Table of Contents
How a Microsoft product manager who failed spectacularly with MS-DOS bundles went on to build Expedia and Zillow using "provocation marketing" and the courage to challenge entire industries.
Key Takeaways
- Great innovation requires protecting the "foreign bodies" in your organization—the disruptors who make others uncomfortable—because they're the ones who actually drive change forward
- Provocation marketing works by finding emotionally charged topics people care about, addressing sacred cows in that space, but making people feel good rather than scared
- When building consumer brands, the hard path of making up new words (like Zillow) creates defensible brand equity you actually own, unlike generic descriptive names
- Platform businesses become nearly impossible to disrupt once established, unlike tech companies that can be dismantled by "three PhD engineers at Stanford"
- The best hiring indicator isn't the resume's top sections—it's the interests at the bottom, where you can see if candidates light up with genuine passion about something
- Fire quickly and frame it as partnership: unhappy performers are usually unhappy people, so you're helping them find where they actually belong
- "Big pond, good fishermen" is the investment criteria—focus on large addressable markets with capable teams rather than perfect business models
- Taking real vacations where you're completely disconnected forces your teams to develop leadership capabilities and reveals who your actual leaders are
- For work-life balance, prioritize family and health as non-negotiables first, then build everything else around that foundation
- When you're fighting for something bigger than yourself, sustainability becomes automatic—but fighting just for personal gain makes quitting inevitable
Timeline Overview
• 00:00:00 – 00:19:39 | Morning routine and late-night work habits: 6:30 AM wake-up with coffee, silent CNBC news, special smoothie with prune "to keep things moving," and Hyperice Venom back device. Expedia's origins from travel CD-ROM and Easy Sabre on Prodigy, "Power to the People" vision democratizing travel information for consumers
• 00:19:40 – 00:38:30 | Expedia as internal Microsoft startup: convincing Bill Gates to fund internally rather than immediate spin-out, "HR experiment" strategy with Steve Ballmer to retain entrepreneurial talent. IPO road show across 15 cities in 3 weeks, son born on IPO day with promise to name him "Expedia"
• 00:38:31 – 00:57:41 | Journey from Boston strategy consulting to Microsoft: realizing he was a "client not server," preferring building over advising. Influence of summer jobs (house painting, ice cream sales), natural risk-taking personality and business instincts from young age
• 00:57:42 – 01:16:29 | Birth of Zillow through brainstorming with Lloyd Frink: failed home auction concept, breakthrough with Zestimate. "Provocation Marketing" philosophy - find emotionally charged zones, break taboos but make people feel good. Walt Mossberg review and "house porn site" headlines
• 01:16:30 – 01:35:18 | Art of company naming: high-point Scrabble letters (Z, X, Q), two syllables max, "good dog name test." Platform business philosophy - unbreakable vs tech companies defeated by "three PhD engineers at Stanford." Hiring through CV "interests" section, firing quickly as partnership
• 01:35:19 – 02:14:17 | Journey from Microsoft → Expedia → Zillow: platform business lessons, importance of direct brand and workflow integration. Work-life balance through Italy sabbatical, prioritizing family health, "Don't Panic" leadership philosophy in modern anxiety-driven world
The Microsoft Training Ground: Learning to Swing Big and Fail Forward
Here's something most successful entrepreneurs won't tell you: their biggest failures often teach them more than their successes. For Rich Barton, that lesson came early at Microsoft under a boss named Brad Chase, who would fundamentally shape how he thought about innovation and risk-taking.
Fresh out of Stanford with an industrial engineering degree, Barton landed at Microsoft in 1991 when the company had only 3,000 employees. His first big project was managing MS-DOS 5, working on packaging and distribution to retailers like Egghead Software. But it was his spectacular failure with a book bundle that taught him the most valuable lesson of his career.
Barton noticed that "DOS for Dummies" was selling millions of copies at Barnes & Noble and Borders. His brilliant idea? Bundle the book with the MS-DOS upgrade and sell it through bookstores instead of software retailers. It seemed logical—reach a broader audience, leverage an existing hit product, and tap into the massive bookstore market.
The execution was a disaster. The bundled product cost $8-10 to produce but had to be priced at $49-54 to match software pricing. Customers expecting a $12 book were shocked by the price tag. The product looked too much like a book, so people didn't realize there was software inside. It was "at best a C, maybe a D" grade failure that cost Microsoft millions.
