The Old Furnace Repair That Proved Nothing

A man in Calumet pointed at the furnace in his basement and told me they do not make them like they used to. It was forty-one years old and still running. He was certain that furnace was proof the old way was the better way, and that modern furnaces, with their control boards and variable-speed motors, were over-engineered junk that would never last.

I think about Abraham Wald every time I hear that. In 1943, the military wanted to armor their bombers where the returning planes had the most bullet holes. Wald told them they were looking at the wrong planes. The ones hit in the fatal spots never came back to be counted. The holes on the survivors marked the places a plane could take a hit and still fly home.

That old furnace is the plane that came back. The man cannot see all the furnaces from that same era that failed and got hauled to the scrap yard twenty and thirty years ago. They are not in his basement to point at. He sees the one that survived, and he sees it because it survived.

What kept his furnace alive is not mostly the design of that era. It is the specific history of that one unit: a dry conditioned space, a dedicated circuit, stable voltage, correct airflow, and a homeowner who changed filters. Most of that production run got less ideal care, and most of it failed. His is the rare one.

The same trap runs backwards on new equipment. Somebody reads about three control boards that failed in a bad batch and concludes every high-efficiency furnace is junk. The three complaints are visible. The hundreds of thousands of boards running fine for years are invisible, because nobody writes a post about the part that just works.

So I do not argue a man out of loving his furnace. I honor the survivor without ratifying the conclusion. I tell him the Wald story, because the image of armoring the wrong planes lands in a way a statistics lecture never will. His furnace is real. What it proves is only that it survived.

Core line: "The old surviving furnace was selected by survival. The complaining forum post was selected by failure. Neither one is representative of the underlying population."

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You know, uh there is this very specific feeling you get when you walk into the basement of an older house.

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Oh, absolutely. The airdrops a few degrees, it it smells faintly of damn concrete and old dust.

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Right, exactly. And sitting right there in the middle of the room is a machine, a massive humming hunk of steel that looks like it could, I don't know, survive a direct asteroid strike.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Yeah, it just sits there doing its job exactly like it has been doing for decades.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

And in that moment, looking at that absolute tank of a machine, it feels like you were staring at a piece of undeniable physical truth about how the world used to be. Welcome, by the way, to today's deep dive. We're so glad to have you here with us joining the conversation.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Yes, welcome. Because that feeling you just described, it is an incredibly powerful illusion. You see something enduring, something heavy and loud and old, and your brain immediately draws these massive, sweeping conclusions about the era that created it.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Because today our mission is to uncover the hidden, honestly, almost invisible psychological link between a perfectly functioning 41-year-old basement furnace and American World War II bombers.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

Which is quite the leap, but it makes so much sense when we get into it.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

It really does. We are pulling this from a fascinating reflection piece by Dave Hartzell. He's a master HVAC technician operating out of Kingfisher, Oklahoma.

SPEAKER_01 1:21

And he has spent what, 47 years in the trade?

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Yeah, 47 years, which is nearly half a century of standing in those exact basements, looking at the very machines we just described.

SPEAKER_01 1:32

And more importantly, it's 47 years of actually listening to the people who own them.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Exactly. So Dave's reflection reveals this massive cognitive blind spot that tricks every single one of us into believing the world used to be built better than it is today. And I promise you, by the end of this deep dive, you will never look at a vintage car, an old appliance, or even internet reviews the same way again.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

It completely shifts your perspective.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

So to understand how this trick works, let's start with a specific visit Dave made to a customer in a town called Calumet.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Okay, set the scene for us.

SPEAKER_00 2:07

So Dave walks down into this basement and he's confronted with a furnace from the late 1970s or early 80s. It's a Lennox. And the physical description of this thing is just amazing.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Built like a tank, I'm assuming.

SPEAKER_00 2:19

Oh, totally. We are talking about a steel heat exchanger so thick you could literally drive a nail through it. It has a standing pilot light, a heavy-duty fan motor the size of a coffee can, and absolutely zero electronics.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

Right. So no circuit boards, no microchiffs, nothing delicate.

