Retardmaxxing Is the Cheat Code. I've Been Doing It for Years.
- Rich Washburn
- 5 hours ago
- 4 min read
Someone sent me a video this week and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it (or laughing).
Watch it first. I'll wait:
The premise: retardmaxxing. The act of not caring, not overthinking, and simply doing.
The guy explains it with a bell curve. Far left: the actual idiot — blissfully happy, lives entirely in the moment.
Far right: the overthinker — drowning in analysis, philosophizing himself into paralysis, technically brilliant, practically useless.
At the peak: the person smart enough to understand the philosophy, but who has consciously chosen to operate like the guy on the left.
The video is absolutely unhinged. It is also completely correct.
And I say that as someone who is genuinely on the spectrum, with actual cognitive differences that the world spent years telling me were problems. They weren't problems. They were the whole point.
Pascal said it. Nietzsche said it. A chaotic guy on YouTube with 200,000 Instagram followers just said it louder and funnier than either of them.
Pascal: 'A human's inability to act simply is the cause of their misery.' Nietzsche: 'Excessive reflection weakens action.' The video: 'Smart people create imaginary problems and stupid people trip into results because they can't even think of any obstacles in their way.' Same thesis. Different fonts.
The people stuck in the middle of that bell curve — consuming every framework, building the perfect morning routine, researching the perfect business model, never shipping a single thing — those people aren't failing because they're stupid. They're failing because they're too careful. They have so much respect for the complexity of the problem that they've paralyzed themselves with it. And the people actually moving? The builders putting things out before they're fully baked, iterating in public, shipping ugly first versions and refining from there? They retardmaxxed their way to results.
Here's what it looks like at the operator level — not the meme version, the real one.
I don't have a structured morning routine. I wake up, I have ARIA, and I ask: what needs to get done today? Then I do it. Three articles published today before most people finished their first meeting. A LinkedIn post live before lunch. Cover images generated, audio narrated, blog posted — all sequenced in real time, in conversation, between other things. No project manager. No creative agency. No committee sign-off. No 'let's circle back on the messaging strategy.' Just intent, a capable system, and a bias toward output.
That's the advanced player version of what he's describing in the video. Not recklessness. A trained, deliberate decision to stop over-engineering the decision to act and just act. To stop dithering. To stop gilding the lily until the moment has passed.
The AI layer makes this more powerful than it's ever been. Now when you decide to just go — the execution overhead is nearly zero. The only real bottleneck left is your willingness to start.
Alex Karp touched on something adjacent to this, and I wrote about it in The Eloi and the Morlocks. Karp — CEO of Palantir, whose software runs planetary-scale decision systems — went on record telling people to skip elite universities. His reasoning: unless you're neurodivergent, the only remaining durable path is skilled trades. The overthinker with the credentials is increasingly the most exposed person in the room. That's the bell curve made structural. The people in the middle — competent, credentialed, process-following — those are the Eloi. Comfortable, passive, waiting to be optimized away. The people on the edges — physical makers, cognitively different, AI-native operators — those are the people who actually run things. Karp is not being provocative. He's being precise. And the guy in the video illustrated the same point with a Homer Simpson reference and a misspelled slide.
I've been watching Oracle, Meta, and every other major enterprise make the exact same calculation this week. They're not cutting people because the business is struggling. They're cutting the overthinkers. The people whose entire value proposition was 'I will carefully process information and produce a well-considered output.' AI does that now. Faster, cheaper, without the 9am status meeting.
What it can't replicate — what it won't replicate for a long time — is the one thing the retardmaxxer has in abundance: the willingness to just go.
The bias toward action isn't a personality flaw. It's the scarcest resource in a world where execution is nearly free. Everyone has access to the tools now. Not everyone will use them. The ones who do — without waiting for permission, perfect conditions, or a fully validated strategy — are the ones pulling so far ahead in the next 24 months that the gap will look inexplicable from the sidelines. It won't be inexplicable. It will just be retardmaxxing. With better infrastructure.
So here's my version of the bell curve pitch, for the operators reading this: Stop researching the workflow. Build it. Stop optimizing the prompt. Use it. Stop planning the content calendar. Post today. Stop waiting until the business model is airtight. Ship the first version.
Worst case? You go back to where you started with more data than you had before. That's the whole game. As he puts it in the video: 'The only real defeat in life is death. Every other loss, rejection, or failure is a psychological matter.' He's not wrong.
Go full Homer Simpson. Except with an agent stack. That's the cheat code.
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