Society tells us that mumbling to ourselves is a sign of madness, a habit reserved for the unhinged or the socially awkward. But what if the person muttering next to the Gouda is actually the smartest one in the room? In this episode, we discover that history’s greatest minds—from Albert Einstein to Nikola Tesla—weren’t just eccentric, they were utilizing a powerful "thinking technology" that modern science confirms can actually make you smarter.

Join host David Carson as we explore the surprising neuroscience behind self-talk, revealing why LeBron James refers to himself in the third person to win championships and why top engineers at Google explain their code to yellow rubber ducks. We’ll break down how "psychological distancing" can help you regulate emotions and solve complex problems. By the end of this episode, you’ll have permission to stop thinking silently and start talking your way to brilliance—even if people stare.

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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.

[music] So I'm at Trader Joe's last week, standing in the cheese aisle, and I'm having what can only be described as a full philosophical debate with myself. Out loud, not quietly. Full volume. "Okay, David. Do you really need the triple cream brie? Or are you just emotionally eating because your fantasy football team got destroyed?" And then I answered myself, "Both. The answer is both, David. Get the brie. You've earned sadness cheese." I look up and there's this woman staring at me like I've just announced I'm the rightful heir to the throne of a small European country. She does that thing where she pretends to be very interested in the Gouda, but she's clearly just trying to create physical distance between herself and the cheese aisle lunatic. And in that moment, I felt it. That little flush of embarrassment, that voice in my head saying, "Normal people don't do this, David. Normal people select cheese silently like civilized members of society." But here's the thing. I've been talking to myself my entire life. In the shower, in the car, while cooking, while writing, while trying to figure out why my Wi-Fi router hates me personally. And I always thought this was a character flaw, a quirk I should probably hide, something that, if discovered, would result in concerned family interventions and possibly medication. But then I started digging into the research, and what I found completely flipped my understanding of sanity, intelligence, and the entire concept of talking to yourself. Turns out, the people society thinks are crazy for muttering to themselves might actually be the smartest people in the room. And the people who never talk to themselves? They might be missing out on one of the most powerful cognitive tools humans have ever developed. 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 craziest thing you can do is stop talking to yourself. 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. It's thinking wrong on purpose with Juice.

Let me take you to Princeton, New Jersey in the 1940s.

I want you to imagine this old guy shuffling down the street in a rumpled sweater, wild white hair exploding from his head like he stuck his finger in a light socket and decided it was a look. He's muttering constantly, words tumbling out of his mouth in German, in English, in equations that probably only make sense to him and God. I want you to imagine the people on the street just sort of taking all of this in. Local kids think he's a crazy homeless person. Some even cross the street to avoid him. "Hey, mister," one kid shouts. "Who are you talking to?" And the old man looks up, smiles, and says, "The same person you should be talking to. Yourself." Full confession: I made that exchange up. But here's what's real. That muttering old man was Albert Einstein, the guy who literally bent our understanding of space and time. And according to everyone who knew him, Einstein talked to himself constantly. Not occasionally. Not under his breath. Constantly. Full conversations, complete with hand gestures and dramatic pauses. This habit started in childhood. Whenever young Albert was asked a question, he would slowly formulate an answer, mutter it tentatively to himself, and only then repeat his response out loud. It looked like he needed to say everything twice. His parents were so concerned they consulted a doctor. The family housekeeper called him "stupid". But decades later, Einstein's sister Maja wrote about this strange childhood habit in an unpublished biography. She didn't see it as a defect. She attributed it to her brother's thoroughness in thinking. Thoroughness in thinking. That phrase has stayed with me, because here's what modern cognitive research tells us. When we think silently inside our heads, our thoughts jump around at speeds we can't even track. They leap. They skip. They contradict themselves, and we don't even notice. But when we speak our thoughts out loud, something changes. They have to slow down. They have to become words, and words have to become sentences, and sentences have to actually make sense. Speaking forces your brain to show its work, like a student who can't just guess the answer, but has to write out the math problem step by step. One of the greatest minds in human history seemed to understand this intuitively. He treated self-talk not as a sign of madness, but as a cognitive tool, a thinking technology. And Einstein wasn't alone. Nikola Tesla, the guy who basically invented the modern electrical grid, had elaborate conversations with himself that sometimes lasted hours. He'd pace around his laboratory debating with an imaginary version of himself, arguing both sides of a technical problem until he found the solution.Tesla said he couldn't think properly unless he was speaking. The words were how the ideas became real. Charles Darwin talked to himself during his famous walks. He'd circle his thinking path at Down House, muttering about finches and natural selection and barnacles. His children thought it was hilarious. His wife thought it was concerning. But Darwin insisted that the walking and the talking were inseparable from the thinking. One without the others didn't work. Virginia Woolf wrote about her own self-talk in her diaries. She described a constant internal narrator that she would often let spill out into spoken words when she was alone. So, what's going on here? Why did some of the greatest thinkers in history share this supposedly crazy habit? Were they all just weird, or did they stumble onto something fundamental about how the human brain actually works?

