David Carson dives into the shadowy underworld of what he calls anti-memes: ideas so weird, tender, or raw they resist being shared. They don’t trend, they don’t scale, and they sure as hell don’t come with a LinkedIn-approved success story. These are the whispers in your group chats, the half-formed thoughts that haunt your shower, the notes you label “Too Weird to Try.”

Through stories that range from rogue pumpkins to reverse piñatas, daylight savings rants to Greta Thunberg’s awkward brilliance, we explore why the best ideas often start out sounding cringey—and how “cringe” might just be creativity’s immune system.

Oh, and there’s a word of the day that sounds fake but isn’t.

By the end, you might not go viral, but you will want to start a group chat called “Weirdos Only.”

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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.

Something weird happened last week. I was sitting outside pretending to care about the rogue pumpkin plant that suddenly sprung up out of nowhere on my back patio, when I got a notification from a group chat I forgot I was even in. You know the type, six people vaguely adjacent to your college years, now mostly dormant except for the occasional baby picture or "Check out this link before it's deleted." This time, it was a voice memo from a friend I hadn't heard from in years, a guy who used to wear fedoras without irony. He whispered into the phone like he was confessing to a crime. "Okay," he said. "Don't laugh, but I think I figured out why QR codes are actually sacred geometry."

Now, did I laugh? [laughs] Yes. Did I also immediately text him privately to say, "Go on?" Also yes, because something in me recognized that tone, that scared, cringey, I-know-this-sounds-crazy-but-maybe-I'm-right tone. It's the sound of a raw idea being born. That's when I realized the real internet isn't on the internet anymore. It's in the group chats. The memes are public, but the mutations, the real cultural viruses, they're spreading quietly, symptomlessly behind locked threads. The most interesting thoughts I've encountered in the last six months didn't come from essays or podcasts. Uh, they came from encrypted whispers sent at 1:14 AM by people who would deny everything in daylight. That night, I started listening differently, not just to what people said, but to what they almost said, the pauses, the pivots, the swallowed truths, because that's where the future starts, in the margins, in the mumblings, in the moment before someone says, "Never mind, that's dumb." That's when I lean in because that's when it's getting good, and maybe that's the entire point. Because in a world where going viral is the metric for value, what about the things that don't spread? Well, today's episode is about just that. It's about the anti-meme, ideas that resist replication or sharing because they linger in the shadows as awkward, emotionally raw ideas that are too early to be fully understood yet. Welcome to Dumbify, the only show where being unshareable is a compliment.

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.

Welcome to Dumbify. I'm David Carson, and today we're talking about the anti-meme, an idea so allergic to attention that it spontaneously combusts whenever you try to tell someone else.

And let me just say, I'm not proud of this, but I have a folder on my desktop labeled Too Weird to Try. It's filled with ideas I almost acted on, but didn't, a sushi-themed escape room, a dating app that matches people by mutual enemies, a TED Talk performed entirely in mime, and one note that just says, "Reverse pinata." I don't know what that means, but I do know that at some point I believed in it enough to save it, and not enough to explain it. I used to think these were just bad ideas. Now, I think they're anti-memes, ideas that die in the driveway. They don't even make it to the dinner party. They're like introverts in idea form, quietly profound, but never interrupting the conversation. And here's the embarrassing part. I kill these ideas before anyone else has the chance. I pre-reject them like a talent scout with performance anxiety. I self-cringe because somewhere along the way, I picked up the habit of only sharing ideas that sound like they've already been on NPR, but the stuff I can't stop thinking about, it's always the weird stuff, the stuff I didn't post, the notes I scribbled while pretending to take a call, the dream fragments, the unspellable words, the half-jokes I whispered to myself while walking through a Walgreens. So why don't I trust those more? Why do I lock up the oddballs and parade the predictables? Because I'm scared of being cringey, and cringe, it turns out, is the immune system of culture. It's the mechanism that makes us delete the very things that might have made us unforgettable, but maybe it's time to get infected. Let's science this for a minute.

Let's science this

for a minute.

Not an hour, not a day, but right the hell away.

Let's science.

