She Trusted My HVAC Truck Before I Fixed A Thing

A woman hired me once for a reason that had nothing to do with whether I was any good. She told me so herself, right there on the porch, before I had even opened my bag. I have seen your truck go by for years, she said. That is why I called you. Not a review, not a friend who swore by me. My truck.

She had watched that old truck roll down her road a thousand times over the years, headed to somebody else's house, and somewhere along the way it went from a thing she did not notice to a thing she trusted. By the time she called, she already believed in me a little, and I had not earned one bit of it yet.

In 1968, a psychologist named Robert Zajonc published a paper with a plain title, Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure. He showed people made-up words, characters they could not read, and faces of strangers, and the only thing he changed was how many times a person saw each one. The rule came back clean every time. The more often someone saw a thing, the more they liked it. Not because it was good. Just because it had become familiar.

I see this all over my trade once you know to look for it. People stick with the brand that was on the furnace in the house they grew up in, even when a better one is sitting right next to it. They call the company whose name is on the ball field bench or the back of the church bulletin, not because that company is good, but because that name has worn a groove in their memory.

The young me got this wrong for years. I used to get sour that some established outfit got the call just because folks had seen their sign longer than mine. I thought being good ought to be enough. But being good is invisible until somebody lets you in the door, and familiarity is a lot of what opens the door. Standing around bitter about that is like being mad at gravity.

What works is understanding it and then earning what it gave you. Familiarity handed me that customer on credit, and credit has to be paid back with the actual work. So I did the work clean. I showed her what I found. Familiarity got me in the room, and the work is what kept me on the other side of the door. She is still a customer years later.

Core line: "Familiarity gets you in the room. What you do in the room is what makes it real."

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Um imagine for a second letting a total stranger tear apart your home's heating system.

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Oh wow. I mean that is a wildly expensive, deeply invasive piece of machinery.

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Exactly. It's a thing that literally keeps your family from freezing in the winter.

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Yeah, it's not a small job.

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Right. But now, imagine you didn't check this stranger's reviews at all.

SPEAKER_01 0:20

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

You didn't compare their hourly rates with anyone else in town. Right. You didn't even like ask a neighbor for a recommendation.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

Which is what everyone does, or at least says they do.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Right. You hired this person and gave them the keys to your house for one incredibly irrational reason, which is uh you just recognize their truck.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Oh, wow. Yeah. That's um that's wild.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

It is. So today for our deep dive, we are looking at this uh this really quiet, almost invisible force that dictates who you trust and what you buy. And it happens often without you even realizing your brain has been completely hijacked.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

Yeah, because we all, you know, we all cling to this flattering self-portrait of being the rational consumer.

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Oh, totally.

SPEAKER_01 1:03

We assume our trust is this like highly guarded fortress, right? And a person or a brand only gets inside if they provide actual verifiable credentials.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Right, like we did the math.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

Exactly. But the reality of human neurology paints a, well, a much more unsettling picture than that.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

It really does. So today's deep dive is built on this truly fascinating reflection from a guy named Dave Hartzell.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Yes, the HVAC technician.

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Right. He's a master HVAC technician based in Kingfisher, Oklahoma. He's got like 47 years of experience in the trade.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

That's a lot of time in the field.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

It is. And his story comes to us from episode 137 of a show called The Human Diagnostic, from an episode titled She Trusted the Old Truck.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Such a great title.

SPEAKER_00 1:47

It is. So alongside Dave's very grounded, you know, dirt under the fingernails kind of field experience, we're also going to dissect a landmark 1968 psychological study by a researcher named Robert Zajonk.

SPEAKER_01 2:00

Right, a really foundational study.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Yeah. And our mission here is to explore the uncomfortable reality of what psychologists call the mere exposure effect.

SPEAKER_01 2:08

Aaron Ross Powell, which is just uh how mere familiarity tricks our brains into feeling this deep sense of trust.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

Aaron Ross Powell Exactly. And we want to look at how you can actually harness this psychological glitch in your own life instead of you know constantly fighting against it.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Aaron Powell Because once you understand the actual mechanics of this cognitive bug, I mean you start seeing it operate in every single interaction you have, from the grocery store all the way to the ballot box.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

It's everywhere. So let's jump right into the port's confession.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

Okay, set the scene.

