This Episode Is So Boring… You’ll Love It

In this episode of Dumbify, David Carson makes a passionate case for doing… absolutely nothing. No hustle, no hacks—just raw, unfiltered boredom. The kind that makes you narrate cereal boxes in a British accent or build a trebuchet out of takeout chopsticks. The kind that makes your brain go, “Shhh… I’m building something.”

With a brain scan’s worth of science, a fruit basket for Mexico, and a cast of bored geniuses, David invites you into the underrated brilliance of zoning out. You’ll meet the Default Mode Network—your brain’s backstage jazz band—and learn why it only comes alive when the spotlight’s off. You’ll discover how woolgathering (yes, that’s your Dumb Word of the Day) can spark revolutions in underwear design, wizard fiction, and hip-hop musicals.

From ancient bathtubs to delayed trains to Atlanta traffic jams, this episode makes one bold claim: your next big idea is probably hiding behind your boredom.

So put down the productivity apps. Stare at a wall. Let your brain throw a rave without adult supervision. Because sometimes doing nothing is how you find everything.

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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.

If I ever wind up in prison, it won't be the mystery meat or the orange yoga pants with zippers that breaks me. It'll be that vast yawning dead zone between midday chow and lights out, the six-hour boredom marathon where time gets waterboarded. Give me cell block brawls and shiv etiquette any day. Just don't leave me alone on a metal bunk with nothing to do. I hate being bored, and not just in a regular, this meeting could have been an email, kind of way. No, this is a deep, irrational, full body allergy to boredom. The moment things get quiet, I start narrating cereal boxes in an unsolicited British accent. I rearrange paper clips into tiny war reenactments. I once tried to build a trebuchet out of takeout chopsticks just to pass the time waiting for my Kung Pao chicken. But recently, something terrifying happened. Let me set the scene. [laughs] I was stuck in that rare haunting thing known as a quiet moment. My phone was dead. My kids were actually entertaining themselves. My laptop was upstairs, and it was just me and a chair and a room and my thoughts. And right when I was about to go full feral, my brain did something strange. It whispered, "Shh, give me a second. I'm building something." I didn't know what that meant, but it felt oddly reassuring. So, I didn't fight it. I sat. I stared. I waited. And suddenly, weird things started bubbling up, a story idea, a completely unnecessary but deeply satisfying pun involving seagulls and weight loss, a flashback to a dream I had in 2009 about a talking vending machine that only sold regrets. That was when I realized maybe boredom isn't a bug. Maybe it's a feature. Maybe boredom is dumb thinking's best friend.

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. You look like a goose. It's thinking wrong on purpose with JUICE.

Hi, welcome to Dumbify, the podcast that worships the so-called bad ideas because, spoiler, they're usually the good ones wearing fake mustaches.

Bonjour!

I'm David Carson, your resident fire marshal for Dumpster fires of genius. Today, we're getting bored on purpose. You see, the whole reason this podcast exists isn't just about celebrating dumb ideas that turned out to be brilliant. It's about the conditions that let those ideas appear in the first place, the moments when we stop trying to be smart, when we let go of being productive, when we do something so gloriously unoptimized it borders on stupidity. And I think boredom is one of those moments, not something to avoid, but something to invite in and offer a beanbag chair. When I was eight years old, my family went to a wedding reception where the music stopped working and the cake was mostly frosting. I was bored out of my skull, so I invented a puppet show using breadsticks, olives, and cocktail napkins. The napkins played aristocrats. The olives were in love. It got weird, but it also got laughs. And by the end of the night, I wasn't bored anymore. I had built an entire world. And yeah, I know, this sounds cute and nostalgic like some precious TED Talk origin story, but let me remind you, the aristocratic napkins were in a love triangle with a breadstick named Dennis. This was not genius. This was dumb, and it worked. That's the magic I'm chasing, the kind of creativity that shows up not because we whiteboarded it or mind mapped it or reverse engineered it from KPIs, but because we got bored, because we let our brains wander into the parts of the forest labeled do not enter. Which brings me to what I want to explore today: What exactly is your brain doing when you're doing nothing? Why does boredom so often lead to unexpected insights, and how can we use that? Because if we're going to dumbify our lives, if we're going to open the trapdoor that lets the weird and the wonderful sneak in, we're going to need boredom on our side. So, let's do something most people would consider incredibly dumb. Let's sit down, shut up, and talk about neuroscience.