SPEAKER_00 2:37

None of that. It is 41 years old, and it is still just humming along perfectly.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

And the customer, standing next to this really impressive piece of equipment, makes an argument that is, well, it's almost a universal reflex at this point.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

Aaron Powell Yeah, he points at the furnace and says they just don't make them like they used to.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

Trevor Burrus Right. He is absolutely certain that this specific physical furnace proves that modern heating systems with all their variable speeds and control boards are just overengineered, fragile junk.

SPEAKER_00 3:06

Okay, let's unpack this because I have to jump in here and play devil's advocate for a second. If I'm standing in that basement, I'm probably agreeing with the homeowner. It's hard not to. Right. How can you argue with a machine that has survived four decades of brutal Oklahoma winters? The proof is literally sitting right in front of Dave, taking up physical space, doing exactly what it was built to do in 1981. Doesn't that heavily imply that the customer is actually right?

SPEAKER_01 3:30

It implies it, sure. And the argument feels bulletproof because it is so tangible. You know, you can knock on the fixed steel.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

Yeah, it's real.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

But this is where the illusion begins. Because the question isn't what the customer is seeing. The question is what the customer is is entirely failing to see. We have to look at what we call the curated set of survivors. Dave notes a really critical factual detail about this specific neighborhood in Calumet. That 41-year-old Lennox furnace actually had three relatives.

SPEAKER_00 4:01

Wait, what do you mean by relatives? Like other furnaces?

SPEAKER_01 4:04

Exactly. There were three identical furnaces rolled off the exact same assembly line, installed in that exact same neighborhood around the exact same time.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

Wait, really? So there were four of these identical tanks on the same street? So where are the other three?

SPEAKER_01 4:17

They failed 20 years ago.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01 4:19

Yeah, the heat exchangers cracked, or the coffee can motor seized up, the gas valves failed. Whatever it was, they were disconnected, hauled up the basement stairs, thrown into the back of a scrap truck, and melted down.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

Just totally gone.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

Completely forgotten. And this brings us to the foundation of the bias we were exploring today, which is the visible signal versus the invisible noise. The homeowner in Calumet is making this sweeping evaluation about 1970s engineering based entirely on the visible signal.

SPEAKER_00 4:48

While completely ignoring the invisible noise. And by invisible noise, you mean the three dead furnaces that aren't around to be counted anymore.

SPEAKER_01 4:56

Precisely. The failures have literally been removed from the room. If a machine fails, it gets thrown away. If it survives, it stays in the basement.

SPEAKER_00 5:04

So naturally, the only old things left for us to look at are the things that didn't break.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 5:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:09

But human brains really struggle to process absent data. We are very visual creatures. To really understand why our brains fall for this trap so consistently, we have to step out of that Oklahoma basement and go back in time.

SPEAKER_00 5:22

I love a good historical pivot. Where are we going?

SPEAKER_01 5:25

We need to look at a historical precedent that exposes the mechanics of this cognitive blind spot perfectly.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

Let's do it. So we are traveling back to 1943.

SPEAKER_01 5:35

Right in the thick of World War II.

SPEAKER_00 5:36

Yep. The setting is Columbia University in New York. A group of the absolute smartest mathematicians in the country have been assembled into something called the Statistical Research Group.

SPEAKER_01 5:47

Aaron Powell And they are working directly for the military, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:49

They are. And the generals hand them this massive, literal life or death problem.

SPEAKER_01 5:54

Aaron Powell The stakes were incredibly high here. American bombers were returning from missions over Europe and they were taking heavy, heavy casualties.

SPEAKER_00 6:01

Aaron Ross Powell Right. The planes that did actually make it back to base were just shredded. I mean, covered in bullet holes and flak damage.

SPEAKER_01 6:08

Trevor Burrus, Jr. So the military brass naturally wanted to add armor to the planes to protect the pilots and the crews.

SPEAKER_00 6:13

Aaron Powell Makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

But armor is incredibly heavy.

SPEAKER_00 6:16

Aaron Powell Right. It's a huge engineering trade-off. You can't just armor a whole bomber in thick steel, or it becomes too heavy to get off the runway, or you know, it burns so much fuel it can't actually make it to Germany in bags.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Exactly. You have to be incredibly strategic about where you put the metal. So the military officers did something that seems, on the surface, entirely logical.

