Eating Pudding With Forks & The Science of Being Stupid Together

SFX: 00:00:00

[laughs]

David Carson: 00:00:01

I'm thinking about one of my daughter's birthday parties from a few years back. She must've been six or seven, and things had devolved, as they always do at birthday parties for little kids, into complete chaos. Someone started a game where you have to waddle like a penguin while balancing a plastic cup on your head, and now there are 20 adults doing this. Not just the kids, the adults. There's this one dad there, works in hedge funds, always looks stressed, the kind of guy who checks his phone during his own kid's soccer games. And here he is just waddling across the lawn with a red Solo cup sliding off his forehead, laughing so hard he can barely breathe. My wife is doing the same thing. There's a lawyer, a couple of teachers, a real estate agent, all these competent, serious adults acting like complete idiots together. And I'm standing there thinking, "This is the happiest I've seen these people, like ever." Not at the work conference. Not at the fancy dinner party. Here, waddling like penguins, looking absolutely ridiculous. There's something about agreeing to be stupid together that just works. What if being foolish as a group isn't a sign that humanity is doomed? What if it's actually the most sophisticated thing we do? What if all our best human moments require us to abandon dignity simultaneously? Welcome to Dumbify, the podcast that makes corporate consultants nervous about their billable hours. I'm your host, David Carson. Let's get dumb.

THEME SONG: 00:01:45

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.

David Carson: 00:02:12

1960s Texas. A psychiatrist named Stuart Brown is sitting in prison interviews with convicted murderers, and he's asking them about recess, about whether they played as kids, about games and roughhousing and pretend. The murderers think this is weird. The prison guards think this is weird. Brown's colleagues definitely think this is weird, but he's onto something. Specifically, he was part of a team studying Charles Whitman, the guy who climbed the tower at the University of Texas in 1966 and shot people. The state wanted to understand what created someone capable of that kind of violence. Brown interviewed Whitman's family, friends, looked at his history, and then, because he's thorough, he started interviewing other murderers in Texas prisons, young men who'd committed serious violent crimes. He's looking for patterns, abuse, trauma, the usual suspects, and he finds something nobody expected. Almost all of them had one thing in common. They didn't play as children. No roughhousing, no games, no pretend play, no fooling around. Their childhoods were either severely restricted or completely absent of what Brown calls play deprivation. This sounds insane, right? Like, there are lots of reasons people become violent, and didn't play enough seems too simple. But Brown keeps digging. He interviews over 6,000 people, murderers, well-adjusted adults, everyone in between. The pattern holds. The people who engaged in normal, silly, unstructured play as children, especially play that involved being foolish with other kids, were psychologically healthier, more creative, better at problem-solving, and significantly less violent. Here's the part that gets interesting. Brown presents this research to academic conferences in the 1970s. He's basically saying, "Hey, letting kids act stupid together isn't a waste of time. It's essential human development." The response? People thought he was ridiculous. One reviewer called Brown's observations,-

OPERA: 00:04:41

This is the elevation of nonsense to science.

This is what happens when we fund feel-good research. Instead of real psychology.

David Carson: 00:04:58

But Brown kept researching. 40 years of research. And by the 2000s, neuroscience caught up with him. Brain scans showed that play, especially the kind of silly, unstructured, foolish play that involves groups literally builds neural pathways that you can't develop any other way. Social intelligence, impulse control, creativity, empathy, they all require you to practice being stupid with other people. Brown's now considered a pioneer. His TED Talk has millions of views. His book is taught in psychology programs. And his core message is this. The opposite of play isn't work, it's depression. And the quickest way to play is to agree to look foolish together. The man who studied murderers discovered that collective stupidity might be what keeps us human.... 1950s, London, and a guy named Keith Johnstone. He's teaching theater at the Royal Court Theater in London. Very prestigious. Very serious. The kind of place where actors are trained to be dignified, professional, technically perfect. And Johnstone notices something. His students are getting worse. The more training they get-

SFX ACTOR: 00:06:29

To be or not to be?

David Carson: 00:06:30

... the more stiff and self-conscious they become.

SFX ACTOR: 00:06:33

That is the question.

