Hello, Wineabbers. My name is Jesse Meekim and this is podcast number 421 for Wineab, where we teach

you four rules to help you stop living paycheck to paycheck, get out of debt and save more money.

I want to talk today about the danger of averages and to do that I'm going to read from a book called The End of Average,

How We Succeed in a World that Values Sameness.

This is by Todd Rose, and I will read just a little bit of an expert here,

or excerpt, because the story is fascinating.

Here we go. In the late 1940s, the United States Air Force had a serious problem.

Its pilots could not keep control of their planes, Although this was the dawn of jet-powered

aviation and the planes were faster and more complicated to fly, the problems were so frequent and

involved so many different aircraft that the Air Force had an alarming life or death mystery on its

hand. It was difficult to be flying, one retired airman told me, you never knew if you were going

to end up in the dirt. At its worst point, 17 pilots crashed in a single day.

The two government designations for these non-combat mishaps were incidents and accidents,

and they ranged from unintended dives and bungled

landings to aircraft obliterating fatalities. At first the military brass pinned the

blame on the men in the cockpits citing pilot air as the most common reason in crash reports. This judgment certainly seemed reasonable since the planes themselves seldom malfunctioned.

Engineers confirmed this time and again testing the mechanics and electronics of the planes and

finding no defects. Pilots too were baffled. The only thing they knew for sure

was that their piloting skills were not the cause of the problem. If it wasn't human or

mechanical error, what was it? After multiple inquiries ended with no answers

officials turned their attention to the design of the cockpit itself.

Back in 1926 when the Army was designing its first ever cockpit, engineers had measured the physical

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