SPEAKER_00 6:38

Aaron Ross Powell They looked at the returning planes?

SPEAKER_01 6:40

Yes, they looked at the returning planes and they meticulously mapped out exactly where all the bullet holes were located. They gathered the data, looked at the clusters of damage which were mostly along the wings and the tail, and they came to a conclusion.

SPEAKER_00 6:53

Aaron Powell Well, the natural assumption is hey, look at all these holes. We need to put the heavy armor right here on the spots that are taking the most damage from enemy fire. Right. It makes total intuitive sense. If you are constantly getting punched in the ribs, you put on a rib guard.

SPEAKER_01 7:07

It makes perfect sense right up until a mathematician named Abraham Wald looked at their maps and told the top brass of the U.S. military that their intuition was completely backward.

SPEAKER_00 7:19

He literally told them they were looking at the wrong planes entirely.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

Yes. Wald essentially tells these battle-hardened generals that they are only analyzing the planes that survived the missions.

SPEAKER_00 7:31

The planes that took fatal hits, the ones that were actually shot down by anti-aircraft fire, well, they are not in the hangar for them to study. They are burning in a field in France or sitting at the bottom of the English Channel.

SPEAKER_01 7:44

So Wald realized that the clusters of bullet holes on the returning bombers didn't show where the planes were most vulnerable.

SPEAKER_00 7:50

They showed the exact opposite, didn't they?

SPEAKER_01 7:52

They showed the exact places where a bomber could take a heavy hit and still manage to limp back to base.

SPEAKER_00 7:58

That is just wild to think about. The fatal hits were actually the spots on the returning planes where there were absolutely no holes.

SPEAKER_01 8:04

Exactly. The engine bays, the cockpit, the wing roots.

SPEAKER_00 8:08

Because if a plane got hit in the engine, it didn't come back to have its bullet holes counted.

SPEAKER_01 8:11

Right. So Wald tells the military don't armor the places with the most holes. Armor the places with no holes at all. Those are the silently fatal hits.

SPEAKER_00 8:21

It is such a stunning reversal of logic. I mean, it's like conducting a massive survey to determine if skydiving is a dangerous hobby, but you only mail the survey to people who are currently alive.

SPEAKER_01 8:33

That is a great way to put it.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

Your results are going to be a little skewed. You'll get a hundred percent response rate saying, oh, skydiving's perfectly safe. I've done it 20 times, and I feel great. You are structurally filtering out anyone who could uh tell you otherwise.

SPEAKER_01 8:49

Aaron Powell What's fascinating here is that your skydiving analogy captures the exact mechanism of what psychologists and statisticians now formally call survivorship bias.

SPEAKER_00 8:58

Aaron Ross Powell Survivorship bias, if you're Yes.

SPEAKER_01 9:00

It's a concept that thinkers like Leonard and Laudonau and The Drunkard's Walk and Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow have really popularized.

SPEAKER_00 9:07

Aaron Powell So how do we define it officially?

SPEAKER_01 9:09

Aaron Ross Powell Basically, we draw broad conclusions about a population like the safety of skydiving, or the durability of 1970s appliances, or the effectiveness of bomber armor by only observing the members that successfully survived a very rigorous selection process.

SPEAKER_00 9:23

We treat the surviving sample as a representative of the whole.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

Exactly, entirely forgetting that the process of survival itself completely skewed the sample.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Okay, so if we bring this historical insight back to Dave Hartzall and the HVAC trade down in the basement, that 41-year-old Lennox furnace in Calumet is just a World War II bomber that happened to make it home.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

That is the exact connection. The customer in Calumet has zero access to the losers of that 1980s production cohort.

SPEAKER_00 9:52

Right. All the identical furnaces built in 1981 and 1982 that failed in the normal 15 to 30 year window, they have been completely removed from observation.

SPEAKER_01 10:01

But, you know, this still leaves a very practical question hanging in the air.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:05

If it wasn't the supposedly superior 1970s engineering that made things indestructible back then, what actually made this specific furnace survive for 41 years?

