Welcome to the first podcast hosted by the Association for Women in Cryptocurrency, sponsored
by Bracewell LLP.
Today's topic is the ugly truth about crypto, decrypting gender disparity.
The Association is a global professional network of women and male allies around the world
who advocate for the equitable inclusion of women in the future of digital finance, blockchain
technology and web 3.
The views of the speakers are their own and do not necessarily represent those of the
Association, its sponsors or its board of directors.
This podcast is our opportunity to showcase the incredible work being done by our members
around the world in the crypto, blockchain and web 3 industries.
I'm your host, Amanda Wick, founder and CEO of the Association for Women in Cryptocurrency.
And I'm incredibly excited to not only be hosting our first podcast, but also to be
talking with two incredible women in the industry.
Lili, Tara, I won't do you justice because you're both incredible.
So introduce yourselves and tell the world who you are.
Lili, let's start with you.
Hi, everybody.
My name is Lili.
I am a CEO, currently CEO of Cat Labs, which is a startup that is fighting crypto crime
or building tools to fight crypto crime.
And in my previous life, I was a special agent with Department of Justice, DEA, and I pioneered
one of the early task forces for cryptocurrency enabled crimes that focused exclusively on
crypto and dark web enabled crimes.
And just last year, I was the lead agent on the case that took down Hydra market, which
was the largest dark web market in the world and accounted for about 80% of all cryptocurrency
dark web transactions.
And now I just left the government and building a startup.
Just left the government and changing the world.
It's amazing.
Tara, let's go to you.
Hi, everyone.
I'm also fighting crypto crime.
So a nice common theme here.
So I'm previously elliptic, where I headed up technical advisory and been in crypto now
for about eight years, which feels like a lifetime.
Before that, I was in the world of TradFi and then dusted around a number of crypto
startups.
I'm soon going to be in the institutional staking world heading up product for TwinStake.
And outside of that, I have a crypto book, a crypto game, a crypto advent calendar.
And you can find me writing, thinking and dreaming about all sorts of crypto metaverse,
crypto crime topics.
I have to say, I really want to see the advent calendar.
I have a godson who is obsessed with them.
And the idea of a crypto advent calendar is quite possibly the coolest thing I've ever
heard.
So very excited by both of you.
And Tara, you point out something that I didn't realize, which is all of us have this background
in crypto crime.
I think it's a common thread about why we both love the industry and we love the potential
for what it can do.
But I think we've all seen also the negative that can be done with it.
And so I think it makes us very objective and nuanced in our feelings about it.
And I've noticed that between all of our posts is that we all see the good but we're all
very cognizant of the bad.
And I think coming from that shared perspective gives us a lot in common when we're talking
about this.
But today, we're talking about a different aspect, which I know all three of us are really
passionate, which is the issue of gender disparity in crypto.
And I do want to jump right in and talk about, I think, maybe a spicy topic first, which
is the connection between crypto, toxic masculinity and something called the Manosphere.
And Tara, I want to start with you because you recently wrote a report titled Crypto
and the Manosphere, Exploring the Overlap Between Toxic Masculinity and Digital Assets.
Now, I know you wrote that in your personal capacity, I think while you were at Elliptic,
a blockchain analytics company that many of us are quite familiar with.
But can you tell us like what was the impetus for that?
What made you write the report and look into that issue?
Yeah, definitely.
So it wasn't actually any like trigger event with a toxic male in the space that I was
like, you know, I'm going to research into this.
It was actually my twin sister who is actually secretly Gen Z. She's not a millennial at
all.
Like everything she does is watching like YouTube, like mega podcasts that take like
four hours.
And she's super plugged into that space.
And she said to me a couple of months back, she was like, my gosh, I can't believe how
many of the Manosphere guys are talking about crypto.
And obviously, I was like, what's the Manosphere?
And so she kind of opened my eyes.
That was literally my question was what on earth is the Manosphere?
When you said that I had heard cryptosphere, I had heard toxic masculinity, but Manosphere
was definitely new to me.
Exactly.
And it was brand new to me.
So I was like, send me some videos.
I want to see what all this is about.
And the term was actually defined in 2009.
So it's a pretty old term.
But what it encompasses is four groups within the kind of like toxic male system, very specifically.
So it's an umbrella term.
And it's worth saying here, it's not the kind of bro culture.
This is four really specific groups.
So it's men's rights activists.
And there's a lot of fantastic men's rights activists.
But there's also a very like toxic branch of it, which is actually super against feminism,
anti-female policies.
So it's that branch of the male rights activists.
There's also men going their own way.
And that's a category of men who literally hate women.
They think they're toxic.
They don't want to be friends with them.
They don't want marriage.
You've then got the pickup artists, and these aren't like the kind of embarrassing guys
you meet at a bar with, like, hey, did you fall from heaven?
No, it's not those kind of men.
Well, wait, I think I've used that one.
Let's go gentle on that one.
Well, luckily, it's not those kind of people.
It's the pickup artists that believe in things like negging, which is where you insult a
woman to try and bring her down.
So it's that kind of brand of pickup artists.
And then it's a really kind of scary group called the incels, which are involuntary celibates.
They believe that kind of women are conspiring against them, that they have a right to have
sex with women, and how dare they kind of take that away from them.
So those four groups are under the term, the manosphere.
And it's really worth saying here, it's really centered on hatred for women.
So this isn't those men that are like, oh, women, yeah, they're a bit stupid.
The comments you see, the videos you watch, and I've seen some horrific things and read
some really awful things researching for the report.