David Carson: 00:06:34

They're so afraid of looking stupid that they can't actually act. So, he starts doing something radical. He creates exercises where the only goal is to fail spectacularly. He has students tell the worst stories possible. He makes them do scenes where they're specifically trying to look like idiots. He creates what would eventually become modern improv comedy. But at the time, it was just chaos. One exercise, students would get on stage and play the most boring person in the world. They'd describe paint drying or talk about their sock drawer or count backwards from a thousand. The goal was to be so aggressively boring that it became funny. His colleagues thought he'd lost his mind. The head of the program told him he was, "Destroying everything we've built and teaching students to be unprofessional." One theater critic wrote that Johnstone was, "Encouraging mediocrity and celebrating failure." But here's what happened. The students who went through his training became the most successful actors. They were fearless. They could take risks. They weren't paralyzed by the fear of looking stupid. And more importantly, they learned to build something together by agreeing to be foolish simultaneously. Improv only works when everyone commits to the stupidity. If one person tries to look smart while everyone else is being ridiculous, the whole thing falls apart. Johnstone codified this into what he called the Status Game, the understanding that groups function best when people are willing to temporarily lower their status, to be the fool, to look ridiculous for the sake of the group. By the 1970s, his techniques became the foundation for every comedy show you've ever watched, from Saturday Night Live to Second City. Basically, all of it traces back to Johnstone's insight, that the willingness to be collectively stupid is the foundation of creativity. The man who told actors to be boring on purpose changed how we understand performance, creativity, and group dynamics. But I think Johnstone's insight goes way beyond acting or improv. His idea about status, that groups work best when people are willing to momentarily lower their status and play the fool, reveals something bigger. It's the same dynamic that fuels social change. The willingness to look ridiculous together is what turns a crowd into a movement. Let me take you across the pond to Europe right now, this minute, this week. In parks across Germany, there are hundreds of people sitting on grass eating pudding with forks. Let me say that again. Pudding with forks. It started in Karlsruhe in late August. Someone, and nobody knows who, which makes it even better, put up flyers that just said-

SONG: 00:09:52

Come to our We Eat Pudding With A Fork meeting.

David Carson: 00:10:03

And hundreds of people showed up with pudding and forks.

SFX: 00:10:07

Who did that?

David Carson: 00:10:07

It makes no sense, and that's the point. And it's spreading like wildfire on TikTok. Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Vienna, Paris, and Portland, because of course, Portland. People are organizing pudding fork gatherings in parks all over the world, and nobody's asking why. They're just showing up. I wonder if this is Gen Z looking at the world right now. The wars, climate change, the economic uncertainty, the constant doom scrolling, and essentially choosing absolute absurdity to react to the moment. We're all living through one of those recognizable historical moments where people are freaking the fuck out and are getting pretty desperate for a release valve. And historically, when people get desperate enough, that valve gets violent. But this group of Gen Zers is out here eating pudding with forks. These kids are basically looking at a world that increasingly makes zero sense. And instead of nihilism, instead of despair, they're saying, "You know what? The world is chaotically absurd. So, let's instead be absurd on purpose. Let's do something so pointless and ridiculous that it becomes beautiful." There's no protest sign, no hashtags, no specific cause. It's not raising awareness for anything except the human need to occasionally be idiots together. And if you watch the videos, and I've watched way too many, everyone looks genuinely happy. Not Instagram happy, actually joyful. Sure. Why not? One spokesperson in Hanover told a reporter, "The purpose is to let people vent in our current times." Vent by eating pudding with forks.... with strangers in a park. This is synchronized stupidity as mental health intervention. This is choosing to be randomly, collectively, joyfully ridiculous together. The world might be falling apart, but at least we can sit in a park and struggle with pudding together. But here's the thing. This whole business of acting ridiculous together, it's not new. Humans have been doing it forever. We just slap the word "tradition" on it, so we don't have to admit we're basically inventing excuses to throw food and spray strangers with hoses.

David Carson: 00:12:47

Take Songkran in Thailand. Once upon a time, it was a dignified Buddhist ritual. Pour a little water on a statue. Sprinkle some on grandma's hands. Very reverent. Fast-forward a few centuries, and suddenly, it's the world's biggest squirt gun fight. Trucks loaded with buckets, hoses blasting down main streets, millions of people soaking each other like it's the championship round of wet T-shirt Survivor. Or how about La Tomatina in Spain? There's an entire town in Spain that shuts down so 40,000 people can pelt each other with 150,000 tomatoes. No rules. No winners. Just red pulp everywhere, like a Quentin Tarantino salad bar. Or maybe Holi in India, the Festival of Colors. On paper, it's about renewal and devotion. In practice, it's sneak attacking your neighbors with neon dust until everyone looks like a rainbow sneezed on them.

Every culture has these things, the Running of the Bulls, Carnival in Brazil, Burning Man in Nevada. They're not accidents. They're scheduled chaos, collective permission slips to be idiots together. And the thing is, that's not just fun, it's sacred. Because when you're dripping in tomato guts or unrecognizable under a coat of pink powder, you can't cling to your dignity. You can't be regional manager of sales. You're just a person, ridiculous, messy, laughing, and suddenly connected to everyone else who decided that for at least one day being stupid is the smartest thing you can do. All right. Let's talk about what's really going on when groups decide to be stupid together. Because it turns out, let's all look like idiots at the same time isn't just fun, it's science.

SONG: 00:14:49

Time for science. Time to get unnecessarily nerdy with it. 'Cause nerding out is what we do. And we're not going to apologize for it. Get ready for science.

David Carson: 00:15:13

First up, Dr. Barbara Fredrickson at UNC. She discovered that positive emotions don't just make you feel better, they make everyone else around you feel better, too, like a contagion, but with giggles instead of germs. One person in the group starts doing something dumb, like using a bucket as a hat and insisting it's French couture. And suddenly, mirror neurons start firing, stress hormones drop, and everyone else feels permission to join the nonsense. The only catch? Status has to disappear. If the CEO insists on leading the fun while still acting like a CEO, it doesn't work. Nobody wants to play tag with their boss. The stupidity has to be evenly distributed. Otherwise, the magic collapses. Now, Harvard's Amy Edmondson studied hundreds of work teams and came to a startling conclusion. The best teams weren't the ones that kept things buttoned-up and professional. They were the ones where people felt safe being wrong or dumb, or even spectacularly idiotic in front of each other. She actually thought her data was broken because the correlation between silliness and performance was so strong. Imagine, the key to outperforming Goldman Sachs isn't more spreadsheets. It's more late-night karaoke where everyone sings, "I Will Survive," while eating atomic-level hot wings.

