We’re taught that copying is cheating and that true genius requires inventing something from nothing. But what if the "originality" we worship is actually a lie? In this episode, we debunk the myth of the solitary genius by looking at the greatest creative thieves in history. We find out why Shakespeare would be expelled from modern colleges for plagiarism, how The Beatles honed their craft as a cover band in Hamburg strip clubs, and why The Ramones only invented punk rock because they were physically incapable of playing Beach Boys songs.

We’ll dive into the cognitive science of "combinatorial creativity" and the concept of the "palimpsest" to show why the best ideas are often just "bad copies" of old ones. From DJ Kool Herc inventing hip hop by looping James Brown records to Japanese whiskey distillers accidentally improving on Scotch, we prove that your unique voice is actually found in the mistakes you make while trying to be someone else. Stop waiting for a lightning bolt of inspiration and learn why the smartest way to create is to get dumb and start copying.

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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.

So my daughter comes home from school just completely devastated. She's in tears. Full meltdown mode. And I'm thinking, "Okay, is this like a bullying situation or maybe boyfriend drama? Did she fail a test? What are we dealing with here?" And she tells me her art teacher gave her a C on a painting assignment. And I'm like, "Okay, that's rough." But it's not the end of the world, but here's why she got the C. The teacher wrote on her assignment, quote, "Too derivative. Lacks originality. I can see the Monet influence too clearly." And I just sat there for a second processing this. My 15-year-old daughter studied Monet. She loved his work so much that she tried to paint like him. She practiced his techniques. She absorbed his style. And her teacher's response was, "That's bad. You're not supposed to learn from the masters. You're supposed to just invent things from nothing, I guess." And that's when it hit me. We have this completely backwards idea about creativity in our culture. We worship originality like it's the only thing that matters. We treat copying like it's cheating, like it's the opposite of creativity. But what if I told you that copying isn't the enemy of creativity? What if copying is actually how creativity works? What if the greatest artists, musicians, and writers in history weren't original at all? What if they were all, in their own way, just really, really good? Or, in some instances, really bad copiers. And what if the whole concept of originality is actually holding you back from creating your best work? Welcome to Dumbify, the podcast that makes you smarter by thinking dumber. I'm your host, David Carson, and today we're going to prove that the most creative thing you can do is stop trying to be original. So let's do that. 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. Just thinking wrong on purpose with Juice.

Let's start with the greatest writer in the English language, William Shakespeare, the Bard, the guy whose plays are still performed 400 years after he wrote them, the guy English teachers treat like a god who descended from the heavens to bestow perfect literature upon humanity. Here's something they don't usually mention in those English classes. Shakespeare almost never invented a plot. According to SparkNotes and basically every Shakespeare scholar, out of his 37 plays, Shakespeare only wrote two with original plots. Two. Love's Labour's Lost and The Tempest. Everything else, borrowed, stolen, copied. His primary source was a book called Holinshed's Chronicles: A History of England, Scotland, and Ireland, published in 1577. Nearly all of his history plays came from this book; Macbeth, King Lear, Cymbeline. He didn't invent those stories. He read them in Holinshed and thought, "Yeah, I can do something with this." Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, all lifted from Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, specifically from Thomas North's English translation. Romeo and Juliet, stolen from a poem called The Tragical History of Romius and Juliet by Arthur Brooke. The Comedy of Errors? Basically, a translation of a Roman comedy called Menaechmi by Plautus. And here's the really wild part. Shakespeare didn't just take plots. Sometimes he lifted the actual language. In Antony and Cleopatra, there's a famous speech where Enobarbus describes Cleopatra's barge. "The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, burned on the water." It's considered some of Shakespeare's most beautiful poetry, but scholars have shown it's almost a word-for-word copy of Thomas North's prose translation of Plutarch. By modern standards, Shakespeare would be expelled from college. His plays would be flagged by plagiarism software. His career would be over. But here's the thing. Nobody in the Elizabethan era considered this plagiarism. The concept barely existed. Taking stories from other writers and making them your own wasn't cheating. It was just how you made plays. What mattered wasn't where you got the story. What mattered was what you did with it, and what Shakespeare did with it was transform it. He took prose and made it poetry. He took flat historical accounts and made them human. He took the bones of other people's stories and clothed them in language so beautiful that we're still quoting it four centuries later. The raw material wasn't original. The alchemy was.

