From Tech founder to solving the social media addiction crisis - Jess Butcher

0:06Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO. And in this episode, I have a returning guest for you, none other than Jess Butcher, who was actually guest number six on the podcast almost six years ago, if you can believe that. Now, Jess is incredible. I first met her as the co-founder and CMO of Blippa, and she was a tech entrepreneur at the time. And now she's turned her hand to become a social entrepreneur. She's founded an organization called Scroll Aware, trying to tackle the issue of tech addiction, and particularly focused on what tech is doing to kids and what it means for society.

0:40Now, she's collaborating with celebrities and brands to try and bring around change in that area. So I thought it'd be time to catch up with Jess to find out what she's doing and why this matters for brands. Because at the end of the day, it's we as brand owners and advertisers who are spending the money on social platforms to fund what they're doing. And I think it's important that we take a responsible approach to that. And Jess is doing that. Fascinating interview. We talk a lot about her journey as an entrepreneur in tech and also what she's doing now. Here it is. Jess Butcher, welcome to the show.

1:11So fab to be back. It was lovely because I was listening back to our episode. Can you believe it's almost six years ago, which I know makes me feel really old now. But it was lovely listening back because we met obviously when you were at Blipper and, you know, we've kind of stayed in touch ever since. And I listened back to the episode and we talk a lot about Blipper. But right at the end, you say that you're about to do something about social media. And I'm really pleased that we're here today to talk about what you've gone on and done. But it was lovely just hearing the story back then and catching up.

1:41But maybe before we do, love you to introduce yourself to the audience and also maybe mention how you ended up at Blippa as well. And that part of the story. So I'm described as a tech entrepreneur, female, because you apparently need the label at the beginning of the whole time, which is slightly strange because I can't write or read a line of code. so I fell into tech because I love evangelizing new exciting technology or initiatives or things that will make the world better more delightful in some way and I love innovation so you know I rode the coattails of a lot of entrepreneurs during my 20s during the whole dot-com bubble and then burst and I always wanted to do my own thing but I guess the fortune kind of aligned around 2010 when some ex-colleagues and I came together around the technology for Blippa, which was image recognition, computer vision, tech, connected to augmented reality layers over the real world.

2:36And we were at right time, right place. You know, this was the first time that this technology had been seen. We had a really strong team to take it to market. We went after advertisers and brands and their agencies and media owners and sought to turn the static world interactive using the camera, the device. And it was a thrilling journey. So, you know, what started as a pub chat in 2010, I think within three, four years had become a business of 300, 350 people, 10 offices around the world. We raised an eye-watering amount of money, over$100 million. And, you know, we were speaking on platforms all over the world, evangelizing the huge potential of this tech as an ad tech, as an educational tech, you know, testing lots of different industries, lots of different markets to see where, you know, we could find the right traction for it.

3:31And from a personal perspective, obviously, it really elevated my profile. There weren't many women in, you know, bleeding edge tech roles at that time. I didn't understand how the tech worked. But I guess what I learned I was quite good at is translating nerd. And that's my special skill set. I love working with innovators, and I hear what they tell me the tech can do. And I translate that into a message that makes sense for different audiences. That's where I sit. It's communications, ultimately, business development, partnerships. So the tech can do that. How can we translate that for this particular stakeholder?

4:12Whether it's a client, whether it's the media for PR opportunity, whether it's an investor potentially or whether it's the end consumer you know they would say image recognition computer vision technology takes this you can play a video and I said the Harry Potterification of print they're like yeah I guess so I was like right I'm going with that um so it was that was my role how can we sell this technology how can we test it in the market um and it was it was amazing because it was such a tactile tangible visible reaction that people would have back then. I mean, the bad side was that it became a novelty tech quite quickly.

4:51You know, there are lots of gimmicky applications. It just because you can make a dinosaur jump out of a poster doesn't necessarily mean you should, because once the consumer's seen that, you know, they've seen it. So we were constantly trying to educate and we realized that we almost became an agency in working with partners to say, you can do that, but actually we wouldn't suggest that. use it for education, use it for dynamic content, things that can change, that can update, that can, you know, take customers on a journey, inform them in some way. And yeah, it was just such a thrilling, thrilling opportunity.

