Episode 7
How a Bongo Enthusiast & Practical Joker Won the Nobel Prize — And Why Richard Feynman Is the Patron Saint of Dumb-Thinking
Host David Carson dives into the beautifully bizarre brain of Richard Feynman—Nobel laureate, safecracker, bongo enthusiast, and the poster child for thinking dumb on purpose. From poking government safes with a stick to interrogating the color of the sky, Feynman never confused sounding smart with being curious.
You’ll hear how a cafeteria prank led to a Nobel-winning quantum theory, how Feynman prank-unlocked top-secret safes at Los Alamos, and why he once forced a class of elite students into a courtyard to stare at the sky until someone could actually explain why it was blue.
This isn’t physics. It’s philosophy in flip-flops.
Whether you love science or haven’t passed math since 10th grade, this episode will leave you laughing, wondering, and maybe even wobbling like that plate.
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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.
Transcript
Fluorescent lights, mystery meat, that faint scent of industrial dish soap. A college student, bored, caffeinated, flings his dinner plate across the cafeteria like a Frisbee. The plate arcs and does this hypnotic shimmy in midair as if it's drunk, but determined to keep its dignity. While most people in the potential path of the plate begin to duck and swear, one person just sat there watching. Richard Feynman, a lanky 30-something physics professor
::does something weird. He's mesmerized by the way the plate wobbles in midair. He's staring at it the way a cat watches a laser pointer on the wall. While his fork is frozen halfway to his mouth, he's thinking, "Huh, why does it dance like that?" That single wobble, dear listener, will, no exaggeration, help win him a Nobel Prize, lay mathematical bricks for quantum computing, and most importantly, inspire today's episode of Dumbify.
::Hi, I'm David Carson, your resident cheerleader for dumb ideas. And today we're taking a little stroll through the wonderfully wonky mind of Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate, bongo player, safecracker, and quite possibly the greatest dumb thinker of the 20th century.
::Dumbify, let your neurons dance. Put your brain in backwards pants. Genus hides and 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.
::Welcome to another episode of Dumbify.
::This podcast isn't about being the smartest person in the room. It's about what happens when you stop trying to be, and that's what I've always admired about Richard Feynman. I mean, the guy had an enormous IQ, but to hear friends who knew him, you'd never know it.
::He had this great Brooklyn accent and was always kind of goofy and playful and curious, and just super odd in all the right ways, but Feynman didn't just wake up weird one day. It started when he was a kid.
::Feynman's father, Melville, was a uniform salesman who moonlighted as a philosopher. Instead of bedtime stories, he'd do something weird like just point out the window at a bird and say, "Richard, knowing that bird out there is called a thrush tells you absolutely nothing about what it is or why it is or even how it flies. Knowing the names of things is not knowledge." I mean, that's one way to put your kid to bed.
::But I think it shows that Feynman came from parents who also thought out of the box, or at the very least, unconventionally. So I imagine little Richie just absorbs all of this, this... like a sponge absorbs spilled beer,
::and the result is that Richard grows up to be an adult who suspects every standard or overly complicated explanation of just about anything. Might be a bit suspect or incomplete or maybe just perfume on a pig. He'd rather check it out for himself, get curious, poke it with a stick. Otherwise, he's not buying. But I think this might be why Feynman also became such a practical jokester. One perfect example. When Feynman was working in a top secret government lab, the top brass loved to brag about their custom-made titanium safes, impenetrable fortresses strong enough to survive a war and totally theft-proof. This must have sounded like a bit of a challenge, so classic Feynman, he just decides to poke it with a stick. Picture this secret desert lab, top secret everything with crazy security that's so tight a misplaced paperclip could trigger DEFCON 2. Yet here's 20-something Feynman spinning a safe combination lock like he's auditioning for Ocean's Eleven, but the best part is that he discovers that the safes still use the factory default combo. Just hilarious. So he pops these safes open in minutes, and then leaves these cheeky little prank notes inside that say things like, "Borrowed your plutonium. Back in five. Richard Feynman."
::Can you imagine?
::A security meeting at 0900 hours
::where a room full of powerful, macho military generals just turn purple with anger and dismay, just fuming and baffled at the fact that no one tried the factory default combination, with exception, of course, to this little 20-something smart-ass. I just love it. Hilarious. So to me, Feynman exemplifies one of the hallmarks of dumb thinking, which is never worship an idea until you've had time to properly poke it with a stick.
::Never worship an idea till it squeaks or maybe hisses. Poke it with a splinter broom, tally up its blisses. If it yelps "Eureka," great, invite it in for tea. If it pops like weak old soda, toss it in the compost heap with me. So raise your sticks, you holy fools, and jab the thoughts that flow. For nothing's truly sacred till the poking makes it so.
::Okay. Back to our cafeteria Frisbee. Immediately after witnessing that flying, spinning, wobbly plate thrown across the cafeteria, Feynman flips out and gets pretty excited and decides to poke what he just saw with a stick. Now, most of us would have just shrugged and chalked it up to cafeteria chaos and got back to eating and studying for our midterms, but Feynman does the dumb thing.[cheerful music] He clears his table, grabs some scrap paper, and continues to spend three solid weeks pondering the plate's goofy mid-air rhythm with calculus. For three solid weeks, he ignores faculty meetings, social outings, possibly hygiene, and dives down the plate wobble rabbit hole, until finally, one night, mid-equation, his obsessive fascination mutates into a question.