Let's talk about the Beatles, the musical equivalent of oxygen, the guys who invented having hair. If you were a betting man in 1960, you would not have bet on these guys. You know what the greatest band in history was doing in 1960? They were playing covers in strip clubs in Germany. Yup.I'm not making this up. Before the screaming fans, before the Ed Sullivan Show, before they were the Fab Four, they were basically human jukeboxes in the red-light district of Hamburg. They were playing marathon sets. We're talking four sets a night on Tuesdays, five on Saturdays, six on Sundays. Sometimes playing until 3:00 AM. And were they playing, "I Want To Hold Your Hand"? No. They were playing Chuck Berry. They were playing Little Richard. They were playing whatever the drunk guy in the leather vest shouted at them to play. Paul McCartney admitted it. He said, "We started as a little covers band." John Lennon, John Freaking Lennon said, quote, "We didn't sing our own songs in the early days. They weren't good enough." Can we just pause for a second? John Lennon had imposter syndrome. John Lennon looked at his notebook and thought, "Oh no, this is garbage. I'm a fraud. Everyone's gonna find out I'm just a guy from Liverpool." So, in 1961, instead of dropping the hottest mix tape of the century, they were backup musicians for a guy named Tony Sheridan. Tony Sheridan sounds like the assistant manager at a Toyota dealership who tries to sell you the extended warranty. But the Beatles were his backup band. Even their first album, Please Please Me, half of it was covers. They were covering the Shirelles. It wasn't until 1964, years later, that they actually released an album of all original material. That is years of copying. Years. But here is the data point that matters. The copying was the feature, not the bug. First of all, you cannot play six-hour sets fueled only by German beer and adrenaline without turning into a technical machine. Malcolm Gladwell loves his 10,000 hours, right? Well, the Beatles did their 10,000 hours in a dungeon that smelled like stale cigarettes and desperation. But they weren't just getting callouses on their fingers. They were getting data. By playing hundreds of other peoples' hits, they were reverse engineering the DNA of pop music. It's like eating 10,000 pizzas so you can eventually bake the perfect calzone. They learned exactly what makes a crowd scream and exactly what makes a crowd go to the bathroom. And that brings us to the weirdest part of the equation. They found their own voice by failing to be other people. They tried to be Little Richard, but they were too British. They tried to be Elvis, but they were too scrawny. They filtered American rock and roll through a filter of polite English boys, and what came out the other side wasn't a copy, it was the Beatles. John Lennon said it wasn't a rip-off, it was a love-in. So, if you feel like a fraud because you're copying your heroes, good. Keep doing it. It's not theft, it's apprenticeship. You have to be a really good cover band before you can change the world. You've heard this quote, it's basically the live, laugh, love quote, but for creative directors. And the quote is, "Good artists copy. Great artists steal." It's usually attributed to Pablo Picasso. Steve Jobs famously quoted it in a 1996 PBS documentary while wearing a turtleneck that screamed, "I'm smarter than you," and he credited Picasso for the quote. And the beautiful irony is that there is zero evidence Picasso ever said it. Think about that. The most famous quote about stealing was stolen. It's kind of the perfect crime. It's a meta theft, but I digress. So, who actually said it? According to the quote investigator, which sounds like a procedural cop show I would watch exclusively when I have the flu, they traced it back to a guy named W.H. Davenport Adams, and he wrote it in 1892. But it's not even what he said. What he actually said was, "Great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil." So, the original guy said basically, "Hey, please don't steal. Stealing is for losers," and history looked at him and said, "Yeah, that's kinda boring. We're gonna change your quote and make stealing sound cool, and we're gonna give the credit to a guy who painted a woman with three noses." But then even better, in 1920, T.S. Eliot gets involved, and he looks at that quote and decides to flip the script. He says, quote, "Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal." I love that distinction. Mature poets steal. It sounds so dignified. It makes me feel like if I get caught shoplifting a Snickers bar at a 7-Eleven, I can just tell the police, "Unhand me. I am simply a mature poet engaging in the artistic process." Eliot went on to say, "The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn." Hmm. Welds his theft. That is the key. That is the instruction manual. The difference between being a hack and being a genius is transformation. If you're an immature artist, you copy the surface, you trace the drawing, and we know you traced it. While the mature artist is more of a chop shop.You steal the car, you strip it for parts, you melt down the frame, and you build a helicopter. By the time you're done, nobody looks at the helicopter and says, "Hey, is that a 1998 Honda Civic?" No, they say, "Cool helicopter."

