A woman in Watonga told me, in her kitchen, that she did not want the variable-speed unit because it sounded like it was going to be complicated.

She did not mean it would make a complicated noise. She meant the word complicated. She had heard me say variable speed and her body had supplied a feeling of complication, and from that feeling she had concluded the equipment was not for her.

I want to talk about that today. About the way decisions about machinery get made by the body before the mind has a chance to look at the data.

Paul Slovic and his colleagues wrote about this in 2002 in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, in a paper called "The affect heuristic." They argued, with a long body of supporting evidence, that people often judge risks and benefits based on how they feel about something rather than on what they know about it. A feeling of dread attaches to nuclear power. A feeling of warmth attaches to family farms. The feelings, attached early and often unconsciously, drive subsequent judgments about safety, value, and desirability. Even when subjects are given clear analytic information, the feeling tends to override the analysis.

Slovic's central observation was that affect is not a downstream output of risk assessment. Affect is an input. The body responds to a cue with a feeling, and the feeling shapes the assessment that the mind builds on top of it. The mind, asked afterward to explain the assessment, generates analytic-sounding reasons, but the reasons usually do not reflect the actual decision process. The decision was made in the body, and the mind was assigned to dress the body's verdict in plausible clothing.

The customer in Watonga was doing this and could see herself doing it, when I asked gently.

Core line: "I have to ask myself whether the brand I am leaning toward is the brand the customer should buy, or whether it is the brand my body trusts for reasons that are forty years old."

Give Us A Shout

Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, HVAC in Kingfisher and central Oklahoma. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort.

We're family-run and powered by 47 years of experience. Whether it's AI-powered thermostats, geothermal systems, or classic tune-ups, we deliver upfront pricing, expert care, and warranties that back it all up.

🛠️ Book Online:
https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true
🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite
🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003
X: https://x.com/HartzellsHVAC
Facebook: facebook.com/hartzellsheatair
LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell

Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

A customer in Okeene, after I had spread three replacement quotes on her kitchen table and walked her through them for forty minutes, looked at me and said, whatever you think is right.

She had heard the differences. She had nodded at the differences. She had asked one or two questions. When the decision arrived, she handed it to me. Whatever you think is right.

I want to talk about that today. About the option people pick when they cannot stand to be the one picking.

There is a specific kind of choice fatigue that customers carry into a replacement decision and I have come to recognize the look. It is not stupidity. It is not laziness. It is a particular kind of exhaustion that sets in when the decider has been asked, for an hour, to compare options whose differences they do not fully feel. They want the decision over. They want someone they trust to make it. They want to default.

William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser wrote about this in 1988 in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty. The paper was titled "Status quo bias in decision making." They demonstrated, across multiple experimental setups, that decision-makers disproportionately stick with whatever option is framed as the default, even when the default is arbitrary. The mechanism was not laziness; the subjects were not lazier than non-default-picking subjects. The mechanism was that the default option carried an implicit recommendation, and the cost of overriding the recommendation felt higher than the cost of accepting it.

Core line: "She said she had been talking to a friend whose tech had upsold her on a system she did not need, and she wanted me to know that she had told the friend to call me next time."

Give Us A Shout

Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, HVAC in Kingfisher and central Oklahoma. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort.

We're family-run and powered by 47 years of experience. Whether it's AI-powered thermostats, geothermal systems, or classic tune-ups, we deliver upfront pricing, expert care, and warranties that back it all up.

🛠️ Book Online:
https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true
🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite
🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003
X: https://x.com/HartzellsHVAC
Facebook: facebook.com/hartzellsheatair
LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell

Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

A customer in Hennessey told me, two weeks after I had installed a new heat pump in her house, that she could not believe how many heat pumps were going in around town now. She said she saw them everywhere. She named six driveways within a mile of her house where there was a new outdoor unit sitting in the gravel.

I told her, kindly, that those units had been there for at least the last year. Most of them since before her install.

I want to talk about that today. About the trick the mind plays when it learns a new word.

There is a name for this. The linguist Arnold Zwicky, at Stanford, coined the phrase frequency illusion on his blog in 2005, although the phenomenon had been informally known for decades. He also recorded an older nickname for it, the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, attributed to a 1994 newspaper letter writer who had heard the name of the German radical group twice in twenty-four hours after never having heard it before. Zwicky's preferred term, frequency illusion, has two parts. The first part is selective attention. Once you notice a thing, your attention now has a hook for it, and the hook catches instances you would have walked past before. The second part is confirmation bias. Once you have noticed the thing twice, you remember the noticing and forget all the moments when you did not notice anything. The combination produces a felt experience of sudden prevalence, even though prevalence has not changed.

