How to Make a Fortune Doing Nothing

:: 00:04

I'm scrolling through obscure insurance websites at 2:00 AM because that's apparently what I do for fun now, when I stumble across something that makes me question everything I thought I knew about business. The Saint Lawrence Agency in Altamonte Springs, Florida will sell you alien abduction insurance for $24.95, not as a joke, as an actual policy with actual terms and conditions and actual customers who've been paying actual claims for decades. The coverage includes $10 million paid out at $1 per year for the next 10 million years.

:: 00:42

[gasps]

:: 00:42

Plus outpatient psychiatric care, something called sarcasm coverage for immediate family members, [laughs] and something else called double identity protection in case the aliens clone you and your clone tries to hijack your Netflix account.

:: 00:58

[gasps]

:: 01:00

I stare at my screen for a full minute trying to process what I'm seeing. Then it hits me. Someone has figured out how to turn absolutely nothing into a profitable business model, and they're not alone. There's an entire underground economy of entrepreneurs who've cracked the code on monetizing the void itself, selling products that technically don't exist, services that provide no utility, and experiences that are purely theoretical.

:: 01:31

Today we're diving into the sacred art of profitable emptiness and discovering why sometimes the most brilliant business ideas are the ones that sound completely insane.

:: 01:42

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.

:: 02:10

Welcome to Dumbify, the show that gives standing ovations to ideas everyone swore were certifiably bonkers right before those ideas accidentally revolutionize entire industries. I'm David Carson, and today we are exploring what I call profitable emptiness, the beautiful art of creating value from literally nothing by wrapping that nothing in enough story and ceremony that people will pay for the privilege of owning the absurdity. Our guides on this journey are three entrepreneurs who looked at the concept of nothing and thought, "You know what this needs? A price tag." There's the guy who runs a Florida insurance agency that's been covering alien abductions since 1987, two Canadians who built a business bottling and selling fresh mountain air, and the masterminds behind Cards Against Humanity, who once sold pure nothingness for $5 and made $71,000 in a single day. Their stories reveal something profound about human psychology and the modern economy. We now live in a world where a guy in New Zealand can crowdfund $55,000 to make potato salad, where a San Francisco startup can sell silent meditation tapes that are literally blank audio files, where people can hire actual human beings to run marathons for them just to improve their social media fitness stats. Welcome to the narrative economy, a marketplace where the tale outranks the tangible, where meaning outweighs molecules. Let's start with the alien abduction insurance salesman, Mike Saint Lawrence. His origin story reads like something out of a David Lynch fever dream, but every detail is documented in interviews spanning three decades. Back in 1987, Mike is an insurance bookkeeper half watching Larry King Live while crunching numbers. Larry King's guest that night is Whitley Strieber, whose bestseller Communion was convincing Americans that alien encounters were way more common and way more personal than anyone wanted to admit. In the blue glow of his TV, Mike had what can only be described as a cosmic business epiphany. His industry had policies for everything, fire, flood, theft, acts of God, but alien abduction, total market gap. So Mike does what any reasonable insurance professional would do. He hammers out the world's first extraterrestrial kidnapping policy in 15 minutes on a typewriter. His first policy sold for $9.95, but nobody took him seriously at that price. "It felt too jokey," he told a reporter, apparently forgetting that he was literally selling cosmic kidnapping coverage. So Mike doubles the price to $19.95, adds a deluxe framed edition that you can get as an upsell for another five bucks, and suddenly business started humming like a UFO engine. According to various news reports, Mike's numbers shift like UFO sightings, always a little blurry. He sold somewhere between 6 and 35,000 policies over the decades. Sales seem to spike whenever Congress mentions UAPs or TikTok rediscovers Area 51. But my favorite part of Mike's story is that he's actually paid out on claims twice. One customer sent Polaroids so underexposed you could project anything onto them, plus a notarized letter from an MIT professor confirming a non-terrestrial implant.... but keep in mind that Mike's policy is to eventually pay out a $10 million claim, but in $1 increments paid out annually over 10 million years. So every December, Mike dutifully mails a $1 check tucked into a Christmas card decorated with cartoon flying saucers to each of his claimants. When a journalist asked if the checks get cashed, Mike's response was pure poetry, "Oh yeah, every year. Can't let the aliens win, can we?"