But here's where the story gets interesting. Instead of being fired or demoted, Barton found himself in a review meeting with Brad Chase expecting the worst. Instead, Chase asked him: "What's your next big idea?"
This wasn't just good management—it was a philosophy that would shape everything Barton built afterward. Microsoft understood that encouraging innovation meant not punishing intelligent failures. As Barton explains, "great organizations encourage innovation, encourage big idea people to take big swings and do not punish them when it doesn't work out according to plan."
The lesson extended beyond just tolerance for failure. Chase and Microsoft actively protected and invested in the "foreign bodies"—the disruptors and innovators who sometimes made the corporate immune system uncomfortable. These were the people who wanted to rock the boat, and rocking the boat was essential for real innovation.
This early experience taught Barton a crucial truth about building innovative organizations: you have to hire, cultivate, protect, and invest in the people who think differently. Because while mainline corporate culture often rejects innovators, these are exactly the people you need to stay ahead.
Expedia: The Art of the Internal Startup and Strategic Spin-Out
The path from Microsoft product manager to travel industry revolutionary started with a personal problem and a prescient observation about the future of commerce. When Barton's wife Sarah was applying for medical residencies, he faced the possibility of leaving Seattle—and Microsoft—to follow her career.
This potential life change led him to transfer from the Windows 95 team to Microsoft's consumer division, where he took on a portfolio of multimedia CD-ROMs. One product in particular caught his attention: an encyclopedia of travel guides crammed onto a single CD-ROM. It seemed like a great idea until he analyzed the market reality.
The entire travel book industry in the US was maybe $100 million—hardly a Microsoft-sized opportunity. Plus, you couldn't travel with a CD-ROM when laptops weighed 20 pounds and looked like compact suitcases. But then Barton discovered something that would change everything: Easy Sabre on Prodigy.
Easy Sabre was a tool that let travel agents access airline reservation systems from home. Barton saw the future instantly: "If we can have consumers be able to do this, then we can become the largest seller of travel in the world." This wasn't just about digitizing existing processes—it was about fundamentally democratizing access to information and transactions that had been locked up in professional systems.
When Barton pitched this vision to Bill Gates, he made a crucial strategic argument. This wouldn't be a Microsoft business because it was "travel first, software second, not software first, travel second." Gates agreed completely but made a counterproposal: instead of doing it outside Microsoft, build it as an internal venture.
The negotiation revealed Gates' legendary strategic thinking. He agreed to consider spinning Expedia out if it got big enough, and he wanted to rebuild the mainframe systems on Windows NT. Most importantly, he somehow arranged for Sarah to match her residency at University of Washington, keeping the team in Seattle.
What followed was one of the most successful corporate spin-outs in business history. Barton pitched it to Steve Ballmer partly as an HR experiment—a way to retain Microsoft's best entrepreneurial talent who might otherwise leave for the incredible opportunities outside the company. When hot startups were going public at massive valuations, the public markets could fund Expedia's growth far more efficiently than internal Microsoft budgets.
The spin-out took 150 people from Microsoft, with all but two choosing the adventure over security. The hardest sell wasn't the employees—it was their spouses. Barton remembers multiple dinners at Wild Ginger in Seattle with skeptical spouses, S-1 documents spread on the table, highlighting and annotating the IPO paperwork like it was a legal contract.
But the timing was perfect. When the dot-com crash came, Expedia was already profitable and growing rapidly. While Microsoft's stock took 17 years to recover its 1999 peak, Expedia bounced back in just a couple of years. The HR experiment succeeded brilliantly, proving that corporate ventures could compete with pure startups when given proper structure and incentives.
Zillow and the Science of Provocation Marketing
After selling Expedia to Barry Diller and taking a sabbatical in Florence learning to paint and road bike, Barton was ready for his next challenge. The genesis of Zillow came from brainstorming sessions with his Stanford and Expedia colleague Lloyd Frink in a borrowed office in Seattle.
They cycled through various ideas, including a Dropbox-before-Dropbox cloud storage concept that Frink calculated would have "100% this is going to work, but there's going to be no profit." Eventually, Barton remembered an old Microsoft research project about creating digital marketplaces for various industries, including real estate.
The timing was perfect for a provocation marketing masterpiece. In 2003, you couldn't even get basic home price information online. The real estate industry had been exceptionally good at defending their data monopoly, keeping information opaque and controlled. Barton and Frink were "power to the people" guys who had already democratized travel booking—why not do the same for real estate?
