👋 Hi fellow dumdums,

Last Tuesday, while I was main-lining cold brew and doom-scrolling, I watched a grown man on Strava defend how his 5 mile run “accidentally” traced a perfect cartoon phallus on a Strava map.

That’s where fitness lives in 2025. Deep in the uncanny valley between exercise and performance art. We don’t just run anymore. We stage runs — curating pace, heart-rate, and skyline selfies the way influencers curate brunch. Miles have become social currency, and like any currency, people counterfeit it.

• GPS spoofers who jog from couch-to-fridge while their phone “teleports” across the Alps.

• “Strava mules”—actual humans hired to rack up heroic runs on someone else’s account.

• Jogging Influencers filming wind-swept hair with an off-screen fan so their 7 mph looks like Mach 2.

In other words, the line between cardio and cosplay is now one shaky selfie stick.

Which brings me to Arthur Bouffard, a 26-year-old Dutch developer who looked at this madness and thought:

"You know what's missing from this picture? More madness."

So Arthur built Fake My Run — a website that generates completely fraudulent workout data with the kind of meticulous attention to detail usually reserved for NASA missions.

Heart rate? Fake.
GPS coordinates? Fake.
That inspiring sunrise photo from mile marker 3? Well, that one's still real, but give Arthur time.

The truly beautiful part? His website works too well. When Arthur tested it by uploading a fictional marathon through Antarctica, his friends didn't congratulate him on his endurance. They staged an intervention.

"Arthur," they said, with the kind of concerned voices usually reserved for people who collect vintage milk bottles, "why are you running through a penguin colony at 3 AM?"

But here's where Arthur reveals himself as an accidental philosopher disguised as a mischief-maker.

See, most of us would have looked at the Strava industrial complex — where people hire actual humans called "Strava mules" to run marathons for them (yes, this is real) — and thought…

This is the essence of dumb-thinking. When everyone else is tiptoeing around a problem, you grab a megaphone and announce it from the rooftop while wearing a tutu.

Arthur didn't set out to expose the existential crisis of modern fitness culture. He just followed his ridiculous idea far enough to accidentally stumble into profound social commentary.

It's like how the comedian, Steve Martin, became a philosopher by pretending to be an idiot.

The "dumb" idea contains the smart insight, but only if you're brave enough to look foolish long enough to find it.

Arthur's methodology, broken down for those of us still learning to think backwards:

Step 1: Notice something everyone pretends is normal (people paying strangers to fake their exercise)

Step 2: Ask the question that makes people uncomfortable ("What if we just made this even weirder?")

Step 3: Make the thing that shouldn't exist (a fake run generator)

Step 4: Watch the world reveal its own absurdity in response (ie, Strava deploying AI to fight fake runners, people having existential crises about what "exercise" means)

The result? Over 200,000 people have visited Arthur's website. Not to use it, necessarily, but to stare at it the way you'd stare at a car accident involving a clown car and a mariachi band.

Because sometimes the only way to show people how broken something is... is to break it so spectacularly that the pieces spell out the problem in letters large enough for everyone to read.

Arthur didn't solve fitness culture. He just made it impossible to ignore how bonkers it had become.

Dumb Word of the Day: Reductio ad Absurdum

The art of following someone's logic so far down the rabbit hole that you emerge on the other side of sanity with a clear view of the problem. Like when your friend says "money doesn't matter" and you offer to hold their wallet indefinitely.

Why it's weaponized dumb-thinking: Arthur Bouffard performed a textbook reductio ad absurdum on fitness apps. Instead of arguing that people were becoming too obsessed with workout metrics, he built a machine that let them become completely obsessed with completely fake workout metrics.

It's the intellectual equivalent of handing someone enough rope to hang themselves, except the rope is made of their own flawed logic and the hanging is really just a very public realization that maybe they should rethink some things.

The beautiful part? Arthur never had to explain why fitness apps were problematic. He just built the most problematic fitness app possible and let people connect the dots themselves.

Use it today: "My boss kept saying we needed to 'think outside the box,' so I performed a reductio ad absurdum by suggesting we hold our next meeting in a bounce house. Suddenly, 'inside the box' seemed very reasonable."

The “Ridiculogic” Challenge

Here's how it works:

First, find something that annoys you — but everyone else seems to treat as perfectly normal. Maybe it's the way people check their phones every thirty seconds. Maybe it's how every email chain turns into reply-all chaos. Maybe it's the way social media "influencers" pretend their curated lives are spontaneous.

Second, crank the dial. What would happen if we took that annoying thing and pushed it to its most ridiculous extreme?

People check their phones constantly? What if phones only worked five minutes per day?

Endless reply-all email chains? What if every email cost a dollar to send?

Social media influencers? What if influence were an actual currency you could lose?

Third — and this is the important part — you don't necessarily need to build these things. Arthur built his website because he's a programmer with time on his hands. But you can perform reductio ad absurdum in smaller ways:

If you're annoyed by people who document every meal, try documenting every bite for a day. Take a photo of each individual piece of food as it goes into your mouth. Post them all separately. Watch people's reactions.

If you're frustrated by people who turn every conversation into an opportunity to talk about themselves, try doing that extremely. Respond to everything anyone says with a story about yourself. "Nice weather today." "That reminds me of when I was in weather once..."

If you're irritated by people who constantly seek validation for ordinary activities, try seeking validation for absurdly ordinary activities. "Just blinked 47 times in the last minute. Feeling blessed. #BlinkingJourney #EyeHealth #Grateful"

The point isn't to annoy people or be obnoxious. The point is to use extreme, ridiculous logic to shine a light on behaviors we've all quietly agreed to accept as normal.