:: 06:35

Here's where Mike's alien insurance policy reveals something profound about human psychology and modern commerce. According to his interviews, Mike figured out early that he wasn't really selling protection from extraterrestrial kidnapping. He was selling something much more valuable, the right to be the most interesting person at any dinner party. "You can't get it if you don't get it," became his unofficial tagline. The policy isn't about scarcity of inventory. It's about scarcity of shared sense of humor. His customers aren't buying protection. They're buying a conversational souvenir, a way to be the narrator of their own delightful absurdity. This is what I call narrative surplus, value that exists not in the product itself but in the story the product allows you to tell.

:: 07:25

Mike discovered that in our hyper-connected, over-documented world, we're starving for ways to stand out, to be interesting, to own a piece of genuine weirdness. The $10 million is stage dressing. The real product is the story. This same principle explains how two guys in Canada figured out they could sell bottled mountain air for $20 a can and create an international sensation. Moses Lam's eureka moment happened in 2014 during a hike near Lake Louise. As a joke, he filled a Ziploc bag with mountain air and threw it on eBay for 99 cents. It sold. The second bag fetched over $100. Lam called his buddy, Troy Piquette, with what amounts to the greatest business pitch in history.

:: 08:14

Remember how Mel Brooks had canned air in the movie Spaceballs?

:: 08:21

Turns out reality wants in on that gag.

:: 08:28

So let's start a company, a beautiful Canadian company that packages air from Canada into canisters people can smell and breathe like a Canadian. Woo.

:: 08:46

Within a year, they'd incorporated Vitality Air and started hand-bottling rocky mountain breeze 10 hours at a stretch, basically CrossFit with more existential questions. Their breakthrough came when Chinese media discovered them during Beijing's red alert smog crisis. Suddenly, everyone wanted a taste of Canadian freshness. Their first major production run 4,000 bottles at CAD 20 each sold out before clearing customs. One seven-liter can promises roughly 150 lungfuls of rocky mountain freshness, because apparently breathing should never be basic. What Moses and Mike understand intuitively, behavioral economists have been studying for decades. We don't buy products. We buy stories about ourselves. When Vitality Air's story hit the internet, Moses told reporters something that perfectly encapsulates the entire business model. "You ever see someone chug a bottle of Evian when you know there's perfectly good tap water? Same principle, just lighter." And he's absolutely right. Vitality sells status in aerosol form, an inhalable Instagram filter. In a world drowning in particulate despair, the promise of carrying mountains in your pocket becomes irresistible, no matter how absurd it sounds. This is what psychologists call identity signaling through consumption. We use purchases to communicate who we are, what we value, and which tribes we belong to. But here's what's brilliant about our three case studies. They figured out how to sell identity signaling at its purest form. No messy products to manufacture, no complex supply chains to manage, just pure story crystallized into something you can buy. [ka ching] Cards Against Humanity took this to its logical extreme in 2015 when they literally sold nothing for Black Friday. They took their entire store offline and replaced it with a single button with two words: Buy Nothing. The price? $5.

:: 11:03

No disclaimers, coupons, or confetti cannons hiding in the HTML. 11,248 humans smashed the button because nihilism with a receipt is irresistible. Some double dip. One hero slaps down 100 bucks for 20 copies of nothing, presumably to diversify his nothing portfolio. Revenue by midnight, $71,000.

:: 11:28

Bravo.