It is the cognitive version of buying a red truck and then thinking the world is full of red trucks. The trucks were always there. You did not see them as a category before. Now you do.

Core line: "The industry is in a transition, which is news-worthy, but the volume of refrigerant discussion has not changed by the order of magnitude their experience suggests."

Give Us A Shout

Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, HVAC in Kingfisher and central Oklahoma. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort.

We're family-run and powered by 47 years of experience. Whether it's AI-powered thermostats, geothermal systems, or classic tune-ups, we deliver upfront pricing, expert care, and warranties that back it all up.

🛠️ Book Online:
https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true
🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite
🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003
X: https://x.com/HartzellsHVAC
Facebook: facebook.com/hartzellsheatair
LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell

Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

A woman in Dover told me, after I had condemned her compressor, that she had known all along it was going to go out this summer. She said she had felt it. She said the unit had been telling her since spring.

I asked her, gently, what the unit had been telling her in spring. She thought about it. She said it had been making a different sound. She could not say what kind of different.

I want to talk about that today. About what we remember knowing, and what we actually knew, and the gap between those two things that runs through almost every conversation about a failure after it has happened.

Baruch Fischhoff wrote about this in 1975, when he was at Hebrew University. The paper was titled "Hindsight is not equal to foresight." He had subjects read about historical events, like a nineteenth-century war between the British and the Gurkhas, and then asked them to estimate the probability of different outcomes. Some of the subjects were told the actual outcome before they estimated. Some were not.

The ones who knew the outcome rated the actual outcome as having been much more probable than the ones who did not know. Even when Fischhoff told them explicitly to estimate as if they did not know, they could not. Once they knew, the outcome looked more inevitable in retrospect than it had been in prospect. Fischhoff called it the creeping determinism. The future, once it arrives, looks like the only future that could have arrived. The mind cannot easily reconstruct the prior state of uncertainty in which other futures were equally live.

That is hindsight bias. After the compressor fails, every quiet click and odd sound from the previous summer becomes, in memory, a warning sign. Before the compressor fails, those same sounds were the background noise of a system that was running normally and that no one had any reason to suspect.

Core line: "There are customers who did notice real warning signs and who did try to act on them and who did get ignored or dismissed by spouses or by previous techs."

Give Us A Shout

Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, HVAC in Kingfisher and central Oklahoma. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort.

We're family-run and powered by 47 years of experience. Whether it's AI-powered thermostats, geothermal systems, or classic tune-ups, we deliver upfront pricing, expert care, and warranties that back it all up.

🛠️ Book Online:
https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true
🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite
🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003
X: https://x.com/HartzellsHVAC
Facebook: facebook.com/hartzellsheatair
LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell

Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

A man in Calumet pointed at his furnace in the basement and told me they do not make them like they used to. The furnace was forty-one years old. It still ran. It had three relatives in the neighborhood that had failed twenty years ago and been hauled to the scrap yard and forgotten.

I want to talk about that today. About how the survivors lie to us about what kind of world made them.

There is an old story about Abraham Wald in 1943. The Statistical Research Group at Columbia, working for the military, had been handed a problem. American bombers were coming back from missions over Europe full of bullet holes. The brass wanted to know where to add armor. The natural answer was to look at the returning planes, map the bullet holes, and reinforce those areas. The areas with the most holes seemed like the areas getting hit the most.

Wald told them they were looking at the wrong planes. The planes they were looking at were the ones that had come back. The planes that had been shot down were not in the sample. The holes on the returning planes were in places that, evidently, a plane could be hit and still survive. The places without holes on the returning planes were the places where a plane could not be hit and still survive. Those places, the engine bays and the cockpit and certain wing roots, were the places that needed armor. Not the places with the most holes. The places with the fewest, because those were the silently fatal hits.

Wald saved a lot of pilots. Not by analyzing the survivors but by remembering the planes that were not in the room with him.

I think about Wald every time someone points at an old furnace and says they do not make them like they used to. They are looking at the plane that came back. They are not looking at the planes that did not.

Core line: "The hundreds of thousands of boards that are running fine are not visible, because nothing on the internet writes about a board that has been working for six years."

Give Us A Shout

Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, HVAC in Kingfisher and central Oklahoma. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort.

