In this episode of Dumbify, David Carson explores the magnificently dumb—and disturbingly genius—world of Fake My Run, a website that generates completely fake, wildly convincing workout data. But this isn’t just a prank. It’s a philosophical takedown of fitness culture itself.

Created by 26-year-old Dutch developer Arthur Buffard, Fake My Run lets you “exercise” from the comfort of your couch while racking up imaginary marathons through Antarctica. It’s funny… until you realize it’s also true. Because in a world where people pay strangers (Strava mules!) to run on their behalf for social clout, what even counts as real anymore?

Arthur didn’t build an app—he performed a reductio ad absurdum, pushing fitness culture to its most ridiculous extreme and holding up a mirror. The reflection? A species more obsessed with posting their run than running it. David follows this thread to its wild conclusion—and even runs a weeklong social experiment of his own.

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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.

[gentle music] I'm standing in my bathroom at 6:47 AM, staring at my reflection in the mirror, when my Fitbit buzzes with what I can only describe as passive-aggressive enthusiasm. "Time to move," it chirps, like a digital life coach who's had too much coffee and not enough boundaries. I haven't even brushed my teeth yet, but apparently I'm already behind on my step count. My watch face shows a cartoon figure doing jumping jacks, and for one terrifying moment, I consider actually doing jumping jacks in my bathroom just to make the little digital man happy. That's when it hits me, I've been in a relationship with my fitness tracker longer than most of my actual relationships. And unlike my actual relationships, this one never sleeps, never takes a day off. But here's the really disturbing part, I kind of like the judgment. I've become addicted to the approval of a piece of silicon and plastic that couldn't care less whether I live or die, as long as I hit my daily targets. Which brings me to Arthur Buffard, a 26-year-old Dutch developer who looked at this fitness tracking madness and thought, "You know what this needs? More madness."

Yes.

Yay!

So Arthur built something, a website that generates completely fake workout data with the kind of meticulous attention to detail usually reserved for space missions or my mother's Christmas dinner timeline. And that, dear listeners, is where today's magnificently dumb adventure begins.

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 stinking wrong on purpose with juice.

[upbeat music] Welcome to Dumbify, where we pin medals on ideas so deranged they need a note from their therapist. Stick around. These lunatics usually end up running the place. I'm David Carson, and today we're diving deep into the sacred art of reductio ad absurdum. That's Latin for following someone's logic so far down the rabbit hole that you emerge on the other side of sanity with a crystal clear view of the problem. Our guide on this journey is Arthur Buffard, who didn't set out

to become an accidental philosopher of modern fitness culture. He just wanted to see what would happen if he made fitness tracking even more ridiculous than it already was. But before we meet Arthur, let me paint you a picture of the world he decided to break. Last Tuesday, and I swear this is real, I watched a grown man spend 47 minutes explaining to his Strava followers why his morning run looked suspiciously like the shape of male anatomy. "It's a coincidence," he insisted in the comments section, apparently unaware that coincidences don't typically require 17 screenshots and a detailed map analysis to explain. This is where we are as a species. We've become so obsessed with proving we exercise that we're now creating accidental genital art with our GPS coordinates and then writing dissertations to defend it. We live in a world where people hire actual humans, they're called Strava mules, to run marathons for them so their social media profiles look more impressive. Yes, this is a real service that real people pay real money for. We've turned movement, the most basic human activity, i- into a performance. We've gamified walking. We've made sweating social. We've turned our own bodies into content creation machines. Arthur Buffard looked at all of this and thought, "What if I just made it even weirder?" Arthur is a 26-year-old app developer who lives in the Netherlands. By his own admission, he's someone who enjoys dabbling in a healthy bit of mischief that blurs the lines between technology and reality. Arthur didn't wake up one morning and decide to become the patron saint of fake jogging. Like most great dumb ideas, it started with irritation. As an avid runner himself, Arthur had become familiar with certain trends in the running community, some more troubling than others. He'd noticed how often people would complete marathons and immediately grab their phones to upload their results to Strava. As he put it, "If a run does not exist on Strava or on social media, it might as well not exist at all." But what really got to him was discovering the phenomenon of Strava mules, people who hire actual humans to run for them just to improve their online stats. Yes, this is a real service that costs $10 to $20 per run. Arthur said, "This made me think of how this whole hobby has become more and more performative." What had happened to jogging for the pleasure of it without needing external validation? So earlier this year when Arthur was importing his running data from one fitness app to another, he realized something interesting. He could edit the individual files, the GPS data, heart rate information, average pace. It was all just data that could be modified. That's when it occurred to him, if people were paying Strava mules, why not build something that makes fun of that whole industry?