:: 11:29

A few days later on Cyber Monday, Cards Against Humanity published a spreadsheet itemizing staff purchases from the Black Friday loot. Highlights include a 24-karat gold vibrator, a used Ford Fiesta that only turns right, five gallons of mayonnaise, cat litter for an entire year, several charity checks, and for the office decor, a life-size print of Nicholas Cage as a mermaid. Internet reaction vacillates between "Capitalism is dead," and "Take my money, harder."... turns out the stunt began as a dare over lunch. They wanted to see if people would pay for the receipt of their own consumer absurdity. They expected only a few hundred hardcore fans. Instead, the site dashboard ticked upward like a rogue thermometer in a sauna. This is profitable emptiness distilled to its essence: no product with minimal overhead that delivers absurd infinite bragging rights.

:: 12:29

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

:: 12:39

That's right. It's my favorite part of the show. It's time for dumb word of the day. Today's dumb word is pretty magnificent and long. Ready? Okay.

:: 12:53

Floccinaucinihilipilification. Spelled F-L-O-C-C-I-N-A-U-C-I-N-I-H-I-L-I-P-I-L-I-F-I-C-A-T-I-O-N. Floccinaucinihilipilification. It means the act of judging something to be worthless. And that's a mouthful. 29 letters that will make your mouth sound like it's full of socks that escaped Shaquille O'Neal.

:: 13:18

Oh.

:: 13:19

Here's how you use it in a sentence. I spent 10 minutes floccinaucinihilipilificating my neighbor's garden gnome collection, then realized I just bought alien insurance from a man in a UFO tie. So perhaps I should examine my own judgment criteria.

:: 13:36

Because here's the cosmic joke, every one of today's entrepreneurs got paid precisely because the rest of us were busy floccinaucinihilipilificating their ideas into oblivion. I can't believe anybody would pay for alien insurance, but what do I know? Boom, 30,000 policies sold. Who's dumb enough to buy Canadian oxygen in a can? A lot of people in Beijing apparently. Who knew? Selling pure nothing, worthless, and yet 11,248 people happily Venmo-sprinted five bucks to own a receipt that certifies they now possess absolutely zero. So the next time your brain starts warming up to drop the F word, the long one, on somebody's half-baked scheme, remember, floccinaucinihilipilification might be the surest signal that you've just spotted the next million dollar void.

:: 14:34

In the narrative economy, dismissing an idea as worthless is basically ringing the dinner bell for someone else's wallet. Okay. That was fun, and long, and weird. But let me just say, across all three tales runs a carbon fiber through line. Perceived value equals utility plus narrative. Most companies slave over utility like medieval monks copying parchment, but our trio juiced narrative until it swallowed utility whole and belched confetti. Behavioral scientists call these purchases identity signals. Sociologists call them positional goods. I call them cocktail grenades. You lob them into conversation, wait for jaws to drop, then sip the reverberating status boost. When the story is this tasty, atoms become optional.

:: 15:31

Overjustification theory warns that external rewards can nuke intrinsic motivation, yet when the reward is the story, when the punchline is baked into the purchase, intrinsic curiosity returns dressed as extrinsic swagger. You're not inhaling vitality air to live longer, you're inhaling it to live louder. You're not paying Mike to keep aliens at bay, you're paying him to keep boredom in exile. Put simply...

:: 16:03

We're narrative carnivores. Hunting novelty steaks. Serve them rare, price them cheeky. And watch wallets purr.

:: 16:17

Naturally, I had to test this theory myself. But instead of just buying someone else's profitable emptiness, I decided to see if I could create my own from scratch. I created what I'm calling the Certificate of Witness Procrastination,

:: 16:33

an official-looking document that certifies the bearer has successfully avoided doing something important for a specific amount of time, complete with gold foil seal, calligraphic fonts, and legal-sounding language about temporal displacement activities. I listed it on Etsy for $12.99, fully expecting it to sit there forever as proof of my own questionable judgment. It sold within six hours to someone in Portland who apparently needed official documentation of their Netflix binge. So I made five more. They all sold within a week. People started requesting custom versions. Certificate of Witness Laundry Avoidance, Official Documentation of Strategic Meeting Dodging, Verified Proof of Productive Bed Rotation.