But they made crucial mistakes before finding their breakthrough product. First, they tried to auction homes, thinking market efficiency demanded it. This failed because real estate markets aren't liquid—you need time to show properties to multiple buyers, not real-time bidding. Second, any business that requires educating customers about a radically new buying method faces enormous friction.
The breakthrough came with what Barton calls their "killer feature": the Zestimate. Instead of trying to change how people bought homes, they gave them something they desperately wanted but couldn't get—estimated values for every home, displayed like stock charts over time, overlaid on aerial maps.
This wasn't just a product feature—it was a provocation marketing masterpiece. Home values hit multiple emotional triggers: homes are most Americans' largest asset, people are naturally curious about their neighbors' wealth, and everyone wants to know if their investment is growing. The Zestimate was what Barton calls "catnip" for consumers.
The provocation marketing framework that emerged from Zillow's success has several key components. First, find what Barton calls "seven deadly sin zones"—emotionally core topics that incite strong responses. Then address sacred cows or taboos in that space. But here's the crucial difference from cheap attention-seeking: instead of scaring people, make them feel good, tickled, or entertained.
The framework worked so well it became repeatable. At Glassdoor, the provocation was salary transparency—inherently taboo but valuable. At Avvo, it was rating attorneys systematically, something that had never been done and guaranteed lawsuits. But having strong legal grounds and knowing the controversy would generate massive attention made the lawsuits part of the marketing strategy.
The data distribution infrastructure became equally important. Amy Batinsky, Zillow's marketing chief, recognized that local newspapers had an infinite appetite for housing data. By building systems to constantly feed that hunger, Zillow got massive brand building without traditional advertising spend. When you have constantly changing data that people care about, you can think like Bloomberg—feeding hungry consumers through earned media rather than paid advertising.
The Art and Science of Naming Billion-Dollar Companies
Barton has developed one of the most systematic approaches to naming companies in Silicon Valley, based on his experience creating brands that need to stick in consumers' minds and become verbs in everyday language.
The fundamental choice in consumer branding is between the easy way and the hard way. The easy approach uses descriptive names like Hotels.com or AirlineTickets.com. The advantage is immediate comprehension—everyone knows what you do. The massive disadvantage is that you can't own brand equity for words that already exist in the dictionary.
The middle path uses existing words in new applications—think Apple Computer or Amazon.com. This approach works but requires building new definitions for familiar words, which those companies obviously accomplished successfully.
Barton prefers the hard path: making up entirely new words. It's difficult because you have to teach people what the word means, but once you succeed, you own that definition completely. With effective provocation marketing, he believes he can build the audience necessary to familiarize people with new brand names.
The tactical framework for inventing words draws from Scrabble strategy. Use high-point letters like Z, X, and Q because they're distinctive and rare—they jump off pages and stick in memory in ways that aren't crowded by other words. This explains why all of Barton's companies feature these letters prominently.
Keep syllables to a minimum, with two being the sweet spot. Barton admits Expedia was too long in hindsight, though it worked because it evoked positive concepts like speed and expedition. But fewer syllables make words easier to remember and use.
The word should work as a good dog name—something you can call out easily. This usually means ending with a vowel sound and having a friendly, approachable feel. Related to this, the word should easily convert to a verb, which typically requires that vowel ending.
Double letters and palindromes create visual interest and memorability. Words that look unique on the page tend to stick in people's minds better than standard letter combinations.
Applying this framework: Expedia has the X for distinctiveness and evokes speed/adventure, but fails the syllable test. Zillow hits the sweet spot—distinctive Z opening, double L, soft vowel ending, two syllables, perfect dog name potential. Glassdoor gets points for double letters and transparency metaphors, though it's not ideal as a dog name.
The naming philosophy reflects Barton's broader approach to building lasting consumer brands: take the harder path that creates defensible advantages rather than the easier path that leaves you vulnerable to competition.
Platform Business Strategy: Building Unbreakable Moats
One of the most valuable insights from Barton's conversation with legendary investor Doug Leone was understanding why platform businesses in his space are nearly impossible to disrupt once they achieve critical mass.
Leone explained that while most tech companies can be dismantled by "three PhD engineers at Stanford" who build a better, faster, cheaper solution, the same isn't true for established platform businesses. No engineering team in the world could quickly replicate what Zillow had built by the time of their growth rounds.