5:27And that was 2011 to sort of 2016, 17, that, you know, we were riding very high and I was on airplanes traveling the world, met Sheryl Sandberg, went to Silicon Valley, you know, on the main platform stage, you know, big ad tech conferences, quite overwhelming. More so because I had three children in four years then as well. Wow. Okay, just a small task. Yeah, the other three startups. The other, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The most valuable startups you'll have in your life. You've touched on a really key role of a marketer, I think. You mentioned just because you can doesn't mean you should. And I think that, you know, so much of tech is driven by what's possible, not what's needed.

6:13And it's like sometimes we kind of try and sell what we can make rather than make what's going to sell kind of thing. I think that's a really important marketing lesson. I remember around the time, by the way, anyone listening, I mean, obviously we've got things like Google Lens now that can kind of image recognize anything on the planet. And in fact, I did a LinkedIn post the other day showing me having tidied my desk. It was just a satisfying kind of, oh, look, I've sorted my desk out. And then someone said, oh, what desk do you use? And I'm like, I can't remember where I got the desk from. And anyway, I just literally uploaded the image to Google and it linked straight through to where you can buy the desk in my post.

6:48I was like, that's amazing, isn't it? But now, of course, this all feels every day today, but this is almost 10 years ago. And back then it was completely revolutionary. I remember I spoke at the European Packaging Conference in 2013 and I announced to everybody the QR code was dead, which I now feel a bit stupid. Thanks to the pandemic, the QR code made a revival. But I mean, your tech at the time was genuinely mind blowing. And I remember the, I mean, the reason I came across it was I just left a big corporate job. I was working at Britvik. I spent 13 years there. And I found myself in a small juice startup with zero budget.

7:28And it was on those kind of private equity situations where they bought the brand. They hired me because apparently I knew drinks and I was a marketer. And they're like, you know, make this thing the next household name, drink brands in the UK. But we're not going to give you any money. And I was like, oh, no, how am I going to make this thing famous? And I remember the idea, I remember the moment I came up with the idea, because I was with our designers, William Murray Ham. And the idea for the brand was juice, it's called juice burst, as in exaggerating the flavor. And we sat there and we had this idea.

7:58What if the fruit on the pack actually exploded? And then I'd read an article about your launch and about what you were doing. And I think someone, an agency I'd worked at the time, has sort of pitched this idea that if you put your phone over an advert, the advert would come to life. and I thought what if you could put that on a label so I remember rather than photograph fruit we we we hired a Hollywood camera to film exploding fruit and it was the funniest thing because we had to like explode raspberries and blueberries and apples now I can't tell you it's very complicated to explode a fruit because any kind of charge it will basically you know obliterate a fruit if you think about it because obviously explosives are designed to blow up buildings not black bits of fruit so we had to invent the world's smallest ever electrical charge it was it was 32 times smaller than a normal electrical charge basically because otherwise it just destroy the thing and then we had the at the time the most advanced phantom hollywood camera so that we could film it in slow motion but what we did with you guys which just i just thought was amazing is we filmed this fruit exploding and then we worked with you guys to then make the pack explode in front of when you put your phone in front of a bottle of juice burst rather than seeing an apple or an orange it just explodes in slow motion around and i think we'd also worked on i think we're the first people ever to make it wrap around the bottle so rather than being like an advert it actually went dynamically around the bottle but that at the time i don't think anyone had done that before you were the dream client because the biggest challenge we had back in the day was they couldn't see this as its own dedicated medium everybody said the every brief was can I play my tv ad on my press ad and we're like oh god technically you can but please don't do that you know look at this as a new interactive medium that you can play around with and that you did but trying to move clients into that kind of mindset but and it wasn't necessarily their fault because they thought in media silos whether it was buying silos or creative silos you know they had a team that would think about press and outdoor and you know and trying to sell something in that didn't fit neatly in one of those swim lanes was was a big challenge and what we found was it was much easier to do that with brands like juice burst because you were upstarts pretenders to the thrones you know there was a there was a risk appetite um then the big incumbents understandably because there's a hunger to try something new maybe there's an award you You know, there's more risk ultimately within those organisations.

10:30So that was a really real thrill, but it made business development from my perspective very hard. Because it wasn't just about the feel of the brand, but it was finding brand managers that had that hunger. There was you. Another one that stands out is a girl called Kate Wall. I think she's married now, but she's now, she was a junior person at Cadbury. and she really played with the tech interactively and she's now I think CMO at KFC you know her career's done that and it was so interesting because I pegged her at that time thinking this girl's you know she's got something about her incredibly creative incredibly energetic and she made herself a hero internally by championing this technology and pushing it on our behalf internally and we did a fantastic I think it was during the Olympics and Olympics activation off Cadbury bars.