And it's around hatred, it's around inciting violence, it's against seeing women as real
like low class.
Some of the quotes in my report are actually quite hard, I think, to read, because it is
pure hatred.
And so that's what we're kind of talking about with the manosphere.
And there's a growing group of manosphere influences, primarily slightly kind of the
younger generation, very much millennial gen Z.
There's a couple of like OG guys who are a bit older, but they're really prevalent on
TikTok, on YouTube, on Twitch, for instance.
And as my sister showed me, they're starting to get into the crypto space.
So what my report was doing was an investigation into how exactly they're getting into crypto.
Are they holding crypto?
Are they doing crypto projects?
Are they leading crypto courses?
So in the report, I dig in and we can maybe talk in a bit about all the very different
touch points they have with crypto.
But what was really scary is to see that they have huge followings, millions and millions.
And in some cases, like people like Andrew Tate have billions of video watches.
And what they're espousing is hatred against women.
It's really derogatory and really damaging.
And then they're starting to get into the kind of crypto world.
And you think, my gosh, that's absolutely not the people that we want coming into the
industry.
It's not the views we want coming into the industry and polluting those who maybe have
in a crypto brew tendencies to start with, or maybe those that could be influenced that
way.
So that was very much the impetus for the report of just learning this word and being
like, right, how big of a problem is this?
I got to investigate it.
I will say I don't usually talk about my past life in the last year that often.
But there were shades of your report that talked about the overlap with hate groups
and how it kind of blurs not just into issues with women, but also with race and homophobia
and some other things.
And the last year of my life that I spent on the select committee in the house, and
there was echoes of that, that was kind of terrifying.
But I will say, I was surprised when I read your report, because that part of the industry
seems very foreign to me in the sense of like, I know about it.
And I was a little bit thinking about crypto world culture and where did it overlap with
the manuscript.
It feels like such a small sector of the industry that a lot of us what I think of as professionals
don't really pay attention to because it's like that Peter Pan syndrome area where they
like, oh, don't want to grow up, right.
And they just want to be little boys.
But I feel like a lot of us spend time and like compliance and crime fighting and on
all of this stuff.
And we're building real things and we're solving real problems.
And that feels like the previous version, like the early iteration of crypto.
But you in your conclusions in the report, we're really concerned that there is in fact
a risk of for lack of a better word, contagion between the manuscript and crypto.
I definitely want to talk a little bit more about that because I feel like the naive part
of me thinks that nobody takes that crowd seriously enough anymore for it to have actual
risk of spreading.
But you see that risk.
Yeah, definitely.
Because you've got and I'm sure we've all come across them, right.
Like I referred to them as the DeFi frat boys, like the hype, hype, hype.
You walk into a conference and they immediately like mansplain something to you that you could
like and I enjoy like just ripping them to shreds on anything they say technically incorrect
because my background is the kind of tech protocol level of things.
So there's that kind of like group of people already in crypto.
But what I worry about more is looking at the growth of the Manosphere at large.
There's huge kind of, I almost don't want to call it recruitment drive, but a lot of
the disenfranchised youth Gen Z kind of age coming in are really attracted by the hustle
culture entrepreneur.
And that's actually one of the real challenging things when you look at the content that these
Manosphere influencers are creating.
A lot of it is really good advice.
Like for instance, like within the men going their own way, there is a really strong focus
on mental health and they give great advice.
Look after your mental health, don't work too hard, work life balance.
And you're like, yeah.
And then they go and women are evil and you're like, no.
And so that's the challenge.
Yeah, they like interweave these narratives.
And so if you think of like Fresh and Fit, for instance, so they do these podcasts all
about working hard, you know, respect other guys, like loads of really like strong, like,
yeah.
They do podcasts about money management, where they teach you about taxes, they teach you
about investing and you're like, yeah.
And then they also do the After Dark podcast where they bring in a load of women.
They essentially make them fight against each other.
They're really derogatory.
They have topics like where there's a couple of men and they'll talk about who's the fattest
chick you've ever banged, like really awful content.
And they interweave it all.
And the problem is you've got young guys listening to the content and they can't extrapolate
what's good advice from what's really toxic masculinity.
And so that's why I really worried that we've got this band of young men primarily being
taught that the women are awful alongside, you know, make sure you put money into your
pension and because they can't like tell the difference between them, they bring those
who's in.
And so that's what I'm really worried about in the industry because I think we have some
really bad guys in the industry.
Yeah.
But like I think maybe we've found fairly rarely come across them or at least I do.
I can put them in on one hand, the really bad ones I don't like, but it's this kind
of influx I think we're going to see coming from the likes of these mannish for influencers
who are getting into crypto from their podcasts and their videos.
Why does it feel like what you just described is very effective brainwashing?
Like when I read about kind of cult behaviors where it's like, don't start with something
negative, start with something positive and then just kind of weave in the end, you know,
this is the horrible thing in here surrounded by wonderful things.
And I think that's the most terrifying thing.
I also think that one of the areas that it seems riskiest to me in terms of like that
crypto bro culture or maybe even the manuscript having an actual impact on the industry and
not just being some YouTubers and crypto enthusiasts is venture capitalism or some people call
it VC culture.
A couple of weeks ago, I was at a summit in Paris called the Investor Summit where we
talked about the horrifically low rates of venture funding for female founders globally,
which I think globally the numbers at or below 2%.
And it's even lower for people of color, it's even lower for women of color.
And there's numerous studies showing the bias in VC funding in the process, the pitching
process, the process that determine who gets funding.
Lili, I know earlier you said you're the CEO and founder of Cat Labs, you're VC funded,
you've seen that process firsthand.
