How to Make a Fortune Doing Nothing

What do alien abduction insurance, canned Canadian air, and paying $5 for absolutely nothing have in common? They’re all best-selling business ideas. In this gloriously dumb—and secretly brilliant—episode of Dumbify, host David Carson dives headfirst into the underground economy of “profitable emptiness”: a world where useless products, theoretical services, and absurd experiences are packaged so well, people happily throw money at them.Meet Mike St. Lawrence, who’s sold over 30,000 alien abduction policies since 1987—complete with psychiatric care and sarcasm coverage. Then there’s the Canadian duo behind Vitality Air, who started bottling fresh mountain air as a joke… until it became a hot commodity in Beijing. And don’t forget Cards Against Humanity, who made $71,000 in a single day by selling nothing. Literally. Nothing.But this isn’t just about gag gifts. It’s about human psychology. It’s about narrative surplus—the idea that in a hyper-optimized world, the real currency isn’t utility… it’s story. You’re not buying protection from aliens. You’re buying the right to be the most interesting person at a party.By the end, you’ll question everything you thought you knew about value, worthlessness, and why we buy anything at all.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.

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