18:27]

they have some experimental wall farms, but they don’t grow every kind of vegetable, so you’d probably need some mix.

Now, one of the big issues in the inner city is something called food equality. If you haven’t heard that term, it refers to the fact that if you’re eating the wrong kind of food, your energy is low, you’re literally not as smart, you might even have behavior problems or all kinds of health problems from eating the wrong kind of food. But if you had some kind of centralized food source—even though it’s optional, you don’t have to eat there—you would at the very least have something that the parents could say, “Look, kids, you’re eating here.” Food equality is over. I mean, we have food equality, you just have to eat the centralized stuff. Less variety, but you’re mostly going to have an option for that. There are probably other ways to get there as well.

You want some kind of shared gym or exercise area and maybe a dog park. The reason I throw them in is

[19:28]

that you also want to manage this area for natural connections. There’s nothing cooler than a dog park where you take your dog to run around outdoors with other dogs, because it gets you to meet your neighbors. You always have something to talk about. It’s like, “Hey, is that your dog? I love that dog. How old is your dog?” I’ve been to dog parks, and they’re great for socializing. Same with the gym. You want a place that people can go. Maybe somebody suggested basketball courts that you could rent on your app, so maybe you just reserve it—I don’t know if renting is right, but suppose you had an app where you could find nine other people to play basketball, and then you could schedule a time and you’ve got an hour. That would optimize your court; people would not be monopolizing it, and everybody would get something.

Imagine that you organized to make bulk purchases of the

[20:31]

things that everybody uses. It could be things like milk and paper products. Since you don’t want to drive wherever you gotta drive to Costco and have a Costco membership, maybe the community is big enough that they can do some bulk purchases. Now, that bulk purchasing might include wireless access, it might include cable, it might include insurance. You can imagine a lot of things that a hundred families could negotiate for and get better prices.

Imagine, if you will—and I’ll just take you through this thinking, I’m not saying this is the idea, again, these are just to stimulate thought—imagine if you started with dirt, and the very first thing you built right in the middle was a training facility to train people how to build, to be builders specifically for this community. So you train them and then you have them build. Now let’s say the next thing you do is

[21:31]

have Elon Musk’s company called The Boring Company—it bores holes in the ground. Have them bore holes for the geothermal. That produces a lot of dirt that you’ve got to do something with. Elon Musk has said they’ve already figured out how to turn that dirt into bricks on-site. So now you’ve got bricks, you’ve got geothermal, you’ve got a training facility where you’re creating jobs and they’re building the homes, so they feel some connection to it.

The idea here is that your community should help you with your jobs, your social life, your livability, your transportation, your food. If you haven’t designed all that into your community, it’s just homes. And plopping an existing style home into the middle of the inner city

[22:32]

and not doing anything else with the community or security or anything else—not making it affordable—it doesn’t get anywhere. You’ve got to be able to make sure that they can sustain themselves in every possible way, from health to security to jobs to transportation.

I’m going to take you on a little tour of my house. Oh, and here’s another thing: if you get the right kind of mix of people so that the kids have other kids to play with and the adults have people who have something in common, you improve the social life immensely just by having people your same age in your same situation.

Would you like to see my home? I know you would; that’s why you’re here. I’m going to turn the camera around and then I’m going to take you around my house. Now, keep in mind, here’s the idea: I’m not suggesting that the things you see in my home would make sense in an

[23:32]

inner city. My house was not built for that. But it will stimulate some ideas, and let’s look at that.

Let’s start with this lamp. This lamp seems kind of random and not important, but it is, because with the addition of that little bit of accent light—which you can’t see too clearly here—it completely opens up this part of the room. The point of that is that if you spend just a little bit on lighting, it completely changes how people perceive the livability, and it costs almost nothing to put in a little bit extra of accent light.

Next point is the view. I did not optimize my house for the view, so you have to kind of get up to the windows to look out. Now, in a community, you wouldn’t have this kind of view, of course, but you could easily organize it so that you’re always looking at something interesting, whether you’re looking out your window at the, let’s say, the park or you’re

[24:34]

looking at interesting architecture across the way. People’s lives completely change if you get that right.

Here’s my workspace. This is where I do all of my Periscopes from. Typically I’m in that chair, and the iPad I hold in my hand would be right in front of that chair. Here’s where I do all my work. This is a Wacom Cintiq. It’s a computer screen that is a drawing pad at the same time, so I draw directly on the computer monitor. And here’s a Dilbert that you won’t see for a month or two in the papers. One of the things I do is that I hate desks that face the wall because you feel claustrophobic, so I put my desk area so that it’s facing out to the room and the view.