We're family-run and powered by 47 years of experience. Whether it's AI-powered thermostats, geothermal systems, or classic tune-ups, we deliver upfront pricing, expert care, and warranties that back it all up.

🛠️ Book Online:
https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true
🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite
🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003
X: https://x.com/HartzellsHVAC
Facebook: facebook.com/hartzellsheatair
LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell

Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

A homeowner in Crescent stopped me in the middle of an explanation last spring and asked me, very politely, what a coil was.

I had been talking for about three minutes about superheat. I had used the words coil, refrigerant, latent capacity, and metering device, and I had assumed, the way I always quietly assume, that the words were doing what I needed them to do. Her question stopped me. I sat down on her porch step and started over.

I want to talk about that today. About the cost of forgetting that you ever did not know something.

There is a name for it. Colin Camerer and George Loewenstein and Martin Weber called it the curse of knowledge in a 1989 paper in the Journal of Political Economy. They were studying how well-informed economic agents predict the behavior of less-informed agents, and they found, robustly, that the well-informed agents could not undo their own knowledge well enough to model what the less-informed agent would do. Once you know a thing, the thing is loud in your mind, and you cannot quiet it back down to silence to imagine someone who has never heard it.

Elizabeth Newton ran a famous experiment on this at Stanford in 1990 for her doctoral work. She had subjects tap out the rhythm of a familiar song on a table and ask a listener to guess the song. The tappers, hearing the melody in their own heads as they tapped, predicted that listeners would guess the song about half the time. Listeners actually guessed it about two and a half percent of the time. The tappers could not unhear what they were hearing internally, so they could not estimate what the listener was getting from the bare taps.

That is the curse of knowledge. You have the melody. The other person has the taps. You cannot fully imagine the silence between the taps because your head is full of the song.

Core line: "If they do not ask, the gap stays open and the apprentice goes out to work on a coil they think they understand and they make a mistake that the explanation should have prevented."

Give Us A Shout

Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, HVAC in Kingfisher and central Oklahoma. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort.

We're family-run and powered by 47 years of experience. Whether it's AI-powered thermostats, geothermal systems, or classic tune-ups, we deliver upfront pricing, expert care, and warranties that back it all up.

🛠️ Book Online:
https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true
🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite
🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003
X: https://x.com/HartzellsHVAC
Facebook: facebook.com/hartzellsheatair
LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell

Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

A man in Hennessey, fifty-something, met me at the curb before I could get out of the truck. He asked me to back into the driveway so the company name on the side faced the house, not the street. He said his neighbors did not need to know he was having work done.

I asked him what kind of work he thought they would think it was. He said, you know. Repair work. Like something was wrong.

I want to talk about that today. About the spotlight that almost nobody else is actually shining.

I backed in. It was no trouble. I have backed into driveways a thousand times for a thousand reasons, sometimes practical and sometimes psychological and sometimes both. This one was psychological. He was not worried about me blocking his mailbox. He was worried about Roger across the street seeing the truck and concluding something about him.

We went inside. The system was a sixteen-year-old condenser with a failing capacitor and a contactor that was pitted to the point where it was arcing every time it tried to engage. Fifty-dollar capacitor, ninety-dollar contactor, twenty minutes of labor. Not a big repair. Not a small repair either. Standard mid-life maintenance on a unit that was going to keep running for another three or four summers if nothing else gave out.

While I was at the disconnect, he came out and stood by me and asked if I could keep the toolbox out of view of the road. I moved the toolbox six feet. He thanked me. He was a quiet man, polite, embarrassed in a way I have seen often. He kept watching the street.

Core line: "Behavior, in more extreme cases, like postponing repairs that should not be postponed because the customer cannot stand the idea of the truck being out front for two more visits."

Give Us A Shout

Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, HVAC in Kingfisher and central Oklahoma. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort.

We're family-run and powered by 47 years of experience. Whether it's AI-powered thermostats, geothermal systems, or classic tune-ups, we deliver upfront pricing, expert care, and warranties that back it all up.

🛠️ Book Online:
https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true
🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite
🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003
X: https://x.com/HartzellsHVAC
Facebook: facebook.com/hartzellsheatair
LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell

Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

A woman in Okarche told me, on the phone, that her whole house was cold. She wanted me out the same day. I asked her where in the house she had measured. She said she had not measured anywhere. She just knew.

I want to talk about that today. About how the body becomes the thermostat and how, when it does, the rest of the house disappears.