So Arthur started building Fake My Run, a website that generates completely fraudulent workout data that's more detailed, more convincing, and frankly more impressive than most people's real workouts. When Arthur first tested his creation by uploading a fictional run through Antarctica, his friends contacted him almost immediately, asking, "Why are you running in Antarctica?" It was perfect.Now, this is where most stories about internet pranks would end. Guy builds ridiculous website, gets some laughs, moves onto the next project. But Arthur had accidentally stumbled into something much deeper than a joke. He'd performed what philosophers call a reductio ad absurdum on the entire fitness industrial complex. See, reductio ad absurdum isn't just a fancy Latin phrase philosophy professors use to sound important at cocktail parties. It's a weapon-grade thinking tool. You take someone's logic and follow it to its most extreme conclusion until the absurdity becomes impossible to ignore. Arthur didn't argue that fitness apps were problematic. Instead, he built the most problematic fitness app in the world and let people connect the dots themselves. And connect the dots they did. When a video of his website was reposted on social media with the caption, "Believe nothing, not even people's runs," it sparked exactly the kind of reflection Arthur had hoped for. People began asking uncomfortable questions. Why do I need external validation for taking care of my body? When did exercise become a performance instead of personal health? What am I actually trying to prove with these workout posts? Arthur had weaponized absurdity to reveal a truth nobody wanted to admit. We turned our bodies into content creation machines, and we were more interested in the metrics than the movement.

I love data and clout more than I love my actual life. Because my actual life isn't photogenic or that interesting.

Over 200,000 people have visited Fake My Run since launch, and about 500 have actually purchased tokens to generate fake runs. The cost? Starting at $0.42 per download. It's not exactly printing money, but as Arthur said, laughing, "It's way more than I ever expected." And besides, this was never meant to be a business venture. Within weeks of launching Fake My Run, Arthur started receiving emails that read less like customer feedback and more like therapy sessions. One user wrote...

I realized I was spending more time posting about my workouts than actually working out.

Your website made me confront the fact that I was exercising for Instagram,

not for my health.

I've been lying to myself about why I run. Seeing how easy it was to fake the data made me realize I'd been faking my motivation all along.

Arthur had built a mirror that reflected back the weird psychology of performative fitness, and people didn't like what they saw. Let me take you inside the psychology of what Arthur accidentally exposed, because understanding this gets to the heart of why his dumb idea was secretly brilliant.

Behavioral psychologists who study social media's impact on health behaviors have discovered something that makes my brain hurt. They've found that we've created a feedback loop where the documentation of healthy behavior has become more rewarding than the healthy behavior itself.

UCLA researchers have actually studied what happens in people's brains when they post workout content on social media. When someone likes your fitness post, your brain releases dopamine, the same chemical that's released when you complete an actual workout. Your brain literally can't tell the difference between the social validation and the physical achievement. Think about that.

The GPS trace of your run generates more satisfaction than the actual run. The social validation of your workout post feels better than the endorphins from working out. The photo of your salad gets more dopamine than eating the salad. We've hacked our own reward systems and we didn't even realize we were doing it. This is what psychologists call external motivation displacement. You start exercising for internal reasons, you want to feel better, get stronger, live longer, but gradually, the external validation, likes, comments, comparative metrics, becomes more powerful than the internal motivation. Eventually, you're not exercising to feel good. You're exercising to look good exercising, which means Arthur accidentally discovered something that fitness app designers have known for years but never talked about. The apps aren't really about fitness. They're about creating addiction pathways around the performance of fitness. Every metric, every badge, every leaderboard, every social feature is designed to make you dependent on external validation for activities that should be intrinsically rewarding. Arthur just made that manipulation visible by building a machine that provided all the validation without any of the activity.

One user told me, "I spent more time analyzing my workout data than I spent working out. I had charts and graphs and trend lines, but I was getting less fit every month. Arthur's website made me realize I'd become a data analyst of my own body instead of actually living in it." Another said, "I was running routes based on how they'd look on social media instead of how they'd make me feel. I avoided certain paths because they weren't photogenic. I was literally letting Instagram choose my exercise."

[gentle music] This is the genius of Arthur's reductio ad absurdum. He didn't need to write a think piece about the problems with fitness culture. He just built a machine that exposed those problems by following their logic to its most extreme conclusion.

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. Because discovering bizarre vocabulary that sounds like someone sneezed while reading a dictionary is basically the intellectual equivalent of finding money in your couch cushions.

Okay, today's dumb word is fanfaronade, spelled F-A-N-F-A-R-O-N-A-D-E, fanfaronade. Fanfaronade is that glorious moment when someone throws themselves a ticker tape parade for doing the absolute bare minimum, like they've hired a brass band to applaud the way they successfully inhaled and exhaled before noon. The word sprouted from fanfare, so, yes, it's literally a self-scored victory march for life's most forgettable errands. It spotlights that moment when someone trumpet blasts their hydration journey or gloats about crushing a three-minute mindfulness session. They're basically demanding a standing ovation for remembering how to blink.

