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Yesterday I watched a seven-year-old explain to his mom why she should let him eat ice cream for breakfast. His argument was simple.

"It has milk, which is healthy, and I'll be really happy, which is also healthy, so basically ice cream is a vegetable."

She said no, obviously.

But I couldn't stop thinking about how his terrible logic actually made perfect sense. Sometimes the worst-sounding ideas reveal truths we're too sophisticated to see.

Part of me wanted to tell her that a Japanese study from Kyorin University found that people who ate ice cream for breakfast had faster reaction times and better information processing abilities than those who didn't. But being the guy who quotes random studies to defend a seven-year-old's breakfast choices felt like crossing a line.

Which raises the question:

Turns out there's actual science behind our instinct to reject anything that sounds too weird.

Your brain treats genuinely novel ideas like spoiled food. Researchers at Cornell University discovered that when people encounter truly original concepts, they activate what Jennifer Mueller and colleagues call "The Bias Against Creativity" - an unconscious negative association with novel ideas that emerges whenever we feel uncertain.

The study found that even people who explicitly value creativity will unconsciously associate creative ideas with words like "poison" and "agony" when they're feeling stressed or uncertain about outcomes.

This bias is so strong it actually interferes with our ability to recognize a good idea when we see one. Meanwhile, separate research on neophobia shows that when rats encounter novel tastes, their brains light up the same threat-detection circuits - particularly the amygdala - that activate when they sense danger.

Your next move when an idea makes you instinctively cringe? Pause for thirty seconds and ask yourself if you're being protective or just scared of change.

Which brings us to a perfect case study in terrible-sounding brilliance. Meet the man who convinced the world that public humiliation could be a business model. 👇

In 1971 Kobe, Daisuke Inoue was arguably Japan's worst professional musician. After getting fired from yet another gig, this keyboardist had what he later called "the world's dumbest business idea". He wanted to build a machine that plays instrumental versions of popular songs so drunk businessmen can sing terribly in public. His friends called it "audio torture" and predicted it would destroy Japan's respect for music forever. Even Inoue knew it sounded insane. He watched a terrible singer at a bar and thought, "I could make this experience even worse for everyone."

The prototype was laughably crude. A car stereo, a microphone, and a coin slot duct-taped together. Bar owners initially refused to buy it because, as one put it, "Why would I pay money to let customers humiliate themselves?" Inoue never even bothered patenting the machine because he thought it was too ridiculous to steal. He just wanted to help bad singers feel less alone in their badness.

Today karaoke is a $5.4 billion global industry. What started as one terrible musician's solution to unemployment became humanity's favorite way to bond through shared musical incompetence. Turns out people weren't looking for good music. They were desperate for permission to be publicly terrible at something.

Of course, terrible-sounding ideas aren't limited to entertainment. Sometimes they're literally matters of life and death—which makes the initial resistance even more intense. 👇

In 1960, William Kouwenhoven stood before the Maryland Medical Society and proposed what sounded like assault with good intentions. This electrical engineer from Johns Hopkins suggested that ordinary people should press hard and fast on unconscious strangers' chests. The medical establishment was appalled. For decades, resuscitation had been the exclusive domain of trained professionals using sophisticated techniques. Now "Wild Bill" Kouwenhoven wanted housewives and store clerks pumping on people's sternums.

The resistance was immediate and fierce. Many physicians insisted that "closed-chest cardiac resuscitation should only be taught to physicians, dentists, nurses and emergency rescue squads." The idea of giving laypeople permission to apply forceful pressure to someone's chest seemed reckless and dangerous. Critics worried about broken ribs, punctured lungs, and lawsuits. The medical community questioned whether untrained hands could safely deliver the precise force needed without causing more harm than good.

But Kouwenhoven and his team had discovered something remarkable by accident. His student Guy Knickerbocker noticed that simply pressing defibrillator paddles firmly on a dog's chest caused blood pressure to rise. After proving the technique worked on animals and then humans, they went on a "barnstorming tour" across America, teaching firefighters and ordinary citizens how to perform chest compressions.

Today, CPR saves hundreds of thousands of lives annually, and the technique once considered too dangerous for non-professionals is now taught in high schools.

Dumb Moral: Sometimes the most lifesaving ideas sound the most dangerous.

Ultracrepidarian — (n.) That well-meaning know-it-all who fires off hot takes on topics they’ve Googled exactly once.

The term laces up back in ancient Rome, where a cocky shoemaker heckled a painter’s masterpiece. Asked what qualified a cobbler to critique brushstrokes, he puffed his chest and claimed mastery over everything “beyond the sandal” — ultra crepidam. Congratulations, history’s first Twitter reply guy.

His heirs are everywhere. The vinyl snob who calls karaoke “auditory waterboarding.” The white-coat purist who insists only professionals should pump a stopped heart, moments before a fearless bystander saves the day with chest compressions. Even the word itself swaggers, sounding like it keeps a Latin dictionary in its glove compartment just to correct strangers at stoplights.

Test-drive it: “The office ultracrepidarian lectured everyone on how karaoke would shred Japan’s musical soul, then hijacked the mic for three power ballads at the holiday party.”

Example: Instead of saying "I want to create a meal delivery service for busy professionals," try "I want people to pay me $15 to bring them a sandwich they could make for $3, except it'll be cold by the time it arrives and probably not what they actually wanted."

The goal isn't to find ideas people immediately love - it's to build your tolerance for pitching something that sounds ridiculous and getting rejected. Every breakthrough idea in history got laughed at first. This exercise trains you to separate "this sounds dumb" from "this IS dumb" and gives you practice being brave enough to pursue ideas even when people think you're crazy. Because if you won't champion your ridiculous ideas, who will?