I’m going to take you down the hall. Oh, here’s a big old TV, and I’m going to make a point about how that might not be useful to

[25:37]

have any kind of TV screen in modern homes. Here are some books I’m reading; you don’t care about that. [Music] There’s some Dilbert awards I’ve won and some Dilbert dolls.

I’m not going to show you the bedrooms; they’re not very interesting. But look down here. Here’s a piano. You would not have these in inner-city homes, but I can imagine that you would have some homes that are optimized for different lifestyles. You might have—I shouldn’t say “homeless guy”—a soundproof room for people who are musicians. That might actually be your job. Maybe you’re a professional musician; they need a room to practice or to do gigs in. So I’ve got a little backlighting there just to show you how a little bit of light completely changes what you’ve got going on.

I’ll take you this way. Here’s a room that’s

[26:44]

sort of a playroom. Again, this doesn’t apply directly to anything in the blighted areas. Here’s a drum set and a little portable piano. Christina uses the piano, and I’m trying to learn the drums.

Now, here’s what’s interesting. Notice that I’ve set the drums up across from the TV. I actually take drum lessons online with a live person, and I was doing this as sort of a test to see how useful it is to try to take a class where the video screen—instead of a live person—it’s a live person who just happens to be on video. He just calls in on FaceTime. I send my phone over to the screen, and I’m talking to him live. He shows me how to play, and it works pretty well. So that might be a model of education in the future, that you just need a quiet

[27:45]

room.

I’ll take you into this room. Some of you already know I’m obsessed with laundry rooms, and it’s because laundry rooms are rarely set up to be optimized. There are a million things you need to do. For example, notice that I’ve got a little garbage bin there and then some fabric softeners above the dryer. You always have to throw away the little lint and various things when you’re doing laundry, and if you don’t have a garbage right there, it’s ineffective. This is poor design on my part, because I didn’t put a place to easily put a garbage pail, but I need it all the time. You have to have the doors lined up so that one doesn’t interfere with the other. You need lots of space.

And here’s something that I like: this is a movable cart that I use for taking my laundry where I need it, picking up the laundry, et cetera. Somebody just asked me, do I have

[28:47]

somebody doing my laundry? I do not.

Here’s my cat box. I built a separate room just for the cat’s bathroom, and I put in it, of course, a floor that’s easy to clean. Maybe all your cat supplies are here, and then a little area that the cat can go up and look out the window if she wants. But my life is so much better because my cat box is raised. I never have to bend down; the cat just jumps up here and jumps in there. I made it super big so that I don’t have to clean it as often, and then all my supplies are here. I just bag it and throw it in there temporarily.

That’s the cat room. Come with me downstairs; I’ll show you a few other things. [Music] Here’s—whoops, something just happened on my screen that I can’t get rid of. There we go.

So here’s my

[29:54]

main living room. There is nothing to learn on this for blighted people except this one design element: you see that behind the couch there’s a long table with some stools. This is a really good design, putting a table behind a couch, because it discourages people from eating on the couch—because it’s just as easy to sit on this little table if you’re trying to watch TV. But I’m not sure a modern house needs a television.

Now, let’s look at the floors. My floors are porcelain. Porcelain is probably too expensive for inner-city homes, but there might be something that’s the best design for a floor that has these qualities: which is you can’t stain it, you can’t break it, it’s almost indestructible. You can just wash anything with a rag. And if you had a Roomba—one of those little robot vacuums that is

[30:57]

like a robot—you can have your place clean with minimal effort. If you build your house with a vacuum robot assumed as part of the design, you could just have a place for it to be out of the way until it does its thing.

This is what I call the “crap island.” The door over there is the entrance from the garage. That’s where I’m usually entering, and when I enter the house, I almost always have stuff I need to put down. So I built this as the place you put stuff down. Now, unfortunately, it gets messy pretty easily, especially when you’ve got electronics and you’re plugging stuff in. This is kind of a mess—that’s the mess—but I probably would have built this to have drawers for this stuff, or maybe some kind of a cover so that you’ve got stuff plugged in but you don’t have to look at it unless you want to. So this could have been designed better.

I’m going to show you my kitchen. Again, very little of this

[32:00]

will be applicable to the inner city, but it might give you some ideas. Notice that there’s an eating area that’s really just part of the kitchen—it’s just built in. This is a really good design for a family. You would want this bigger, at least seating four or five, but it’s an excellent design to have the island there.

