Antidoters Podcast Jess Butcher

Entrepreneurs are optimists by nature and masters at turning problems into solutions.  Many of the best harness counter-intuitive thinking that plays on human emotion rather than rationality - as best articulated by the Prince of behavioural interpretation (who may or may not appreciate being verbed).  So how can we harness his antidoter ways of thinking to solve the teen smartphone problem? (or get him in a room with Jonathan Haidt for a brainstorm - I’ll make the tea and take notes).
My career has been shaped by seeking to fuel the innovations of optimists.  It’s why I’ve invested the last three years at Sweatcoin, an exciting business which took the huge problem of our increasingly sedentary, unhealthy lifestyles and turned it into an opportunity.  They believed (and have since proven with over 150M global users) that incentives and rewards can represent a paradigm shift in how we think about movement:  the difference between choosing to stand on a moving-up escalator or walk up it; of taking the stairs rather than the lift or proactively getting off a bus a stop early.  Each additional step = points which can be spent on a range of goods and services.  It provides daily nudges that have the power to impact life-long behavioural change.  
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Ultimately, the Sweatcoin vision is to create a ‘movement economy’, one to rival the attention economy - but unlike the latter, offering a win-win for all, connecting brands and users in a marketplace of reward and benefit, with the potential to save the taxpayer billions on preventable diseases. (Type2 Diabetes costs the NHS £14Bn a year, >10% of its total budget and more than the police, fire and judicial system put together(!!).  With news this week that diagnoses are up 39% for Under-40s in just 6 years, move more, people. Move more).    
Being a small part of Sweatcoin’s success leads me to wonder how such incentive-led solutions might be harnessed for other problems I care about.  Working closely with such do-ers also explains my frustration with the opportunity cost of so much navel-gazing social discourse and the negativity of tear-down strategies.  Too many super-smart people get stuck in awareness-raising-mode (often misdirected by biased data) or rage, seeking to dismantle rather than build to take bites out of problems. 
Rory Sutherland is the master of positive alchemy and counter-intuitive thinking. He wrote the book on it.  He is one of the most erudite, amusing and potentially irritating podcast guests, with his hosts struggling to get a word in edgeways as he goes off on tangents of whimsical anecdotes to highlight insights into behavioural science E.g. here, here, here  (lesson to podcasters: just let him rip).
He is particularly strong on how simple reframing can solve problems. E.g. repositioning the annoying bus that arrives to unload plane passengers as a VIP chauffeur direct to immigration to avoid the queues; how a fraction of the money earmarked for HS2 rail could have created greater opportunity if it went towards upgrading existing trains with greater comfort and reliable wifi for relaxation and deep work opportunities; or how the Uber live-map functionality is ‘a psychological moonshot’- not reducing waiting time but making it 90% less frustrating.   
As an Ad-man, he frequently references the many brands that have successfully played with perceptions, turning weaknesses into strengths - think Guinness’s ‘good things come to those who wait’, Stella’s ‘reassuringly expensive’ or Marmite’s ‘love it or hate it’.    
Some favourite quotes: 
“Engineers, medical people, scientific people, have an obsession with solving the problems of reality, when actually … once you reach a basic level of wealth in society, most problems are actually problems of perception.”
“The skill you need to win an argument