I'm curious if you're seeing any of this, do you see issues in that sector that support
Tara's conclusion and my concerns about the Manosphere contagion, for lack of a better
term.
But do you see any parallels there?
I think that for me, I had some issues, but there were enough investors out there.
Thankfully, I had a good network and good mentors that were able to introduce me to
many of the investors that are on my cap table now that don't succumb to the Manosphere and
have nothing to do with that world and don't hold those kind of preconceived notions or
unconscious biases about women and when they're hearing pitches.
So I think for me, it wasn't that bad, but there were some issues that I experienced.
For example, some of the investors would ask me questions such as, how are you going to
be a CEO and a mother at the same time?
What are you going to do with your daughter?
And they would never ask this of a man, of course, but it's one of those things that
it's just so tone deaf.
And I just have to explain to them that I'm a big bad special agent right now and my schedule
right now is probably a lot crazier than any CEO that you will ever know.
And I'm probably having to juggle.
But I think framing the issue is very important when you are trying to affect change here.
So I don't like to be extremely confrontational in these kinds of situations.
I like to enact the Socratic method if I have time or if the situation presents itself where
I can actually ask questions and reframe the individual's state of mind and cause self
reflection on their part.
So I think that's a better way of affecting change or changing someone's mind.
But a lot of times you just can't change someone's mind and you just move on.
And there are plenty of people out there that are aware of unconscious biases and they actively
try to fight them.
And the investors on my cap table right now, I have many, I have, I think 12 right now
investors on my cap table.
And they were all super supportive and both men and women.
So it was...
Oh, that was going to be my next question.
Are there women on your cap table?
Absolutely.
Yes.
Several women on the cap table.
And I'm curious, did you see any difference in terms of how like male versus female VC
funders, like did you notice anything different in the process or the experience?
No, not really.
One thing that I did notice, and this is something that I talk about a lot and it's unfortunate,
is that I actually got a lot more mentorship and support from men during the fundraising
process than I did from women.
And especially from women that would promise and do a lot of lip service to helping other
women, being the champion for other women, promising that they would introduce me to
investors or they would do this and that and it would never materialize and it was kind
of disappointing at the time.
So I did notice that trend that I actually got a lot better mentorship with men, unfortunately,
during this process.
So you have to navigate the process.
You have to learn the game.
And that's also on us on women, right?
We have to...
One of the main actually issues of why women don't get funded as much is women have higher...
There are higher expectations that are put on women.
And it's actually also true with women in leadership of why women don't get promoted
as much to senior leadership is because there are higher expectations of performance.
And I saw this too, as you know, in my previous job in a very, very, very male-dominated field,
probably more than even tech, right, in federal law enforcement.
I saw this a lot where women tended to work like twice as hard just to get recognized
for the work that they do because they had to basically prove themselves and overcome
this notion that, oh, well, this is not really a woman's job.
And to prove to me that it is a woman's job, you have to do, go above and beyond.
So there was this kind of background noise or I don't know how to put it in terms of
just this notion, right, that women aren't supposed to be here, right?
To the point where actually, I'll give you a crazy example.
When I was doing my PT test, right, a physical fitness test, just to get hired, the instructor
that was administering my test told me that it's unfair that women have lower standards
in physical fitness tests.
For example, they have to do less push-ups, right, or they have to run the mile in less
time.
Yeah, it's like slightly modified, right?
Right.
Yeah.
You know, they said because we're doing the same job.
So he was, and you know, this guy was very, very against just women being on the job.
And that was, and you can imagine, I'm already nervous trying to take this test.
And he's telling me this, like, oh, women aren't supposed to be here.
It's so unfair.
You know, if they can't do the same physical activities as men, they shouldn't be on this
job.
You know, meanwhile, after you'd finished the academy, we never get tested for our physical
fitness and everybody gets fat anyway.
So, you know.
I do want to pick on one thing that you said, draw out something that you said in there,
which is something that comes up over and over at our association events, which might
be a topic even spicier than we were talking with.
And I think that's a good point, too, Sarah, which is that we don't talk enough about how
women can be an even bigger part of the problem than we like to admit, that we talk about.
I know you and I have had these conversations, but that issue of women not only failing to
support other women, but often actively sabotaging them.
That is one of the issues that we hear from women at association events around the world.
And I mean, across all cultures, you can be from Southeast Asia, you could be from Africa,
you could be from the United States.
The single common theme that we hear is that, in fact, for most women, is that their worst
professional experiences are often from other women, and men are actually some of their
biggest supporters.
I know this was true for me.
It sounds like it was true for you, or at least in certain situations.
Tara, I'm curious, because I know Lili and I probably align on that.
But would you agree, disagree, like what your experience has been with that?
So from my personal experience, I've come across some of the most incredible women in
this space.
I've got a group of people from...
Okay, well, you work with Liatch.
You work with Liatch, that's right.
So that's not entirely fair.
Because when you work with an angel, yes, it obviously is going to bias your view of
the most incredible women in the world.
Exactly.
I mean, she's one of the people I'm thinking of.
We've got this group who we meet all the time, we're like each other's height people.
If anyone ever said to me, like, oh, I need someone in crypto who works in HR, I'm like,
you need to speak to Lily Fish.
There's just this group of women who are just all about helping each other.
I think I've been lucky by the sound of it compared to some of your experiences.
But I genuinely am sitting here struggling to think of a woman I've come across who I'm
like, oh, she was actively out to get people.
The only bad experiences I can think of in crypto are with men.
I can't think of any with women.
