TRIGGERnometry - Jess Butcher on Women in Tech, Social Media and a Positive Vision of Men and Women

Episode Date: May 19, 2019

Jessica Butcher MBE (@jessbutcher) is a technology entrepreneur, angel investor, speaker, board director and co-founder of Blippar, a world-leading technology platform and one of Britain’s best-funded technology scale-ups. Jess is the recipient of numerous female entrepreneur and tech awards including Fortune’s Most Powerful female entrepreneurs and BBC’s Top 100 Women. Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/trigger... https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishol. And this is a show for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about. And Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts. We ask the experts. Our fantastic guest this week is a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of Tick. Just But you're welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you for having me. Before we get into the interview, I just noticed Francis has replaced the word of with the word with, which you've been getting a lot of shit on YouTube for. I know I have. And social peer pressure is finally, you've crumbled me.

Yeah, I know I have crumbled. You've sold out. I know he's not geratically correct, but it's a colloquialism of where I come from. But due to you vicious bullying bastards, you've impinged on me. And it's made me sad anyway. You've made him improve his grammar. Sorry, Jess. That was just totally random.

Very warm welcome to Trigonometry. We obviously know exactly who you are. But tell us a little bit about four of youers. What's your journey through life? How are you where you are, how have you ended up sitting in the chair and what you currently sit? Oh, the short version. I'll give you the short version. I'm from the Midlands. I've worked very hard at losing the accent. I am the product of a very happy middle class upbringing, two siblings, very supportive parents.

And I've been in London since graduation. I had the scrappiest messiest CV or ever where I kind of jumped jobs every two years because I'd get bored or I couldn't be managed but there was a theme there was a theme to all of it which was one of just really enjoying

working on the front end as in the sales and the marketing of disruptive new businesses that were trying to change behaviours and I guess what I always was on which I now am to cut to the end of the story is I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, I always wanted to build businesses, I always wanted to be my own boss, I guess. But it took me a long time, I guess, to get the confidence and, of course, the golden bullet of an idea to do that. So I kept riding the coattails of all these other entrepreneurs in my 20s in a very scrappy way and learning from some of the best and also some of the worst about, you know, how to build businesses.

And then I met my business partners at my first company, which was blippoor. which I started in 2011. And that was for some years, one of the big tech success stories that came out of the UK. We were the global pioneer in the augmented reality space. My job, again, sales, marketing, communications,

building brands and media interest, helping with investment. And it was a thrilling ride. We went global. We were talking on stages all over the world and really, you know, disrupting something. And I loved the story of that. And it was certainly the most on and alive

I've ever felt on my life building that business. And that's just given me the hook. And I'm now, I was for a couple of years, I moved into a sort of advisory consulting role where I was working with a lot of other startups, helping to scale them, give them advice, did some investing consultancy. And then a year ago I got my head turned

and now I am back at the bottom of the pile building another tech business. for my sins, a really, really exciting, very, very ambitious micro video platform business for user-generated, how-to content. And yeah, I'm back at the on the roller coaster again. It's very exciting. So you're a woman in tech. I am. So you're definitely oppressed, as we know. It's hugely oppressed. I'm a woman in tech and I'm a female entrepreneur.

So I am double intersectionally oppressed with those two labels. And yeah, and I guess because I, the journey between Blipper and Tick involved a couple of years where I stepped out of the front seat of that business because I had three children in four years. Wow. Yeah, a bit foolish with hindsight, obviously hugely rewarding. But it just meant that I was kind of less inclined to do the 100-hour work weeks, I lived my life on a plane and I needed to reclaim some balance and frankly sanity to my day-to-day. So I had sort of a year and a half, two years at home.

And it was during that time that I really started to think about in more depth and explore this apparent oppression, or not oppression, this sort of discrimination within these two fields that I was so closely connected with and which I was being invited to talk about on platforms all the time. And there are a number of sort of catalysts to my thinking at that time. The first was my mother, actually, I took her to a speaking event that I was at where I was being in. interviewed about how hard it was to be a woman in tech. And I was very good at this line. I had all the stories and things. And it was only afterwards that she sat me down over a glass of wine.

And she said, tell me, has it been hard? How has it been hard? I really genuinely just want to understand how it's been hard for you. And I kept telling these stories. And she said, that's not your story. That's someone else's story. That's not your story.

That's someone else's story. Have you found it hard? Because what I've seen is that you're getting more opportunities to speak on platforms and any of your male business partners, you keep getting these award nominations that none of your male business partners go, you get a lot of PR and column inches. Have you found it hard? And the way she grilled me on this, I kind of thought, hmm, I am using other people's stories and I am saying this sort of stock line on my actual fact, it hasn't been hard. I've actually loved being a minority within

my two spheres because it does enable me to stand out. It enables me to get recognition. And then I also started to think about how I've got all those opportunities. And I realized that so much of it had come from the love and support of the men in my life. You know, those men who really believed in me, which started with my incredible father who just brought me up thinking I could be and do anything the boys could be. There was no concept of, you're going to find it harder than your brother. None of that. You know, whatever you want to be, you can be, you know, how can I help you? You know, what should we talk about today? What's interesting you at the moment? And then business bosses that I had, mentors that I had, people that I looked up to,

they always supported me and pushed me forward and gave me opportunities. And I'm now fortunate enough to be married to a wonderful man who does that, who really enjoys my success, is a bore at dinner parties and always wants to tell people what I've been doing. And who, You know, my wife's got an MBA, and I'm, stop, but how embarrassing is that? And then I started to think, well, actually, some of the people that I've had the biggest challenges in my professional life are being women.