What I find is that in the modern world, people rarely want to use the dining table, so I didn’t want to have a separate room for a dining table. So I just floated it out in the main part of a central thoroughfare, and I’ll probably just get rid of this because I’ve literally—I don’t think in five years I’ve had a meal at that table. So I might just get rid of it. I would say in a low-cost home, a dining room would be unnecessary.

And here I’ve got a few microwaves. Microwaves are problematic, some say, because they destroy the

[33:02]

nutrients, but I don’t know the science there. Here’s a warming drawer. We’ve got all kinds of burners here and a griddle in the middle. So this middle thing heats up; it’s like a griddle. Very handy. I’ve got a couple of dishwashers; you need that in a big house.

Now, here’s a feature called an appliance garage. When you open it up, here are your appliances. The messy stuff has cords and just doesn’t look good on the counters. You can shove it all in there and it stays plugged in. When you want to use them, you just drag them out and they’re already plugged in. It’s a very good feature.

Now, I’m a big fan of not putting the oven and the cooktop facing the wall. It’s much better if you’re facing out. If there’s a television in the mix

[34:04]

that’s even better. Here’s the back kitchen. Oh, and here’s something: this little closet right here is a little broom closet. These two little doors. I once lived in a house that had no broom closet near the kitchen. I had to go three stories to get a broom. It was the worst design ever.

You should, of course, make sure that you’ve got a place for your animals if you have pet food here. I built a little cart that I use to clean up the house if, let’s say, you’ve entertained and you need to go pick up a lot of dishes, et cetera. I’ve got pullout drawers for recycling and garbage—very handy, and they look good when they’re closed.

Let me take you down this way. I’m skipping the bedrooms; there’s nothing interesting in there. So here was my biggest mistake

[35:08]

when I built it: it’s a home theater and seats ten. If I were to build a house today, I doubt I would include this. Here’s the reason: in today’s modern home and the way people live, almost nobody ever wants to watch the same show at the same time. We all just use our phones and our headphones, and it’s just better. So the home theater you don’t need. And I would question in a low-income house if you even need a television of any kind if you have smartphones. So that would be a question I have.

Down here—sorry, this is a little blurry—I’ve got a central wiring closet here. So you’ve got all kinds of stuff here. It’s good home design to do a sort of a home run situation where all your wiring

[36:10]

goes to a central place. Now, here’s the interesting thing: when you’ve got all this equipment in here, this closet gets warm, so I actually have to cool it. But I always thought it would be better to see if you can recycle the heat from your electronics and make it part of the house heating.

This was a pool table that nobody plays on except the cat—that’s a cat toy in the pool table, that’s all I use it for. And here’s an example of how important it is to have the outdoors coming in. So the “city” here is the little sunspot that I sometimes sit in. Here’s a little home gym I have that I use when I’m not going to the gym. I prefer going to the gym just to get out of the house, but sometimes I don’t have time, so I might use this one.

Here’s my backyard

[37:20]

there’s nothing to learn here except that if you don’t get enough vitamin D from the sun, you have all kinds of problems: attitude problems and energy and health and whatever. So you should design a home so that people are encouraged to go outside for something—just to be outside to get that vitamin D. It’s not going to look like this in the inner city, but there should be someplace that’s sort of right outside that could encourage you to go get some sun.

[Music] Snickers wants to go out. Here’s a sauna—you won’t see that in the inner city. And then this room is the most surprising room. Well, I’ll just show it to you. Most inner-city homes

[38:23]

don’t have an indoor tennis court. This is the reason I built my house. Tennis was my passion for most of my life, and so I built this here. I no longer play tennis because I don’t like the repetitive motion—it’s not good for me—but you can imagine something along these lines. Not a tennis court, but some kind of an indoor facility that people can rent and run around in when the weather is bad.

That’s enough of that. And then here we’ve got a dog door that goes to an outdoor area that’s a smallish area that just has artificial grass so I don’t have to let the dog out. She can just go out there and do her thing. It was real easy to clean up on the artificial grass; it’s much easier to clean up the dog stuff from the artificial grass than it is from real grass.

[39:24]

[Music] I’m going to wrap up. Was this useful? Did anybody learn anything from this? No, I’m not in a gated community; I resist gated communities, I don’t love them. Why an indoor tennis court when you live in California? I have the kind of skin that just begs for skin cancer, and even though California is a wonderful climate, most of the time it’s too hot or too cold or too dark.

Good. We’re getting good comments on this, so make sure you check out BlightAuthority.com. If you know anybody who designs communities, I would love to have their input. We will talk to you later, but for now, I hope you enjoyed that and I hope that was useful.

[40:24]

Now let’s see if we can do something good for the inner cities. That would be an amazing outcome if we could get there. I’ll talk to you later.