Neuroscience. Neuroscience. Because something has to explain why you cried at that car commercial.

I'm sorry. I just had to do that. It's a condition I have, and I won't apologize for it. So, anyway, neuroscience. Imagine you're lying in a tube the size of a large hamster run, wearing a hospital gown that somehow manages to feel both too loose and too tight. A technician slides you in and says, "Just relax and don't think about anything," which obviously is the fastest way to start thinking about everything, including whether cheese can hum show tunes.

If cheese

could sing...

Then something wild happens. The brain scanner lights up, not because you're doing something, but because you're not. Scientists have discovered that when you stop focusing on a task, your brain doesn't shut down. It switches modes. It lights up a network of regions known as the default mode network, or DMN. And I know it sounds like the sad setting your router reverts to when the internet dies, but in your head, this thing is more like a jazz club.[Instrumental music plays] The minute your attention checks out, the band starts tuning up. Daydreams, memories, imaginary arguments from 2006, revenge monologues you could have said in the Trader Joe's parking lot, all of it, that's the DMN doing what it does best, improvising in the background. And here's where things get interesting. That same brain jazz mode, it's where some of our most creative thinking happens. A 2024 study from the University of Utah and some very brave people at Baylor literally drilled holes in people's skulls and placed electrodes directly on their cortex, don't try this at home, and found that creativity doesn't light up the same parts of the brain as logic or problem-solving. When they told people to freestyle, to think in weird, loose, unexpected ways, those DMN regions threw a full-on disco. This isn't just theory, it's biology. It's the actual, measurable, observable dumb side of brilliance, and it happens when we're not trying, when we give up, when we zone out, and maybe that's the whole point. Let me put it another way. If your brain is a restaurant, then the prefrontal cortex is the serious waiter taking orders and delivering entrees with the precision of a Michelin-starred psychopath. But when you're bored, that waiter goes out for a smoke, and the kitchen staff, your memories, your imagination, your half-baked jokes from 6th grade suddenly throw a dinner party. There are flaming doughnuts. There's a giraffe playing a trumpet. Someone's drawing blueprints for an invention that solves loneliness using turtlenecks. Welcome to the default mode network, population, every single idea that's ever been called stupid or dumb. Now, I ran an experiment, real science, very serious. I sat on my couch for five minutes, no phone, no laptop, just a wall. At minute one, I had a small existential crisis. By minute two, I started assigning emotional personalities to the couch cushions. Minute three, I came up with a sketch about jealous toothbrushes. And by minute five, I had the outline for this very episode. Was it dumb? Of course it was dumb, but it worked, because boredom is a vending machine, and the currency is your attention. Feed it a few quiet minutes and it spits out something weird, wonderful, and possibly covered in metaphoric cheese. You may have heard about dopamine fasting, a trend where influencers sit alone in dark rooms avoiding all stimulation so they can reset their brains. It's like being grounded, but voluntarily, and with more ring lights. Science has some mixed feelings about that. Yes, overloading your brain with constant novelty can dull your ability to feel joy.

Yes, it helps to unplug sometimes, but you don't need to become a dopamine monk. You just need to stop constantly trying to optimize every second, because that's the real enemy of dumb ideas, this compulsive need to be on all the time. Dummify, at its core, is about letting go, letting your brain be messy, strange, bored, curious, letting your ideas come out wrong before they come out right. That doesn't happen when you're scrolling. It happens when you're staring at grout, or watching squirrels, or wondering what it would be like to teach ballet to raccoons, which by the way, is now on my bucket list. Now, if you're thinking, "This all sounds lovely, David, but my boss tracks keyboard activity like it's oxygen," don't worry. There are loopholes. Schedule a 15-minute calendar event titled Sync with DMN. If anyone asks, tell them it stands for document management node. Then walk into a supply closet and gaze wistfully at the toner, or better yet, embrace what scientists call freely moving mind-wandering. It's like letting your brain walk the dog without a leash. Research shows that people who can let their thoughts drift without getting totally lost are better at solving complex problems and generating original ideas. And that, my friend, is dumb thinking gold, because dumb doesn't mean stupid, it means unguarded, unfiltered, unexpected. It means letting your brain take the weird way home. But we're not done yet, because all this neuroscience is nice, but what does it look like when boredom actually creates something? What happens when you let dumb thinking run the show? Up next, a naked Greek mathematician who literally ran through the streets shouting, "Eureka!"