Okay, so science. Memes aren't just cat photos and dance trends. Richard Dawkins coined the term to describe how ideas replicate like genes, copying, mutating, and spreading from brain to brain. But here's the twist. Not all ideas want to be shared. Some are built to hide, to whisper, to infect without a fever. That's the anti-meme.[Music] Nadya Asparouhova talks about this in epidemiological terms. A meme is like a sneeze at Coachella; airborne, loud, and sticky. But an anti-meme, that's more like asymptomatic measles. You're carrying it, you just don't know how to tell anyone. This explains a lot, like why your uncle will post conspiracy theories on Facebook but never admit he's afraid of dying, or why a groundbreaking concept might show up first in a meme stock subreddit before it hits the news. Virality rewards what's simple, sticky, and socially safe, but that filters out any nuance, complexity, or vulnerabilities. It rewards mimicry, not meaning. So the smartest, strangest, most beautiful ideas, they live underground, or in your drafts folder. What's worse, your brain has its own content moderator. It's called cringe.

Cringe is the biological firewall that stops you from sharing what actually matters.

But if you can sit with the cringe, you might find the signal in the noise. Because anti-memes aren't failures, they're embryos. They need incubation, not exposure.

Let's talk about the ghost that haunts your microwave twice a year: daylight "savings" time. Here's a policy that literally no one seems to like. Farmers hate it. Parents hate it. People with digital watches really hate it. And yet, twice a year, we all just do it. We spring forward, we fall back, we mumble through the fog like hungover time travelers, and then we pretend it just all made sense. And what always cracks me up is no one ever really talks about fixing it. Sure, there's some public outcry, but nothing that's sustained. There's no shouting, no real protest signs that say, "Stop stealing my sunset!" Just a collective shrug, a few memes, and a quiet return to the status quo. That's because daylight savings time is an anti-meme. It's something that infects our lives but resists discussion. It's the psychological equivalent of a popcorn kernel stuck in your teeth. You feel it constantly, but you never schedule a dentist. And yet, it's deeply consequential. It messes with circadian rhythms, increases heart attacks, and causes spikes in car accidents. Isn't that wild? This is not just an inconvenience. It's a low-grade public health hazard dressed up in tradition. So why don't we do anything about it? Because it's culturally cringy to care. It's too boring to tweet about and too old to feel radical. It lives in that anti-memetic dead zone where ideas go to be passively endured, and that makes it powerful because nothing thrives like an unexamined habit. This is the danger of the anti-meme. It hides in plain sight. It's a cultural malware that we've all agreed to ignore.

In 2018, a 15-year-old girl sat outside the Swedish Parliament with a cardboard sign. It read, "School strike for climate."

That's it. No megaphone, no TikTok dance, just a vibe and a vibe check. And then it spread, but not like a meme. Not at first. At first, Greta Thunberg was met with the classic symptoms of an anti-meme infection; silence, skepticism, and a patronizing pat on the head. "Cute," people said, "but ineffective." Except it wasn't, because what Greta carried wasn't a meme, it was a truth. One of those jagged, slow-burning, high-friction truths that don't tweet well. It wasn't sticky. It was stubborn. She wasn't selling a product. She wasn't optimizing for likes. She was doing what anti-memes do best: resisting assimilation. She stayed weird. She stayed literal. She didn't dilute the message to make it go down easier. And eventually, the idea caught up with the moment, not because it was catchy, but because it was correct. And suddenly, people weren't just retweeting her, they were marching with her. They were building around her. Champions showed up. Movements grew.

In the dumbify model, Greta is a truth-teller, the kind who carries an anti-meme until it hardens into something un-ignorable. Her awkwardness was her armor. Her cringe was the price of clarity. Because sometimes the only way to carry a big idea is to risk looking like a very small person screaming into a very large void. And sometimes that's exactly what the void needs.

Let's go even deeper. We all know that the discourse happens online, but the real discourse, the uncut stuff, that all happens in the group chats. You've probably felt it, that moment someone drops a spicy link and immediately says, "Don't share this." Or when a friend posts a theory so unhinged and brilliant you whisper, "Holy shit," out loud, but only react with that weird grimace emoji because maybe you're scared someone will screenshot it. Group chats are where anti-memes go to train. They're the cultural black markets of the internet. Ideas mutate here. They grow strange legs. They incubate without the pressure to perform.