I'm not allowed to say that. You know, that is, but ultimately, I don't subscribe to this identity box definition. I'm not a female entrepreneur, and I started to resent that. You know, I'm just an entrepreneur, and I want recognition for building great businesses. I don't want people that buy my product because I'm a woman.

I don't want any special favours because I'm a woman. But I always felt this slight sense of conflict because obviously I do have a product to sell. So if there's positive discrimination to be taken advantage of, then absolutely I will do that. Yeah, of course. And I also feel a conflict because it's not like I'm saying the whole narrative is wrong. I do believe that women respond very well to role models. And I understand a lot of the initiatives behind these awards and the publicity and the media narrative around getting more women into the public eye and getting them to share their story. Because younger women, including myself when I was younger, are hugely affected by seeing people like them succeeding.

And that is very empowering as far as being able to identify with that and see yourself in that position. And of course we come in all different shapes and sizes. It's not the sort of Deborah Medan-esque dragon in business. It's, you know, sort of scrappy skateboarding girls and pink-haired girls and every colour, every age, introverts, extroverts. You know, it's really important. I think women do get influenced by that. So a lot of what's happening within, I guess, the diversity industry in my two fields,

I support and I'm actively involved in. but I stop or draw the line when it comes to the over-emphasis around discrimination and disadvantage because I think when you start tipping into negativity and definition of ourselves around our gender, I have less time for that because I ultimately don't think it does girls and women any favours. And do you think there is a problem with the tech industry and women in particular and attracting women, do you think it's male-dominated? And therefore, it's harder for a woman to make a way? I know you've got your story,

but somebody else's story can be different, for example. Yeah. Oh, there's no question it's male-dominated. There's no question about that. To the second point, is it harder for a woman to make their way? No, I don't believe it is. I mean, if they're going to feel uncomfortable in a majority male environment,

then they might feel less inclined to it. But I don't believe it's harder. I think that there's been an overcorrection there. And there's a lot of positive discrimination for women coming into the technology space, which I don't agree with either, because I'm perhaps naively a meritocrat and I believe it should always be best person for the job.

But it's a vibrant, buzzy, exciting sector and very few women that I know that come into it, have day-to-day anxiety within that sector. And also, tech isn't really an interesting, I also get a bit crossed with that as a definition. Everything's tech. There's no business in the world right now that isn't tech in some way. And there's so many creative media communications, product opportunities that aren't pure coding.

But we seem to obsess on that underrepresentation within the technology job specifically. And the fact that that's apparently having an impact on how products are designed and they don't have women in mind. and that certainly has been the case and some high profile examples of that, so I'm glad to see some of that being corrected. But I don't feel, I feel a fantastic industry for women, and most of the women, all the women I see, are doing tremendously well within it. And I would love to see more women in it, but I'm afraid I believe in the differences, the average differences,

between the predilection of men and women. And it's born at time and time again in the data as far as they're, and interests in certain types of fields of science, for example, and more people, softer social interests than things. There is evidence for that and I find it compelling. Before we get into that, I just wanted to go back for a moment. Can I just stop? I just want to make it clear to everyone here that I don't see gender.

No, I don't. Call me, Bob. Call me Bob. Call me Bob. It's interesting that your girlfriend is female. How did that happen? Well, I was attracted to Aurora. Anyway, carry on.

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Go to avocado green mattress.com slash trigger to check out their mattress and furniture sale. That's avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Okay. Well, there you are. I was going to ask you if we go back a little bit before we get into the details of the kind of men and women, all the rest of it.

I was interested that you've had a journey of kind of almost a transition from a particular way of talking about this issue to a totally different one. What do you think it was that made you talk about, you know, discrimination and all that stuff from that perspective in the first place? That is really interesting and it was a journey. It was actually quite accidental.

It was something I was feeling sort of disillusioned with for a long time, but also very, very nervous about putting my head above the parapetons because I was conscious that I'd be swimming against the stream that, frankly, I work within. All these people are great friends of mine. Sorry to interrupt. I actually meant when you were talking about how there is discrimination, what was it that pushed you to?

to do that in the first place before you chose. Ah, because that was what everyone was staying. It's really hard to be within these sectors. I mean, that's what the, that would almost be the title of the session that I'd be in. So it was inviting us to all relay those moments when we'd been the only woman in a room and the client has been talking,

that we've been talked over or, you know, someone had directed comments to junior male colleagues in next to us. So I guess I was, yeah, I, I guess I heard so many of those stories that I felt, well, I must have some to contribute. And there is a problem here. And there has been a problem there, I should say. You know, I don't believe that that problem totally no longer exists.

I'm very far from that. And, you know, I think it's important that they're aired. But it's when we get to a stage that now we're looking for everywhere. And that's kind of where we are now. And that troubles me. I'll give a really cool example actually because this week on Twitter I saw about 12 of my friends resharing this tweet where a woman had applied for a credit card and she put her title as doctor and then her gender as female and this alert had come up to say, you know, we don't recognize that title or that gender. And of course, she was horrified and within 24 hours, 14.5,000 likes and shares. And I just thought, seriously, I work in tech.

I know that those two fields are not in any way connected on the back end and that no computer is going to see those. And sure enough, you know, I followed this thread down and some guy had replicated exactly the same user experience bug that had happened on the tech platform. And yet the Huff Poe had picked it up. They all wanted to talk about this sort of misogyny in this product. And this credit card company is basically getting demonised for what is a stupid UX technical bug. But it was the mob mentality. There was almost this glee. Oh, look, we found another example of it.

And I kind of just thought, how is this doing women any favors? And it's not fair to the company. I feel sorry for them. I mean to fire a UX guy or look into the back end a bit. But that's not what this was, it had nothing to do with that. And that to me is so symptomatic of where we've got to with the narrative that looks for it everywhere. You know, Pepper Pig's dad fixes the computer and not the mom. This is a gender stereotype.