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.

So let's talk about what science actually says about creativity. Because it turns out cognitive scientists have been studying this stuff for decades, and their findings might surprise you. Margaret Boden, a researcher at the University of Sussex, has identified three types of creativity. The first is what she calls combinatorial creativity, taking existing ideas and combining them in new ways. Think of a mermaid, a woman's head and torso combined with a fish's tail. Neither element is original, but the combination is. Research in cognitive psychology consistently shows that this combinatorial creativity, bringing together previously unrelated concepts, is how most creative breakthroughs actually happen. It's not about inventing something from nothing. It's about seeing connections that nobody else saw. Niels Bohr compared an atom to the solar system. Neither concept was new. The analogy was studies on creative problem-solving have shown that exposure to diverse existing ideas actually improves creative output. People who are exposed to a wider range of examples generate more novel solutions. The raw material of creativity isn't blank space. It's other people's ideas recombined and transformed. There's even research showing that imitation can enhance creative problem-solving. A 2014 study in the Journal of Creative Behavior found that when people studied exemplar solutions before tackling creative problems, their own solutions improved. Not because they copied the examples, but because the examples gave them frameworks and strategies to build upon. I think the best example of this, the absolute gold medal in the Olympics of creative theft, happened on August 11th, 1973 in a rec room in the Bronx, and an 18-year-old kid named Clive Campbell, who was DJing a party. Clive went by the name DJ Kool Herc. He was born in Jamaica, so he understood the physics of a killer sound system. But he noticed a glitch in the matrix. When he played funk records, the crowd would get bored during the verses. They were just waiting. They were waiting for the break, the part where the singer stops talking about his feelings, the melody drops out, and the drummer just goes absolutely feral. The problem? The break is short. It's, like, 10 seconds. Then the vocals come back in, and the energy nosedives. It's the musical equivalent of eating the filling out of an Oreo, and then having to eat the dry cookie part. So Kool Herc had an idea, an epiphany. He thought, "What if I buy two copies of the same record?" He realized he needed doubles. He needed a Noah's Ark of vinyl, two of every animal. Imagine the guy at the record store. "Uh, Clive, you already bought that James Brown album." And Clive is like, "I need another one. Don't ask questions."

And here's the math. Clive took James Brown copy number one and played the break on the left turntable. He took James Brown copy number two and queued it up on the right turntable. When the break ended on the left, he didn't let the song finish. He immediately flipped to the right turntable, where the break was just starting. While the right one played, he spun the left one back to the start, back and forth, left, right, left, right. He turned a 10-second drum solo into a five-minute loop. Then he did the unthinkable. He mixed that loop directly into a loop of another song. He called this technique the merry-go-round. And that night, he transitioned from James Brown's Give It Up or Turn it Loose directly into a track by a group called The Incredible Bongo Band. The raw material was James Brown, but the creativity was in the edit. From that one act of creative copying, we got everything. We got hip hop. We got sampling. We got the entire philosophy that says creativity isn't about making something from nothing. It's about taking what exists and refusing to let the good part end. So far, I've been talking about people who copied well.

