Ice Cream for Breakfast?! — Why Brilliant Ideas Sound So Terrible at First

David Carson: 00:00:00

So I'm at the park yesterday, and there's this seven-year-old having what can only be described as the negotiation of his young life with his mom. The topic? Ice cream for breakfast. His argument was, "Mom, it has milk, which is healthy, and I'll be really happy, which is also healthy. So basically ice cream is a vegetable." She said no, obviously. But I couldn't stop thinking about it because his terrible logic, it actually made perfect sense in this weird twisted way. Part of me wanted to jump in and tell the mother about this Japanese study from Kyorin University that found people who ate ice cream for breakfast had faster reaction times and better information processing than those who didn't. But then I realized, being the guy who quotes random studies to defend a seven-year-old's breakfast choices, that's probably crossing a line. But it got me thinking, why do brilliant ideas sound so terrible at first? Why do we immediately cringe when we hear something that challenges what we think we know? Welcome to Dumbify, the only show that guarantees you'll get smarter by thinking dumber. I'm your host, David Carson. Let's get dumb.

SONG: 00:01:15

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.

David Carson: 00:01:42

Let me tell you about Daisuke Inoue. In 1971, this guy was arguably Japan's worst professional musician, and I mean worst. He kept getting fired from gigs left and right. After yet another termination, this keyboardist had what he later called the world's dumbest business idea. He wanted to build a machine that plays instrumental versions of popular songs so drunk businessmen could sing terribly in public. His friends called it audio torture.

SFX: 00:02:14

Ah!

David Carson: 00:02:14

They predicted it would destroy Japan's respect for music forever. Even Inoue knew it sounded completely insane. He literally watched a terrible singer at a bar and thought, "I could make this experience even worse for everyone." The prototype was laughably crude. A car stereo, a microphone, and a coin slot all duct taped together. Bar owners refused to buy it because, as one put it, "Why would I pay money to let customers humiliate themselves?" Inoue never even bothered patenting the machine because he thought it was too ridiculous to steal. He just wanted to help bad singers feel less alone in their badness. Today, karaoke is a 5.4 billion dollar global industry. What started as one terrible musician's solution to unemployment became humanity's favorite way to bond through shared musical incompetence. Turns out people weren't looking for good music. They were desperate for permission to be publicly terrible at something. Now, terrible sounding ideas aren't just limited to entertainment. Sometimes they're literally matters of life and death, which makes the initial resistance even more intense. Let me tell you about a Saturday morning in 1958 at Johns Hopkins Hospital that changed the course of medical history. Guy Knickerbocker, a 29-year-old electrical engineering graduate student, was working alone in the lab on the 12th floor of the Blalock Wing. He was part of a team developing a closed chest defibrillator under William Kouwenhoven. They called him Wild Bill-

SFX: 00:03:52

Yeehaw!

David Carson: 00:03:52

... an electrical engineer who'd been studying the effects of electricity on the heart for decades. Knickerbocker was working with one of their laboratory dogs when disaster struck. The dog's heart went into ventricular fibrillation, the chaotic deadly rhythm that kills. Normally, they'd just wheel over their defibrillator and shock the heart back to life. But that day, their 200 pound wheeled defibrillator cart was seven floors down on the fifth floor, and everyone who worked at Johns Hopkins knew about the notorious Blalock Wing elevators. They were legendarily slow, painfully, dangerously slow. Knickerbocker knew the science. No mammal could survive more than five minutes in ventricular fibrillation. With those sluggish elevators standing between him and the defibrillator, he could calculate that this dog was not long for this world. But he'd noticed something strange in previous experiments. When he pressed the heavy copper defibrillator paddles firmly against a dog's chest, even before sending the shock, he'd seen a brief spike in blood pressure. So as the dog lay dying, Knickerbocker made a desperate decision. He started rhythmically pressing on the animal's chest while his colleagues raced for the elevator. 20 minutes. For 20 agonizing minutes, four times longer than any previous successful resuscitation attempt, they pumped that dog's chest while waiting for the defibrillator to arrive. 20 minutes of manually squeezing a heart through a rib cage, keeping blood flowing to the brain, buying time against death itself. Finally, the defibrillator cart arrived. They applied the shock, and the dog sprang back to life. They'd just discovered that external chest compressions could maintain circulation long enough to save a life, but the medical world wasn't ready for what came next. In 1960, 74-year-old Wild Bill Kouwenhoven stood before the Maryland Medical Society and proposed what sounded like assault with good intentions.... he suggested that ordinary people, housewives, store clerks, random bystanders, should press hard and fast on unconscious strangers' chests. The medical establishment was horrified. For decades, resuscitation had been the exclusive domain of trained professionals using sophisticated techniques. Physicians insisted that closed-chest cardiac resuscitation should only be taught to doctors, dentists, nurses, and emergency rescue squads. They worried about broken ribs, punctured lungs, lawsuits. They questioned whether untrained hands could safely deliver the precise force needed without causing more harm than good. The idea of giving regular people permission to apply forceful pressure to someone's chest seemed reckless and dangerous. But Kouwenhoven believed in his discovery. So at age 74, he and Guy Knickerbocker went on what they called a barnstorming tour across America, teaching firefighters and ordinary citizens how to perform chest compressions combined with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. And here's the beautiful part. During these teaching presentations, Knickerbocker would strip off his shirt, lie down on the floor, and become the demonstration dummy. This electrical engineer who'd made the discovery would expose his chest and let strangers practice chest compressions on him to prove the technique was safe. But even after they'd proven it worked, the resistance continued. In 1966, six years after the breakthrough, the National Research Council convened a conference on CPR. Despite mounting evidence that bystander CPR saved lives, the conference continued to discourage teaching the technique to the general public. The medical establishment's message was clear. This is too dangerous for ordinary people. Meanwhile, people were dying who could've been saved. Today, CPR saves hundreds of thousands of lives annually. The technique once considered too dangerous for non-professionals is now taught in high schools. That unnamed dog who went into cardiac arrest on a Saturday morning, his near-death experience has since saved an estimated 25 million human lives. Sometimes the most life-saving ideas sound the most dangerous. So, when experts say, "Only we should do this," ask yourself whether the alternative is doing nothing at all.