11:23And it's been fabulous watching Kate's journey ever since then, because I think they've done that people dipping weird advert recently and loads of headlines. Great stuff. It's amazing, actually, because I remember trying to negotiate with you guys, obviously because you worked on it pretty much for free, I think, and saying, look, I'll tell you what, if you apply all your tech and all your cleverness to Juice Burst, then you'll create the case study that everyone else goes, can you give me one of those? We needed the examples. We were two hasslers. together right trying to come up with something awesome my favorite one the one that really surprised me actually was the business card I had no idea so I thought look I'm all in on this right so I thought you did the business card before we did you asked for the interactive business card and everyone internally was like why aren't our business cards interactive it's probably the most effective media buy I've ever done so I remember that so bear in mind this is a sort of traditional juice business that we've just bought out and I went to the company and said right all of you are going to be filmed and we're going to make you like princess leia coming out of your business card as if you're in star wars kind of in a fuzzy black and white kind of image and you've got to do a one minute pitch for the band and and what what blew me away we had so much fun like just filming that and actually working the tech out so you put your phone above the card and literally you know this this black and white image appears a little kind of music kicks off and it's it's wonderful but what what what i had no idea about was how even i only had i don't know maybe a thousand and business cards made, but we had 60 ,000 blips of the business card.

12:53And people were then sending videos of the business card round to people. And I even remember going to, I even went to like Tesco and One Stop, who are our biggest customers, had the entire meeting, didn't open my laptop once because I just had the business card. They were so transformed by this thing. So it's also as a retail, as a sort of a business to business media, it was just incredible as well. I mean, embarrassing that you came up with the business card idea before Blippa did as a company. And, you know, there was a lot of novelty around. That was why the business card did so well, right?

13:27You know, and we struggled as an organization to ever move ourselves outside of the innovation box tick. And that was the challenge. We didn't get people to look at the tech in the long term, in the round, to embed it throughout. And there were weaknesses anyway. I mean, there was a lot of entrepreneur business building mistakes made and lessons learned but I think in many ways the tech itself was almost too clever because it wasn't intuitive enough you know we called ourselves the QR code killers and with hindsight I'm like the QR code's brilliant because and it's ugly as sin but it's so obvious what it is you know and it's a free tech anybody can use it anyone can figure it you can put it anywhere you can put it on your t-shirt you know whatever you want and there's that's clever you know that that's human you know behavior to want something that's that obvious whereas blipper in many ways was almost too clever and and ahead of its time in terms of people using their phone and I guess the conflict that I felt after a while because I was also on this parenting journey at the same time is this growing gnawing sense that I didn't want to be responsible for putting the phone between us and our real world experiences.

14:44I'm a firm believer that tech is supposed to enable our real lives. And lots of what Blippa was doing was we hoped would do that, you know, the unlocking of the right information, the right content at the right time. But it's not, I didn't want it to just be a distraction and something that put barriers up between ourselves and the real world. And I guess that revelation at that time was, you know, obviously something that I've then honed in on professionally and, you know, and moved into a whole new field of work and exploration around. Yeah. I wonder if it's a little bit the old Maya principle of most advanced yet acceptable.

15:23I mean, again, I got very excited by Blippa, but then it's that adoption, isn't it? Whereas actually probably today, well, I mean, Google have integrated it into Lens, I suppose, but it might be a timing thing. You guys were just so ahead, weren't you? Yeah, yeah. And what we are proud of, and I think anyone involved in that journey, spoiler alert, we combusted in orbit, is incredibly proud of, I guess, what we gave to the industry as far as good practice, bad practice, obviously hard technology that, you know, is now in Google Lens, was used in Snap, app, you know, is part of what's in filters and translation techs.

16:04There's a lot of engineering tech that uses computer vision technology. And obviously, as a team, there was so much talent there. So many entrepreneurs that have gone on to build incredible businesses, cut their teeth within that roller coaster, you know, massive rocket ship trajectory that we had. But I think it was a bit too soon. I remember actually having a meeting with you guys probably about the time I think I left juice person might mean 2015 and you're presenting your early concepts for visual search which was just mind-blowing literally it was it was you know pick a pair of boots put your phone over there it'll tell you where the boots are from where you can buy it information about it the history through to the wikipedia site through the website it was amazing and it's incredible to think that's 2015 that's 10 years ago and that effectively is what google are doing today Yeah, but only now probably in recent years has it been nailed because it was never just about the image recognition, computer vision, tech.