Well, that actually gives me a lot of hope.
But I will say it also does explain, I think, some of the reactions that we see at the association.
So some women, because they've had the experiences that Lili and I have, they are so excited
when they find a group of women who...
So we have two roles in the association.
We say this at all of our events.
The first rule is no mean girls, which sometimes they have to translate into foreign languages,
which is hilarious because mean girls as a concept doesn't necessarily translate.
But once you explain what it is, like mujeres malas, then they're like, oh, okay, I know
what you're talking about.
That's the first rule.
And the second rule is whether you're male, female, we want you so long as you believe
in supporting women and equitable inclusion of women in the future of digital finance
and militantly advocating for it.
And I think what's amazing is that when women find that space, and it sounds like you found
that space, which is awesome, because so many of us have that issue in our past, it does
lead us to that.
It feels different.
When we say this at association events, it's so funny because I tell people when I say
the no mean girls rule, two things happen.
I look around the room and there's women who are like, yes, all right.
And then sometimes there's women who are like, and you just see this eye shifting and I'm
like, oh, found one.
Okay, you know, I know.
Because like, like, Lili smiling because she knows we know who they are.
Like they know who they are.
We know who they are.
Right?
Like, that's the first step.
The first actually the fact that they know who they are.
That means they're not in denial, which is, which is a first step is acceptance, right?
Maybe they're on their way to change.
I like to say, look, I want all the Regina Georges after they've been hit by a bus.
I just don't want Regina George before she's been hit by a bus.
I think everybody's capable of change.
But at the same time, we all know what happens, like, especially if multiple of them get together
and they start a click and it's just toxic.
And you see this in some women's groups where there's like a queen bee and there's women.
And this is very real.
Like it's there's a reason there was a movie and a musical like this is a very real aspect
of female culture.
And it's funny because we just had events in Madrid, we had this incredible brunch and
drinks but the brunch was really kind of like the session where we talked about building
a chapter there.
And culturally, the women were like, this is very real.
Globally you can go anywhere in the world.
And when you find women who support other women, something magical happens because we
talked about historically actually was interesting.
Why was this not the case?
And if you go back hundreds of years, it's because women had to compete with each other
for the resource that was meant because we were owned.
We were literally property and we competed with each other to be owned by the best owner.
Right?
So literally hundreds of years of baking competition for quote, limited resources.
And undoing that and undoing like the cycle of that, it requires effort.
Like I find that you kind of have to consciously talk about it and think about it.
It seems like we should be hundreds of years past that.
But frequently the reality is they're not.
Yes, but that's the thing.
We have to be introspective in terms of, okay, what is it that's driving us?
And is this drive necessary in our day and age because our instincts don't necessarily
catch up with reality in a timely manner.
And it's the same...
It's also very, very true for men, right?
Men because they want the best females, right?
They want the best mates and the most, you know, the highest number of mates.
They are always in pursuit of power and resources.
So that goes back to, Tara, your report and the Manosphere and why the Manosphere world
got into crypto is, well, it was because of the bull market.
And I think the bear market is going to solve this problem because crypto is fast money
and men are attracted to that creation of wealth, right?
Instinctually.
So I think that being introspective and knowing what drives you both for men and women and
actually having that power to change those drives based on your reality and based on
the world we live in now is very important.
So in terms of that introspective and kind of like thinking about your almost animalistic
urges, what's really interesting when you listen to a lot of these Manosphere kind of
content producers is that they're basically saying, don't fight that.
That's who you are.
So when they talk about, you know, men wanting younger women and they talk about this idea
that when you reach 26, that's basically your peak.
After that, you know, you're done as a woman.
And that they're basically telling men like, just embrace that, embrace the animalistic
tendencies that you have.
And that's actually one of the really damaging things about it is that they're just kind
of saying to these like men become Neanderthals again.
And then they're also saying to women, you can't fight your animalistic urges, but your
animalistic urges are that you're, you know, sexually promiscuous and that's bad, that
you just crave being pretty because you're simple, you're less intelligent, like all
of those kind of really negative buckets of it.
So whilst I think introspection can be really good, actually what I see about the introspection,
the Manosphere is really, really bad.
Well, so here's where I would challenge that.
Because I find this interesting in that recently I read this incredible book called The Power.
I think it was by, what's her name, Naomi Alderman.
Don't quote me on that.
It came out like six years ago, I want to say, so I'm a little behind the curve.
They made it into a show on Amazon Prime.
But what I find absolutely fascinating about this book is that basic premise, all across
the world, one day, 15-year-old girls develop an organ that gives them the ability to electrocute
people, which suddenly shifts the balance of power between men and women.
And all of a sudden, women are literally just as empowered as men.
And what's fascinating about the book is that what I love is that she talks about how a
lot of the things that we say are, quote, gendered, like what you were just saying,
right?
I think it's actually not male.
It's empowerment.
It's that historically one gender has, in fact, been empowered and has taken most of
the power.
And what you do with power is actually the question.
With great power, you know that expression from Uncle Ben, with great power comes great
responsibility.
And the question is, what do the genders do with that responsibility?
And her book, it's fascinating how she's fiction, obviously.
Sorry, I don't know why I said that as if someone around the world is growing this organ.
But it's fascinating because she really breaks down the difference between what we think
is gendered.
And this pisses me off all the time when people say that certain skills or traits are masculine
or feminine, when in fact, they're just skills or traits.
And we can talk about how society has disincentivized or incentivized those.
That probably could have been its own podcast.
But I think we just have to be really careful when we talk about, and especially when we
use the terms masculine and feminine, for things that are just traits, right?