Take aside the fact that Pepper Pig's dad's a fucking idiot. And the men's rights hate Pepper Pig. Do they? Oh, yeah. because they think that he's just betrayed as such a fool in everything that he does, which he is. My husband hates it. This is what our children are growing up to.

But the fact that he fixed the computer and his wife didn't is evidence of this sort of subconscious indoctrination that we're doing of children about gender roles. So as I said, be a mum of three children under five and watch enough pepper pig and you'll know that you've actually got that entirely the wrong way around. I would never have predicted that we would have gone. on to pepper pig. Sorry about it.

In the context of everything, there's a scandal now about how there's some kind of children's book that talks about fire men as opposed to fire people. Prime and Sam is the other big course de jour on the how we're indoctrinating children. And I'm like seriously, give children

some credit. You know, it's they just, I just don't believe they see it. It's insidious and it's waving. I don't think it is anymore. I'm glad that somebody at one stage said, actually, you know, there's a little too much of this going on. But I don't find girl power a particularly compelling message from my daughter either.

I, you know, I find that all a bit, I went into paper chase, and there's this whole row of glittery, sparkly girl power, you know, we can do it. Defeat the patriarchy. Yeah. And I just don't know, work with them. You're not a girl first. You're you, you're kitty. you're your own unique individual

and you have more in common with people that share your values, your outlook, your upbringing, arguably, than you do with anyone because they happen to share the number of chromosomes. And that, to me, is what's worrying. We distill people down and then we exacerbate the difference. And that's across all identity politics,

not just the gender debate. Do you think it's a problem as well with these types of messages where somebody would go, oh, I'm not going to go into tech because somebody like me isn't welcome, or there is a problem with it? That's where my angle is entirely.

So I did a TEDx on this, and this was what I was alluding to earlier, the fear I felt for putting myself out there on this line. My argument is that, firstly, I'm an optimist. I do believe that women have many, many more opportunities than the narrative would have you believe. And secondly, I feel that this victimhood narrative is really damaging.

for how women perceive themselves. So I think it's only going to exacerbate the confidence gap that is already existent in more women than men as a trait. As an average trait, women are much more subject to imposter syndrome in the confidence gap than men are. And I was, a woman with all the opportunities in the world, a fantastic education, a great upbringing.

I still had that imposter syndrome. I shouldn't have had that. So if I'm having it, and I see it amongst so many of the women that I mentor, that I work with, There is this sort of, we say what we're good at, we don't oversell ourselves. You know, we ask for what we want, we don't ask for more than that. You know, we apply for jobs where we can do 80% of the job spec, whereas a guy's more likely to do it at 30, 40%.

There is this just sort of more innate risk aversion in women. And I feel that the narrative encourages that further. It does two things. One, it will make them more anxious about certain fields where they're told they're going to be discriminated. against, you know, they're not going to be walking into those quite as bullish and as confidently as I think they would otherwise. And what was the second thing? I forgot on the second thing.

Oh, the second thing is that this narrative lets them off the hook. And that's not good for them. You know, in my fields, when I meet with young female entrepreneurs, the number of times I've heard people say, or I didn't get that funding because, you know, they don't invest in women or they're not, you know, it was a gender. reason why I wasn't taken as seriously in that scenario. I've now got, I guess, the experience, the age of gravitas and I'm mentoring them to actually say to them, no, actually, I was in your pitch. It wasn't good. You know, don't let yourself off the hook. You know, you need to take feedback as an

individual and you need to constantly self-improve and look at what you can do. And even arguably, even if it was due to discrimination, the most productive reaction to that is not wounded insecurity, you know, go cry to someone about how you might have been, you know, gender discriminated against. But it's to actually go, well, come on then, I'll show you, and take the onus to circumvent the situation in some way. You know, resilience.

It should be about resilience. And I feel that the narrative of discrimination in victimhood undermines both that confidence and also that resilience and also the individual onus to take ownership of how you put yourself forward and to mould yourself, change yourself to the circumstances as required, which everybody needs to as an individual, man or woman, that's not gendered.

The point you make is really important, I feel, because a lot of the time, you know, there seems to be this narrative that women are more impressed than ever, But I used to be a teacher. I was a teacher for 10 years. Girls are outperforming boys on every level in academia. Every level. And then when they go to university, they're outstripping boys.

I mean, boys seem to be the one struggling, especially when it comes to the school level. Yeah. And that's another area of the debate that's incredibly fraught with nastiness and unpleasantness. Because obviously in reaction to a lot of the feminist line, you've now got men's rights, trying to, excuse me, draw attention to, you know, where those disparities exist.

But the data does speak for itself, and I find it pretty compelling, you know, whether it's outperformance at university, whether it's the fact that women in their 20s and 30s are earning just as much, sometimes more than men. And it's really striking when, in my field, again, when you look at STEM data, and, you know, the ratios there apparently being so off whack, but they are off whack if you only take a very narrow definition of STEM, which is engineering and computer science and, you know, that type of science. If you take in social science, behavioral science, medical science, anything of a biological nature, women are 75% within those fields of science. And nobody's saying we need to level up

both sides. You know, we're only saying there aren't enough women in computers. I agree. I would love to see more women in computing and engineering. I think they have so much to contribute and different balance of the types of products that we're building. But in order to achieve that, we need to talk them out of other. They're not going to just create these women out of nowhere. We need to talk them out of the other choices

that they're making. And I would certainly personally err on the side of choice. I don't believe women should be talked out of things that they want to go into. And there's certainly the sort of women are picking those behavioral or biological sciences as opposed to the technical hard sciences. Pretty bright women, you know,

if they're picking those sciences. So I trust them to make those judgments. And I don't either wanna be talking women out of careers in arts and social work and media and the creative fields. Hell known, not out of education, but nobody's saying less women in teaching, please, let's have more men in teaching. So it's.