17:02It was all about how you connect it, you know, to the world of information that lives online in the right way. And obviously there's a lot of AI in that. And, you know, I think we're just reaching sophistication now. And it's back to your point about behavioural science, isn't it? And with Google, we're used to Googling things. So to then just to make one change, which is upload the picture and then it sends you the links, it's a small behavior step isn't it compared to download the app you know put your phone up there this is a different ecosystem to what I'm used to all those kind of things make it a bit challenging um you talked about uh combusting so what if I can ask you kind of what what were what went wrong and what were the biggest lessons do you think you took away from that that period of your career although I mean the actual logistics of what went wrong were you know incredibly complicated.

17:52I mean, ultimately, it boiled down to runway running out and a lot of logistics on funding rounds not closing at the right time. I mean, there were a lot of personal lessons in that, you know, I actually wasn't still in the front seat of the business at that time. I was in a more advisory, ambassadorial role for personal reasons. Obviously, family and three children under four. But equally, this sort of reprioritization that I had at that stage, and a recognition that I had been the right generalist to kickstart that. But there were better people than me. Ultimately, it was a hard realisation, she says, with some humility.

18:32That, you know, there was, I was a good startup to scale up CMO. There were better people than me to actually run a scaled up team. And that compounded with my, you know, lack of inclination to sit on planes to New York and the West Coast all the time, was a natural decision for me to become more of an ambassador at that stage. But it was a painful process to have that conversation with yourself. And you know that if you take yourself out of the front seat, you never get back in it. And there were a lot of pressure on me from people who wanted more women at the top of technology, more role models to stay there and to be that role model for other people within other women, particularly within the sector.

19:19But ultimately, I had to make the right decision for me personally. Learning that I'm an incredibly heart-on-sleeve person and that doesn't make for the best people manager, that was another lesson that I had. I'm great at business development and being out there and you kind of think, well, I want to run this huge team, but I wasn't very good at delegating. I wanted to be in control. I remember during one mat leave, In fact, I was in the hospital intervening on an email thread about the way something was happening and being bollocked by my co-found. So you weren't in the previous meeting. Can you not?

19:57You know, we don't want to hear from you for six weeks. Enjoy your baby. And by the time I did start to reintegrate, it was a short American style mat leave. I think that was the first or second. I can't remember. decisions had been made that I wouldn't have taken and they were better if I was honest with myself than the decisions that I would have taken and so there was a real growth jump for me because I realized that you know I needed to empower in order to scale my area of the business because I had become the break because I wanted to be involved in everything and yet you know empowering actually enables, you know, a better team.

20:35And I think I learned that lesson a little late and, you know, stalled, you know, the development in my side of the business. So, so many lessons. I mean, those are just a couple of personal lessons. I learned a lot about cap tables and, you know, how to hire and when to hire and fundraising and things like that, which, you know, I continue to support other entrepreneurs on those questions in their journey. but it was definitely the most intense learning process period of my life. I've got to say that self-awareness and that honesty and humility is quite rare. I don't hear that very often. I'm told I'm an oversharer.

21:14I think a lot of people resonate with that actually because you're articulating the questions that a lot of people have in their minds and the doubts that a lot of people have and that's really impressive to understand where your skill set is but also without downplaying what you're amazing at as well, recognizing what your your superpowers are which are many talking about you talk about being a being a woman in tech at the time and i know that was very that is and still is quite unusual but also female founders and entrepreneurs getting funding is something that's kind of well documented what advice what are your observations on where we are with you know our ability to fund female founders and any advice to female founders it's a really complicated conversation and i tend to take a more nuanced view of it than a lot of the sort of binary headlines that you see in under-representation in any field for women there's an assumption now within the narratives that that's down to discrimination now discrimination does exist absolutely and I've never denied that but I do think that the that we're not always asking the right questions around why there might be under-representation in anything whether that's women in technology female entrepreneurs, funding for female entrepreneurs, women in different sectors, in politics, whatever it may be.

22:31Because I think in order to solve these questions, and that's always been my interest, getting more women into the fields that I'm passionate about, that I think we need that sort of diversity of outlook and thought and skill set. We need to understand that there are bell curve differences between men and women. People don't understand bell curves. It's utterly fascinating to me, because of course, the majority of us overlap on everything. So yes, of course, every individual woman can do anything that every individual man can potentially do. But bell curves are so important because they play out in the statistics, particularly in the extreme statistics, which of course are Nobel Prize winners, you know, at one end of the spectrum or unicorn businesses, you know, this is a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of businesses that achieve that.