Like assertiveness, aggressiveness, confidence, self-assuredness.
I would not say any of these things are inherently masculine or feminine.
They're skills or traits that you can have, whether you're male or female.
So there's literally a Fresh and Fit podcast.
It's an after dark one.
So with a bunch of women on there as well, where they discuss this.
And they have a number of women who are very much aligned with one view, which is like
women are X, men are X.
There's some women and they tend to get kicked off the podcast, I don't know why, who have
the view which is more aligned with you, Amanda.
And then they have a couple of men on the podcast who obviously all believe that men
are men and women are...
And it's really interesting listening to that.
And I'm really hard to listen to it certainly with the views I have, which I think I'm much
more aligned with what you're saying, Amanda.
But it's really interesting, this is a debate in the Manosphere as well.
Like they're having these debates.
Their conclusions are of course, like all the good traits in the world are dominated
and naturally owned by men and all the bad ones are owned by women.
But a lot of these conversations, and this is what I come back to before about a lot
of the Manosphere content is like interesting.
Some of it's good advice and good content, but then it's interwoven with a lot of this
misogyny and toxic masculinity.
And that's where it was researching this was really interesting because I listened to podcasts
where I was like jarred by some of the stuff they said was just like, wow.
And then I listened to other stuff and I was like, oh, that is a really good debate.
And then the influencer comes in with all women are hoes and you're like, oh, okay,
I'm there, finish.
It's an interesting debate.
Yeah.
Wait, what?
Yeah.
Just to challenge you guys a little bit and not too much because I do align with most
of what you just said, Amanda.
The only thing I don't align is, is I do believe that there are traits that are more masculine
and more feminine or that women possess more often and men possess more often, but it doesn't
necessarily mean that a woman can't possess those more traditionally masculine traits.
Right?
So like, for example, myself, I think that I have more masculine traits than probably
the average woman.
But I think that things, you know, there is biology and we have hormones and there are,
you know, there are certain things in our bodies that dictate certain temperaments or
the proclivity towards a certain temperament.
For example, women have more connections between the left and the right hemisphere.
It helps them multitask more.
I mean, there are certain things that are just biologically true and it doesn't necessarily
mean that there aren't men that can multitask.
Of course there are.
It's just kind of like an average.
And I feel like we can't deny this and we can't say, no, no, no, we're just a hundred
percent everything.
It just blanks late.
You know, it just depends on your personality.
There are some biological drivers for certain traits.
Aggressiveness, for example, you know, testosterone is responsible a lot for aggressiveness as
well.
You know, the trait of aggressiveness.
And I think the issue is here is that we tend to glorify traditionally more masculine traits
and say, okay, well, these traits are the ones that are going to make you successful.
Whereas a lot of the traditional feminine traits are not being glorified, which I think
are extremely important to emphasize when we talk about power.
I get what you're saying there.
I think one of the things, I think the thing that I would pick out of that and a hundred
percent agree with is that we need to emphasize like the value of certain skills and traits
more.
One of the things that was really interesting at the investor summit that came up to your
point was that they have done these biological studies and women and men, like their brains
are literally different, right?
And they found that men tend to be tunnel thinkers and women tend to think more in like
webs and connections and kind of like seeing different possible connections between people.
And you could see right where for a CEO or a founder, that would be incredibly useful.
And the discussion was, well, if the pitch process as we currently see it for VCs is
currently incredibly limited in terms of the skills that it assesses, right?
In terms of, okay, you get X amount of time, you pitch your company, right?
And to a certain extent, it rewards a lot of narcissism, self-assurance, bravado, right?
Like certain things where you're kind of like, okay, he talked the talk.
And for, yes, for some VCs, there's probably a lot of, you know, a lot more exploration
there.
But generally like the average pitch process values a very limited set of traits.
And so their point, which was interesting was, well, what if we change the pitch process
and made it so that it recognized like questions that talked about your ability to empathize
or longer like exposure, like taking a walk together.
Like basically changing the process to recognize that there are other skills and traits that
would make you a good leader long term, other than just this ability to convince people
to give you money in like a five-minute period, right?
Which is insanely narrow.
I will say one of the things that I heard from VCs, because I've talked to some of them
on the side under Chatham House rules, because that question of how is it on earth that we
don't have more funding than 2% of women globally.
Obviously, I think everybody I've talked to has agreed that there's a pipeline problem.
We need more women with entrepreneurial spirits who are willing to take risks.
And that's a whole nother discussion we can have about women and how they assess risk
and why more women aren't willing to kind of start companies, start things, right?
But there is, and I've talked with VCs about this, sometimes a substance problem where
women founders don't have those skills of confidence, self-assuredness, empowerment.
And I'm not even talking about the narcissism or kind of like the bravado.
I'm talking about the things that a person would need to feel in order to feel comfortable
giving another human money and investing in that.
Now, Lili, I've watched you.
You're a force as a founder.
You've successfully raised what your seed round of $4.3 million and a bear market is
a feat for Cat Labs.
And some of the VCs I know would say, okay, look at her.
Of course she raised money.
She's a baller, former DEA, doesn't take no for an answer.
I forget the term you used earlier, hotshot DEA agent.
If all women were like her during the pitch, the number would skyrocket up from 2%.
I have to say I struggle sometimes because I don't disagree with that.
Like to your point earlier, sometimes I think, and I think Tara mentioned this too, we're...
Some people say, oh, we're required to be exceptional.
But there are some things that I'm like, but some people would say those are fundamental
things.
You need confidence, self-assuredness, empowerment.