:: 17:25

Each sale triggered the same psychological response I'd predicted from studying our three entrepreneurs. Buyers weren't purchasing certificates. They were purchasing permission to be proud of their own absurdity. They were buying the right to frame their character flaws as achievements. One customer emailed me, "I hung this next to my college diploma. My parents don't know which one I'm more proud of." I realized I'd accidentally recreated the entire profitable emptiness formula. Find something everyone considers worthless, procrastination, wrap it in ceremony, official certification, price it as an impulse buy-... just 12.99, and watch people pay for the story they can tell about themselves. Within two weeks, I'd made $180 selling elaborate documentation of people's failures to be productive. I was officially in the business of monetizing human weakness, and everyone involved was delighted about it, which brings us to the dumb challenge of the week. I like to call this one the nothing audit. Step one, look around your life and identify one thing you've dismissed as completely worthless. Maybe it's the weird sound your radiator makes. Maybe it's your ability to perfectly predict which elevator will arrive first. Maybe it's your collection of takeout menus from restaurants that closed years ago. Step two, apply the profitable void protocol. How could you wrap that worthless thing in enough ceremony, craftsmanship, or story that someone might pay for it? Not because they need it but because owning it would make them interesting. Step three, ask yourself why you dismissed it as worthless in the first place. What assumptions were you making? What stories were you telling yourself about value, utility, and worth? The goal isn't necessarily to start a business selling nothing. Though if you do, please send me a certificate of ownership. The goal is to recognize that value is much more fluid, much more dependent on framing and narrative than we usually admit. Because once you understand that worthlessness is often just a failure of imagination, you start seeing potential everywhere. Mike St. Lawrence, Moses Lamb, Troy Paquette, and the Cards Against Humanity team didn't discover how to sell nothing. They discovered something much more profound. They figured out how to sell meaning itself. In our hyper-connected, over-documented, aggressively optimized world, we're starving for authentic weirdness, genuine surprise, real personality. We wanna own stories that make us interesting, purchases that reveal our character, products that prove we're in on the cosmic joke. These entrepreneurs succeeded because they understood something economists rarely admit. The most powerful force in any economy isn't supply and demand. It's the human hunger for narrative significance. We want our lives to matter, our choices to reflect our values, our purchases to tell the world who we are. In a marketplace flooded with identical products optimized for identical needs, the most valuable thing you can sell is uniqueness itself. Mike's alien insurance doesn't protect against abduction. It protects against boring conversations. Moses' mountain air doesn't improve your health. It improves your story. Cards Against Humanity's buy nothing doesn't give you anything. It gives you everything, the right to be the person who bought nothing and loved it. The secret handshake of profitable emptiness is this. Change the frame, change the value. Change the story, change the price. Change the meaning, change everything, because in a world where everyone's selling something, the smartest business model might just be selling nothing at all as long as that nothing comes with a really, really,

:: 21:42

really great story.

:: 21:44

Thank you for getting dumb with me today. If this episode made you wanna buy something completely useless just to see how it feels, share it with someone who has strong opinions about the difference between needs and wants.

:: 21:58

If you want more weaponized absurdity delivered to your inbox without any alien insurance premiums, subscribe to the Dumbify newsletter at david-carson.com. And remember, somewhere in Florida, a cheerful silver-haired prankster is licking a Christmas stamp, sliding a $1 check into a card that depicts Santa abducted by aliens, and mailing it to a guy who proudly cashes it every year. If that doesn't restore your faith in entrepreneurial perseverance, I'll sell you some.

:: 22:32

Until next time, stay curious, stay gloriously dumb, and never underestimate the ROI of a well-packaged nothing. This is David Carson signing off from the Narrative Economy, where meaning costs extra, emptiness sells out, and value is just a story that hasn't been told loudly enough. [upbeat music]