Consider the defensive moats: 500 million global fans, broadcasting relationships in 190 countries, 40 billion annual organic video views, exclusive athlete contracts, and deep integration into industry workflows. Even if Barton left and tried to compete against Zillow, he'd need to raise billions and spend at least a decade rebuilding those relationships and audience.
The platform defense strategy has two key components. First, build a giant brand that customers know and love, so most traffic comes directly to your site rather than through intermediaries like Google. This reduces dependency on any single source of customers, which Michael Porter's Five Forces analysis identifies as a critical strategic vulnerability.
Second, become digitally integral to the workflow of your industry. Don't just be a lead generation middleman collecting Google traffic and selling it to service providers. Actually build tools that professionals use to do their jobs, handle transactions, and manage their businesses.
This workflow integration protects against the constant threat of disintermediation that faces pure middleman businesses. When Google decides to move into your vertical—offering their own reviews, booking tools, or lead generation—you're in trouble if you're entirely dependent on them for customers.
The evolution from Trip Advisor-style lead generation to transaction platform represents this strategic progression. Pure middlemen are vulnerable because they have "an overdependency on any supply of customers" or suppliers. Building direct brand relationships and becoming essential to industry workflows creates much more defensible positions.
Barton applies this thinking across his portfolio companies. At Glassdoor, they moved beyond just salary data to career tools and job searching. At Zillow, the long-term vision is becoming a "super app" for anyone renting or buying—a one-stop shop with all professionals and services integrated into the workflow.
The platform approach also explains why certain markets are inevitably dominated by one or two major players. Network effects, switching costs, and data advantages compound over time to create winner-take-all dynamics. Understanding these forces helps identify which battles are worth fighting and how to structure them for long-term defensibility.
The Hiring Philosophy: Passion in the Margins and Quick Course Corrections
Barton has developed an unconventional approach to hiring that focuses less on traditional qualifications and more on intrinsic motivation and cultural fit. His methods have evolved through decades of building teams at Microsoft, Expedia, and Zillow.
The most revealing part of any resume isn't the work experience or education—it's the interests section at the bottom. Barton always gets candidates talking about their hobbies and passions, asking basic questions and watching for genuine excitement. If someone lists skiing, he might ask them to estimate the size of the ski industry or discuss their favorite mountains.
The logic is simple: if candidates put something in their interests, they should be able to light up talking about it. People who are passionate about their hobbies tend to be passionate about their work. Conversely, people who can't get excited about anything they claim to enjoy probably won't bring energy to professional challenges.
This approach helps identify what Barton calls "passionate people"—individuals who have genuine enthusiasm for something, anything. These tend to be the employees who go above and beyond, who care about outcomes rather than just completing tasks, and who bring energy that elevates entire teams.
But even good hiring processes produce mistakes, which leads to Barton's second key principle: fire quickly. He admits that almost all his leadership mistakes have been "leaving the pitcher on the mound too long, hoping that the arm would get better."
The firing philosophy reframes termination as partnership rather than punishment. If you're unhappy with someone's performance, that person is almost certainly unhappy too. Nobody enjoys failing at their job. So firing becomes an act of compassion—helping someone find where they actually belong and will succeed.
This approach naturally leads to more humane conversations. When you're looking for shared alignment rather than delivering punishment, you show heart and genuine care for the person's future. Most people need to be heard and understood, so creating space for that processing is both kind and practical.
The exit interview becomes equally important, both for voluntary and involuntary departures. People leaving often have insights about organizational problems that insiders can't see. Creating casual, non-threatening environments for these conversations yields valuable intelligence about team dynamics and systemic issues.
Barton also emphasizes the value of entrance interviews—checking in with new hires about a month after they start. Before people get fully indoctrinated into company culture, they can serve as fresh consultants, offering perspectives on processes and problems that veteran employees no longer notice.
Work-Life Integration and the Leverage Mindset
Barton's approach to work-life balance comes from hard-earned lessons about sustainability and what really matters for long-term success. The catalyst was a health scare during his wife's high-risk twin pregnancy when he was CEO of Expedia.
Sarah went into early labor at 27 weeks while they were driving to Whistler for a weekend trip. What should have been a quick hospital check turned into six weeks of bedrest to prevent premature birth. During this period, Barton was managing a public company, dealing with post-9/11 challenges in the travel industry, and caring for their 3-year-old son Will.