And I know there's bias.
I'm not saying there's not bias.
And I'm sure there are women who have those things that are not getting funded.
But I saw some of the women who were founders at that conference had conversations with
some of them.
And they didn't have those skills.
They didn't present themselves that way.
And I wouldn't have given them money, which I felt terrible about.
But I think we really have to talk about that, right?
I mean, you can't have people who say like, well, women should...
You have to have substance there, right?
I mean, maybe I'm...
I don't know.
Maybe I'm just being too harsh.
And sometimes I am.
But I sometimes look and say, and I know I'm guilty of this, when a woman gets up and doesn't
crush it, sadly, she makes it harder for everyone else.
Because everyone will watch that and say, well, that was their token woman and the woman
didn't perform.
So that's why I don't know that we should have women speaking in a conference.
I've actually heard...
I've actually had men say this.
Meanwhile, I've seen a lot of lackluster white men kind of get up and do average or below
average performances.
And then the lady afterwards says, I don't know that we want to have white men in a conference
again, do we?
Like, I...
Tara, you laugh, but literally when I say this to people, some men are like, oh, yeah, no,
that is...
Hmm.
Yeah.
For women, the stakes are high.
Yes.
Because when we succeed, we represent women.
And actually, so I was going through this in my previous job as an agent.
I was mentoring a new agent who was a female, and she was making a lot of mistakes.
She was messing up a lot.
She, you know, she would like wear flip-flops to surveillance, or she would forget her handcuffs
when we would go arrest people, things like that all the time.
And I would try to mentor her, and I would tell her, look, you can't afford to do this.
You literally have to be perfect for all of us.
Because if you are not perfect, it's going to reinforce the belief that women don't belong
here.
If a man forgets his handcuffs, nobody's gonna think twice.
If a woman forgets her handcuffs, that's it.
Oh, that's because women shouldn't be doing this.
Of course, she forgot her handcuffs.
You know, so it's a very pervasive problem, I think, in a lot of industries, male-dominated
industries.
And, you know, we have to change that mindset.
We have to change that mindset.
And we have to do it in a very structured way, right?
Psychologically, yeah.
I agree with that.
I will say I struggle with that.
I catch myself.
I don't know if this has ever happened to you guys.
But I catch myself where I'm literally judging a woman for exactly that reason.
Because I know I watch them stand up at a conference, and if they bomb, I think of all
the conference planners that I'm going to talk to who are going to say, well, we have
this one woman, right?
Because exactly what you said.
But at the same time, I know that for, you know, women who come after, like, for true
equality and for it to be equitable, women should be allowed to be average and subpar,
just like men.
You know there's guys running around and flip-flops out on surveillance and forgetting their handcuffs,
and they're going to do just fine.
And there's a part of me that wants to say, but women should be allowed to be subpar,
too.
But to your point, I know the reality of what happens.
And I find myself in this constant internal struggle of wanting to both make the situation
better in the broken game that we're playing, while also simultaneously trying to fix the
rules of a broken game.
And it is a constant cognitive dissonance and struggle that I face.
And I'm curious, do you, like, really, it sounds like you, I don't, do you guys feel
that?
Like, do you ever have that experience?
Because I'm with you.
I just find myself struggling to be like, yeah, I want you to be below average and still
succeed.
I just don't, that's just not the world we live in right now.
I think the trick here is to, and I use this all the time in my daily life and business,
is to know the rules of the game, know the rules of the current game, and know how to
play the current game perfectly.
And this is where my mentorship to this woman comes in.
I'm not going to tell her you should be allowed to be average.
No, I'm going to tell her you can't mess up, you have to be perfect.
Okay, but at the same time, I go to the men and I say, look, you've forgotten your handcuffs.
Right?
It's okay that you forgot her handcuffs.
You've forgotten your handcuffs.
So you have to play both sides.
You have to know the rules of the game and play the current game while in the background
making slow and efficient change.
Right?
And change those mindsets and change those, reveal a lot of the cognitive biases that
we live by, unfortunately.
So just playing both sides, I think, is very important here.
You have to kind of be a little conniving.
Yeah, I had a friend say to me one, and I don't know where she got the phrase from,
but it was, we'll know we have equality when useless women are in charge, or incompetent
women, I think it was.
And I was like, oh, that's such a good way of phrasing it, right?
Because like, as we're talking about here, you know, you've got a load of men that would
forget their handcuffs or men that would mess up on stage.
And that's allowed, it's fine.
You're kind of like, oh yeah, of course it happens.
The moment you have a woman mess up, it's like, oh no, oh my gosh.
So I think that will be almost a positive.
We almost kind of want to say, yeah, kind of, it's okay to keep messing up because that
will be a mark of equality when the women that mess up are somehow leading stuff and
you're like, oh, she shouldn't be in charge.
But okay, at least we've got more women.
So yeah, I think that I loved when she said that phrase to me.
It really like stood out as a mark of like, oh yeah, that really is the balance of things.
Yeah.
And you know, to something that Lili said a moment ago, it's funny, I came out in the
same place and I tell people this all the time because I literally at the conference
on my panel, I said, I am now in a place where I want to change the rules of the game and
the association's mission is militant advocacy, right?
Sometimes to the point, like literally where I see something, say something, organization.
But I will say that I also say that for the women who are playing the game right now,
while the rules are broken, to Lili's point, why not try to be Serena?
Like if yes, should you be able to be an average or below average player and win just, and
that would make equality to men a hundred percent, but that's not the game that we're
playing.
So if you want to win now, this is what you have to, Lili's point, this is what you have
to do now.