A plague-dodging introvert who watched apples fall until gravity was invented, a British woman stuck on a train who dreamed up a wizard boy with a lightning bolt scar, and a fax machine saleswoman who attacked pantyhose with scissors and accidentally created Spanx. These aren't just quirky anecdotes. They are the proof that boredom, real, un-sexy, nobody wants it boredom, is the front door to dummify-level brilliance. So refill your teacup, put your notifications in timeout, and meet me in the tub with Archimedes. I promise it's as weird as it sounds, but before we do that, let's yank the wheel and skid sideways into...

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

That's right, it's time for dumb word of the day. And that dumb word is

woolgathering, spelled the way a Brooklyn vegan bar might label its artisanal throw pillows, W-O-O-L-G-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-G.[Instrumental music plays] Woolgathering. Back in 16th century England, shepherds' kids would pluck stray tufts of wool snagged on thorny bushes, literal wool gathering. It was slow, meandering work that looked suspiciously like daydreaming. The phrase soon leaped from hedgerows to heads, becoming shorthand for mental wandering, drifting through idle thoughts instead of, say, inventing calculus or paying taxes. At first blush, it sounds like a hobby for sheep wearing cardigans, soft, fuzzy, maybe holding a tiny poetry slam. But don't be fooled. Woolgathering is a precise word for creative mischief. It's the sanctioned art of letting your brain wander off leash, nose-first into the hedges of your subconscious, scooping up random mental lint and knitting it into something vaguely useful, or at least hilarious at parties. This isn't multitasking, it's multi-wondering. The strategic dawdle, the intellectual coffee break where your cortex puts its feet on the desk, hums elevator music, and then accidentally solves the thing you've been faking expertise on all week. Here's how to use it in a sentence. "During the quarterly earnings call, I was woolgathering so intensely, I accidentally invented a religion based on office supplies. Staplerism now has three apostles and one HR complaint." That was weird. Moving on. Let's go back to Ancient Greece. Syracuse, third century BCE. Not a lot going on. And when I say not a lot, I mean this is pre-scroll wheel, pre-scroll. Honestly, pre most things. Archimedes, a mathematician, physicist, and early over-thinker, is sitting around stewing on a royal headache. The king has handed him a problem. "My new crown," the king says, "is supposed to be pure gold, but I think my goldsmith is cheating me. I want to know if it's been cut with silver." Now, there's a catch. Archimedes can't melt it, because the king isn't asking, "Hey, genius, can you tell me what this blob of metal is made of after you've turned it into fondue?" He wants that crown, same sparkly filigree, same royal bragging rights, handed back in one pristine piece. So why doesn't he just weight it against a bar of gold? Because the goldsmith wasn't dumb enough to shortchange the weight. He shortchanged the density. Picture two suitcases on an airport scale. One is stuffed with bricks of pure gold. The other is the same exact weight, but full of marshmallows and a bowling ball. The scale shrugs and says, "Both 25 pounds." But you and I know the marshmallow suitcase is filled full of, well, marshmallows. That's the king's problem. A crooked smith could swap a chunk of super dense gold for a bigger hunk of lighter silver, bring the whole thing back to the same weight, and no Bronze Age bathroom scale would tattle. All Archimedes would see is mass, not what's taking up the space. To catch the cheat, you must compare mass and volume, AKA density. So what does he do? He stares at it. Then he stares at the wall. Then he stares at the ceiling. For days, he paces, he doodles, he pokes at figs, and finally, he gives up. Not on the problem, on the grind. He's stuck. He's burned out. He's profoundly, deeply bored. So he does what bored people do. He wanders, and eventually, he bathes. He lowers himself into a tub of still, warm water. And for the first time in days, maybe weeks, he's not trying. He's not solving. He's just soaking. And that's when something subtle happens. His brain, no longer under surveillance by the Committee for Being Brilliant, starts to roam.

