You know that feeling when someone finishes explaining something and asks, "Does that make sense?" and you nod like an idiot even though you understood maybe 12% of it? Turns out that nod is the problem. In this episode, we make the case that confused people are actually the smartest ones in the room — and that your lifelong suspicion that you're the only one who doesn't get it is actually a sign your brain is still working while everyone else's quit early.

We'll dig into the UCLA research on "desirable difficulties" that proves confusion is literally how learning works, why Einstein called abandoning his own confusion his "biggest blunder," and how Jeff Bezos built a trillion-dollar company on being 30% unsure about everything. If you've ever felt dumb for not getting it while everyone else nods along confidently, this one's for you.

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Dumbify celebrates ideas so weird, wrong, or wildly impractical… they just might be brilliant. Hosted by David Carson, a serial entrepreneur behind multiple hundred-million-dollar companies and the go-to secret weapon for companies looking to unlock new markets through unconventional thinking. Dumbify dives into the messy, counter-intuitive side of creativity — the “dumb” ideas that built empires, broke rules, and ended up changing everything.

I spend about 40% of my life pretending to understand things. Someone explains something, I nod. They ask, "Does that make sense?" I say, "Totally." But it does not make sense, not even a little. But I've already nodded. I'm committed to the nod. I'm a nod guy now. And you know what I've noticed? The most confident people in any room are usually just the ones who stopped thinking first. They're not smarter, not really. They just got tired of being confused faster. Certainty is just confusion that gave up. And confusion? Confusion is your brain actually working. It's the loading screen, and we hate loading screens. We'll click refresh 17 times rather than wait three seconds. But what if the loading is the thing? What if confused people aren't as dumb as they look? In fact, what if they're the only ones actually paying attention? Welcome to Dumbify. I'm your host, David Carson, and today we're talking about the art of confusion, how not figuring it out and sitting there in the fog like a weirdo and enjoying it is a ninja skill that nobody likes to master, but should. So let's do that. Let's get confused. Let's get dumb.

Dumbify, let your neurons dance. Put your brain in backwards pants. Genus hides in daft disguise. Brilliance wears those googly eyes. So honk your nose and chase that spark. Dumb is just smart in the dark. Dumbify, yelling like a goose. It's thinking wrong on purpose with juice.

Let me tell you about all the things I don't understand. I don't understand my cell phone bill. I've had a cell phone for decades. I pay that damn bill every month, but I have never once understood what I'm paying for. There's a line that says "fees" and another line that says "additional fees," and I don't know who I would even ask about this. Verizon? Good luck. They don't know either. They just work there. I don't understand wine. Someone will say, "Notes of blackberry with a hint of tobacco," and I'll think, "Yeah, tastes like wine." I can't tell the difference between a $15 bottle and a $150 bottle unless I see the price tag. And you know what? Neither can you. There's been studies. It turns out sommeliers can't tell the difference when they're blindfolded. The whole thing is just confidence in a glass. I don't understand how planes stay up. Yes, I know about lift and thrust and Bernoulli's principle. I've read the Wikipedia page multiple times. I still don't believe it. Every time I'm on a plane, there's a small part of my brain going, "This shouldn't work." We're all just agreeing to pretend we can fly. But here's my point. I'm not uniquely confused. Everyone is this confused. The difference is that most people have learned to hide it better than me. Let's say you're in a meeting and someone uses an acronym you don't know. You could ask, but you don't because you figure everyone else knows and you'll just look dumb for asking. Meanwhile, I bet everyone else in the room is thinking the exact same thing. The entire meeting is just people nodding at an acronym that nobody understands. Confusion is the most universal human experience that nobody admits to, and that's insane because confusion isn't a bug. It's a feature. It's literally just your brain being honest with you. About 2,400 years ago, a guy named Socrates figured this out. Socrates was a philosopher in ancient Athens, which meant he basically walked around asking annoying questions. He was the human equivalent of a four-year-old who keeps asking, "But why?" Except he was a middle-aged man doing it to senators. One day, his friend Chaerephon went to the oracle at Delphi, which was like ancient Greece's version of Google, except the answers came from a woman inhaling volcanic fumes in a cave. Chaerephon asked, "Is anyone wiser than Socrates?" The oracle said no, Socrates was the wisest. Now, here's what makes Socrates Socrates. He didn't update his bio to say, "Officially the wisest, oracle verified." He was confused by it. He thought, "I'm not wise. I don't know anything. What is this oracle talking about?" So he did research. He went around Athens interviewing people who were supposed to be wise, politicians, poets, craftsmen, the TED Talk speakers of their day, and he discovered something funny. Every single one of them thought they knew things they didn't actually know. The politicians were confident about justice, but couldn't define it. The poets could write beautiful verses, but couldn't explain what made them beautiful. They weren't wise, they were just certain, which is a completely different thing. Socrates realized why the oracle was right. He wasn't the wisest because he knew the most. He was the wisest because he was the only one who knew what he didn't know. Everyone else had reached certainty. Socrates was still confused, and that made all the difference. The Athenians, by the way, did not appreciate this insight.... they executed him, which tells you everything you need to know about how much humans love certainty and hate the people who question it. Now, Socrates was philosophizing, which is great if you're into togas and hemlock, but what does actual science say?