And it's not fair, but I tell people like you can choose to be a better player because
you want to win or it's totally fine.
It's not worth winning and just do your life and be happy and try to fix the rules of the
game for the next generation.
I will say that one of the things that Lili said that I also kind of want to like pick
out on is that we are always inclusive and we encourage men to come to our events because
of exactly that, working both sides.
And I'm always excited and thrilled when men come because it's always an empathy building
exercise.
Well, when I talked to male conference planners, I had a male conference planner, I put forward
a woman and he said, oh, I don't know that she, she had the title, but he said she looked
too young and he wasn't sure if she was senior enough.
And I said to him, I was like, but you frequently have their 20 something year old CEO who looks
like a man child speak, but he has the title and he looks young, but she has the title
and she looks too young to speak.
And he actually caught himself and was like, oh my gosh, I never noticed I did.
You're right.
It was such an interesting, and we have men that come to events.
I had one guy that came to an event and we have facilitated networking and the guy was
sitting at a table and another man was there and the other guy didn't follow the instructors,
just launched into a thing, just started like explaining something in crypto.
And the other gentleman came up to me afterward and said, this is what it's like for you at
conferences and things like that.
It's just like a man just sits there and just suddenly it starts explaining things to you.
And I looked at him, I said, does a man explain, does a man's plane, does a man's planning
happen?
Yes.
But the thing is, is that in your day to day life, if you don't see it, right, this is
why I say, see something, say something, because so many men, it's unintentional.
They don't see it.
But the minute that you pointed out to them, once they see it, they can't unsee it.
And this guy was like, when I, he's like, I'm sitting here thinking of a lot of work
meetings.
I see, like I am seeing it differently now because he was the minority at a meeting of
so many women and experiencing that was a huge thing.
So the importance of the empathy and the reason I bring it up is because I think it leads
to one of the most important topics that I'm super passionate about, which is Tara, while
we talked about how men and the manosphere can absolutely be part of the problem, I think
to Lili's point and something I feel strongly about, they have to be and often are a huge
part of the solution, right?
It's why we are inclusive of men in the association, why they were some of our earliest sponsors
and supporters.
I talk about male allyship all the time.
I'm a broken record about it.
And I'm curious how you guys feel about it.
Is it more or less equally important?
Lili, I know you touched on this, Tara, if you have thoughts, I'd love to have them.
But I feel like I'm a broken record about male allyship, but maybe I'm alone in that.
I don't know.
Yeah, I think it's super important.
And I remember actually back in, I would say it was like maybe 2017.
So women of Silicon Roundabout did a conference and one of the final speakers said, look around
the room, it's just women.
And she was like, in the nicest possible way, this conference has been women complaining
about problems to other women who already know the problems because they're women.
And she was like, next year, I want every woman to bring a man with them.
And I've seen conferences do similar things where they'll offer free tickets to men.
And I love a free conference ticket for stuff, but I think for many conferences where it
is about females in the space and they're very focused on getting women into crypto,
you have to be pushing to get more men there because otherwise it's women complaining to
other women in a room of women.
And that's never going to make a difference.
So yeah, I think it's super duper important to have male allies to exactly as you said,
to change people's perspectives, approaches, open their eyes to these things, because that's
the only way you're going to get change.
And I can think of a number of the problematic men that come to mind in crypto.
Actually the scary thing is a lot of them will say, oh, I really support women in crypto,
really, really for it.
And then they do stuff and you're like, that is so unhelpful to me personally, but other
women in crypto.
And I think the only way you can kind of get them past that stage of holding up the banner
of like, who are women in crypto to actually like helping is by getting them along to more
events, educating them much more about the challenges.
But also just, I think a lot of this comes down to exposure.
They just need to see there are kick-ass women in the industry who understand the industry,
who can raise a shed ton of money in a bear market.
You've done incredible things to catch crypto criminals as we kind of all have, who can
speak super technically about things and actually a conference today.
And there's a whole bunch of women in the room.
There's a whole bunch of women speaking.
We've got, you know, Matt's formula on screen.
Like it's super duper technical.
And I wish more of the men that kind of weren't fully subscribed to the idea of women in crypto
could see that because if they could see more of these amazing women, I think maybe that
would change their perspective on things too.
Yeah.
And I think also about changing perspective, we need to use a more targeted strategy.
I guess that's worked for other people in the past.
So you can try to affect change by yelling and screaming and saying, this is wrong.
You guys suck.
You know, you're all misogynists and toxic masculinity and all this stuff, right?
But a lot of times this kind of approach that only relies on this kind of activism, so to
speak, is not very effective because a lot of times it'll alienate the group that you're
trying to convince, right?
And they start feeling defensive.
They actually get desensitized to the problem.
A lot of the times.
And I like to bring in one of my idols that I really respect is RBG, right?
RBG is five foot negative hundred pound woman on whose shoulders we all stand today.
And she was just absolutely incredible at changing people's minds.
And she's a lawyer.
And Amanda, just like you, right?
She's a lawyer.
She was a lawyer.
And she knew how to argue and she knew how to strategically change people's minds without
just screaming, this is wrong.
This is wrong.
And I think she kind of used a three prong approach, which is she knew how to frame the
issues to her audience, framing it and making people understand it if they don't understand
it the way that you're presenting it.
So an example would be how she framed discrimination on the basis of sex or on the basis of gender.
She actually changed the word sex for the word gender to be, I guess, more general.
And one of her first cases that kind of sprung up and caused a lot of the changes in legislature
was actually discrimination against a man where there was social security benefits that
a man, a widower didn't get because he was a man because of the way that the legislature
was structured at the time.