23:23So in a lot of the conversations that I'm having with women in technology or female entrepreneurs, I'm fascinated by the choices that women on average make more frequently than the choices men do. And, you know, this question of more VC for women, obviously, I want more successful female founders. But what has struck me from being around the female entrepreneurship community for the last 10-15 years and judging all these competitions, meeting all these incredible entrepreneurs, is women tend to build slightly different businesses. They build businesses out of problems that they've identified, passion sectors like fashion or beauty or food that, you know, that they love.

24:07You know, a lot of women when they start families build parenting businesses and, you know, toy manufacturing businesses because they're passionate about that particular area. And those businesses aren't typically VC businesses. You know, they don't need super deep pockets. And the businesses that come out survive or a higher percentage of them survive because they use debt. They bootstrap. They grow within their cash flows. You know, women, let's be honest, they're more sensible. You know, on average, on bell curves, you know, they build carefully that, you know, the bell curve of risk aversion is the critical one when it comes to business building.

24:48And personally, I think that's a good thing because more of those businesses survive, right? Women aren't as masochistic as men on average, you know, so we don't take these huge risks. If you look at VC-backed businesses, what, 5%, 10 % that survive? so there'd be a huge number of female sacrificial lambs to that statistic that we'll lose whereas i would prefer there to be 50 success rate from the businesses that that women choose to create so all these things can be true at once we do want more women funded but equally let's have the more nuanced conversation about what the businesses are that women typically build and you know how we support those and there's some fantastic initiatives like buy women belt, you know, that I think Sahar Hashemi pulled together, forgive me if I've got her name wrong, you know, that are really shining the light on female entrepreneurship of all types, you know, so it's not just about VC, you know, tech businesses that like Blippa, you know, may well explode in orbit.

25:52Yeah, good comparison, actually, to your very point. You talked about some of the kind of female characteristics that help, you know, manage risk and that sort of thing, which what you spend a lot of time with lots of founders, What other characteristics of successful founders do you observe in the kind of businesses you work with? I mean, to the things that I realized I wasn't very good at, you know, delegation. The best skill is to find people that are better than you. You know, the best entrepreneurs are really, really good people, recruiters. They find people that are better than them and have the humility to understand that and pull the right teams together.

26:31No business succeeds without the right teams. So an appreciation of what you need and how you can offset your own weaknesses is the most important. And then you've got ruthless prioritization, obviously, and move fast, break things better sooner than perfect. You know, there's a reason why you keep hearing these mantras time and time again, because the successful entrepreneurs move quickly and take risks. take every opportunity that presents themselves and don't need to get everything perfect you know because if there's a mistake there's a mistake you learn from it you know fail fail fast i sound like a walking book of cliches but there's a reason why those are the cliches because it that those are the the differentiators yeah you're so so right and and my career has been mostly apart from creating this podcast actually which is more so but most of my career has been spent in large organizations trying to be the entrepreneur inside the organization there's an amazing book actually i should give a little plug to adam morgan because the book he's famous for is eat big fish which is all about how challenger brands create you know create some new categories and become successful he did this follow-up book that hardly anyone's read that i think is amazing called the pirate inside because what he realized is he was studying all these startups and then he he set up a consultancy called eat big fish which advises businesses on how to be challengers none of the startups were hiring him because they couldn't afford it they're too busy doing right but big companies got this fear of how do we act like the small guys that are basically eating our lunch and he wrote this brilliant book called the pirate inside but all the lessons that i took from that because i created a business within within britvik many years ago i called seed brands but it's exactly the things you talk about is you need to act like an owner so you need to like act as if you own it sort of thing you need to work out how to do something 10 times quicker than the competition you need to obsess about execution as well really really obsessed i remember like seeing radical growth in some of the brands i was managing just because i i realized that the store and and how you execute in the store was everything so how much space you have are you in the right position have you got the right flavors you know no one was focusing on this but by focusing on that became really you know really exceptional and making choices as well because in big companies with big budgets we want to do everything we're going to do the tv we're going to do outdoor we're going to do this we're going to do that whereas actually what you have to do when you've got no money a bit like you and i'm working in blipper right is you have to double down on the thing that you know is going to make a difference and almost win a part of the market you know prove the concept then then go for the funding whereas in big companies the funding comes first in a small business you have to earn the right to fund and that process and then the The other point, which I think you started on, which I just could not agree more, is you've got to hire the right people.