SPEAKER_00 10:15

While its three identical neighbors went to the scrapyard two decades ago.

SPEAKER_01 10:19

Exactly. Dave breaks this down with very specific, honestly unromantic mechanical reality from his source text. It wasn't just the era that saved it, it was ideal conditions.

SPEAKER_00 10:29

Let's actually unpack those exact factors because it reveals so much about how these machines really function in the real world.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

First, Dave notes the furnace was located in a dry, conditioned space.

SPEAKER_00 10:41

Okay, so why does that matter so much?

SPEAKER_01 10:43

This is crucial because a furnace is essentially a giant metal box. If you put it in a damp, unconditioned crawl space, the metal simply rusts from the outside in over a few decades. This one was kept dry.

SPEAKER_00 10:56

Makes sense. What else?

SPEAKER_01 10:57

Second, it was on a dedicated electrical circuit with stable voltage.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

Now, wait, why does stable voltage matter so much for a machine with no electronics? I mean you said it didn't have any circuit boards.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

It matters because of that heavy coffee can fan motor. If a furnace shares an electrical circuit with other major appliances, the voltage can slightly drop when those other appliances kick on.

SPEAKER_00 11:18

Oh, like when your lights dim for a second when the vacuum turns on?

SPEAKER_01 11:21

Exactly. And over decades, those subtle voltage drops cause the furnace motor to run hotter and work harder. That slowly degrades the copper windings inside the motor until it shorts out. But this furnace had clean, dedicated power.

SPEAKER_00 11:35

Okay, what else? Dave mentions it wasn't overfired, which prevents something called short cycling. I've heard that term, but what is short cycling actually doing to the machine?

SPEAKER_01 11:45

Short cycling happens when a furnace is too large for the square footage of the house. It blasts a massive amount of heat, warms the house up in like five minutes, and shuts off. Ten minutes later, it turns on and blasts heat again. This rapid on and off cycle forces that thick steel heat exchanger to rapidly expand from the intense heat and then contract as it cools down over and over and over again.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

That's like bending a paper clip back and forth until it snaps.

SPEAKER_01 12:13

Exactly that. Eventually the metal gets fatigued and cracks. And a cracked heat exchanger leaks carbon monoxide, which means the furnace is instantly condensed.

SPEAKER_00 12:21

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 12:22

But this specific furnace was perfectly sized for the house, so it ran in long, gentle cycles. It had correct airflow, minimizing thermal stress.

SPEAKER_00 12:30

And finally, there is the most human element of all. It had a homeowner who actually bothered to change the air filters regularly.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Which is paramount. A clogged filter suffocates the system. When you look at all these factors combined, you realize this furnace's survival is mostly a product of meticulous maintenance, a perfect physical environment, and quite frankly, pure statistical luck.

SPEAKER_00 12:54

So the other three identical furnaces on that street were likely installed in slightly damper basements, or were slightly oversized, or had owners who forgot the filters.

SPEAKER_01 13:03

And so they tore themselves apart 20 years ago.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

Dave has this brilliant quote in his reflection that summarizes this perfectly. He writes, the survivor cannot speak for the population. The survivor can only speak for itself.

SPEAKER_01 13:16

It's so true. You cannot look at a sample of one a sample selected purely by the fact that it happens to still be running and draw a valid conclusion about the thousands of units that failed and disappeared.

SPEAKER_00 13:26

Okay. So we've established how survivorship bias makes us look at the past through rose-colored glasses. The failures rust away in junkyards, leaving us staring at the single indestructible tank, which tricks us into thinking everything used to be built like a tank. But Dave points out something equally fascinating in the modern day. This exact same psychological blind spot runs in reverse when we look at the present.

SPEAKER_01 13:47

Yes, the reverse bias. If the past looks indestructible because the failures are hidden from us, the present looks incredibly fragile because the successes are hidden from us.

SPEAKER_00 13:58

And nothing amplifies this reverse bias quite like the Internet. I mean, the Internet is basically a massive engine for curating failure.

SPEAKER_01 14:06

Oh, absolutely. Dave uses the example of modern heating equipment to show how people view new stuff today.