SPEAKER_00 2:38

So Dave Hartzell rolls up to a residential service call. He walks up the steps, and before he has even unzipped his tool bag, the homeowner just stops him. Just right there on the porch. Right there. She tells him point blank that she didn't hire him because he had like a five-star rating online or because his prices were competitive.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Which is usually what you want to hear as a business owner.

SPEAKER_00 3:00

Right. But she hired him simply because she'd watched his work truck drive down her road maybe a thousand times over the past few years, headed to other people's houses.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Aaron Powell I mean, she's just openly admitting that her trust is entirely detached from any actual data about Dave's competence.

SPEAKER_00 3:16

Right. Not at all.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

Somewhere along the line, that physical truck just transitioned from background scenery into like a tangible credential.

SPEAKER_00 3:24

It's crazy. It completely undermines the whole idea of a meritocracy.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 3:29

I mean, it it is terrifying to think that we mistake a passing vehicle for a resume. And, you know, if she is doing this with an HVAC technician, making a major financial decision based on a truck she saw out her window.

SPEAKER_01 3:44

We are all doing it.

SPEAKER_00 3:45

Yes. We are all doing this in a hundred different ways every single day.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

We really are. It is a documented, totally universal feature of the human mind.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

All right.

SPEAKER_01 3:53

And this is where Robert Zayc's 1968 paper, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, becomes so essential.

SPEAKER_00 4:01

Right. The paper titled Attitudinal Effects of Mirror Exposure.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

Exactly. Zayjonc basically wanted to isolate this exact phenomenon. He needed to prove that we don't just like things because they are inherently useful or, you know, beautiful. He needed to prove we like things just because they are there.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

Aaron Powell And he did that by stripping away all meaning, right? Yes. Like if you show someone a picture of a puppy 50 times, they like it. But I mean, they already like puppies.

SPEAKER_01 4:27

Exactly. The puppy is loaded with positive meaning already.

SPEAKER_00 4:30

So Zajak used complete blank slates instead.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

Yeah, he got really creative with it.

SPEAKER_00 4:36

He showed participants made-up nonsense words, just fabricated gibberish.

SPEAKER_01 4:40

Right.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

And he used Chinese characters for participants who did not speak the language. So uh to them, they were just abstract configurations of ink.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

Just shapes on a page.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

Right. And he even used photographs of the faces of complete strangers.

SPEAKER_01 4:55

Aaron Ross Powell He basically removed any logical reason for the participants to form an attachment to these things. Right. And the only variable he manipulated in the entire experiment was just the frequency of exposure. He he literally just tracked how many times a person saw a specific nonsense word or a specific character.

SPEAKER_00 5:12

And the results were ironclad.

SPEAKER_01 5:14

Totally. The more often a participant saw a visual stimulus, the more favorably they rated it.

SPEAKER_00 5:19

Aaron Ross Powell But they learned absolutely no facts about the nonsense words.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

Not at all.

SPEAKER_00 5:24

The strangers in the photographs never did anything nice for them.

SPEAKER_01 5:27

No, they literally just saw them repeatedly. That visual repetition alone is what warmed the participants up to the object.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

It's um it's exactly how we interact with the new song on the radio.

SPEAKER_01 5:39

Oh, that's a perfect analogy.

SPEAKER_00 5:41

Right. Like the very first time you hear a chaotic, complex new song, it might actually annoy you.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

Because it's a lot to process.

SPEAKER_00 5:49

Exactly. Yeah. You don't know the rhythm, you don't know where the chorus drops, it just sounds like noise.

SPEAKER_01 5:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:54

But then you hear it playing quietly in the grocery store. You hear it at the gym, you hear it like bleeding out of someone's headphones on the subway. Yep. By the tenth time that exact same audiophile plays, you were sitting at a red light, tapping your foot to the beat.

SPEAKER_01 6:09

You're into it.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

Right. But the song did not get objectively better. The notes didn't change at all.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

No, your cognitive relationship to the stimulus changed. And this points directly to the actual biological mechanics of how our brains process information. It all comes down to something called cognitive fluency.

SPEAKER_00 6:28

Which is basically the brain's desire to conserve calories, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:32

Exactly that. I mean, the human brain is an incredibly metabolically expensive organ to run.

SPEAKER_00 6:38

It takes a lot of energy.