Time for science. Time to get unnecessarily nerdy with it. 'Cause nerding out is what we do. And we're not going to apologize for it. Get ready for science.

In 1994, a psychologist at UCLA named Robert Bjork discovered something that should be on billboards. He called it desirable difficulties. The concept is this. When learning feels easy, you're usually not learning. When it feels hard, when you're confused and struggling and kind of want to give up, that's when the actual learning happens. Think about that. We've built an entire education system around making things clear, explaining things well, removing confusion. And Bjork's research suggests we've got it backwards. The confusion is the learning. The struggle is the point. It's like going to the gym and wondering why the weights are so heavy. That's... That's why you're there. If the weights were light, nothing would happen. Your brain works the same way. It needs resistance. Confusion is resistance. Certainty is just sitting on the couch, telling yourself you worked out. In 2012, researchers at Notre Dame took this further. They ran an experiment where they deliberately confused people while they were learning. They gave students animated tutors who would contradict each other, present conflicting information for students to make decisions without enough data. The confused students learned better. Not just a little better, measurably, significantly better. They could apply what they learned to new problems the non-confused students couldn't solve. The researchers called it productive confusion, which is my new favorite phrase. Productive confusion. It sounds like something you'd put on your resume. Skills: Excel, PowerPoint. Productive confusion. But here's the key part. The confusion has to be real. You have to actually not know. You have to sit in the not knowing. The moment you pretend to understand, the learning stops. Want to know the dirty secret of genius? Geniuses are just people who stayed confused longer than everyone else. Take Einstein. In 1917, he was applying his theory of relativity to the whole universe, but his equations had a problem. They said the universe should be expanding or contracting. It shouldn't just sit there. At the time, everyone assumed the universe was static, eternal, just hanging out. So Einstein added a fudge factor to his equations, something called the cosmological constant to make the math work with what everyone believed. According to physicist George Gamow, Einstein later called this his biggest blunder. He let certainty win. He trusted what everyone knew instead of trusting his own confusion. In 1998, scientists discovered the universe is expanding. And not just expanding, accelerating. To explain it, they had to bring back Einstein's cosmological constant. His blunder turned out to be right. His real mistake was abandoning it. Einstein's equations were confused. He should have stayed confused with them. Or take Darwin. Everyone knows he figured out evolution. What they don't tell you is that he was confused about something massive. He had no idea how traits actually passed from parents to children. Darwin thought traits blended together like paint colors. But if that were true, natural selection couldn't work. Any new trait would just get diluted away. He knew something was wrong with his theory. It bothered him his whole life. The answer, genetics, was sitting in an obscure journal that Darwin never read. A monk named Mendel had figured it out with pea plants. But here's the thing. Darwin's willingness to stay confused, to say, "I don't know how this part works," is part of why his theory survived. He left the hole open. He didn't fill it with wrong certainty. Lesser scientists would have made something up. Darwin said, "I'm confused about this. Someone else will have to figure it out." And someone did. Okay, this is great for philosophers and scientists and all, but what about the real world? How about something like business, where you have to make decisions and sound confident and wear pants? Fair. Let me tell you about Jeff Bezos. In 2016, Bezos wrote a letter to Amazon shareholders where he introduced a concept called "disagree and commit". The idea is...

Disagree and commit. When you can't reach consensus. If someone says, "I still disagree, but I'll commit."And work to make it succeed. That's awesome, let's let that be our thing.