SPEAKER_00 14:12

Say a customer is researching a new high-efficiency furnace and they go online to read reviews. They stumble onto a forum post about three specific control boards that totally failed straight from the factory due to a manufacturer's bad badge.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

And how does the customer process that information?

SPEAKER_00 14:29

Well, here's where it gets really interesting. They immediately conclude that all modern high-efficiency furnaces have terrible, fragile control boards. They read those three bad reviews and think, see, modern stuff is over-engineered junk. It's an incredibly relatable trap. It's like assuming every single restaurant in your entire city is an absolute nightmare because you only read the angry, all caps, one-star reviews on the internet.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

Right. Completely ignoring everyone else.

SPEAKER_00 14:57

Yeah, completely ignoring the thousands of people who went out, quietly ate a fantastic dinner, paid their bill, and went home to sleep without ever logging onto a forum to write a post about their totally normal evening. Survivors of attention. I like that.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

Think about the selection process happening there. The complaining forum post is actively selected by a premature failure. The hundreds of thousands of complex control boards that are silently working perfectly in basements across the country right now, they aren't on the internet.

SPEAKER_00 15:33

They have absolutely nothing to say. They are too busy heating houses to complain on a message board.

SPEAKER_01 15:37

Exactly. So neither the 40-year-old surviving furnace in the Oklahoma basement, nor the angry online complaint about the brand new furnace, is a random representative sample of reality.

SPEAKER_00 15:49

They're both highly curated extremes. One is selected by extraordinary survival, the other is selected by extraordinary failure.

SPEAKER_01 15:57

And our brains fundamentally struggle to recognize that the vast, silent majority of normal, everyday experiences are entirely missing from our view.

SPEAKER_00 16:08

So, what does this all mean for us practically? Because, you know, knowing about a cognitive bias in theory is one thing, but dealing with it face to face with another human being is totally different. How does Dave handle this?

SPEAKER_01 16:18

That's a great question because he's a technician. He's standing in a guy's basement.

SPEAKER_00 16:21

Right. The homeowner is beaming with pride over his 41-year-old Linux. Dave can't exactly pull out a whiteboard diagram, survivorship bias, and tell the guy he's the victim of a psychological fallacy. That would be so condescending.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

He definitely doesn't do that. And that highlights the most impressive part of Dave's 47 years of experience. He understands the human element of persuasion.

SPEAKER_00 16:43

Because nobody wants to be told their beloved vintage possession. Something they take pride in maintaining is just a statistical fluke.

SPEAKER_01 16:50

Exactly. He knows that directly contradicting the customer's reality just doesn't work. Hitting someone with statistical base rates and probability models usually just makes them defensive.

SPEAKER_00 17:01

So what's his strategy?

SPEAKER_01 17:03

Well, Dave starts by respecting the furnace. He acknowledges that the machine has earned the customer's love. It really has served him for four decades. That is a real physical accomplishment.

SPEAKER_00 17:14

Okay, fair enough.

SPEAKER_01 17:15

But when the customer asks him directly if modern furnaces are worse, Dave simply says they are different.

SPEAKER_00 17:21

Okay, I have to push back on Dave here for a second, on behalf of the listener. Are you really telling me a delicate circuit board that fries in five years because a drop of water hit it is just different than a massive steel tank that lasts 40 years? Isn't a five-year lifespan objectively worse?

SPEAKER_01 17:38

It depends entirely on what you're optimizing for. This is where Dave explains the trade-offs of modern engineering. Yes, a 1970s furnace was built like a tank, but it was also horribly inefficient.

SPEAKER_00 17:49

It sent a massive percentage of the heat you paid for straight up the chimney, right?

SPEAKER_01 17:53

Exactly. Modern furnaces are designed to extract almost all the heat from the combustion gas, so much heat, in fact, that the exhaust turns into a highly acidic, corrosive liquid condensation.

SPEAKER_00 18:05

Oh wow. So the modern machine is dealing with acidic water constantly running through it just to hit those high efficiency standards.

SPEAKER_01 18:11

Precisely. And to manage that complex process, plus provide varying fan speeds so your house doesn't feel like a wind tunnel, you need computer boards. Computers plus acidic condensation plus a damp basement means naturally varying lifespans and more potential failure points.