But what about people who copied badly? If you're old enough to remember Xerox machines, the big, clunky office copiers from before everything went digital, you might remember doing something as a kid that seemed pointless, but was actually kind of magical. You'd make a copy of something, then you'd take that copy and make a copy of it. Then you'd make a copy of that copy. And you'd keep going. And what happened? Each generation of copy degraded a little bit. Lines got thicker. Details got blurrier. Contrast shifted.By the time you'd copied the copy of the copy of the copy, maybe 10 or 15 times, the final image looked nothing like the original. It had gathered all these imperfections along the way. Each new copy gave it a new life, until eventually, the final copy had become something entirely its own. And here's the thing. I think that's exactly what happens in art. People try to imitate their heroes, but they're terrible at it. They can't quite get the sound right, or the technique, or the feel, and in failing to copy accurately, they end up sounding like themselves. Their imperfect way of copying is what makes the work feel original. Let me give you the perfect example, The Ramones, four guys from Queens who looked like they were allergic to the sun, the guys who invented punk rock in 1974. They influenced everyone. The Clash, Green Day, Blink-182, every band that has ever worn a T-shirt over a long-sleeved T-shirt traces their lineage back to the Ramones. But here is the thing. The Ramones didn't want to be a punk band. When they first started, they were trying to be the Beach Boys. Just imagine that for a second. Joey Ramone in a leather jacket, standing in a garage in Queens thinking, "I just wanna be a 'California Girl'." It is so sweet, and also, so delusional. They wanted the harmonies. They wanted the sophisticated chord progressions. They wanted to be a sunny pop group. But there was just one little tiny problem. They couldn't play any instruments, not a single one. They physically couldn't do it. Trying to get the Ramones to play a complex Brian Wilson chord progression was like asking a bulldog to solve a Sudoku. So they pivoted. If they couldn't play good, they would play fast. And since they couldn't play 12 chords, they played three. They essentially stripped the car down to the chassis and then set it on fire. Johnny Ramone said in an interview, "We started off just wanting to be a bubblegum group. We looked at the Bay City Rollers as our competition." The Bay City Rollers, the guys in the tartan knickers who sang the song Saturday Night, that is who the Ramones thought they were fighting. That is like a pack of wolves thinking their main competition is a basket of puppies. Johnny said, "But we were so weird." Yeah, you got that right. And that was the magic. Their biggest hit, Rockaway Beach, was literally written by Dee Dee Ramone as a Beach Boys surf song. He was trying to copy Surfin' U.S.A. But because they were the Ramones, they couldn't make it sound like surfing. They made it sound like a chainsaw cutting through a birthday cake. But this isn't just a music thing. In 1918, a young Japanese man named Masataka Taketsuru traveled to Scotland with one goal, to learn exactly how the Scots made whiskey so he could bring that knowledge back to Japan and recreate it perfectly. He studied at the University of Glasgow. He apprenticed at Scottish distilleries. He took meticulous notes on every aspect of the process. In 1923, he helped establish Japan's first whiskey distillery, Yamazaki, near Kyoto. The entire point was to make Japanese whiskey that tasted exactly like Scotch whiskey, and for decades, they were considered a failure. Japanese whiskey was dismissed as a bad copy of the original. Whiskey purists looked down on it. The Scots certainly didn't take it seriously. It was, in the words of one whiskey website, "Long considered a bad copy of the Scottish single malt." But here's what happened. The Japanese couldn't perfectly copy Scottish whiskey even if they wanted to. The water in Japan is softer than Scottish water. The climate is different. They started using local woods like mizunara oak for their barrels, which imparted completely different flavors. They adapted the techniques to Japanese taste, which were less smoky, more delicate. And then in 2001, something remarkable happened. Nikka's 10 year Yoichi Single Malt won Best of the Best at Whisky Magazine's awards. In 2003, Yamazaki won gold at the International Spirits Challenge. And it just kept happening. Japanese whiskeys have won the world's highest award in some category at the World Whiskies Awards every single year from 2007 through at least 2022. The bad copy is now regularly beating the original, because somewhere along the way, the imperfect copy accumulated so many differences, so many adaptations, so many happy accidents, that it stopped being a copy at all. It became its own thing. And this philosophy of creative copying isn't just in music or spirits. It's everywhere. Look at open source software. The entire tech industry runs on code that people share, copy, modify, and build upon. Linux, the operating system that powers most of the Internet's servers, is built on this principle. You take what exists, improve it, share it back. Look at fashion. Designers have always copied each other. Trends spread because people see something they like and adapt it. Or how about cooking? Every chef builds on techniques developed by previous generations. Nobody accuses a French chef of plagiarism for using a sauce that Escoffier invented 100 years ago. Even in science...Isaac Newton famously said, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Every scientific breakthrough builds on previous discoveries. Einstein's Theory of Relativity was built on Maxwell's Equations and Lorentz Transformations. Nobody invents physics from scratch. You learn what came before, and then you see something nobody else saw.