First, it notices the quiet, then the warmth, then the waterline. He watches it rise as his body sinks in. And in that gently curious, unguarded moment, he wonders, "Wait a minute, if my body pushes the water up, does that mean objects displace water equal to their volume? And if I can measure volume that way,

I can test the king's crown." Boom, that's it. The connection, the sideways jump. Boredom, stillness, curiosity, idea. He doesn't write it down at first. Instead, he does what any bored man turned inspired streaker might do. He leaps out of the tub, sopping wet, and runs through the streets of Syracuse yelling, "Eureka, I have found it." And what he found wasn't just the solution to the king's problem. He found a process. He found the value of letting go of the grind, of giving your brain room to wander and then wonder. He wasn't trying harder, he was trying nothing. He made space, and the space made room for the answer to appear. Still with me? Good. Let's fast-forward 1,800 years to a different crisis. No togas, but lots and lots of plague.

Oh my God.

Isaac Newton is 23 years old, and his university, Cambridge, has shut down because of the Great Plague of 1665, which means he is locked down, socially distanced, bored. So what does he do? He returns to his family estate, wanders around completely bored, and allegedly sits under an apple tree. The apple falls. [apple thuds] Newton stares and wonders, "Hmm, what is that? What is that force?" Now, was it really a single apple that led to the entire theory of gravity? Maybe, maybe not.[gentle music] But what we do know is that Newton's most productive period, his annus mirabilis, his miracle year, came while he was in exile from school, from his professors, from his mentors, from his routine. In other words, he was left alone with nothing but time, boredom, and apples, which I guess is also how Gwyneth Paltrow launched GOOP. [audio whooshing]

[gasps] Rude.

But Newton, like Archimedes, stumbled into something brilliant, not because he was trying harder than everyone else, but because he wasn't trying at all. He, he was staring at fruit and letting his brain wander into territory no one had mapped yet, boredom for the win. Let's jump forward again. England, 1990, a woman named Joanne Rowling is on a delayed train from Manchester to London. It's hot. There's no phone, no laptop, no sudoku, just a window and a brain. And then somewhere between platforms and boredom, something arrives, a boy wizard, a lightning scar, a school called Hogwarts. Rowling later said the idea simply fell into her head. She didn't write it down immediately. She just sat, and stared, and let it grow. And I know it's easy to retroactively glamorize that moment knowing it led to midnight book releases, and theme parks, and whatever the hell butterbeer is. But in that moment, she wasn't trying to make a franchise. She was just bored. The genius of Harry Potter didn't start with a business plan. It started with a long, annoying train delay and the decision to sit with it. [gentle music] Now, let's make two more stops. Let's fast-forward again to Atlanta in the late 1990s. Sarah Blakely is 27 years old. She's selling fax machines door-to-door, wearing uncomfortable shoes, making cold calls, smiling through rejection like it's her cardio. It's not glamorous, but there is one strange glorious part of her day, her commute. Every morning and evening, she sits in traffic, no music, no podcasts, no calls, just silence and wheels turning both on the road and in her head. She says this was her idea time. Everyone else was drowning in noise while she was swimming in quiet. And one day while doing absolutely nothing in particular on I-285, a single word floated to the surface of her brain, Spanx. No whiteboard, no branding firm, no naming consultant in ironic glasses asking about core values. Just boredom. Just silence. Just her brain whispering a word that made her laugh. She knew it was dumb. She also knew it was right. That name, the weirdness, the sharp X at the end, the way it made people giggle became the brand's secret weapon. In interviews, she said, "My best ideas always came to me in silence. I created space. Everyone else was filling theirs." She didn't hustle harder. She didn't optimize. She just made space for silence and let dumb ideas wander in uninvited. So, yes, boredom can name a billion-dollar underwear company. But what happens when you give it permission to write an entire Broadway show?