This week I’ve been overwhelmed by ‘bounce head’.  My term for something every working mother will understand:  the feeling of holding more to-dos and conflicting emotions in your head at any one time than it’s possible to get down on a list; that sees your focus bounce back and forth constantly, within seconds from the most mundane lifemin to the most important family, friend or working-life priorities.
Sometimes known as ‘the mother’s mental load’, here’s mine this week in no particular order but as they bounce around my bounce head:
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A CEO Linkedin strategy; de-flea-ing an unhappy cat; 2 x two-page-long packing lists for school residential trips; replacing a rotten window frame that has just fallen off its hinges; inviting 20 Health-tech leaders to an event in Amsterdam; messaging eight mums re. dates for a birthday sleepover;  two more chapters of the book draft I’ve promised a publisher by end of June; booking a summer holiday; (damn it, and camp bookings between those dates); a 5-page business award nomination; puppy training for a dog that won’t stop rolling in sh1t; getting the final slides in for a main-stage talk at London Tech Week; replacing cricket whites that now flap around the calves; refunding unhappy guests in a tired, requiring-update Airbnb; 378 pages of board-paper reading (and more importantly, thinking);  four waiting loads of washing; trying to find a pitch template I saved 2 years ago to share with an impressive social entrepreneur I’ve just met;  buying four birthday party gifts;  follow ups to four exciting meetings;  a marketing strategy for the local town market; walk the new puppy; and all this around the existential emotional worries: an act of utter carelessness that has hurt a much-loved friend; that one child has received next to no 1:1 attention of late or that another’s academic confidence is in decline -  oh, and a blog to write.  And it’s only Tuesday.  Aaaaaaaand breathe. 
Bounce head is not actually about the sheer volume of the to-do-list but the head f*ck that comes from moving from one highly emotive or important issue to five other mundane, urgent actions in the space of a single minute.  And I bet many mums could meet or raise me on that list in any given week.  Our heads are a constant melee of emotion, guilt, frustration, irritation, deadline pressure and exhaustion - we’re Neo in the Matrix, dodging bullets that just won’t stop coming.
We’re left with an inability to prioritise the deep work that is really important until we’ve cleared some of the mental load of the urgent - with much of the latter triggered by immediacy - a call from the school nurse; a customer complaint or the sports kit left in the footwell of the car that is required prior to the away-coach leaving at 1pm. 
This is the reason that I lose patience with the ‘productivity’ industry (primarily promoted by childless men).  Yes, it would be lovely to eat the frog, time-box, read more self-help books or just do the three important things that day.  To choose not to worry about the washing piles or the kitchen table covered in a detritus of scrunched-up uniform in bags, dropped flower heads and sticky stains - but for most mums, the urgent can’t wait for the important.  The sh1t hits the fan when it choses and it’s impossible to push the little irritations into the back brain to enable deep focus elsewhere.  Decks must be cleared. 
And much of this is female.  It plays out along gendered-lines in so many family homes around me and all over the internet with men stepping over the optimistic pile on the bottom step or able to focus perfectly well on their laptop amidst the scrunched up uniform and on top of the sticky stain.  (Here’s Sally from Home & Away crying as she has this phenomenon explained to her by a psychologist, quoting how much more biologically

Activism is in-vogue.  So much so, ‘Activist’ appears to now be a job-title according to LinkedIn and it’s perhaps no surprise given that rage has replaced sex as the hottest marketing tool (Scott Galloway is great on this here). Maybe it never left, and arguably, we have much progress to thank it for.  The right to protest is a fundamental democratic right that most of us in the West believe in wholeheartedly.  It can be hugely inspiring to observe and no doubt participate in crowds thronging together in a single, shared world-changing purpose.  Feeling like we’re ‘doing something’ and ‘making a difference’.  
As Yascha Mounk writes in the Spectator this week of the current protest : 
Its ostensible cause is hardly ignoble. It’s possible to be appalled both by the 7 October attacks and the tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths. It would be inhumane not to share the widespread horror at what is happening in Gaza. And anti-war rallies have, of course, long been part of the student experience, a hallmark of a free society. 
But as the above article goes on to demonstrate, I am not alone in fearing that the current angry, lawless iterations risk damaging their causes more than furthering them.

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Like many, I’ve watched the on-campus protests in the US and many others in recent years- increasingly imported to the UK - along with their descent into unruliness with a mixture of alarm and fear.  Where is the line between peaceful protest and anarchy? 
On the current issue, I utterly accept my own ignorance, despite having sought to read as widely as I can from all sides.  But given my ongoing ignorance of the complicated historical, religious and ideological context, I defer the debate to experts and instead, like many, to resort to favouring gut instincts based on my own values - democratic processes, respect for law, tolerance of difference, free speech, debate and the rules of modern warfare - all of which, frankly appear under threat.  It is alarming. And deeply upsetting to witness mass loss of civilian life, but personally I choose not to wade in and fuel any agenda with further ignorance. The issue on which I have Antidoter concerns this week is around modern activism itself. 
Primarily… does it actually work?  As far as I can observe, it seems to turn people away rather than towards the violent protestor’s cause (and I do draw a distinction between peaceful and violent), driving even deeper wedges down through society between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’.  Have we entirely lost the ability to converse respectfully on contentious issues, instead requiring shouting and worse - destruction and violence - to make ourselves heard? 
When passions run high, anger is unavoidable but common sense suggests it’s rarely the best strategy.  If we resort to dehumanising each other and violence, have we not already lost the argument?   As the saying goes - never negotiate with terrorists… and as any parent of toddler-terrorists knows, it is rarely effective.  To acquiesce to the demands or descend to the level of the screaming child rarely gets results, and worse, it risks damaging the causes the protesters care so much about.  
In our attention economy, it’s become performative and darker. As I’ve come to realise, it’s perhaps the most high-profile symptom of so many of the various issues I’ve discussed previously -  polarisation, privilege, victimhood and narcissism.  
Many (not all!) activists drink from a firehose of one-sided, angry, politicised content and then tribe-up in self-affirming bubbles of outrage to signal their global-good-person credentials vs the ‘unenlightened’. These days, it’s fuelled by binary short-form content which is performative by design, stoking fear and rewarding outrage.  The inten