David Carson: 00:16:46

Then there's Dr. Jaak Panksepp, who studied play across species. He found that the same neural circuits that light up when we're horsing around with friends also activate when we're solving complex problems. In other words, the brain treats figuring out how to land on the moon and tickling your buddy until he cries as the same kind of activity. And here's what's really interesting. The moment you make play productive, those circuits shut off, which means brainstorming sessions titled "Creative Ideation Workshop" are dead on arrival. But sneak in a rubber chicken? Now, we're in business. Dr. Robin Dunbar at Oxford added another twist. He found that the strongest human bonds form during what he calls shared vulnerability moments. Translation, doing something equally dumb together. Dancing badly, singing off-key, laughing at the same dumb meme. These activities bonded groups faster than working on actual important tasks. Apparently, your coworkers spilling nacho cheese on themselves at the holiday party makes you trust them more than their stellar quarterly report ever could.

David Carson: 00:18:05

And finally, Dr. Nicholas Hobson looked at rituals."... Why do humans invent bizarre, irrational customs? Throwing tomatoes in Spain, body paint in Brazil, pudding with forks instead of spoons." His answer: "Because they tell the group, 'I'm willing to look stupid for this tribe.'" That act of synchronized foolishness creates what he calls group coherence, or what the rest of us call finally trusting that guy enough to go to karaoke with him. So the science is unanimous. Groups that give themselves permission to be ridiculous together end up more creative, more trusting, more resilient, and frankly, more fun to be around.

Collective stupidity isn't wasted time, it's infrastructure. It's how you keep the whole messy thing, teams, families, societies, standing upright.

SONG: 00:19:08

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: 00:19:19

Well, hooray for me. It's my favorite part of the show. It's time for dumb word of the day, and today's word is …“constulting,” spelled C-O-N-S-T-U-L-T-I-N-G. “Constulting.”

This old, beautiful English word has fallen out of use for hundreds of years, and we need to bring it back. It comes from the Latin “con,” meaning together, and “stultus,” meaning foolish or stupid.

ed from common use around the: 1700

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Yes. [laughs]

David Carson: 00:20:28

But the behavior never really went away. We just stopped having a great word for it. Let's use it in a sentence.

"Gerald initially tried to remain dignified at the water balloon fight, but eventually surrendered to constulting and ended up soaking wet like everyone else." And not for nothing, how cool would it be if this were your business or career title? "Hello, I'm David Carson, and I'm a constultant." That... would kinda rule. Okay, moving on. This week's big dumb challenge is simple and deeply uncomfortable. I'm calling it the collective foolishness experiment. Here's what you're going to do. Step one, gather a group. Could be friends, family, coworkers. Doesn't matter. At least three people. More is better. Step two, propose something completely pointless and slightly ridiculous. Not dangerous, not expensive, just silly. Eating pudding with forks, having a conversation in fake accents, walking backwards through a park, wearing mismatched shoes on purpose, singing nursery rhymes in harmony. Whatever feels really delightfully stupid to you. Step three, actually do it together, in public if you can handle it, for at least 15 minutes. No ironic distance. No making fun of the activity. Commit fully to the foolishness. If someone starts being sarcastic or trying to look cool, call them out. This only works if everyone surrenders to the stupidity simultaneously. Step four, pay attention to what happens. Notice when people start laughing. Notice when the self-consciousness drops. Notice the moment when everyone realizes they're all equally ridiculous and something shifts in the energy. Bonus points, do this with people you normally maintain professional distance from, coworkers, neighbors, acquaintances. The synchronized foolishness works best when it dissolves existing status hierarchies. The goal isn't to become a silly person. It's to remember that groups function better when they can occasionally abandon dignity together. And the only way to learn that is to practice it. I'm not saying you should throw tomatoes at your boss or show up to a board meeting covered in colored powder. I'm not saying professionalism is bad. I'm saying that groups that can't occasionally be stupid together are missing something essential. The happiest, most creative, most cohesive groups I've ever studied all have one thing in common. They found ways to regularly engage in collective foolishness, to agree that for this moment, we're all going to look ridiculous. And that's not a weakness, it's a feature.

David Carson: 00:23:35

Thanks for getting dumb with me today. Subscribe to the newsletter at david-carson.com for transcripts, references, and my ongoing collection of dignified people who would be happier if they occasionally ate pudding with forks. This is David Carson reminding you the opposite of foolish isn't wise, it's alone. And the fastest way to find your people is to agree to look stupid together. Until next week, stay deliciously foolish on purpose with friends or colleagues, or potentially even people who are on the cusp of deeply pissing you off. You might find a new way to really bond.