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.

Let's talk about what science actually knows about talking to yourself because it turns out there's a whole field of research on this, and the findings are wild. First up, Dr. Gary Lupien at the University of Wisconsin. In 2012, Lupien ran a series of experiments that proved something Einstein would have loved. He had participants search for objects in a cluttered visual field, like finding a specific item in a messy room. Half the participants searched silently. The other half said the name of the object out loud while searching. "Banana, banana, banana." The results? The people who talked to themselves found the object significantly faster. Not a little faster, significantly faster. Saying the word out loud activated the visual properties associated with that object, essentially priming the brain to recognize it more quickly. Lupien called this the label feedback hypothesis. I call it proof that I'm not crazy for narrating my search for my car keys.

But here's where it gets really interesting. Dr. Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan has spent over a decade studying what he calls the voice in your head, and he's discovered something that sounds completely bananas but is backed by rigorous science. The way you talk to yourself, specifically what pronoun you use, dramatically affects your performance and emotional regulation. In one experiment, Kross had participants prepare for a stressful public speaking task. Half were told to use first-person self-talk: "I can do this. I'm going to be great." The other half were told to use their own name: "David, you can do this. David, you're going to be great." The third-person talkers, the ones who used their own names, showed significantly less anxiety, performed better in the speech, and recovered faster emotionally afterward. Kross calls this psychological distancing. When you talk to yourself in the third person, you create a tiny bit of space between you and your emotions. You become both the experiencer and the observer. It's like you're coaching yourself from the outside. "David, calm down. David, focus. David, stop eating cheese in the Trader Joe's parking lot. People can see you." And this explains something I've always wondered about: LeBron James, one of the greatest basketball players of all time, and he refers to himself in the third person constantly. "I wanted to do what was best for LeBron James," he said in his famous "Decision" interview. Sports commentators made fun of him for years. They said he was arrogant, delusional, narcissistic. But according to Kross' research, LeBron was doing something psychologically sophisticated. He was creating distance between himself and the pressure, between LeBron the person and LeBron the brand, between his emotions and his decisions. He was coaching himself from the outside, which is exactly what you need when you're under the most intense pressure imaginable and millions of people are watching your every move. And LeBron's not alone. Serena Williams gives herself pep talks on court between points. You can see her lips moving, coaching herself through the match. Mia Hamm used to narrate her own performance out loud during games. Michael Phelps talked to himself before every race. The pattern is undeniable. Elite performers across every field use self-talk as a tool. But my absolute favorite example of institutionalized self-talk comes from the world of computer programming, and it involves a rubber duck. I am not making this up. There's a widely used debugging technique called rubber duck debugging, and it's exactly what it sounds like. When a programmer can't figure out why their code isn't working, they get a rubber duck, put it on their desk, and explain the code to the duck line by line out loud. "Okay, duck, so first I'm declaring this variable. Then I'm checking if the user is logged in. Then I'm calling this function, which returns... Oh. Oh, no, that's the problem. Thank you, duck." The technique was popularized in a 1999 book called The Pragmatic Programmer, but programmers had been doing it informally for decades.... the idea is simple. The act of explaining forces you to slow down, articulate each step clearly, and often reveals the flaw in your logic that you couldn't see when it was just rattling around in your head. The duck doesn't give advice. The duck doesn't respond. The duck just sits there being yellow and rubber and slightly judgemental. But somehow, explaining the problem to the duck makes the solution appear. It's Einstein's thoroughness in thinking, except with a bath toy. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, some of the smartest people in the world working on the most complex problems in technology have normalized talking to rubber ducks, and nobody thinks they're crazy. Because in that context, we understand that talking out loud is a tool, a technology, a hack for the human brain. But put that same programmer in a Trader Joe's cheese aisle talking to themselves about brie, and suddenly, they're a person to be avoided. The behavior is identical. The context changes everything, which raises an interesting question. Why is self-talk acceptable in some contexts and considered crazy in others? Let me tell you about the historical stigma against talking to yourself because it's weirder than you think. In medieval Europe, talking to yourself was considered a sign of demonic possession. Seriously. If you were caught muttering to yourself, people assumed you were having a conversation with Satan. Villages would sometimes exile or even execute people for excessive self-talk. In Victorian England, talking to yourself was classified as a symptom of moral insanity. Psychiatrists believed it indicated a weak character, a disordered mind, or early dementia. The proper Victorian lady or gentleman conducted all mental processes silently, invisibly, without any outward sign of inner turmoil. This stigma carried into the 20th century. Early psychology textbooks listed excessive self-talk as a symptom of schizophrenia, psychosis, and various personality disorders. The assumption was that healthy people think silently. Only disturbed people let their thoughts leak out. But here's what those psychologists missed. Everyone talks to themselves. The only difference is whether they do it out loud or not. Dr. Russell Hurlbert at the University of Nevada developed a technique called descriptive experience sampling, where he has people wear beepers and report exactly what's going on in their minds when the beeper goes off. What he found is that roughly 30 to 50% of our waking hours involve some form of inner speech. We are constantly narrating our lives to ourselves. The stream of consciousness is more like a stream of self-conversation, so the stigma against talking to yourself isn't based on anything real. It's just a cultural norm that got confused with mental health. The difference between healthy and crazy isn't whether you talk to yourself. It's whether you let other people hear it, which is kind of insane when you think about it. We're all doing the same thing. It's just that some of us are quieter about it.

I'm so sorry, let's talk about science again 'cause this part is really cool.

Okay. I know we already did some science stuff, but I need to get sciencier about the neuroscience of why talking to yourself actually makes you smarter, because this is where it gets really cool. When you think silently, you're primarily using a region called Broca's area, which handles internal speech processing. But when you speak out loud, even to yourself, you activate a whole additional network. Your auditory cortex processes the sound of your own voice. Your motor cortex coordinates your mouth and vocal cords, and critically, your brain processes what you said as if it came from an external source. This is huge. When you hear yourself say something out loud, your brain treats it with more weight than when you merely think it. It's like the difference between having an idea and hearing someone else suggest that same idea. External input carries more cognitive authority. So when you talk to yourself, you're essentially crowdsourcing advice from a more trusted source, a voice outside your head.