SPEAKER_01 6:39

So much energy. So it is constantly looking for ways to save energy. When you process a brand new novel piece of visual information, like a stranger's face or an unfamiliar company logo, your brain has to expend a lot of cognitive effort.

SPEAKER_00 6:57

To like analyze it and categorize it.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

Right. It has to figure out what it means.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

But the second time you see it, the neural pathway is a little bit warmer, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 7:03

Exactly. It takes slightly less effort.

SPEAKER_00 7:05

And by the thousandth time that woman sees Dave's truck roll past her house, her brain processes that visual data instantly.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

With absolutely zero friction.

SPEAKER_00 7:15

Right. It is a highly fluent experience.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

And here is the profound evolutionary glitch in all of this.

SPEAKER_00 7:20

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 7:21

The brain chronically misinterprets that ease of processing as a positive emotion. Really? Yeah. Because the image is easy to look at and easy to process. The brain just tells you, I like this.

SPEAKER_00 7:31

Wow. And we can trace that straight back to our hunter-gatherer hardware, can't we?

SPEAKER_01 7:36

Oh, 100%.

SPEAKER_00 7:37

Like if you are walking through a forest thousands of years ago, novelty equals danger.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

Yes. The unknown is dangerous.

SPEAKER_00 7:44

The plant you have never seen before might be poisonous. An animal you don't recognize is a potential predator.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 7:51

So your brain is wired to view the unfamiliar with this intense suspicion because your survival literally depends on it.

SPEAKER_01 7:59

But conversely, if you walk past a specific type of berry bush every single day for three weeks and you don't get sick and nothing jumps out of it and attacks you, your brain categorizes that bush as safe. The mere lack of negative consequences over repeated exposures actively builds this biological profile of safety.

SPEAKER_00 8:17

Okay, so Dave's truck is the berry bush.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Yes, that's exactly it.

SPEAKER_00 8:20

It drives by it doesn't crash into our mailbox. Yep. It just exists passively a thousand times. The truck moves from a novel threat to a familiar sight to a symbol of safety. It does. And the human brain cannot distinguish between the biological feeling of this stimulus is safe and the complex modern concept of this technician is highly skilled and trustworthy.

SPEAKER_01 8:44

Right. The two concepts just merge completely. And the most powerful aspect of Zha Shang's findings is that this entire process happens below the waterline of our conscious thought.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 8:54

Yeah. Later research into the mirror exposure effect actually demonstrated that participants could not even consciously recall having seen the specific images before.

SPEAKER_00 9:03

Wait, really?

SPEAKER_01 9:04

Yeah. Yet they still showed a strong, measurable preference for them.

SPEAKER_00 9:08

That is wild. You don't even have to consciously remember the truck to trust the truck.

SPEAKER_01 9:12

Nope. Your brain does the math in the background without your permission.

SPEAKER_00 9:15

Which, I mean, that explains so many of our deeply ingrained, seemingly irrational habits.

SPEAKER_01 9:20

Oh, completely.

SPEAKER_00 9:21

Dave points out how this manifests in the HVAC industry. Like, people will absolutely insist on buying the specific brand of furnace they grew up with in their childhood home.

SPEAKER_01 9:31

Yes, the brand loyalty is huge.

SPEAKER_00 9:33

They will stare at an objectively superior, far more energy efficient modern system sitting right next to it. And they will choose the old brand.

SPEAKER_01 9:43

Aaron Powell Because the modern, highly efficient system is a stranger.

SPEAKER_00 9:47

Right.

SPEAKER_01 9:48

The childhood brand is the familiar berry bush.

SPEAKER_00 9:51

We do the exact same thing with local businesses, don't we?

SPEAKER_01 9:53

Oh, all the time.

SPEAKER_00 9:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:54

People will hire the company whose name they've seen printed on the back of a church bulletin for a decade.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

Or painted on a ball field bench.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

Exactly. They don't pull that company's better business bureau file, they call because that name has literally worn a groove into their neural pathways. Wow. An unfamiliar name feels inherently risky, while a name you've seen on a grocery cart feels like a vetted friend.

SPEAKER_00 10:18

But you know, applying this to our own lives, this is incredibly disheartening.