Because men are toxic. But all the conversations are being had in silos in the underrepresented fields, you know, whether that's in finance or it's in tech. And that to me is, you know, you can't have them in isolation. And the boys' arguments and the men's underrepresentation is never discussed. And indeed, you know, the different lifestyle disadvantages that men as a group experience, you can't even bring up. Like what?

There's so many. There's so many and there's suicide rates, there's homelessness rates, rates of depression, rates of school dropout, workplace deaths, deaths in service of course, on frontline. You've got sentencing court disparity, men receiving 60% longer sentences for the same crimes as women, child custody, paternity cases, domestic abuse, which actually, a heavy percentage of men, you know, suffer from that and we never hear about that. But it's, I don't know that it's helpful to fight fire with fire. I think sometimes the context is required to help broaden

and open up the Overton window a little bit and I think that's where some of the more moderate voices like myself are trying to just say, well hang on, let's look at the full picture before we dive deep into one particular area. But then you get into a stage where there's this sort of competitive victimhood, which I think is where the men's rights movement falls down.

There's a lot of very smart people trying to make these arguments. And I guess just as the feminists or the progressive feminists would say, we've got to overcorrect in order to get back to a normal, I suppose the men's rights feel likewise, and overcorrect and overstress these things in order to at least get some awareness for them, particularly in this sort of clickbait, you know, headline grabbing media world and online world that we now live in.

but it's just, it's victimhood by another name. That's my biggest worry with it. That's my concern. That's my biggest worry with it because it encourages people to go to the other extreme as well. And for men, men's rights movement is never going to be a particular success because people don't tend to feel sorry for men in the same way that they feel sorry for women. It's just a fact of life, you know. I feel sorry that we don't feel sorry.

I feel sorry for men that we don't feel sorry for men. But that's, again, you talk about realities. It's the biological reality in my opinion because you look at, you talk about male deaths and the workplace and all the rest of it. Men evolved, we evolved to be disposable in a way that women are not. If you think about two tribes of ten people each, right? Let's say five men, five women in each tribe. The tribe that sends its men off to war, only one man comes back.

You can replenish your tribe at the same rate. If you send your women off to war, it's not the same. So men are disposable biologically in a way that women are not. And I think that until we have no war, until no one needs to be a fight, firefight or whatever, that will not change because that's how men evolved to be and women evolved to be different.

You talk about risk-taking, etc. We've had evolutionary psychologists on the show talk about where that comes from, you know, the risk-taking, risk-aversion differences between men and women. It's evolution, right? And this is why it's so important to take it and around, as you say,

because you can't just focus on one thing and go, well, men are more likely to die at work. Yes, it's true. It is true, and we don't feel as sorry for men as we do for women, but there's advantages to being a man, there are disadvantages to being a man. There's advantages to being a woman, there are disadvantages to being a woman. And what we have to do, I think, as a society, is get rid of discrimination, but remember that we're not the same. Sure.

And one of the great things about women is women are different to men. So I reckon if you had more women in banking, for example, in 2006, 7, 8, with really powerful voices, I don't know if we would have had a financial crash in quite the same way, because it would have been the super hyper-risk hungry people making those decisions. If you had some women who are more risk-averse with a strong voice in that boardroom, we may not have had the same problems, which is why I really think it's important that we do have people of both sex as represented. But that has to come through, as you say, through opportunity, equality of opportunity,

not by forcing people into those positions, right? That sounds like a party political broadcasts the Women's Equality Party. Yeah, but I think it's an important point to make. It is an important point to make, and that leads me very nicely on. Jess, do you believe in quotas? No.

Surprise. They're not believe in quotas at all. I don't think any self-respecting minority boxed tick wants to feel like they're there because they're a boxed tick. I think some people will tell themselves that this is required in order to correct an imbalance.

But I think it does nobody any favours. It might correct that imbalance in the short term. I think there's nobody any favours in the medium to long term. So no, I'm not fun. I mean, there's a counter-argument to that where there is unconscious bias in that you're not aware that you have a bias, but you know, you only hire people that, you know,

look or sound like you or have the same background as you, hence why everybody at the BBC comes from the same. college at Oxford or Cambridge or whatever else. Do you believe that it doesn't sort of counterbalance that and force people to look outside the box, as it were? Well, yeah, I mean, this concept of unconscious bias is now accepted. Yeah.

And yet, I understand it has been entirely debunked scientifically. It's just nobody wants to report that. I've read articles that have actually done the research and say it's been debunked. However, I do believe there's a little bit of people like me hiring that goes on. But I don't believe that that is around identity boxes. I believe it's around upbringing values, you know, social behaviours, you know, if they went to schools, you know, you've automatically got that point of reference with that individual. And you might

know some of the same people. You know, London's a small place in many respects. So I do think it happens a bit although you know I have read that that unconscious bias is is massively overstated and I I want to give people the benefit of the doubt that there is more meritocracy and and judgment employed in those things but it's the lack of diversity on ideology people type and background and and viewpoints socio-economic diversity that I think is the biggest risk and the diversity I think we should be focusing on as opposed to the visible diversity boxes.