How does one market the certainty of death to people?  It’s tricky if not impossible given we all prefer (need?) to believe we’re invincible. And yet the Death Industry is the most market-robust of all, patiently residing in the shadows of the internet awaiting a google-prompt at our hour of greatest, heart-breaking need: undertakers, coffin-makers, florists, wake-providers and head-stone carvers.  It serves a never-ending stream of customers via calm, soothing websites suffused with love-affirming quotes and calla lily images.
As you’ll know by now, I love a good snorkel around a new industry and this one intrigues me.  
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Specifically, the history-graduate-turned-tech-entrepreneur in me was troubled as to what the massive expansion of our digital footprint was doing to the historical record, both for society and for our own, personal memories. What will be left of our lives and the lives of those we love and will lose, with the days of discovering troves of handwritten love letters and sepia photos in a box in a cupboard now long gone? 
Yes, there is a lot more content that has been captured in this modern, digital age, but how accurate - and accessible - is it to those we leave behind?  How considered and thoughtful? The art of letter-writing has all but died, so which parts of our scrappy digital archive would we want people to know is actually ‘us’ amidst all the guff and digital detritus of grown-out-of opinions, out-of-context throw-away comments, ugly photos and old passions long-since discarded. On whose servers, and how safely does it reside for posterity?  
Death is the only certainty in life.  Remembering that can be a source of panic… or reassurance, depending on how we perceive it.  None of us are immune and it is a passage that every human in history has taken before us.  It’s the final, great equaliser.  
Like many others, it is the deaths of those I love that occupy my fears more than my own.  My experience of it - of a parent, a sister-in-law, a close friend - all of whom passed well before their time, are a constant source of pain, but one I’ve learnt to channel into gratitude for the life, health and love I have.  Little glimpses and memories of their vivid lives surround me: old articles and a hand-written diary from my father; my sister-in-law’s powerful, poignant art covering the walls of my mother-in-law’s house;  squirly, hand-written notes on the Christmas decoration gift boxes from my friend that I unwrap lovingly each year on decorating the tree.   
To know about your impending death, or not to know? That is the question.  Objectively, now that the shock has long subsided, in many ways I’m thankful for my father’s sudden death on a Winter’s morning on a mountain side- his favourite place in the world, with his family around him.  No fear or the cruelty and pain of a drawn out terminal illness.  But perhaps there are ‘advantages’ to the latter (if you can call them that):  an opportunity to prepare and think deeply about legacy and your loved ones.  A university friend wrote the most beautiful memoir of her life’s learnings for her twin six year olds during her terminal months. Kate Gross’s ‘Late Fragments:  Everything I Want to Tell You (About this Magnificent Life) is an achingly poignant reminder of the beauty and fragility of life which I have now re-read 4x (and gifted many times).  It is the most precious gift she could have left for her young sons in the absence of her own loving arms throughout their childhood.   
Perhaps this blog is a less profound version of mine to at least enable those I love to know a fraction of the myriad of thoughts that run through my head.  But will Substack still exist by the time my kids are of an age that they might be curious?  (Ironically, maybe i’ll produce a printed-out version for them in time

The self-belief industry (along with the exclamation mark) is off-the-charts thriving.  These days everything is all about soundbite self-empowerment. You-affirming slogans scream from posters on every wall, note-pad and card shop-shelf, t-shirt fronts, instagram grids and out of every music-speaker. 
Riffing further on the themes of last week, is it any wonder that there’s been such a decline in mental health in a society that constantly encourages us to look inwards, at ourselves, at how everything makes us feel and to examine what we’re getting (or not) out of any particular situation. 
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Stoking the ‘cult of me’ is a lucrative business. The ‘inside ourselves’ trends discussed last week is one manifestation, pop culture another with empowerment lyrics woven through so many top pop songs including  Katy Perry’s ‘Roar’,  David Guetta’s ‘Titanium’ or Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’.  Indeed, Taylor Swift has created a one-woman billion dollar industry about her inner monologue affirmations.  But perhaps the best examples are the huge growth of ‘life coaching’ and the success of the self-help book genre:  self-empowerment through self-empowering others, if you will.  You can subtly ‘stop giving a f*ck’ like Mark, embrace the power of Eckhart’s ‘now’, think ‘fast and slow’ like Daniel or adopt either Stephen’s ‘7 highly successful’ or James’ ‘atomic’ habits.   
But no, I’m not disparaging coaches or a whole genre of writing.  Indeed, as an entrepreneurial gold-digger, maybe I’ll join them.  ‘What’s the point of everything?’, along with ‘what’s the point of me?’ are the questions a huge market is currently seeking answers to - perhaps in response to the rise of societal cynicism and nihilism.  I have myself benefitted from a wonderful coach and many of these are fantastic books by talented writers distilling wisdom borne of centuries of population-wide insight.  But as we move from one concept to the next, perhaps feeling momentarily inspired and motivated, are we actually addressing what has created the underlying issues in our lives?   To learn about ‘me, me, me’ is the only place to look ‘someone else, someone else, someone else’? 
The more interesting question perhaps being: when does self-esteem tip over into narcissism?  Here’s a helpful primer from ‘Psychology Today’ yielded from deep research on page 1 of Google on the difference between the two:  
Whereas self-esteem refers to a person's subjective evaluation of their value and worth, narcissism refers to feelings of self-centeredness, self-importance, superiority, grandiosity, and entitlement. A person with high self-esteem thinks, “I am good.” A narcissist thinks, “I am special,” or “I am the best.”
Oh. Too late.  Here’s Lizzo to drive the point home:  
In case nobody told you today… You're special
In case nobody made you believe (nobody, no, no)... You're special
Well, I will always love you the same….  You're special
Of course, self-belief can be self-fulfilling.  Supremely confident people are enviable and impressive, so where’s the harm in infecting more people with that glow of self-belief?  If we stop dwelling on our insecurities and believe ourselves capable, we can radiate confidence, which breeds confidence, freeing us to get s**t done without the neuroses.  
But feelings are not facts. In fact, our feelings are rarely to be trusted… neither the negative, nor positive, I’m afraid.  Self-doubts take root and bloom, often when we’re tired, dejected or late at night when we should be sleeping.  Over-indulging leads us down a dark tunnel from which it can be hard to gain perspective.  But believing unquestionably that we’re awesome could be just as, if not more damaging.  I can’t help feeling it provides a superficial pick-me-up