SPEAKER_01 10:23

It is a bit grim, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:24

I mean, if I'm putting myself in the shoes of someone trying to build a career, right? Like an artist trying to get noticed, or a contractor starting a business, or an employee hoping for a promotion.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

Yeah. It feels unfair.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

It feels like a death sentence for meritocracy. It implies that actual quality, the hours you spend mastering your craft, are totally irrelevant against the sheer force of just being highly visible.

SPEAKER_01 10:49

That tension is agonizing. And, you know, Dave Hartzell's incredibly candid about wrestling with that early in his career.

SPEAKER_00 10:57

Yeah, he talks about the mindset of uh young Dave.

SPEAKER_01 11:00

Right, young Dave. He was pouring all his energy into being an exceptional technician. I mean, he knew the physics of refrigeration, he knew the electrical systems.

SPEAKER_00 11:08

He was good at the actual job.

SPEAKER_01 11:09

Very good. But he would sit in his truck and watch established, highly visible companies in town companies he knew for a fact were cutting corners or doing sloppy work, getting all the phone calls.

SPEAKER_00 11:20

Man, that must have been so frustrating.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

Oh, young Dave was furious because he was operating under the assumption that the world is fair.

SPEAKER_00 11:27

Right. He believed the work should speak for itself.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

Exactly. We all want to believe that quality is loud. We want to believe that if you are simply good enough, the world will beat a path to your door.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

Yeah, but Dave realized that this mindset is just a trap. A huge trap. Quality is actually incredibly quiet. It is completely invisible from the street.

SPEAKER_01 11:47

It really is.

SPEAKER_00 11:48

It's sort of like writing a once-in-a-generation literary masterpiece, like a book that could change the world, right? Okay. But then you lock it inside a heavy steel safe and then get furious that nobody is reading it.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

Oh, that's a great way to put it.

SPEAKER_00 12:02

The brilliance of the words on the page has zero ability to pick the lock on the safe. The quality of the work only matters after the safe is open.

SPEAKER_01 12:11

And familiarity is the mechanism that opens the safe.

SPEAKER_00 12:14

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

Familiarity gets you inside the house so your quality can actually be demonstrated. Dave realized that spending his energy resenting the mere exposure effect was a profound waste of time. He called it being mad at gravity.

SPEAKER_00 12:28

That's such a perfect phrase. Being mad at gravity. Because gravity is going to pull things toward the earth, whether you think it's a fair system or not.

SPEAKER_01 12:35

Right. Doesn't care about your feelings.

SPEAKER_00 12:37

Exactly. The mere exposure effect is going to pull human trust toward the familiar. Regardless of your personal feelings about merit, you cannot legislate human neurology.

SPEAKER_01 12:48

You really can't. So Dave has shifted his entire strategy. Aaron Powell Okay.

SPEAKER_00 12:52

So how do you ethically use this then?

SPEAKER_01 12:55

Well, he didn't give up on being excellent, obviously, but he changed his relationship with that unearned familiar trust. Right. He developed a philosophy of what works. And it starts by recognizing that when a customer hires you because they saw your truck, they haven't actually hired you. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 13:12

Oh, they've hired the truck.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

They've hired the truck. They have handed you a customer on credit.

SPEAKER_00 13:17

Ah, on credit.

SPEAKER_01 13:18

Trevor Burrus And credit, by definition, has to be paid back. You don't look down on the customer for being influenced by a cognitive bias, but you absolutely do not coast on it either.

SPEAKER_00 13:29

Trevor Burrus Right. You treat that unearned trust as a massive loan.

SPEAKER_01 13:32

Aaron Powell Yes. You have to respect the gap between the illusion of competence created by the mere exposure effect and your actual proven competence in the room.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

Aaron Powell Right. Because when Dave steps onto that porch, he knows the truck got him there. But he also knows the truck cannot like diagnose a blown capacitor.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

Trevor Burrus Exactly. The truck can't fix the AC, so his response is to do the work meticulously clean. He doesn't act like a guy who has already earned his reputation with this woman. He acts like a technician starting from absolute zero.

SPEAKER_00 14:02

Aaron Powell Which is so smart. He walks her through the system, he shows her exactly what failed, he explains his process.