Mexico, 2008, Lin-Manuel Miranda is exhausted. He's just finished writing In The Heights, his first Broadway musical. It's a success. He's riding the wave, but his brain, fried. So he does what overachievers rarely admit they need. He takes a vacation, a real one, beach, sand, sunshine. No deadlines. No music. Uh, just a biography. That biography, Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, which let's be honest, is not exactly beach reading. It's dense. It's historical. It's a doorstop filled with footnotes about debt structuring in the early republic. Most people would have used it to prop up a margarita, but Lin is bored, open, unoccupied. His brain, no longer booked solid, starts doing what bored brains do best. It starts playing, and then something wild happens. As he reads about Hamilton's scrappy childhood, his duels, his unstoppable rise, Lin starts hearing beats, hip-hop rhythms, melodies, rhymes. Not on purpose, not because he sat down to brainstorm a concept album, but because his default mode network, his possibility forge was off leash and looking for trouble. He later described the moment like this. "I'm on vacation and suddenly I'm pacing around the beach like a lunatic going, 'Hamilton was hip hop.' It made no sense. It made total sense." Here was a man, Hamilton, who rose from nothing, wrote constantly, fought like hell for his place in history, and left behind a paper trail of bars. He was a one-man mixtape in a powdered wig. Lin wasn't trying to create anything. He was decompressing, and in that decompression, the idea appeared, not fully formed but loud enough that he couldn't unhear it. And here's the part I love. Lin didn't engineer this. He didn't optimize his calendar for insight. He went on vacation. He got bored, and his brain did what bored brains do best. It wandered. It free associated. It started collecting wool. Hamilton wasn't just a creative win. It was a victory for boredom. And for that reason alone, I kind of want to send a fruit basket to Mexico.

Mexico.

[upbeat music] Hey.

Here, have a fruit basket. You're awesome. Thank you, Mexico.

For letting Lin get totally bored so he could create Hamilton, the Musical. Hope you love the fruit

basket.

Let's tally it up, shall we? Archimedes, Isaac Newton, J.K. Rowling, Sara Blakely, Lin-Manuel Miranda. [cheering] Five giant ideas, five very different people. But all of them let themselves get bored. They let their minds meander. They didn't chase the answer. They left the front door open and curiosity wandered in wearing a name tag that said, "Hi, I'm a really weird idea."

That's the invitation I want you to write yourself. Not to hustle harder, but to stop, to do nothing, to let your default mode network start beatboxing in the background. Because somewhere in that silence might be your wizard, [laughs] your gravity, your eureka, your Broadway show with cabinet meetings performed in perfect rhyme. You won't know unless you get bored enough to find out. So here's your challenge. The Boredom Olympics, event number one. I want you to stare at a wall for five minutes today. That's it. No phone. No talking. No sound. Just you, the wall, and the infinite void of your inner weirdo. Let your mind wander. Let it wool-gather. Let it do what it's been trying to do since you installed 37 apps to stop it from doing anything. And when those five minutes are up, write down what floated in. Maybe it's an idea. Maybe it's a character. Maybe it's a question. Maybe it's a jingle about raisins that slaps way harder than it should. Whatever it is, it's yours, unfiltered, undirected, unexpected. A little wool from the field. Give yourself permission to get bored, to drift, to dumb down your thoughts just enough to hear the good ones. If it worked for Newton, it might just work for your next brainstorm, business idea, or overdue apology email that needs just the right balance of sincerity and cat memes. Thank you for getting deliciously dumb with me today. If this episode gave your default mode network a little hug, share it with someone who needs one too. A friend, a coworker, a parent who's forgotten how to stare out a window for more than eight seconds. And if you want more of this kind of counterintuitive curiosity, subscribe to the Dumbify Newsletter at david-carson.com. It's like a granola bar made out of creative risk and occasional sock puppets. Until next time, stay curious, stay dumb, and keep gathering that wool.