Did you know the first "reply guys" were actually ancient Greek scholars who scribbled jokes in the margins of the Odyssey ? In this episode, host David Carson traces the lineage of the "Scholiast" to prove a wild theory: the comment section is now the true art form, and the content is just a prompt . From a viral video of a deep-sea fish to the rise of Letterboxd, we explore how the audience has seized the means of production—and why the funniest person in the room is usually the anonymous lurker .

You’ll also meet the "Claque," a 19th-century Parisian mob of professional ticklers and weepers hired to save bad plays, and discover the secret of the "Laff Box," a padlocked machine that manufactured the laughter for The Brady Bunch . It’s a history of heckling that connects the dots between Roman soldiers and Reddit trolls, proving that for 2,400 years, the people in the cheap seats have actually been running the show.

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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.

Major League Baseball is dying of boredom, yet a team named after a fruit—led by a man in a bright yellow tuxedo—is currently outselling the Yankees and boasts a waitlist of 3.2 million people. In this episode, we dissect the chaotic genius of the Savannah Bananas and their founder, Jesse Cole. We explore how he took a "dumb" product (a minor league team that gets booed at parades) and turned it into a global entertainment empire by instituting rules that would give a purist a heart attack: players on stilts, grandma dance squads, and counting foul balls caught by fans as outs. It’s a case study on what happens when you stop trying to be respectable and start trying to be remarkable.

Sign up for the Dumbify newsletter: https://www.david-carson.com/

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.

Can a Domino’s Pizza tracker predict a military invasion better than a Pentagon analyst? In this episode of Dumbify, host David Carson investigates a reality where "confusion beats certainty" and a retired accountant in suburban Ohio can outperform the world's top geopolitical experts. We dive deep into the story of the Good Judgment Project, a government-sponsored tournament where a ragtag team of amateurs—armed with nothing but Google and open minds—humiliated intelligence agencies by predicting global events with 30% more accuracy than analysts with access to classified data.

Sign up for the Dumbify newsletter: https://www.david-carson.com/

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.