It should be much more about getting more psychological diversity. That's where, because at the moment, the identity box, sorry, I've got off on from one now, the identity box ticking only serves to help the people, you know, of colour or the women. I've gone to the same universities that, you know, have had the fortunate, you know, well-supported upbringings with, you know, parents that believed in them and you know and and I've heard the argument that well that's where you start and then you create the role models to bring more people through the system but at the moment I see I see the recipients of a lot of the diversity industry are those people that that that we're doing pretty well

already as a result of you know how fortunate they were with education or or with attitude you know some people are just born more intelligent born you know more driven and So how do we get access to those types of people, you know, the people who grow up, who want to achieve, but don't always come from the most affluent backgrounds, don't always have the wealth of opportunity? Because one thing that really angers me

is the whole internship culture that I see happening now. And that it didn't happen when I graduated university, but after 2008, I think it gave companies a little bit of carte blanche to start going, I'll come and work for free, and then we'll see if you get a job or not. Okay, I think from what I've seen, and I'm not an expert at this, and you just asked possibly the biggest societal challenge question of all, how do you bridge socioeconomic background? I don't have the answer to that. How do you get a better melting pot of people from all those different backgrounds?

I do know that the tide has turned on that free internship thing now. No serious business offers a free internship anymore because they have recognised that that is not the way, it's not fair, and it only were. those that can afford to do it as opposed to those that can't and you know and I'm very encouraged by you know the people I know within the business community that absolutely accept that and go out of their way to engage with schemes that are about access for those that don't aren't fortunate enough to have lots of parents you know within the school community that can offer those those free work experience there's some brilliant initiatives

whether it's the founders for school initiatives or the Workfinder app or access aspiration I think it's called that are deliberately around and creating networks of mentors and schemes and opportunities for those that don't have them within their existing community and school networks. I'm a big, big, big fan of those. And do you think we should obligate companies to, I mean, maybe look at, if you're making a certain amount of money and profit,

that you should be maybe obligated or, you know, to bring people in from different socioeconomic backgrounds, or do you think it should be more free market? I do, I err on free market on most issues in life, but I don't see the harm in telling, strongly saying you need to get involved in your communities in better ways. But it doesn't have to be companies coming into business, but it can be companies going into schools. Yeah.

And that's the big way that I'm witnessing and I'm a big part of now actually on the advisory board of this fantastic initiative called Founders for Schools, which you is now too narrowly defines, not just founders, it's all business people now going in. And it can be the 21-year-old graduate scheme guy, or it can be a 60-year-old CEO that goes in because everybody's got some mentoring that they can offer to those further down the ladder to them.

Whether we need to mandate it, I'd say probably not, but I think if you're a responsible business, and you do it, it makes you more appealing to people that then want to apply to you. actually self-promotional in some ways to do more of this. It's getting your brand into these schools for the talent to be aware of as they get there as they graduate. And this is a question that I've always wanted to ask because I'm a former teacher. You're someone who works in business,

you're a leader. What do you think about this generation of young people? Because it seems to me that a lot of people in the media say, oh, you know, the education system, it doesn't produce, you know, good workers, you know, the next generation, they're awful, they're dreadful. Where do you stand on this new generation? Do you think they're ready for work when they come out? Or do you think... Which generation are talking about? Millennials are obviously already in the workplace?

Are we talking about Generation Y, Generation 3rd, and I-Gen. I'm an optimist. I think there's going to be so much talent coming through. But my biggest concerns and another debate that I've tapped into after I started going down the rabbit hole of feminism was... And also now as a parent is how we're bringing up children. And my concern, and obviously I'm very tuned in also to the sort of snowflake culture conversation

and this culture of safetyism that is in universities now. So the generation at university now is the one that was kind of brought up with smart devices and social media and below. And I've really started going into depth now on what's happening to teenagers. how are devices and social media and screen time affecting their upbringing and you know their sense of self and I feel sorry for them in many ways you know I think they think that this is the most fun and as far as technology is concerned ever but it's also created this culture of sort of always on mental health

anxiety desire for dopamine and you know the kids now kind of to have to have a personal brand from the age of sort of 11, 12, 13. And there's this constant focus on self that really worries me. And I think what we're doing, and there's some fantastic research done by a woman called Gene Twenge in the States, which I stumbled across through a fantastic book, which has been a big influence on me, Jonathan Hates and Greg Lukianoff's coddling of the American mind, that talks about how an 18 year old today is now more like a 15 year old 10 years ago because they've been kept so safe in a not allowed to go out not allowed to have Saturday jobs

you know not allowed to walk to school before the age of sort of 12 13 there's this sort of terror that there's so many evils in the world now that we really want to protect our children and we're no longer preparing our children for the road but the road for the child and that this this coddling has dramatically impacted how resilient children are and made them nervous of bogey men around every corner and really had a big impact on the maturity levels when they reach university which is why a lot of them want protecting from bad words nasty conversations ideas that they don't want to confront by the time they get there and i think that's a very very real phenomenon some people say it's overstated but

I think it is a real phenomenon. I think that technology has been a big factor in that, although I also think it's down to parenting styles and the things within the educational system that no one has to win anymore. We've all got to be, you know, we've all just got to take part of teams. And, you know, there's so much going on around how we're bringing up children and educating children.

And I think when he's thrown this massive missile of a 24-7 weapon of a smartphone, for teenage girls to exact passive aggression on each other in the middle of the night by leaving them out of photographs or groups. You know, we've, it's, there's a very, very toxic, massively, rapidly changing environment that kids are being brought up in now. And how much responsibility do you think the tech companies have to these types of users? Because there's a huge debate going on now.