Here's how to use it in a sentence. I caught myself mid-fanfaronade the other day, brag-posting about a 47-day meditation streak as if I'd just conducted the Vienna Philharmonic through Beethoven's Ninth while eating a cheeseburger. Kind of weird. Moving on. At the risk of touting my own fanfaronade, I decided to try Arthur's insightful insightfulness myself. I decided to apply his methodology to my own relationship with digital validation. I decided to spend one full week generating fake versions of my normal social media content. Instead of posting real photos of my meals, I used AI to generate fake food photos. Instead of sharing real quotes from books I was reading, I made up fake profound quotes and attributed them to fake philosophers. Instead of posting real travel photos, I used stock images from places I'd never been. The results were disturbing. My fake posts got more engagement than my real posts. The AI-generated food photos got more likes than pictures of meals I'd actually eaten. The fake philosophical quotes got shared more than real insights I'd actually had. The fake travel photos generated more envious comments than any real vacation I'd ever taken. It was like discovering that people preferred my fictional life to my actual life, which made me wonder what was the actual purpose of sharing my real life in the first place. By the end of the week, I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience every time I opened social media. I could see the performance anxiety, the need for validation, the way I was curating my life for an audience instead of actually living it. I realized I'd been treating my own life like content, and not very good content at that.

So I did something radical. I deleted all the fake posts, stopped posting for a month, and just lived without documenting. And you know what happened? Nothing. The world didn't end. My friends didn't forget about me. My life didn't become less meaningful without the constant documentation. If anything, the opposite happened. Without the pressure to make my life look interesting online, I started doing things that actually interested me instead of things that would look interesting to other people. I took walks without mapping them. I ate meals without photographing them. I had conversations without live-tweeting them. I read books without posting quotes. I watched sunsets without creating stories about them. And slowly, I started to remember what it felt like to experience things for their own sake instead of for their social media potential, which brings us to your dumbified challenge for this week, and I'm calling it the ridiculogic challenge. Here's how it works. First, find something that annoys you but that everyone else seems to treat as perfectly normal. Second, crank the dial. What would happen if we took that annoying thing and pushed it to its most ridiculous extreme? Third, and this is the important part, you don't necessarily need to build anything. Arthur built his website because he's a programmer with time on his hands, but you can perform reductio ad absurdum in smaller ways. If you're annoyed by people who document every meal, try documenting every bite for a day. Take a photo of each individual piece of food as it goes into your mouth. Post them all separately. Watch people's reactions. Or if you're like me and get really frustrated with people who turn every conversation into an opportunity to talk about themselves, try doing that extremely. Respond to everything anyone says with a story about yourself. Nice weather today. That reminds me of when I was in weather once.

If you're irritated by people who constantly seek validation for ordinary activities, try seeking validation for absurdly ordinary activities. Just blinked 47 times in the last minute. Feeling blessed. #blinkingjourney. The point isn't to annoy people or be obnoxious. The point is to use extreme, ridiculous logic to shine a light on behaviors we've all quietly agreed to accept as normal. Arthur Buffar didn't set out to become a philosopher. He just wanted to see what would happen if he followed a ridiculous idea to its logical conclusion.... but in building Fake My Run, he accidentally performed one of the most elegant pieces of social commentary I've seen in years. He held up a mirror to our fitness-obsessed, metrics-driven, performance-addicted culture and said, "Here's what you actually look like." And what we saw was kinda shocking. We saw people who cared more about appearing active than being active. We saw individuals who were more interested in the data about their lives than their actual lives. We saw a species that had turned the most basic human activities into content creation opportunities. But here's what's beautiful about Arthur's approach. He didn't shame anyone for this. He didn't lecture or moralize or explain why everyone was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. He just built something absurd and let people reach their own conclusions. Some people saw his website and realized they needed to change their relationship with fitness tracking. Others saw it and realized they needed to change their relationship with social media entirely. A few saw it and realized they, they needed to change their relationship with external validation in general.

Arthur gave people permission to question things they'd never thought to question, and he did it by being silly instead of serious, ridiculous instead of righteous. This is the power of weaponized absurdity. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is the dumbest thing you can think of. Sometimes the most profound insights come from the most ridiculous experiments. Arthur proved that you don't need to be a philosopher to reveal philosophical truths. You don't need to be a critic to expose cultural problems. You don't need to be an activist to create social change. Sometimes you just need to be brave enough to follow your dumbest ideas far enough to see where they lead. Because at the other end of absurdity, if you're willing to travel that far, you might find something that all the seriousness in the world can't deliver: clarity.

Thank you for getting absurdly philosophical with me today. If this episode made you wanna question every metric in your life and maybe build a fake life generator just to see what happens, share it with someone who has 17 fitness apps on their phone and calls that motivation. If you want more weaponized absurdity delivered to your inbox every week, subscribe to the Dumbify newsletter at david-carson.com. Until next time, stay curious, stay dumb, and remember, sometimes the only way to show people how broken something is is to break it so spectacularly that the pieces spell out the problem in letters large enough for everyone to read. This is David Carson signing off from the age of artificial authenticity, where fake runs reveal real truths, and the most radical thing you can do is follow your ridiculous ideas to their logical conclusion.