SPEAKER_01 14:08

Aaron Ross Powell Right. He actively proves the competence that her brain had previously just assumed was there.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

He bridges the gap. He takes this subconscious, biologically driven bias and methodically replaces it with conscious, evidence-based trust.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

Aaron Ross Powell Yes. And because he treated that initial familiarity as a debt to be repaid rather than, you know, a victory he deserved, he fundamentally altered the relationship.

SPEAKER_00 14:35

The anchor of trust completely relocated.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

It did.

SPEAKER_00 14:38

Because years later, she is still his loyal customer. But the truck is completely irrelevant now. She trusts Dave the person.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

Right. Familiarity got him in the door, but the actual undeniable quality of his work is what built the permanent foundation.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

The mere exposure effect was just a psychological foot in the door.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

Exactly. Which leads to the core thesis of Dave's 47-year career and really the most vital takeaway from this whole analysis.

SPEAKER_00 15:01

Right. And for you listening, this is the part to write down. Familiarity gets you in the room. What you do in the room is what makes it real.

SPEAKER_01 15:10

It's so true.

SPEAKER_00 15:11

If you're listening to this and you've ever dealt with imposter syndrome because you got an opportunity, you felt you hadn't fully earned, maybe you just knew the right person, or you happen to be the most visible option in the room. This is your blueprint.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:24

You don't have to give the opportunity back. You just have to make it real once you're inside. You take the unearned momentum of the universe and you forge it into actual substance.

SPEAKER_01 15:34

We can harness this ethically to build our own lives, absolutely. But, you know, we also have to recognize that we are constantly the ones being acted upon.

SPEAKER_00 15:42

Oh, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 15:43

We are all operating under the same gravitational pull. And while it's relatively harmless when we're choosing a brand of furnace or calling a local plumber, the implications scale up in ways that really shape society.

SPEAKER_00 15:55

Yeah, it changes the entire landscape when we look at how we make our most consequential world-shaping decisions.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

Exactly. I want you to think about the sheer volume of visual information you are subjected to during a political election cycle.

SPEAKER_00 16:08

Oh, it's overwhelming.

SPEAKER_01 16:09

It is. Campaigns spend millions of dollars not on detailing complex policy platforms or, you know, writing long-form essays about civic duty.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

No, not at all.

SPEAKER_01 16:19

They spend it simply on plastering a name in your field of vision as many times as physically possible. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 16:26

Yard signs on every corner, bumper stickers at every red light, 30-second television spots where a candidate's name just flashes across the screen in bold letters.

SPEAKER_01 16:35

Right. And we want to believe that when we walk into a voting booth, we are executing this high-level, deeply rational analysis of character and policy.

SPEAKER_00 16:45

We want to believe we're being smart.

SPEAKER_01 16:46

Right. But Zojount's research dictates that your brain is silently tallying those exposures.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

It's doing the math.

SPEAKER_01 16:53

Exactly. Every time you pass that bright blue or bright red yard sign on your morning commute. And again, this isn't about left or right, it's just about the exposure cognitive fluency is building.

SPEAKER_00 17:03

The name becomes slightly easier for your brain to process.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

Yes. The metabolic cost of reading it drops.

SPEAKER_00 17:10

And your brain translates that metabolic ease into a feeling of safety.

SPEAKER_01 17:13

It does.

SPEAKER_00 17:14

So you're standing in the voting booth staring at a long list of down ballot names for local counsel or county judge or state representative. Right. You haven't read their voting records, you haven't attended their town halls.

SPEAKER_01 17:25

But as you scan the list, one name gives you a gut feeling. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 17:28

A subtle, comforting pull.

SPEAKER_01 17:30

Exactly. Amidst a sea of strangers, one name just feels like the right choice, the safe choice.

SPEAKER_00 17:36

Aaron Powell It forces you to question your own internal compass, honestly.

SPEAKER_01 17:39

It really does.

SPEAKER_00 17:40

Like how much of what we call our profound intuition is actually just a biological glitch?

SPEAKER_01 17:46

That's the terrifying part.

SPEAKER_00 17:48

It is. So the next time you feel absolute unquestioning certainty about a person, a brand, or a choice on a ballot, you have to stop and ask yourself a very uncomfortable question.

SPEAKER_01 17:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:59

Is this genuine, earned trust based on facts? Or has my brain just quietly mistaken mere exposure for genuine safety? Did this person actually earn my trust, or did I just watch their truck roll past my porch a thousand times?