Does Facebook have responsibility? Does Instagram have responsibility? Is it the parents' responsibility? responsibility? I do think big tech has responsibility. This is my industry and I'm tuned into all these debates about what they could and should be doing. The first thing I'd say is I think some of these are inadvertent byproducts and a lot of people will say that they're mirrors on behaviours. They're just made more accessible for the behaviours that teenagers engage in anyway. And I think they have to look at how they

moderate content, what they allow and the behaviours, but the fundamental problem with all of big tech is their business models, particularly social media business models, which are determined and reliant on dopamine, dopamine, eyeballs and time spent online. So ultimately, the longer you're online, and it's dopamine that fuels the amount of time you spend online, the more money they make. Now, that is a problem, and I don't see how they can correct that overnight, you know, that we need children to get offline. It's been scientifically proven that mental health and online, poor mental health and online time is directly correlated, more time offline, you know, a better mental health.

And I think, you know, the social media neuroses, the neurosis that's caused by social media is a massive problem. So I think tech is the problem. I think parents need to watch this, I think, has caught them unawares. because a lot of it's been happening in the bedrooms, and we're all playing catch-up on how quickly these behavioral trends have happened. But I also think tech is the solution.

So there's my entrepreneurial optimism for you. I think that different business models, different communications around what's happening. And I also think that there's a new narrative and appreciation of the dangers of tech that's only just starting now to get serious. The last two years we've had this sort of whimsical, oh, God, I'm addicted to my phone.

Isn't it awful? I sleep with it by my bed. And, you know, there's too much time. And then looking at screen time reports and thinking, God, what else could I have done with that four and a half hours today? Is that just me? It's probably more for us. Yeah, absolutely.

But the tide has moved from that sort of whimsical sort of incredulity about our tech use to actually now thinking, I resent this. There's something really not quite right about this. The fact that people aren't looking at each other on the street. The fact that we're constantly being distracted whilst we're in the middle of something and we're happy to be distracted about it. The fact that you can walk around the Louvre and 80% of people have got their back to the art,

taking selfies of the art and not looking at it. There's something profoundly depressing that I think people are now realizing about the negative byproducts of these sorts of behaviours. And I think that this will result in a lot changing. And I believe consumers vote with their eyeballs. You know, we've already invited all our parents onto Facebook and have left them there. You know, and it will change the behaviours and platforms will go as quickly as they've come. And I believe that new tech will come up like my business, which empowers altruism, which empowers knowledge.

passion sharing and inspiration in order to drive people offline. So that's my business, basically. I'm trying to take that Instagram stories format and repurpose it into people creating content. It isn't about them and their face and whether they're looking gorgeous today. But it's about what they love, what they're good at, what they've learned to do, and empowering other people to do it in less than one minute so that they can get offline and actually do it. and putting that in an open web bank that can be searched, that can be found, almost like Wikipedia,

and can be built upon by other people who've got other ideas and things that they've learned. It's a really powerful thing that you're doing because I can't remember there was a piece of research done that actually you feel best about yourself, not when you achieve something, but actually when you help another person. Absolutely. The dopamine hits is much more profound than a...

Oh. Yeah. You know, if somebody actually says to you, wow, you know, I love that, that cake that you taught me about. That's not a great example. Cake is incredible. Cake can be incredible. But say it's like learning how to fix something or learning how to do something offline or a new yoga pose or, you know, or crafting. You know, and they say, oh, I did that.

And then I changed the colour scheme and I added this to it and look what I built. And if somebody sends you that image or the video of what they've created off the back of something that you taught them how to do, you're just going to have this sense of, oh, you know, that child got that toy that their parent made for them or they had that party and they had that really fun game because I told them what that game was and they found it out because of me.

So I don't know how naive it is to think that we're going to shift the tide immediately because that, somebody likes me, somebody loves me, dopamine hit is the most powerful motivator on earth. You know, everybody, it's got status in it, it's got validation, it's got friendship, and that's what all those business models are powering.

And I believe we can power it in a way that delivers something that is more fulfilling in the long term. And Tick, my business is trying to work out how we get those hooks firing. Helping those less fortunate than you're always very important. That's why I like working with Francis. I'm kidding, but in terms of you, obviously someone is very optimistic and just to take, we've got about 10, 50 minutes left,

to take us back to the whole conversation about men, women, all of that. How do we move to a more constructive way of talking about these things? Because, you know, we had that horrible shooting in New Zealand recently. It will be a couple of weeks by the time this episode goes out, probably. And you have the leader of the Women's Equality Party in this country I can't remember her name, coming out and saying this was all, this is just toxic masculinity. That's the cause of this stuff. And it seems like we're using everything now to make these very narrow political points about men and women and all the stuff.

So how do we move forward positively from here? Hmm. You've never been asked that question before. I have. There's a very good TED talk that I did where I talk about my, positive solutions as I see it. I think we need to broaden the context of the whole discussion. And that's, I guess, another one of my biggest concerns.

There's the undermining of confidence in women in the victimhood mentality, but there's also the fact that we're seemingly not allowed to have so many of these discussions. And we need to stop shutting people down for broadening them or asking things in different direction. to allow men to be in the debate more, not just on one side. They're allowed in the debate as long as they're singing from this song sheet that, you know, all men bad or women good.