SONG: 00:08:41

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

David Carson: 00:08:51

Okay, it's that time again. It's time for my favorite part of the show. It's time for Dumb Word of the Day, the only segment legally classified as vocal parkour. And the dumb word of the day is:

ultracrepidarian. That's U-L-T-R-A-C-R-E-P-I-D-A-R-I-A-N, ultracrepidarian.

An ultracrepidarian is that well-meaning know-it-all who fires off hot takes on topics they've Googled exactly once. You know the type. The term goes way back to Ancient Rome, where a cocky shoemaker heckled a painter's masterpiece. When asked what qualified a cobbler to critique brush strokes, he puffed his chest and claimed mastery over everything beyond the sandal. Ultracrepidism. Congratulations, history's first Twitter reply guy.

SFX: 00:09:48

Boo.

David Carson: 00:09:48

Let's try using it in a sentence.

and mind interact. In around: 2016

SONG: 00:12:40

A possible explanation for increased alertness is the simple presence of consuming breakfast versus not consuming breakfast. Our brain needs glucose to function. And a high-glucose meal will aid mental capacity considerably compared to a fasted brain.

David Carson: 00:13:26

She followed that up with, "This, however, does not condone eating dessert for breakfast." Notice what's happening here. They're not disputing the results. They're not questioning the methodology. They're essentially saying, "Yeah, it works, but we still don't like it." Charlotte Sterling-Read from SR Nutrition chimed in that she "certainly wouldn't recommend ice cream for breakfast." Again, not because the science was wrong, but because it challenged everything they'd been taught to believe about proper nutrition. And here's the kicker. The study itself doesn't appear to have been published in English, making it tough to verify or review. Some critics pointed out that this made them suspicious, like maybe it wasn't real science. But you know what this reminds me of? Every breakthrough idea that ever challenged conventional wisdom, the resistance isn't to bad science. It's to science that sounds too good to be true.

This brings us to the real question, why do our brains treat genuinely novel ideas like spoiled food? Researchers at Cornell University discovered something they call the bias against creativity. It's this unconscious negative association with novel ideas that kicks in whenever we feel uncertain about outcomes. Here's what's wild. The study found that even people who explicitly say they value creativity will unconsciously associate creative ideas with words like poison and agony when they're feeling stressed or uncertain. This bias is so strong it actually interferes with our ability to recognize a good idea when we see one. Meanwhile, other research shows that when rats encounter novel tastes, their brains light up the same threat detection circuits that activate when they sense actual danger. So when Professor Koga announced that ice cream could make you smarter, nutritionists' brains literally treated it like a threat. Not because the science was bad, but because it violated everything they thought they knew about healthy eating. The seven-year-old at the park? His brain wasn't fully developed enough to have this bias yet. That's why his logic, milk plus happiness equals vegetable, made perfect sense to him. He wasn't rejecting the idea because it sounded ridiculous. He was just following the evidence as he saw it. Plus, let's be honest, the little guy just really wanted some ice cream.

So here's your challenge for this week. I call it the Make it Sound Stupid Challenge. Take your most sensible idea. Pick something you've been thinking about that sounds perfectly reasonable and logical in your head. Now, make it sound awful. Rewrite your pitch to emphasize only the parts that sound ridiculous, impractical, or like they'll never work. Then test the reaction. Share this terrible version with someone and see if they dismiss it immediately or ask curious questions. For example, instead of saying, "I want to create a meal delivery service for busy professionals," try, "I want people to pay me $15 to bring them a sandwich they could make for $3, except it'll be cold by the time it arrives and probably not what they actually wanted." The goal isn't to find ideas people immediately love. It's to build your tolerance for pitching something that sounds ridiculous and getting rejected. Every breakthrough idea in history got laughed at first. This exercise trains you to separate "This sounds dumb," from, "This is dumb," and gives you practice being brave enough to pursue ideas even when people think you're crazy. Because if you won't champion your ridiculous ideas, who will? What idea are you sitting on because you know it sounds absolutely insane when you say it out loud? The one that makes perfect sense in your head, but sounds like nonsense when it hits the air? Send me a voice message, shoot me an email, or hit me up on social. I want to hear your terrible concept. I'll help you figure out if the world just isn't ready for your genius yet. First person to send me an idea that makes me think, "This is so dumb, it's definitely going to work," gets a virtual crown and eternal bragging rights.

So that's the end of our show. I'm your host, David Carson, and thank you for getting dumb with me today. Join us next week where we'll poke at another tribe of misfit ideas that shouldn't have worked, but did. And if you want even more dumbness from the Dumbified Dummy Verse, subscribe to the Dumbify Newsletter at david-carson.com. Until then, keep your head in the clouds, your feet in the kiddie pool, and your mind wide open.