Dr. Paloma Maribefa at Bangor University ran experiments where people performed tasks while either staying silent, saying irrelevant words, or talking themselves through the task. The self-talkers significantly outperformed both other groups. But here's the key finding. The benefit was strongest when the task was difficult or unfamiliar. Self-talk seems to be most valuable precisely when you need it most, when you're confused, overwhelmed, or learning something new. This maps perfectly onto child development research. Kids talk to themselves constantly. It's called private speech, and developmental psychologists have studied it for nearly a century. The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky proposed that private speech is actually how children learn to think. They start by talking out loud, then gradually internalize that speech until it becomes the inner monologue we experience as adults. So here's the beautiful irony. We train ourselves to stop talking out loud as we grow up because society tells us it's childish, but that "childish" behavior is actually a sophisticated cognitive tool.When we face truly challenging problems as adults, the smartest thing we can do is regress back to that childhood technique. Talk it out. Let the words become real. Let your brain hear what you're thinking. Einstein never fully internalized his private speech. Neither did Tesla or Darwin or countless other geniuses. Maybe they were immature, or maybe they intuitively understood what the science now confirms: Some cognitive tools work better when they're external. Some thoughts need to be spoken to become truly useful.

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

Oh, yes. 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 ...

soliloquy. Spelled S-O-L-I-L-O-Q-U-Y. Soliloquy. Now, you might think you know this word. It's what Hamlet does when he asks, "To be or not to be?" But here's what most people don't realize. The word comes from the Latin solus, meaning alone, and loqui, meaning to speak. It literally means "to speak while alone", which is just the fancy theatrical version of talking to yourself. Here's why this word is perfect for today's episode. When Shakespeare has a character deliver a soliloquy, we consider it high art. We study it in school. We pay hundreds of dollars to watch actors do it on stage. But when someone delivers a soliloquy in the cheese aisle at Trader Joe's, we call them crazy. The behavior is identical. The only difference is the lighting and whether you bought a ticket. Shakespeare understood something fundamental about the human mind. We think through speaking. His characters don't just feel things internally. They have to say them out loud to understand them. Hamlet can't just be confused about mortality. He has to talk through his confusion in front of an audience for 35 lines to figure out what he actually believes. Let's try using it in a sentence. When I caught my wife in the shed delivering a passionate soliloquy about whether to organize her gardening tools by function or by size, I asked if she needed a moment. She told me she was having a moment, a cognitive breakthrough moment, and that Shakespeare himself would approve.

That was weird and also kind of true. Anyhoo, moving on. So here's your challenge for this week, and I'm calling it the soliloquy sprint. Here's what I want you to do. Step one: Find a problem you've been stuck on, a decision you can't make, a project that's stalled, a relationship issue you keep circling, something where your brain just keeps buffering without reaching a conclusion. Step two: Find somewhere private, your car, your shower, a walk around the block, anywhere you won't be interrupted and won't feel self-conscious. Step three: Talk through the problem out loud, not in your head, out loud. Use your own name. "Okay, David. Here's the situation. You've been avoiding this decision because..." Let yourself ramble. Let yourself repeat. Let yourself argue both sides. Give yourself a full five minutes minimum. Step four: Notice what happens.

I'm betting that somewhere in that five minutes, you'll say something that surprises you. You'll articulate something you didn't know you knew. You'll hear yourself say the solution, or at least a next step, that had been invisible when it was just rattling around in your head. Bonus points: Get a rubber duck or any small object that can serve as your thinking companion. Give it a name. I call mine Dr. Quacksworth, and he has a PhD in listening and an honorary degree in not judging me. Explain your problem to the duck. The duck won't solve your problem, but somehow explaining it to the duck will help you solve it yourself. The goal isn't to become the person who talks to themselves in public and makes everyone uncomfortable. The goal is to reclaim a cognitive tool that you've been suppressing since childhood because society told you it was weird. It's not weird. It's what Einstein did. It's what LeBron does. It's what programmers at Google do every single day. You've just been too embarrassed to do it yourself.

And that's our show. Thank you for getting dumb with me today. If you thought this episode was particularly dumb, good. That means it's working. If you've got friends who need permission to talk to themselves without feeling crazy, send this their way. 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, the next time someone catches you talking to yourself, just tell them you're in a meeting with the smartest person you know. This is David Carson signing off from my ongoing conversation with myself, where we both agree that this episode was pretty good. Right, David? Yes, David. Thank you, David. You're welcome, David. That was weird.