And that's just so binary and it's unfair and it's not accurate and there's nothing positive about that narrative. And that's what concerns me. You know, we shouldn't be teaching girls about powerful girls. We should be teaching boys about powerful girls, you know, and powerful people generally. and appreciating that, you know, we're all individuals, first and foremost, and beautiful, crazy, you know, different, unusual,

you know, distinct in our own rights. And I guess that's what I wanna see, because what's happening is it takes oxygen away from areas where I believe prejudice and discrimination does still exist, you know, whether that's socioeconomic or whether if you just wanna keep it on feminism, you know, everything that's happening with,

women and hijabs in the Middle East, you know, that's real desperate feminism in action that isn't being supported and has got nothing to do with, you know, air conditioning and officers or whatever, yeah, or man spreading and mansplaining and... You know, there's so much oxygen being lost on the little things when there's so many big issues to come up. with and I think having a more healthy and open debate around it, one that isn't gender pay gap equals discrimination, but actually, oh, interestingly, gender pay gap also can reflect choice and positive decisions that women make to reclaim more balance in their lives and,

you know, we won't go off on that, I know you've done quite a bit on gender pay gap previously, but... You are a good example of that. You talk about yourself having three children or four years and how that changed your attitude to your working life and everything else, right? So tell us more about that. Well, I would like to see more women like me publicly saying that, because the number of people that have come up to me

after I've put myself on the line a little bit about this and said, oh, thank you. You know, I totally agree with you. You know, I've chosen to spend time, you know, these years at home. You know, I've chosen to, I don't want to make partner anymore. Why would I want to do that? It's a masochistic, unpleasant life of long hours, no balance, politics and stress. Life is too short.

and, you know, I, this is what I choose, and the gender pay gap between me and my husband is now 90%, 100%. And men, of course, often say, thank you for saying this, because I'm not allowed to. I'm not, why aren't you allowed to? You've got a wife you love dearly,

you've got daughters that you care about. You know, you do not not have a vested interest in this debate. But that won't save you now. That's the thing. It's like both Francis and I partner, like I talk to my wife about this, and she's probably more against this stuff than I am. in some ways.

She's probably less understanding of all this victim than I am. Because I'm like, well, but this happens, but this happens. And she has a very similar to you. She's like, well, you just, you know, of course there's discrimination, but you power through it

or you deal with it. And she can say that, but if a man was to say that. And we know this, for example, in comedy, Francis and I were talking just before you go here. You know, it's perfectly normal now to go into a comedy club

and see a woman talking about how men are trash on stage. That's comedy now. I know. You know, and you just kind of go, well, of course, you know, not all men are perfect, and there are problems with masculinity, but that level of vitriol that you have now is gone to a level, which I find very difficult to understand, that people sit there and kind of take it. You know what I mean?

Yeah. And what concerns me the most is the lack of kindness in the... in the tone of the debate. You know, there's a huge amount of anger thrown around and sort of nasty, piss-taking and shutting down. And that to me doesn't further any debate or discussion. And it means there isn't room for all these different voices. And if people are scared to raise their head on something

as fundamental as, you know, whether they have the right to feel, you know, optimistic about their opportunities in life or not, then there's something seriously wrong there. And I don't, and I have, I'll be perfectly honest, I have found it actually really hard. I tried to do a micro version of my TED talk at a media advertising conference a few months back. And I chose perhaps unwisely to then open that up

to a workshop afterwards. And there's a reason why I've done it in, as a TED talk and not as a debate. I'm actually not that stronger debater. I kind of can get a bit flustered and kind of forget the angles. I hate something like Newsnight or one of those sorts of shows.

But I chose to open it up and people were so nasty and they made it very, very ad hominem about me. It was, well, you're all right. You haven't experienced this, you haven't experienced that. And I took it all. And I ended up totally on the back first and said, oh, well, you know, maybe, maybe you're right.

And then I went away and thought about it and said, no, I'm, I know enough, I've spoken to enough people I've lived in this world. And even if I'm only allowed, if you only allow me to talk about the fields that I know, there's something very wrong within those fields or within some of the narrative around it. I just don't understand why I have to, why it has to be so unpleasantly shut down. Let's have a conversation. The visual is incredible, and it happens particularly when people from supposedly oppressed groups speak out. That's when it seems to be extra vicious, doesn't it?

Like, we've had people on the show from people who are black or female or whatever talking about, you know, there isn't that much racism or isn't this particular problem. And those people get some of the most vicious abuse from their own. from the people who think they're on their side, you know. But that just means that we're never going to have any introverts go into public life in any way. And introverts are often the most thoughtful people on this earth. You know, there's a reason why they've weighed these things up,

they've thought about it. I mean, James DeMoor, sorry, that's the one. I can literally, if I say, James, I can literally throw a bomb into a room full of tech women. I, you know, I thought that whole debate was a debate that needed to be had, no matter where you fell on any side of what he was saying. This is a nerdy introverted guy. He actually got away and done a lot of research,

who distilled it and was asking some interesting questions. Now, you can disagree with the conclusions he came to, but you shouldn't, I personally don't, no. But you shouldn't disagree with his ability to be able to have that conversation. And that, to me, was symptomatic of so much of the level of debate, that why are we not allowed to have that conversation? You're not feeding one side or the other. It's this whole disinfectant of sunlight on an issue.

And obviously, back to big tech again, there's this huge debate around how, you know, the sort of political, sort of social ideologies of these tech companies are now arbitrating in a way that is fundamentally affecting that debate as well, you know, with certain viewpoints totally, you know, and shut down and banned. And I'm sure you know more about that than I do. But it's happening on an everyday level

and everyday conversations. And that's what concerns me. That is not a popular view. You know, the 14.5,000 retweets of this poor tech bug demonstrate that there's a right-on way of being able to talk about these issues. And what amuses me if they all think that they're like some great, you know, activists around these issues. I'm like, this isn't activism.

and this is the line. This is the line that is acceptable. My line's not acceptable on some of these issues and I can get crucified for it and have done very, very personally. So I don't tend to do this in open forums anymore. Well, this is only going on the internet. Oh, yeah, right. You're going to be fine.

Oops. But there is a giveaway in that attitude of having to shut people down, which is by shutting someone down, instead of engaging with their argument and defeating their argument, What you're really saying is, I know they're right. That's what you're really saying. Because if they were wrong, you would just prove them wrong. But if you have to shut someone down, that means their arguments actually are accurate.