The experience forced a complete reassessment of priorities and lifestyle. Barton realized he needed to build his foundation—mental and physical health—if he wanted to sustain the things he loved doing long-term. Six months later, he quit as CEO and moved the family to Italy for a year.
The current approach treats family and health as non-negotiable priorities, with everything else built around that foundation. Barton gets up at 6:30 AM for two hours of personal time before Sarah wakes up. This includes coffee, news consumption, and working through his inbox. He has a daily smoothie with specific ingredients and wears a Hyperice Venom device that heats and vibrates his back during this routine.
The workout regimen includes a couple hours of Zone 2 cardio weekly (bike, rowing, treadmill), weightlifting four times per week targeting different body parts, and lots of "play" activities like snowboarding (35 days this year), tennis, and other sports. The key insight is that feeling good physically directly impacts mental performance and decision-making.
But the deeper philosophy is about leverage and delegation. Barton jokes that if he's doing his job perfectly, he can be on his surfboard and nobody knows when he doesn't show up to work because everyone thinks he's working on something else. This isn't about being lazy—it's about building systems and developing people.
The leadership development technique he coaches is deliberately taking disconnected vacations. Go surfing in Indonesia for two weeks with zero connectivity. Your teams will be forced to figure out important decisions without you, which develops their leadership capabilities and reveals who your real leaders are.
This approach requires surrounding yourself with capable people who care about the mission. With his wife Sarah, Barton emphasizes that "anything she's in charge of is going to happen well" because she's "amazingly smart and capable and cares." That partnership model extends to professional relationships—finding people with skills and genuine investment in outcomes.
The leverage mindset applies to family life too. When his kids were young, Barton was the early-rising parent who got them to school while Sarah stayed up late. He set up their kitchen like a restaurant with a big island and cooktop, becoming their "short order breakfast chef" and making anything they wanted. This created quality time regardless of the kids' moods and resulted in hundreds of candid photos that became his "most prized possession."
Reading for Mental Health: Fiction as Reset Button
Unlike many business leaders who consume primarily non-fiction and business books, Barton has developed a deliberate fiction-heavy reading diet that serves specific mental health purposes. His approach treats reading as escape and brain reset rather than just information acquisition.
The underlying philosophy recognizes that business leaders operate in a state of constant stimulation—what Barton calls "cranked up quick twitch always on alert operational stuff." To counter this, he needs activities that force his "monkey brain" to relax, and fiction provides the most effective escape mechanism.
Recent recommendations center on Mark Helprin, particularly "The Oceans and the Stars." Helprin writes "beautiful, luscious prose" with magical realism elements, creating epic stories of war, romance, exploration, and relationships. His protagonists tend to be around Barton's age, dealing with career transitions and life reflections.
"A Winter's Tale" remains Helprin's most reread book in Barton's collection—a story of early 20th century life near New York City and upstate New York that functions as a "beautiful walk through that area in that time period." The prose quality and immersive world-building provide complete mental transportation away from contemporary business concerns.
Haruki Murakami offers a different kind of magic—surreal, dreamlike narratives that engage the imagination in ways purely logical thinking cannot. Neal Stephenson provides intellectual science fiction that challenges assumptions about technology and society, though his latest "Termination Shock" requires 100-150 pages to fully engage before "it just rips."
The gift-giving approach has shifted in the digital age. Instead of physical books, recommendations now happen through group chats and digital sharing. Barton mentions book discovery happening primarily through "book group chat" rather than traditional browsing or formal recommendations.
Ted Chang represents the pinnacle of short story craft—his collections "Stories of Your Life and Others" and "Exhalation" provide "one night read" experiences that reset mental state between longer works. Chang's ability to blend science fiction and fantasy creates what Barton calls "little ginger snacks in between pieces of sushi"—palate cleansers that prepare the mind for different types of content.
The fiction preference extends to authors who made career transitions themselves. Amor Towles worked in banking for years before becoming a novelist, proving that business backgrounds can inform rather than hinder creative work. This resonates with Barton's own creative experiments during COVID, including digital painting on iPad using Procreate tutorials.
The reading philosophy reflects a broader understanding that sustainable high performance requires deliberate recovery and mental variety. Fiction provides cognitive diversity that pure business content cannot, engaging different neural pathways and providing the mental refreshment necessary for continued innovation and decision-making.
Leadership Philosophy: Don't Panic and Develop Others
Barton's leadership philosophy can be distilled into two core principles that shape how he approaches everything from crisis management to talent development: "Don't Panic" and proactive succession planning.