SPEAKER_00 18:28

So Dave tells his customers he has data from nearly half a century covering both eras.

SPEAKER_01 18:33

Right. He validates a softer version of their belief. He admits some old equipment was indeed incredibly durable, but points out that a lot of old equipment was also absolute dangerous junk.

SPEAKER_00 18:44

The junk just isn't sitting in the basement to point at anymore because it got hauled away in 1995.

SPEAKER_01 18:50

Exactly. And for most customers, that nuanced explanation of trade-offs is enough. They feel heard, they keep their funness, and life goes on.

SPEAKER_00 18:58

But inevitably, a few customers push back hard. They really want to vigorously defend that strong claim about the good old days being objectively superior.

SPEAKER_01 19:06

And that is when Dave brings out Abraham Wald and the bombers.

SPEAKER_00 19:10

He holds the World War II bomber story in reserve for the hardest cases.

SPEAKER_01 19:14

Yes, and if we connect this to the bigger picture, this reveals a crucial lesson in how to communicate complex, counterintuitive ideas. Abstract statistics fail to persuade people because the bias itself isn't housed in calculation.

SPEAKER_00 19:28

The bias is housed in what is physically present in the room. It's housed in the giant humming steel machine right in front of them.

SPEAKER_01 19:35

Exactly. You can't beat a tangible object with a spreadsheet. To counter a powerful physical image, you need an even more powerful mental image.

SPEAKER_00 19:43

Like military brass armoring the wrong planes.

SPEAKER_01 19:46

Yes. The vivid story of the military brass wanting to armor the wrong parts of an airplane, and a lone mathematician realizing the fatal hits were on the planes that were currently sitting at the bottom of the ocean. That narrative bypasses human defensiveness entirely.

SPEAKER_00 20:03

It makes the invisible, missing data suddenly visible in their mind. They can instantly picture the bombers going down over Europe, and in doing so, they can finally picture the broken furnaces sitting in a scrapyard 20 years ago.

SPEAKER_01 20:15

It allows Dave to respect the customer's deeply held bias without ever actually ratifying it as truth.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

That is just brilliant. This has been such a revealing journey. To quickly summarize what we've unpacked today for you listening, our brains are constantly being tricked by absent data.

SPEAKER_01 20:31

We really are.

SPEAKER_00 20:31

Whether we are looking at historic houses that seem incredibly sturdy or vintage cars that are still on the road, or a heavy-duty appliance from the 1970s, we are evaluating a highly curated set of survivors.

SPEAKER_01 20:43

We assume the entire era was robust when in reality the era produced both massive winners and massive losers.

SPEAKER_00 20:50

The losers just exited the stage a long time ago, leaving only the lucky winners behind to testify. And on the flip side, the internet curates failure, making the present look far more fragile than it actually is.

SPEAKER_01 21:02

It is a lens that permanently changes how you view almost everything in the world around you. And to that end, I want to leave you with a final thought to mull over, applying this concept to entirely new areas mentioned in the broader context of the source material.

SPEAKER_00 21:16

Aaron Ross Powell Where else are we getting tricked by this?

SPEAKER_01 21:19

Next time you are scrolling online and you read one of those breathless articles about the daylight habits of centenarians, you know, this woman ate bacon every day and lived to 105 fun, or you read a best-selling book about the business secrets of highly successful billionaires, I want you to ask yourself the Abraham Wolf question.

SPEAKER_00 21:37

Where are the missing planes?

SPEAKER_01 21:39

Exactly. Where are all the people who did these exact same things, who ate the exact same bacon, who woke up at the exact same time, who took the exact same massive business risks but completely failed, who isn't in the room right now?

SPEAKER_00 21:51

Because until you consider the invisible noise, you can never truly understand the visible signal.

SPEAKER_01 21:57

Perfectly said.

SPEAKER_00 21:58

You always have to look for what isn't there. Next time you walk into a cool, damp basement and see a machine humming away, smelling faintly of dust, just remember. It's not a time machine proving the past was perfect. It's just a bomber that was lucky enough to make it home. Thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive today. We really appreciate you being here.