That's not the interesting part. The interesting part is that Bezos said he does this, the founder, the CEO. He gave an example. Amazon Studios wanted to greenlight a TV show. Bezos thought it was a bad idea, complicated to produce, iffy business terms, probably wouldn't be that interesting. His team disagreed. Here's what Bezos wrote back. "I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we've ever made." Think about that. The richest person on Earth writing an email that says, "I think you're wrong, but I'm not sure. So, let's do it your way." That's institutionalized uncertainty. That's a trillion-dollar company saying, "We don't know." Bezos also has this rule. Make decisions with about 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, you're too slow. 70%, that means 30% confusion, 30% I have no idea if this is right built into the system on purpose. Most companies try to eliminate uncertainty. Amazon made it their whole thing. So, here's what I think is actually going on. Confusion isn't a failure state. It's not your brain breaking. It's not a sign you're stupid. Confusion is your brain being honest with you. It's saying, "Hey, this thing is complex. I don't have a clean answer. The situation is genuinely unclear." And instead of thanking our brains for this accurate report, we panic. We grab the first certainty we can find. We nod and pretend. But the world is confusing. Reality is complex. The correct response to most situations is some degree of, "I'm not sure." The people who seem certain, they're not seeing something you're missing. They've just turned off the part of their brain that notices the complexity. They've stopped at 50% understanding, and declared victory. You, the confused person, are still at 70%, still processing, still taking in information, still actually thinking. Certainty is comfortable. It feels good. It's a warm bath. Confusion is uncomfortable. It's itchy. You want it to stop. But the itch is information. The discomfort is signal. Your brain is telling you something isn't resolved yet, and instead of listening, we've been trained to scratch the itch with fake answers.

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb word of the day. Dumb word of the day. It's a word. It's dumb. Use responsibly.

It's time for my favorite part of the show. It's time for Dumb Word of the Day. And today's dumb word is aporia, spelled A-P-O-R-I-A. Aporia. It's an ancient Greek word that describes that weird feeling you get when you suddenly realize you don't know the thing you thought you knew. Socrates was famous for inducing aporia. He'd ask you what justice was, you'd give a confident answer, and 45 minutes later, you'd be sitting there thinking, "Wait, do I know anything?" I love that the ancient Greeks actually had a word for this, a dedicated vocabulary term for productive confusion. We don't really have an English equivalent, just a weird blank stare, like a deer in headlights. Aporia isn't confusion as a failure. It's more like confusion as an arrival. Like, you've finally gotten to the real question where the fog isn't blocking your view. It is the view. So, the next time someone asks if you understand and you feel that uncomfortable knot in your stomach, you're not lost. You're in aporia, which, come on, sounds much fancier. Here's how to use it at parties. "Brenda, I'm not only confused, I'm in a foggy state of aporia." Brenda will either be impressed or will stop inviting you to her parties. Either way, problem solved. All right, so here's your dumb challenge for this week, and it's kind of a weird one. I want you to say, and I know this will be hard, but I want you to say, "I don't know," out loud, genuinely in a real conversation three times this week. I don't want, "I'm not sure, but..." Or, "Gee, I'd have to check." And then follow up with a guess that's really just you pretending to know. Just say, "I don't know," full stop. Let it hang there. Really feel the discomfort. Just marinade in it. I want you to do this once in a meeting, once with a friend or family member, and once with yourself, out loud alone about something you've been pretending to have figured out. Here's what I predict will happen. Nothing bad. The meeting will continue. Your friend will still like you. You will not spontaneously combust. But something small will shift, because in that moment you admit you don't know, you'll give everyone else permission to not know, too. The room exhales. Confusion is contagious, but so is honesty about confusion. And one of those is way more useful. So, that's it. Just three little "I don't knows." Let me know how it goes. I'm rooting for you. And that's our show. Thanks for getting dumb with me today. Here's what I want you to take with you this week. The next time you feel confused, don't panic. Just remember that your confusion isn't the problem. Your confusion is part of the process. The only real mistake is pretending not to be confused and coming up with a half-baked answer to get out of your discomfort. That kind of certainty is really just confusion that couldn't hack the fog and quit too early. So, be the last one still thinking. Be the weirdo in the fog. It's nicer in there than you'd expect. I'm David Carson. This has been Dumbify, the show that proves the dumbest-sounding ideas are secretly the smartest. If you want more dumbness from the Dumbify universe, sign up for my newsletter at david-carson.com. Every week we take another terrible idea and ruin your certainty about something new. It's pretty fun. You'll hate it, but subscribe anyway. And hey, can you do me a favor? If you liked this episode, can you give it a rating and a review? Every little bit helps, and I'd really appreciate it. Until next time, stay dumb, my friends.