So she actually used that case to illustrate to the all white male judges, right, in the
Supreme Court that this needs to change, that we shouldn't be discriminating on the basis
of sex or the basis of gender.
And so framing the argument is very important.
Another thing that we can do is build relationships and we as women know how to do that.
I know you don't think that there's male and female qualities, but I think women do tend
to be very good at building relationships.
And building relationships, same thing, RBG was friends with Justice Scalia.
And even though they disagreed on a lot of the issues, but she still respected him and
they respected each other and it wasn't like an us versus them, right?
So just understanding the perspective and where the other party is coming from is really
important.
And then the last stage is the Socratic method, which I love, right?
It's basically asking questions to change someone's mind and framing questions in a
way that forces people to reevaluate their belief systems and understand that they have
certain biases.
And this can be like, for example, one of the main biases in VC is pattern matching.
When you are an investor and you are watching a pitch, if the person looks like Mark Zuckerberg,
you automatically are a lot more likely to invest in them just because they look like
Mark Zuckerberg.
Our brains are naturally...
We have heuristics...
Wires to short circuit for efficiency.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
We have heuristics, right?
We have kind of boxes that we put things into that help us make decisions.
And these heuristics are amazing because obviously you can't...
If we had to...every time we had to make a decision, we had to kind of gather information
all from scratch, right?
That would be extremely inefficient.
So that's why we have these heuristics that our brain uses.
But unfortunately, that creates a lot of unconscious biases.
So breaking down those biases and making people understand that they have those biases, right?
Just the fact that I'm looking at someone that looks like Mark Zuckerberg doesn't mean
that they're gonna be a good investment and they're gonna be just as successful, right?
So it's...
I think having that 3-pronged approach is very effective.
And this is how RBG changed the world, I think.
And that's how we can change the world in a less aggressive manner.
And I also like to give an example of the vegan movement.
How the vegan movement is not very effective because they're just screaming at the top
of the lungs and deal-tripping people saying, you eat meat, you're a bad person, you're
killing animals, etc., etc.
It's not the best way to go about it and it alienates a lot of people.
But there is a guy, there is a vegan activist named Earthling Ed, who uses the Socratic
method.
He literally goes out to like campus, college campuses and just on the street.
And he makes a statement in a banner and then he allows people to come and debate him.
And it is incredible.
You see somebody like, ah, you're a stupid vegan, you're crazy.
And then by the end of the discussion, they're like, oh, yeah, maybe you're right.
He uses these very empathetic questions.
And based on how the person responds to those questions, he just tweaks his next question
to kind of make the person understand where he's coming from about the vegan movement.
I would highly encourage, even if you don't care about veganism, whatever it is, just
watch the way he debates with people.
It's incredible.
He has so much empathy.
He has so much understanding for people's point of view.
Only you could get me to watch a video that advocated for veganism.
You know, you know how much this girl loves her meat.
Like, so I will, I will watch Earthling Ed just because I 100% agree with you.
And it's something we do at the association all the time.
I mean, I will say, I think people know because I say it exhaustively that I'm militant about
the advocacy, but I really think militancy and aggressiveness are very different, right?
So I think like going back, so I want to try to thread together some things that you said
because we're kind of running out of time.
But I love, I think a lot of, I think so much of what we said ends up on a similar page
of Tatara's point.
There's a toxic aspect, right, of certain parts of the culture.
Obviously not all men are doing this, but there are people who are taking good things
and are doing them badly, right?
Or are doing them for their own purposes that we have to be really careful about.
And we have to be really careful that we acknowledge that yes, statistically there are certain
things that men do more.
There are certain things that women do more.
But at the end of the day, some of them are just traits and skills.
And for those of you that are playing in a rigged game that want to be the best and want
to win, to Lili's point, you're going to have to be better at getting some of those skills
and traits that you might not statistically be the likely gender to have, 100% agree.
But then taking it all back to we would all benefit more.
And I 100% agree.
And I think the association strives to do this with whether you're male or female having
the skill of empathy and not being confrontational in this, but having a Socratic discussion
and questioning and bringing nuance back to civilization, which has been unfortunately
ripped out.
And I think that that is all such good advice.
And I love it because the original topic was decrypting gender disparity.
And I think those are all fantastic suggestions.
I know I'm going to take some of them back to the association.
Tara, I know it came up at investor summit that there was like one or two men in the
room and how we all wanted to have more men there.
So I will say to the men listening, to the women listening, get more men to listen to
this, share it with your favorite man.
Even if you don't know that he's an ally, I will say the number of men who come to our
events who have daughters, granddaughters, nieces, they want the world to be better for
them, for their wives.
And I think they're some of our biggest supporters.
So I will just end this on Lili, Tara, I can't think of two women who would have been better
to have this discussion with.
I appreciate all the incredible work that you guys are doing in this space, not just
incredible to have you for our inaugural episode, but to discuss such important topics with
two people who are so in it.
We want to say a huge thank you to our sponsor Bracewell LLP and everyone listening who hopefully
came with open hearts and minds.
Positive or negative, we welcome your feedback and we hope you'll rate us online.
Let us know if you have comments, questions or thoughts for future podcasts.
For anyone who is interested in learning more about the association, our global events or
the initiatives we're working on to increase inclusion, check out our public LinkedIn page,
our Twitter or Instagram pages at AWIC Global or our webpage at www.womenincrypto.org, which
is also where you can sign up and join.
Thanks again for tuning in and we hope to see you next time.