The "Don't Panic" message, borrowed from both a Burning Man bar sign and the movie "Bowfinger," addresses a fundamental challenge in modern leadership. Between social media, 24/7 news cycles, and constant connectivity, people naturally tend toward fear and high emotional reactivity. Most situations that feel catastrophic in the moment turn out fine, and when they don't, panic rarely helps anyway.
Barton sees part of his job as bringing people "off of their high beta, high swings, high mood swings." This isn't about dismissing real problems, but rather creating space for rational thinking before reactive responses. The alternative—constant fear, outrage, and panic—causes the mental health problems leaders see throughout their organizations.
The practical application involves modeling calm behavior and creating systems that reduce unnecessary urgency. When people feel like they "might ignite," the reality is they "probably won't." This mindset shift alone can dramatically improve decision-making quality and team morale.
The succession planning philosophy challenges the conventional wisdom about being indispensable. Barton argues that the most secure people are willing to "let go and roll the dice on other people" by clearly answering: "Who is your successor if you were hit by a bus?"
Less secure leaders put themselves in positions where they seem indispensable to senior management. But this person isn't promotable precisely because they haven't developed replacements. Conversely, leaders who cultivate strong teams under them become highly promotable even though they're technically more expendable.
This creates what Barton calls "the fine thing"—the counter-intuitive reality that developing others' capabilities actually increases your own career security and advancement potential. The leader who has built a team capable of functioning without them proves they can handle bigger challenges.
The vacation test becomes a practical leadership development tool. Take a completely disconnected trip—surfing in Indonesia with zero connectivity for two weeks. Your teams will be forced to make important decisions independently, which develops their capabilities and reveals natural leadership emergence.
This approach requires building systems, policies, and decision-making frameworks that outlive any individual's presence. It also demands hiring people who genuinely care about outcomes rather than just completing tasks assigned by authority figures.
The leverage mindset extends beyond delegation to fundamental questions about organizational design. If someone's absence creates crisis, that indicates system failures rather than individual importance. Truly scalable organizations function through distributed decision-making rather than bottlenecked authority.
The philosophy acknowledges that leadership often emerges naturally when formal authority is absent. During disconnected periods, real leaders reveal themselves through initiative and others' willingness to follow them. These insights help identify promotion candidates and organizational dynamics that might not be visible during normal operations.
The Billboard Message: Countering Modern Anxiety
When asked what message he'd put on a billboard for maximum impact, Barton chose "Don't Panic"—a simple phrase that encapsulates his philosophy about modern life and leadership challenges.
The choice reflects his observation that contemporary society systematically generates anxiety and fear through social media, news cycles, and constant connectivity. People live in states of heightened alertness that aren't psychologically sustainable and often aren't practically useful.
The message draws from both the cult classic movie "Bowfinger" and a beloved Burning Man installation. In Bowfinger, Eddie Murphy's paranoid character learns mantras like "Even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won't" from a fictional self-help group. The absurdist humor points to a serious truth about managing anxiety and catastrophic thinking.
The Burning Man bar featured a giant neon "Don't Panic" sign over a cozy geodesic dome decorated as an aquarium, playing groovy music. This setting created exactly the kind of calm, connected environment that counters modern digital overstimulation.
Barton's application goes beyond personal anxiety management to organizational leadership. Much of his role involves helping teams and individuals step back from reactive thinking and consider whether situations actually require the emotional intensity they're generating.
The practical benefits include better decision-making, improved team dynamics, and reduced burnout. When people can distinguish between genuine emergencies and perceived crises, they conserve energy for situations that actually matter and think more clearly when those situations arise.
The broader cultural critique addresses how modern technology and media create artificial urgency and fear. The constant barrage of notifications, breaking news, and social media outrage generates fight-or-flight responses to situations that don't actually threaten our wellbeing.
Solutions include deliberate disconnection—taking rafting trips, visiting places without cell service, or simply turning off devices for extended periods. Barton observes that when people disconnect for even a few hours, they naturally return to "mean reversion to human behavior"—playing games, making crafts, having conversations, and engaging in activities that actually make them happy.
The message isn't about dismissing real problems or avoiding necessary action. Instead, it's about creating space between stimulus and response, allowing for thoughtful consideration rather than reactive panic. In a world that profits from keeping people anxious and engaged, "Don't Panic" becomes a radical act of mental self-defense.