I drove out anyway because the call sounded urgent and she was a customer I had worked with for nine years. I got there around three in the afternoon. The wind was out of the south and the front porch had that warm dusty smell west of Okarche gets in late September. She met me at the door in a heavy cardigan and wool socks and pointed at the living room.

I put my hand on the supply register. The air coming out was sixty-eight degrees. The thermostat said seventy-three. I walked to the back of the house, to the bedrooms. The bedrooms were seventy-five. The kitchen was seventy-four. The bonus room over the garage was seventy-two. Only the living room, where she spent most of her day in a recliner that sat directly under the return, was sixty-eight on the supply and about seventy at the seat.

Her body was cold. She had concluded the house was cold. The house was not cold. The recliner location was cold, by about three degrees, and her body had generalized from there to every room she was not currently sitting in.

I am not telling that story to make fun of her. I am telling it because I have lived inside that mistake hundreds of times, in hundreds of houses, with hundreds of customers, and a few times I have lived inside it as the customer in my own house.

Core line: "If the static pressure feels high to me because I have been on a ladder for ten minutes and my heart rate is up, the static pressure feels concerning."

Give Us A Shout

Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, HVAC in Kingfisher and central Oklahoma. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort.

We're family-run and powered by 47 years of experience. Whether it's AI-powered thermostats, geothermal systems, or classic tune-ups, we deliver upfront pricing, expert care, and warranties that back it all up.

🛠️ Book Online:
https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true
🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite
🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003
X: https://x.com/HartzellsHVAC
Facebook: facebook.com/hartzellsheatair
LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell

Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

He had a folder. That is how I knew before he said a word.

A man met me in his garage with a manila folder full of receipts, and he laid them out on the workbench like he was building a case. A capacitor last spring. A blower motor the summer before. A control board somebody talked him into. He added it up for me out loud. Two thousand and forty dollars, he said, into this unit in the last three years. And now you are telling me it needs a compressor.

I want to talk about that folder today, because the two thousand dollars in it was already gone, and it was the main thing keeping him from making a good decision about the next dollar.

Here was the situation. The compressor was shot. On a unit that age, a compressor is most of the way to the price of a new system, and you are putting a major new part into an old worn-out machine that will need the next thing within a year or two. The math was not close. Replacing made more sense than repairing by a wide margin. But he kept coming back to the folder. He kept saying, I have already put two thousand dollars into this thing.

Core line: "If I told him those repairs were a waste, I was telling him he was a fool, and he would have replaced that compressor out of pure spite just to prove the money was not wasted."

Give Us A Shout

Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, HVAC in Kingfisher and central Oklahoma. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort.

We're family-run and powered by 47 years of experience. Whether it's AI-powered thermostats, geothermal systems, or classic tune-ups, we deliver upfront pricing, expert care, and warranties that back it all up.

🛠️ Book Online:
https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true
🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite
🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003
X: https://x.com/HartzellsHVAC
Facebook: facebook.com/hartzellsheatair
LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell

Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

She kept patting the side of the furnace like it was a horse.

It was an old gas furnace in a closet off the hallway, thirty-one years old, and it was done. Cracked heat exchanger, which is the line I do not cross. Past that point I am not fixing a furnace, I am gambling with carbon monoxide in somebody's bedrooms. I told her, gentle as I could, that this one had given all it had and it was time to let it go.

She did not argue with the facts. She just kept her hand on it and said, but it has always worked.

I want to talk about her today, because the thing standing between her and a new furnace was not money and it was not stubbornness. It was something deeper and more human than that, and once you see it you see it everywhere.

In 1979, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published a paper in a journal called Econometrica. They called it Prospect Theory. It is one of the most important things ever written about how people actually decide, as opposed to how a calculator would decide. And the center of it is a finding they called loss aversion. What they discovered, across experiment after experiment, was that losing something hurts about twice as much as gaining the same thing feels good. Losing a hundred dollars stings worse than finding a hundred dollars pleases. We are not balanced about it. We are built to protect what we have far harder than we reach for what we could get.

Core line: "Walking in and listing all the wonderful things she gains with a new system, the efficiency rating, the warranty, the smart thermostat."

Give Us A Shout

Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, HVAC in Kingfisher and central Oklahoma. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort.

We're family-run and powered by 47 years of experience. Whether it's AI-powered thermostats, geothermal systems, or classic tune-ups, we deliver upfront pricing, expert care, and warranties that back it all up.

🛠️ Book Online:
https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true
🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite
🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003
X: https://x.com/HartzellsHVAC
Facebook: facebook.com/hartzellsheatair
LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell

Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.