In public, we optimize. In private, we experiment.And sometimes in that experimental haze, you get something new, something beautiful, something that if shared too soon would get canceled or worse, ignored. These spaces are the dumb labs of creativity. They're whisper networks for wonder. They're not about virality, they're about viability. Because not every idea needs to scale, some need to steep. And it's not just art, it's startup pitches, parenting hacks, fashion theories, religious questions, rebrands, rethinks, and reverse pinatas. The best ones start as voice memos and spirals of, "Okay, hear me out," which means the next big movement. It's probably in someone's archive chat labeled weirdos only. And the people in that chat, they're not influencers, they're incubators.

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.

Why is it my favorite? Because it's the one moment I get to say something completely absurd, spell it out like a third grade spelling bee finalist, and pretend I'm also a professor of nonsense at the University of Dumbness. And today's dumb word of the day is scumble, spelled S-C-U-M-B-L-E. Scumble. To scumble is to soften the edges of a painting with a thin layer of opaque color so that what was once clear becomes deliciously murky. Artists use it to mute, blur, or veil the harshness of a layer underneath. In other words, it's the art of turning something bold and shouty into something whispery and weird. So why is this the perfect word for today's episode? Because anti-memes, the sneaky stars of today's show, are the scumbles of the idea world. They don't shout, they suggest. They don't spread with clarity, they drift through confusion. An anti-meme is the exact kind of idea you'd never pitch at a board meeting, but you would text to a friend at 2:00 AM with the words, "This is dumb, but..." It's what we do when our thoughts are too tender, too early, or too weird to face the harsh light of the timeline. It's not erasing, it's veiling. Like putting a velvet curtain over a disco ball until it's time. Use it in a sentence. Before I told anyone about my business plan to rent emotional support mannequins to remote workers, I scumbled it in a group chat to see if people laughed, cried, or blocked me.

So go ahead, scumble your next thought. Wrap your anti-meme in a whisper. Give it time, space, and maybe a group chat full of weirdos because...

Sometimes

the ideas worth sharing are the ones worth protecting.

Anti-memes,

you go hard. But sometimes

stay home until they're ready.

Okay, it's time. You've listened, you've nodded, you've maybe even whispered, "Reverse pinata," under your breath. So now it's your turn.

Here's this week's challenge. I want you to record a voice memo. Nothing fancy, no editing, no backing track. Just hit record and say the idea that you're most embarrassed to share, the idea you've thought about three times this week but maybe haven't written down, the one that makes you wince with its audacity or awkwardness or unfinishedness, or maybe because it involves raccoons in tiny pants. I don't know, I don't judge, but I want you to record it. And then I want you to delete it. Yep, that's the whole exercise. I want you to delete it, but not because the world doesn't deserve it, but because you do. Because saying it, even just to yourself, proves to you that it actually does exist, and that's important.

It stops being a ghost and starts being a guest. And that tiny action, that's how anti-memes start to become real. Okay, so I know what you're thinking.

Cool, I'll whisper into a voice memo and hope for the best, but how do I know if my weird little thought is a dumpster fire or secret genius in disguise? Excellent question. And here's where it gets juicy. Anti-memes have a vibe. You don't always recognize them by what they are. You recognize them by how they feel. They sneak up on you. They make you pause. They haunt your grocery runs.

Here's what to listen for. If the idea keeps coming back to you at the weirdest times, like in the shower or during funerals or mid-bite of a gas station hotdog, it might be an anti-meme. If it feels too personal to post, too awkward to pitch, but somehow too alive to forget, it's probably an anti-meme in the wild. And if it makes you feel vulnerable or weird or slightly haunted, good. That's not the sign of failure. That's a sign you found something that matters. Bad ideas usually go quietly. Anti-memes stick around like an unpaid intern with a mysterious aura. So next time your brain hands you a whisper that feels offbeat or unshareable, pause. You might be holding the kind of idea that doesn't need applause, just permission. So go ahead, make it weird, make it dumb, make it yours.

Thank you for getting dumb with me today. If your brain feels slightly less sanitized and a little more suspicious, that's the goal. Subscribe to the Dumbified newsletter at david-carson.com, where we embrace the art of whispering nonsense until it sounds like prophecy. And a huge massive shout out to Nadya Asparouhova, whose brilliant work on anti-memes inspired today's deep dive to the ideas that hide, linger, and refuse to perform. Until next time, keep your cringe close, your weird closer, and your anti-memes somewhere just between a whisper and a wink.