29:20And I remember I had a team, I think, 40 by the end in Britvique. And the difference, the delta between the best and the worst was like 20 times. I mean, it was incredible. And if I had my time again, I'd obsess, obsess about the characteristics of the person I'm hiring. You need that entrepreneurialism. They don't need to be asked twice. They can come up with the right answer on their own. They're not waiting for permission. They're not sat in the committee, you know, seeking approval. They're just going and they're asking for forgiveness afterwards and all that kind of thing. And I think the people thing might even be the number one learning for me, actually, is to get the scale is you're going to have to hire, like you said, people better than you that can take decisions for you, that can act in the best interest of business from day one.

30:04Yeah. I mean, the challenge with that is, you know, I think we've got a society. I mean, AI, right, it's going to take the jobs. I'm sure you've had this discussion many, many times. So these skills, the ability to be a self-starter, to self-educate, to hustle, that's the word, right, the overused word, the ability to hustle and make opportunities for yourself and pivot and that sort of resilience to fast change is the most important skill now that's going to be needed in the new world of work. and yet it's it's precisely what we're taking away from children in terms of how society is moving on you know that we have the least resilient young people that we've ever had in the history of humanity you know the ability to pivot think on their feet you know be creative be imaginative take risks you know we're we're just degrading throughout society at the same time as saying that those are the attributes that are going to be required in this world of, you know, rapid AI driven change and jobs, you know, the jobs will look entirely different within 10, 15 years.

31:15Let's wrestle that, shall we? I was going to say, that feels like an entire episode, that, doesn't it? It's a good point though, isn't it? Because the more we build tools to do the doing, the danger is we end up with people that don't do the thinking. You kind of outsource the thinking. But actually, the thinking should, in theory, the tools should give more time to the thinking. But I think there's some research, isn't there, that's showing the greater the adoption of AI, the less people are thinking, I think. Oh, there's a different research paper every single week that's showing how AI is fundamentally remapping how our brains work.

31:51It's terrifying. Actually, there was an MIT study that came out last week that showed that when they looked at people that did the work using AI, Google and books and their own brains, the difference in how they interpreted and recollected the work they did in books versus AI was so dramatic that they had to release it before it's been peer reviewed. You know, honestly, there's so much research on this because young people's brains now are starting to buffer because they're not used to having to think on their feet, you know, because they're so they know what their answer is, but they'll put it into chat GPT and then it will churn out a sort of nice narrative around their answer as opposed to them being able to think on their feet and use.

32:36It's a muscle, right? And if it's not stretched, handwriting does that better than typing. you know reading does that better than you know reading distilled information it's kind of common sense but there is a huge amount of data and evidence to back this up as well i so believe this because i've been thinking should i should i get ai to my linkedin post should i get ai to write me a marketing week article should i get ai to you know the research on the podcast right but what i find is the learning is in the research right the learning is in actually doing it writing it trying it right and and i've never been satisfied with the ai outcome for any of those tasks that actually although it may be 10 times longer for me to physically do it i i personally learn a lot more and the outcome is better it hasn't yeah hasn't fully replaced it yet always i think we all know this intuitively individually as adults that have gone through a process of you know having to learn in that way we understand how to use it for the shortcuts that help our lives.

33:37I think the big question mark now for society is when you embrace these tools earlier, as your brain is developing, what are we doing to the neurons and the pathways and the muscle as it matures, that's going to be able to prevent those sorts of skills and how it's going forward. And we just don't know. But there's an increasing amount of evidence that points to a lot of alarm and a lot of caution and more work required to really understand this. We're talking about the impact of tech. We ended our last conversation in episode six, almost six years ago. You were saying you were increasingly worried about the impact of kind of social media on kids.

34:18I mean, obviously, you know, with young kids yourself at the time. So that's six years ago. Where are we today? And what is the research telling us about this? Yeah, so I'm on a new journey. and it has been almost six years in the evolution and it's all I guess been centered around this growing concern and alarm I've had around cultural rapid cultural change over the last 10 years so I started by tuning into you know issues of polarization you know we talked about women in technology and you know I tend to take a more nuanced approach on some of that and I noticed how many of the narratives have become very binary, very simplistic, very short form, and meant that, you know, that we were potentially solving for the wrong problems if we didn't deeply understand what was going on.