👋 Hi fellow dumdums,

There I was, scrolling through obscure insurance websites at 2:00 AM because that's apparently what passes for entertainment in my household now, when I discovered something that made me wonder if I'd accidentally ingested my wife's sleep medication again.

The Saint Lawrence Agency in Altamonte Springs, Florida—a place that sounds like it was named by someone having a religious experience in a strip mall—will sell you alien abduction insurance for $24.95. Not as a gag gift. Not as performance art. As an actual policy with actual terms and conditions that actual humans have been paying actual money for since 1987.

The coverage is spectacular in its specificity: $10 million paid out at the generous rate of $1 per year for the next 10 million years (which, mathematically speaking, means your great-great-great-times-300,000 grandchildren will still be receiving checks), plus outpatient psychiatric care, something called "sarcasm coverage" for immediate family members, and—my personal favorite—double identity protection in case the aliens clone you and your clone tries to hijack your Netflix account.

I stared at my laptop screen for a full minute, waiting for the punchline. Then it hit me like a UFO to the frontal lobe: Someone had figured out how to turn absolutely nothing into a profitable business model, and they weren't alone.

Welcome to what I've dubbed the Sacred Art of Profitable Emptiness—where entrepreneurs have 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.

The Alien Insurance Salesman of Altamonte Springs

Mike Saint Lawrence's origin story reads like something David Lynch would write if David Lynch sold insurance and had a better sense of humor. Back in 1987, Mike was an insurance bookkeeper half-watching Larry King Live while crunching numbers—a combination of activities that, in hindsight, was clearly preparing him for greatness.

Larry King's guest that night was 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 television, 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 did what any reasonable insurance professional would do. He hammered out the world's first extraterrestrial kidnapping policy in 15 minutes on a typewriter, because this was 1987 and computers were still considered witchcraft in most of Florida.

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 doubled the price to $19.95, added a deluxe framed edition for another five bucks, and suddenly business started humming like a UFO engine.

The numbers shift like UFO sightings themselves—always a little blurry, often contradictory. Mike claims to have sold somewhere between 6,000 and 35,000 policies over the decades, with sales spiking whenever Congress mentions UAPs or TikTok rediscovers Area 51.

But here's my favorite part: He's actually paid out on claims. Twice.

One customer sent Polaroids so underexposed you could project the Sistine Chapel onto them, plus a notarized letter from an MIT professor confirming a "non-terrestrial implant." Another provided what Mike diplomatically calls "compelling evidence" of temporary relocation to "a craft of unknown origin."

Remember, Mike's policy promises to eventually pay out $10 million, but in $1 increments 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?"

The Canadians Who Bottled Thin Air and Made It Thick Profits

Moses Lam's eureka moment happened in 2014 during a hike near Lake Louise, which is apparently where all the best bad ideas are born. As a joke—and I cannot stress this enough, 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.

Moses called his buddy Troy Piquette with what amounts to the greatest business pitch in history: "Remember how Mel Brooks had canned air in Spaceballs? Turns out reality wants in on that gag."

Within a year, they'd incorporated Vitality Air and started hand-bottling rocky mountain breeze 10 hours at a stretch, which is 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 $20 CAD 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.

As Moses perfectly explained their business model to a reporter: "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 Air 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 when you say it out loud.

The $71,000 Button That Sold Pure Nothingness

But if you want to see profitable emptiness distilled to its absolute essence, look no further than Cards Against Humanity's Black Friday stunt in 2015. While everyone else was hawking deals, they did something that makes Mike's alien insurance look practically sensible: they literally sold nothing.

They took their entire store offline and replaced it with a single button labeled "Give us $5”. No disclaimers, no fine print, no confetti cannons hiding in the HTML. Just a button that, when clicked, would charge you five dollars for absolutely nothing in return.

11,248 people clicked it.

Some clicked it multiple times. One entrepreneurial spirit clicked it 20 times, presumably to diversify his nothing portfolio.

Revenue by midnight: $71,000.

A few days later, Cards Against Humanity published a spreadsheet itemizing what the staff purchased with their Black Friday windfall. Highlights included 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 donations, and—for office decor—a life-size print of Nicolas Cage as a mermaid.

The internet's reaction vacillated between "Capitalism is dead" and "Take my money, harder."

According to interviews, 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 maybe a few hundred hardcore fans. Instead, their site dashboard ticked upward like a rogue thermometer in a sauna.

Dumb Word of the Day:

Today's magnificently ridiculous word is: Floccinaucinihilipilification

Definition: The act of judging something to be worthless.

How to 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."

Every one of today's entrepreneurs got paid precisely because the rest of us were busy floccinaucinihilipilificating their ideas into oblivion.

So the next time your brain warms 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.

Dumb Challenge of the Week: The Nothing Audit

Step 1: 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 2: 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 3: 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 recognizing 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.