If you think culture has become a bit ‘samey’ of late, you’re not wrong.  ‘Boring’, might be a better term.   Whether in fashion, music, film, advertising, thought-leadership or business, replication is the name of the game and ticking the buzzword-bingo boxes has become easy and predictable.:  ‘Sustainable’, ‘Diverse’, ‘Clean-living’, ‘Purpose-Driven’, ‘Productivity', ‘Mindfulness’ etc....  all safely within a rapidly shrinking Overton Window of ‘acceptable’ narratives.
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This is the age of copy-cat conformity and apparent cultural stagnation. Nine of the top ten grossing films of the last decade were sequels or franchises, pop music has got more similar over time, fan-fiction books flood into the top-performing genre (bafflingly, fairy-sex fantasy - who knew?)   The ‘Airbnb’ design aesthetic for interior design is now a thing, and punks, goths and emos have all but disappeared.
The familiar is comforting. Algorithms know this and reward it.  TV adverts are formulaic to an almost comical degree; social reels recycle formats and soundtracks- with Beyonce’s ‘Texas Hold’em’ the current thumb-scrolling accompaniment.  Even Linkedin has become awash with generic posts such as ‘here’s a (bleeding obvious) observation’, ‘‘40 things I learnt by 40’ (that frankly, you should have realised by 25), ‘My Top 10 Productivity Hacks’ (including the innovative, unplugged ‘walk’) and ‘The Problem with AI is…’ (normally written by AI).  Why?  Because they convert.  Add some outrage and you’re really on to a winner. Check out the free Everything is a Remix documentary for more - and you’ll see that it’s not necessarily all bad as much of our remixing culture is all about combining new with the old-and-familiar to help us understand the world better, plus achieve cut-through for the new.  As Stephen King comments ‘imitation precedes creation’. All innovation is ultimately copy… transform… combine.  
But we do still need to encourage rebels and mould breakers.  How can we teach true free-thinking to the next generation of innovators in an exploding-AI world which is inherently derivative and risks drowning us in copy-cat content?  A world where human quirk, creativity and unpredictability will become the point of difference. 
I suspect many activists would deem themselves rebels, but are they really?  Yes, they’re fighting ‘the system’ but activism is the new religion of purpose and it thrives within bubble-like tribes where adherents feel safe and welcome whilst indulging in mass confirmation bias. Many within ‘the system’ are typically sympathetic (academia and media especially) plus it’s much easier to advocate for simplistic tearing-things-down than for incremental progress on incredibly complicated, nuanced topics.  It’s rarely ‘risky’. Indeed, pushing back on activism can often prove more perilous to careers and reputation by provoking the ire of mobs. 
Better to play it ‘safe’, emulating tried and tested success or advocating for popular opinions than to go out on a limb in nearly any field.  The recent online documentary ‘Climate - The Movie’ utterly blew my mind on this point, honing in on the science and experiences of non-grata, yet incredibly eminent Nobel-award-winning sceptics and so-called ‘deniers’.  (A hugely worthwhile investment of time if - and only if - you’re intrigued by the possibility of having everything you’ve thought on the subject challenged.  Note: Most aren’t. Please feel free to share any strong rebuttals of it with me as I honestly don’t know what to do with this new insight 🤯).
So where can we go for genuine inspiration now?   ‘Inside ourselves’ seems to be one answer.  
Recently we’ve seen the mainstreaming of serious-enquiry into micro-do