::If a cafeteria plate can wobble all over the place, why not an electron? Then a second, even dumber question. What if particles don't pick one sensible path, but stagger drunkenly down all possible paths at once? It was a completely ridiculous thought, because at the time, in 1946, the sensible, respectable story went a little something like this. Electrons behave, thank you very much. They follow neat little mathematical train tracks laid down by Schroedinger and Newton's ghost. It stipulates that things take the shortest possible distance with the least possible energy, and blammo, a neat, tidy mathematical present given to us wrapped in a bow. But to Feynman's late night brain, by contrast, he pictured those electrons staggering around like freshmen on Penny Beer Night, trying every alley, rooftop, and sewer grate simultaneously, then averaging the chaos into the straightest line our instruments record. Complete lunacy, mathematical heresy. Imagine telling your department chair, "Sir, the particle does not choose a path. It hosts a conga line of all paths at once, then tallies the votes." You'd be advised to take a nap, possibly forever. But Feynman kept scribbling, replacing classical mathematical lines with his shimmering spaghetti strands of probability. Each squiggle got a weight. Each weight got summed, and spoiler, when he finished the math, the numbers matched experiments better than the old polite path story ever did. What the F? That wobbling plate distraction had whispered a cosmic prank, that reality isn't a neat single march, but rather a drunken brass band. And what we call trajectory is just the music drifting down the hallway. Okay, that metaphor was kinda lame, but 19 years later, the world eventually saw the wobble and Stockholm handed Feynman the Nobel Prize for Physics. The cafeteria never apologized, but I like to think the plates still wobble in solidarity.
::Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb word of the day. Dumb word of the day. It's a word. It's dumb. Use responsibly.
::[cheerful music] It's time for dumb word of the day. This is always my favorite part. I don't know why, but I suppose I just like saying funny, weird words. I'm sure there's medication for it, but I'm not gonna take it. It's just who I am and what I'm about. So let me tell you about this delicious Latin word, quidnunc, meaning what now? Spelled Q-U-I-D-N-U-N-C. A quidnunc is that kid who never stops asking, "Why is the sky blue? Why do cats land on their feet? Why is Uncle Tim banned from Canada?" And I chose this word because, to me, Richard Feynman is the patron saint of quidnuncs. His entire career was powered by a relentless quidnunc reflex. His penchant to always ask the dumb question first and refuse to stop until he understood it was superhero quidnunc. By the way, saying quidnunc out loud kind of feels like popping bubble wrap, but in Latin. I don't know what that means, but I highly recommend it. And in case you're wondering, here's how you'd use quidnunc in a sentence. My inner quidnunc just spent 15 minutes Googling why squirrels never fall out of trees. All righty then, let's move on to my favorite Feynman story. I like to call this the day Feynman locked his students outside. Grab your iced coffee, we're heading to Rio, 1951. Feynman is on sabbatical, supposedly teaching advanced electromagnetism to a classroom full of brilliant Brazilian students. And by brilliant, I mean terrifying. These kids can recite Maxwell's equations in perfect Portuguese, like monks doing Gregorian chant karaoke. But to Feynman, something feels, uh, off. They know the words. They know the formulas. But when Feynman asks a simple kindergarten question like, "Why is the sky blue?" the room goes silent. Not confused, just blank. Like he'd just asked them to explain the emotional life of a spoon. And that's when he realizes they don't actually understand the thing. They've memorized the sheet music, but they've never written a song. So he does something extremely Feynman. He marches the whole class out of the lecture hall, down four flights of stairs, into the courtyard, and points at the sky. He says, "Okay, no one goes back inside until someone can explain why the sky is blue."
::They all look around, nervous, sweating. Minutes pass. Mosquitoes assign bite zones. And finally, one brave student says, "Rayleigh scattering," which is correct technically. Tiny air molecules bounce short wavelength light, blue, every which way. So Feynman nods. "Great, so why not violet?" Silence again, the kind of silence that feels deeply personal. And then finally, someone connects the dots. The sun gives off less violet. Our eyes aren't great at seeing it, and the atmosphere filters out the rest. Boom.
::[laughs] The light bulb flickers on, not because they recited the rule, but because they got it.
::Later that night, Feynman is in a local beach bar with his students, just butchering samba rhythms on his bongos like a man trying to summon the gods. The locals find him hilarious and nickname him Professor Motormouth, because once he starts talking or drumming or theorizing, he forgets to stop. But the students see something important. Their Nobel-level professor isn't afraid to look ridiculous. He doesn't protect his genius. He plays with it. And suddenly, asking a dumb question doesn't feel so dumb anymore. The next morning, they're lined up outside his office. Not to recite anything, but to ask questions, real ones, messy ones, ones they don't already know the answers to. So why does this story matter? Because dumb thinking isn't necessarily about being silly. It's about having the nerve to admit you don't get it yet, and staying with that feeling long enough to learn something real.
::Feynman didn't want students who could repeat the answer. He wanted students who could point at the sky, feel confused, and say, "Wait, why does it do that?" Then stay in the discomfort until it made sense. That's the move. That's the muscle. So here's your dumbify challenge for the day. Ask one question that feels beneath you, like, "Why do we refrigerate eggs in the US but not in Europe?" Or, "What is money actually?" Or, yes, "Why is the sky blue?" Because that's the start of real thinking. Not the fancy stuff. The dumb stuff.
::Thanks for getting dumb with me today. I'm David Carson, author and host of Dumbify. If you thought this episode was dumb, good. That means it's working. If you've got friends who could use a little more curiosity and a little less certainty, 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 don't forget to ask the dumb question.