Because otherwise, why would you have to shut them down? Well, I'm not sure I agree with that. I don't know that the point is you're not, why would you not want to disprove that argument? But that's my point. Wrong. Well, because you're scared of it. in some way, perhaps. I don't know.

I just don't know. I just think always more polite, interesting, intellectual, non-personal way of discussing these issues is the way to go. And I'm not quite sure how we'd kind of reverse a lot of the debate and, you know, because it's exacerbated so much by the social media tools and the way in which mainstream media has had to,

it's got to go to the clickbait extreme, of any argument and it means that there's nothing is allowed to be grey anymore. And that's a real worry, because everything's grey. Everything, nothing is black and white. That's such a British point of view, everything is great, depressing and it's always really, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

But it's really important because you hear, you know, and you see these titles, you know, smashes so and so, you know, crushes, whatever, and you think, well, all they're really talking about is ideas. And isn't discussion at its best, when you say, something to me and I go, actually I've never thought about it like that. You know, mate, she's got a point. I'm going to go away and want to have a thing, I'm going to change what I think, and I'm going to evolve as a person and a human being.

But we don't do that anymore because it's about ego now. It's I have to beat you. And ultimately nobody really learns anything. And it's also everything is a soundbite. I've probably said, for example, three or four things within this chat that might not have been that well considered and I'll go and I'll watch it again and I'll think. be the clips we use. And those, and those, thank you very much. But those will also be the quotes that will get thrown at me, you know, the next time I, you know, somebody, somebody would have done their research.

And when I'm fabulously Mark Zuckerberg-esque with my new platform, tick, check it out, it's free in the app store. You know, they'll find something, you know, that ill-advised that I will have said today in some context, in all of this sort of lots of controversy. And you can hear it in the way I talk. I'm working all this stuff out for myself. And I think this is such a cathartic way for us to learn from each other and throw these ideas around. And yet there are so few forums like this

and the one that you put together with trigonometry that really enable us to do that. And that's such a shame. Well, that is what we're trying to do. You know, the final thing... Further the cause of the alt-right. Yeah, apparently that's what we're doing. Thanks, mate.

Someone's going to take that literally. Yeah, I know. It sounds better in my voice as well. It sounds more authentic, doesn't it? You don't sound, I always think all right as Americans, though. You don't sound all right. You just sound racist. Yeah.

The final thing, I always feel like it's important when we talk about this men and women stuff, that we also address the fact that there are some men who've gone off the deep end as well, as you say, as a result of this toxicity on both sides. So you have all these in cells and these people running around going, well, women are always complaining, all this stuff. And it's like, no, that doesn't help either. You know, men and women need to come together. the two groups of people historically

that have always needed to cooperate more than any other groups is men and women. And you look at any successful person, they probably have a very healthy relationship with people of the other sex because that's how you live life by dealing with other people. And if you have those unhealthy attitudes, you're going to struggle whatever it is you're doing.

And that worries me as well. I think it's great that you hear a lot of people, you know, people like we talked about Joe Rogan and people like others, and us trying to remind men as well that don't be a dick. That's also part of the, that also has to be part of the conversation because a lot of men are resentful now. They are resentful is what they see as a kind of war on men.

Yeah. And, you know, there is a legitimate argument to be made that we live in a society where men are kind of stigmatized for being men. But the answer to that isn't to become a dick. The answer to that is to try and have more conversations, to try and learn about stuff, to try and bring the conversation back to the middle. And that's why we were always very grateful to have guests like you

to come on and talk to us about that. So let's have a final question. Right, okay, can I just say that you said men and women come together and I didn't make a joke about it. And I'm so proud of myself. I'm involving as a human being. Look at Jess rolling her eyes, which is the exact same thing that every woman in my life does.

But Jess, just to finish up, we always end on this question. What is the one thing that we should be talking about in society that we're not really? Yeah, you've given me an hour where you've made me talk throughout the whole hour to think about my answers to this question. So it's a sort of summary in some way of a lot of stuff we've been talking about. It's this obsession on self, selfie, me, my identity. There's something that I don't think it's being discussed enough is this sort of the very narcissistic, pleasant nature of you, me, me, sorry, you know, the owner's on, putting it all over you.

And you're a bad joke. Gee, were you in my, were you in the crowd last night? Yeah, I guess it worries me that we are, that nobody is actually saying, well, actually, you know, all this time in our own head, thinking about our self and our mindfulness and our mental health and our, our gender and our identity and what we want and what we can contribute to the world and our values and our what's the trendy thing at the moment is what's your purpose what's your purpose in life and I kind of think well in the that's not a healthy that's a healthy culture if we're all obsessing about us and what we want what we're doing and you know the onus is being lost and I think

the selfie itself is the most symptomatic. visual representation of a culture that is dangerously obsessed with self so yeah big big are we talking about that enough I think we are in lots of

sort of different issues but that to me kind of encapsulates it and we kind of want to say really stop looking at yourself it feels like it's directed at me and stop playing with yourself as well for us and see I've gone down to that level Well, this is what happens.

It's toxicity spreading. Men together. Eventually talks about Willis. Right, okay. So, and on that note. Yeah, great note to finish on. I'm sorry about him and about me, Jess. I'm sorry about everything.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. Your Twitter is... At Jess Butcher. At Jess Butcher. And my business is... Thank. I was about to plug it. It's tick and it's available on the app store.

Yes. Search for tick done on the Apple store, Android coming very soon. As always, follow us at TriggerPod on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. Click the bell button next to a subscribe button so you get notified of when the video comes out. Subscribe to the YouTube channel if you haven't already for more great videos. Give us an iTunes review, blah, blah, blah, blah. We'll see you in a week from now. Absolutely. Also as well, just check to see if you haven't been unsubscribed.

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