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, Dumb Word of the Day. Dumb Word of the Day. It's a word, it's dumb, used responsibly.

That's right. It's time for my absolute favorite part of the show. It's time for Dumb Word of the Day. And today's dumb word is

palimpsest, spelled P-A-L-I-M-P-S-E-S-T. Palimpsest. A palimpsest is a manuscript page that's been scraped clean and written over, but where the original writing is still faintly visible underneath. In medieval times, parchment was expensive, so monks would scrape off old texts and reuse the material, but you could still see traces of what came before. And here's why this word is perfect for today's episode. Every piece of creative work is a palimpsest. There are always layers underneath, the influences, the sources, the things the creator absorbed and transformed. When you read Shakespeare, you're also reading traces of Holinshed and Plutarch. When you hear the Beatles, you're hearing echoes of Chuck Berry and Little Richard. When you taste Japanese whiskey, you're tasting ghosts of Scottish tradition filtered through Japanese water and wood. Nothing is created on a blank page. Every creative work is written over the ghost of what came before. And that's not a flaw. That's how creativity works. The visible text is new. The invisible layers are the foundation. Let's try using it in a sentence. "My new band's sound is a palimpsest. We tried to copy the Ramones, who tried to copy the Beach Boys, who tried to copy Chuck Berry. And somehow, what came out the other end sounds like none of them and all of them at once." That was derivative. And also kind of awesome and weirdly accurate. Moving on. Here's your dumb challenge for this week. I'm calling it the deliberate copy. Here's what I want you to do. Step one, pick something you wanna get better at, writing, painting, coding, cooking, photography, music, whatever. Something where you've been trying to be original and feeling stuck. Step two. Find three people whose work you absolutely love in that field, not people you think you should admire. People whose work makes you feel something. People where you look at what they made and think, "I wish I could do that." Step three. Copy them, deliberately, shamelessly. If you're a writer, take a paragraph from your favorite author and rewrite it in your own words. Then try to write an original paragraph in their style. If you're a musician, learn to play your favorite song note-for-note. If you're a photographer, try to recreate a photo you love. Don't just study how they did it. Actually do it yourself. Step four. Do this for all three of your chosen masters. Copy all of them. And then, this is the key part. Try to make something that combines elements from all three. Take the structure from one, the style from another, the energy from a third. See what emerges when you're not trying to be original, but trying to synthesize influences. Here's what I predict will happen. Your copying won't be perfect. You'll make mistakes. You'll adapt things to fit your own limitations and preferences. You'll discover that you naturally gravitate towards certain elements and away from others. And in the gaps between your intention to copy and your actual output, that's where your voice will start to emerge. The goal isn't to become a plagiarist. The goal is to stop waiting for some magical original idea to strike you from the heavens, and instead to do what every great creator in history has done, learn from the masters, absorb their techniques, fail gloriously at copying them, and trust that your own perspective will transform borrowed material into something new. And that's our show. Thank you for getting dumb with me today. If you thought this episode was dumb, good. That means it's working. If you've got friends who are stuck trying to be original and need permission to copy, badly even, send this their way. And hey, I'd really appreciate you giving this podcast a great rating and review. Every little bit helps. And if you want more weekly weirdness, stories and brain snacks, subscribe to my newsletter, also called Dumbify, at david-carson.com. Until next time, stay curious, stay confused, and remember, originality is overrated. This is David Carson signing off from a podcast format I definitely didn't invent, using a microphone someone else designed, speaking a language I learned by copying other people to share ideas I assembled from books I read, like a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox.