The Perfect Algorithm for Finding Love? with Christian Rudder

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Speaker 1 I'll ask you as a woman. So, when you look, just like let's say I put pictures of men up.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Do you think that like 40-something-year-old men are more attractive than 20-something-year-old men?

Speaker 3 I was gonna say something. I don't wanna say what I'm gonna say.

Speaker 1 No, say what you're gonna say.

Speaker 3 How tall is he when he stands on his wallet?

Speaker 1 This is What Now

Speaker 1 with Trevor Noah.

Speaker 3 I was saying to Trevor before you got here that like

Speaker 3 the okay Cupid marriage success rate is like higher than the Tinder.

Speaker 1 You must say it when we're recording. Oh, we are recording.
No, we're rolling.

Speaker 3 We're waiting for this thing.

Speaker 1 Oh, no.

Speaker 1 We are saying this. Okay.

Speaker 1 We are.

Speaker 2 Well, I really appreciate y'all inviting me on. It was like, I was telling Lindsay when she let me in.
At first, I was like, is this a scam? Am I going to get mugged if I show up to this thing?

Speaker 2 Wait, why?

Speaker 1 Because I was just saying, no, not for night. I didn't think it was real.

Speaker 1 Okay, help me understand why you said, because in my head, I go, Christiana, this is, oh, this is the other thing that you said right before you walked in, Christian, was we were going,

Speaker 1 you are.

Speaker 1 probably not credited for a shit ton of the work that has given us insight into things that we previously didn't have insight into.

Speaker 2 It's just, it has been a while since I've done like any media and I was like, you know, it was just very extremely flattering.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 3 Well, which we noticed because we're like, he's been quiet for a while.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 2 try to lay very low.

Speaker 1 And what, what prompted that? I'm curious.

Speaker 2 I mean, y'all must have much, much, much, much, especially you with such a thick skin.

Speaker 2 Like, I just, it's just like, I just can't deal with Twitter and like all of this stuff, just like people talking at you. And about, it just bothered me.
So I was like, you know what?

Speaker 1 I'm good. Okay.
Well, well you know what we'll we should we should jump into that but i i just want to set the scene a little bit you know for for people who aren't familiar with you i think

Speaker 1 there are a bunch of people who won't be familiar with you of course yeah sure but then there are a ton of people who should be not just familiar with you but almost grateful to you super grateful because they are

Speaker 1 probably in a relationship or they are married or they could even be the product

Speaker 1 of the work that you've created. Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 So just so I don't butcher it, like, you know, you're one of the people who basically started OKCupid. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So help me break this down. Like you, because we live in such an app age now, take us, take us back a little bit.
What was OKCupid when you started it? And like, what was this world?

Speaker 2 Oh, gosh. So we started OKCupid in 2003.
And it had its, which is obviously like so old for the internet. And it actually had its origins.
We all.

Speaker 2 worked at SparkNotes, the like study guide site before, and we had a little part of SparkNotes called Spark Match, which was just like because we were like spark notes is for kids who aren't doing well in school or like high school college like what else can we do to keep them occupied on our website and so it was just you know you look at you fill out a profile almost like like a bio type of thing you know old school and

Speaker 2 you can just browse human beings instead of like content on the internet and that's like in 1999 that was something that just didn't exist right and um spark notes was super popular it actually crashed because we didn't know what we were doing and so we kind of like bookmarked that in our minds and then when we left spark notes

Speaker 2 we decided to relaunch OKCupid or launch OKCupid, which is basically just like the same thing with a different name. And it was just, you know, a place to message and find other people,

Speaker 2 which in 2003

Speaker 2 you couldn't really do online. I used to try to like find someone I knew in high school or something in 2002 or three and just couldn't do it.

Speaker 1 I didn't, I didn't dare do that because when I was using the internet around that time, first of all, we had dial-up. Yeah, sure.
You know, the whole like,

Speaker 1 I remember that well.

Speaker 1 Like that whole thing

Speaker 1 yeah yeah

Speaker 1 like your computer was fighting everything to get into this place called the internet yeah so i didn't search for anyone i would go to one web page if i was lucky and just stay there and then the closest i came to it was like chat yeah yeah yeah just like chat like irc exactly

Speaker 1 exactly yeah we didn't really have i think we had irc yeah like it was the lightest chat clients that you could imagine because the computers were so they were so basic of course yeah they're so basic but that's that's part of the reason i wanted to talk to you specifically and i wanted to have you on is because

Speaker 1 you know

Speaker 1 we're in 2025

Speaker 1 we are living in a world where everyone feels like they're inundated by everything and most of it seems to be digital yeah you know so uh our politics uh our our matchmaking our work finding our working you know if it's not from the office our connecting, our talking to our parents, kids, our, everything is in this world.

Speaker 1 And I thought, who better to have this conversation with than somebody who was sort of like at the genesis of it all, and in many ways, one of like the forefathers of the thing that we're now in.

Speaker 1 You know, like, I always wish you could actually go and get like Benjamin Franklin and all of those people. No, just to actually yell at them.

Speaker 1 No, inventors. Yes, but you know why? You know why? Because everyone has ideas of what they would want or what they would say.
Well, the founding fathers never intended the founding father.

Speaker 1 If you look at their writing, but it would be so great to sit with them and go, Hey, did you intend this? Yeah, like, okay, look at the world now and tell me what you intend.

Speaker 1 And in a way, I feel like you're one of the founding fathers of the way the internet has connected people. You know, so

Speaker 1 maybe we start with this because Christiana, you were saying something interesting just before Christian got here. You were talking about OK Cupid and the matches in particular.

Speaker 3 Oh, I was saying that now looking at it compared to maybe like the Tinders and the bumbles and on the grinders and like, you know, the swiping, like those type of things.

Speaker 3 Okay, Cupid kind of had like this analog feature in this digital world because you had to write about

Speaker 1 yourself.

Speaker 3 What your music you were into, your interests, what's your favorite books? I mean, do people even read books now? You go to ChatGPT.

Speaker 3 They're like, no, but it's just like, you know, it was, you had to be really intentional and thoughtful and creative. And it showed so much about yourself.
by creating that profile.

Speaker 3 And I think, I think a lot about MySpace,

Speaker 3 MySpace and stuff like that. And then

Speaker 3 somebody would have to come and read about you. It wasn't like, you know, it's different when you go on Twitter.

Speaker 2 You had to put in some time.

Speaker 3 It's like retweets and just these thoughts. But someone would have to sit down and really, pictures were a thing, but you'd have to read about this person and then make your decision.
Right.

Speaker 2 It's an interesting thing to watch happen because

Speaker 2 it's definitely the case that in kind of OK Cubit's heyday, and just for, I guess, background, you filled out a profile, you write about your favorite books, you write about, I don't know, what do you want out of life?

Speaker 2 Just, I don't know, whatever, how you describe yourself, what you're looking for.

Speaker 2 And then there's photos, and then there were also match questions where it could be things like, do you want to have kids? Or, you know, how do you feel about abortion rights?

Speaker 2 Or, you know, and including also crazy things like what kind of humor you might like or whatever.

Speaker 2 And everything's sort of like compacted down to just the photo with Tinder and Bumble. And I think, you know, the online dating industry is kind of hurting.
And I think part of it is that

Speaker 2 you've lost so much.

Speaker 1 It's compressed.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it made it like this quick, quick hit, you you know,

Speaker 2 and people can go through and look through tons of hot people and have these like pinging and all of this stuff.

Speaker 2 But it's delivering probably worse matches or something now.

Speaker 2 So it's an interesting topic of conversation with my friends, you know, who helped me start OK Cupid.

Speaker 2 If the time is right to try to do something else and kind of read, like telescope it all back out again, where you actually ask people to do more and say more about themselves than just like a cool selfie or whatever.

Speaker 1 If you if you were giving dating today a grade, like online dating today where would you grade it what what what do you think we're at right now

Speaker 2 i mean

Speaker 2 first well online dating is way more popular than it ever was when no but i'm saying

Speaker 2 but i know i just don't want to sound like a hater

Speaker 1 nonetheless hey

Speaker 3 something biggest hater in the world

Speaker 1 so if you want to become a hater you have to

Speaker 1 we got we got a tag team lots of hateration in this dance surrender so hateration is a great word don't don't don't don't

Speaker 2 best new verb i've heard in a long time um you know I would give it like a C minus, I guess.

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 2 with points for being more popular, which is, there is something inherently good about that. Like more people are using it.
It meets more people's needs to some degree, right?

Speaker 2 But I feel like there's a lot of people that are very dissatisfied. And if you go look at like the

Speaker 2 monthly active user numbers, like Tinder was at, I think, 13 million in 2019 and is like eight now, which is like a massive drop off.

Speaker 2 You know, that's like kind of Facebook levels of sort of becoming a dinosaur. And that's like, it's just interesting.

Speaker 2 It's a weird thing because there's definitely just as many single people as there ever were. And it's not like there's a plan B.

Speaker 2 The other apps are not really absorbing those missing, say, 5 million people. Like the industry is just shrinking overall.

Speaker 2 Whereas if you look at, say, Facebook and it's declined, then you had Instagram to sort of replace it. You have TikTok and like social media is as strong as ever.

Speaker 3 Yeah, people are migrating.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they just, they just change where they're going. But here people are.
When they change what they're doing, they're just like, I'm out. I give up.
Yeah, or whatever.

Speaker 3 I'm just going to meet people at work or like in real life, which is, you know or or through tick tock or not meeting people at all right or i speak about like a lot of my friends who every one of my close girlfriends who's single i get a text that i'm quitting the apps yeah i'm quitting the apps and it's not like they're meeting people in real life because you go out and the men are swiping yeah yeah you know what i mean so it's just like a lot of people just surrender to be like maybe i won't meet someone yeah so i'll i'll i'll speaking from personal experience as someone who's used the apps right i'm young christiana not Not like you married people.

Speaker 1 I'm young. As someone who's used the apps, I'll tell you what I think it is.
I think oftentimes we'll make it seem like it's this nefarious thing that people do. Oh, people can just swipe.

Speaker 1 People can just. But I think in a way, it's a byproduct of the culture that we live in.
In the same way that Amazon makes people shop more because you can shop more.

Speaker 1 In the same way that like anything that allows you to do something more will make you do it more, right? So once they made bigger bags of potato chips, people ate more potato chips.

Speaker 1 It's just like what we're going to do as people. The same thing goes for the dating apps.
And it's that you, you aren't in this thing because you're an asshole.

Speaker 1 Most people are using it because they're searching for something. They're looking for this magical love story that they've all been told about.

Speaker 1 And now someone said, hey, here's an app to help you find it. Here's the app that you're looking for, right? And so what you do is you then start to swipe.

Speaker 1 And in a weird way, I think a lot of people experience this. They go, if I do it more, I'm more likely to get to my end goal.
You know, put in the work. So you can't like swipe three people.

Speaker 1 What, you've only swiped three people? Yeah. No, there could be more.
Keep on going. Keep on going.

Speaker 1 And I think what it creates is a world where we've, we've applied efficiency to something that isn't efficient. Love isn't efficient.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Connections aren't efficient.

Speaker 1 You know, when I think of every solid friendship that I have in my life, like where I love the people dearly, it was a gradual game of attrition, you know, like rocks bumping into each other in like a tumbler.

Speaker 1 And slowly over time, we became pebbles in each other's lives. But there was no like instant and all of a sudden we're there, you know, and I, and I actually,

Speaker 1 you know, I'm shocked that you're shocked that we wanted to have you on.

Speaker 1 No, because I'll tell you why. You took data

Speaker 1 that really no one had taken before

Speaker 1 and you didn't just. You didn't just look at the data, you synthesized it.

Speaker 1 And I, you know, in your book, Dataclism, you wrote something really poignant for me and you said, and I'll paraphrase it, so forgive me me if I if I butcher it but essentially what you were saying was you're going for a long time in society we've relied on how people feel

Speaker 1 how they think and how they feel so you you do a survey how do you feel about a woman president and people will tell you how they feel or they'll tell you how they want you to think they feel right or how they want to think that they feel exactly exactly but then data shows you what they feel yeah you know data doesn't show you like people go like oh i'm a healthy eater i eat this many meals a week, or I eat this much ice cream.

Speaker 1 No, the data actually shows you what people do or don't eat and what they actually do or don't do. And so I think,

Speaker 1 you know, when we look at like what you did with data, Christiana said it so beautifully before you came.

Speaker 1 She said, she said, this is the man who's responsible for so many of the studies that have revealed the world to us in ways that we didn't previously know.

Speaker 3 In particular, your work around racial preferences and dating, which was so illuminating to black women. And

Speaker 3 it's sparked so much discourse.

Speaker 1 It really has.

Speaker 3 You talked about how um black women and asian men were like the least matched and you were digging into that and i i don't want to paraphrase you wrongly but you talk about like we can't take racism out this there's no way of algorithmically gaming that that the site just revealed how people really felt yeah in ways that were maybe some people felt before like some black women felt like maybe i'm unlucky in love asian men felt you know i'm being overlooked in ways and you showed the data that proved that that was true Yeah.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that's very nice to hear because, you know, like publishing that stuff, it feels dicey to be talking about race in a public way, a white dude.

Speaker 2 It's not like I have any firsthand experience of any of this stuff. And we just decided to put it out there in the world.

Speaker 2 And we did get feedback from people that were like very grateful that we were just helping maybe put a, not a name, but maybe a number to their experience of like, you know, my.

Speaker 2 whatever, my friends are having a different kind of experience than I am on your app. And this helps me understand why, because it's, it's nothing with me.

Speaker 2 It's like this, it's the people who come to the app that bring all of their prejudices or just like this kind of sociological like baking that goes on for your entire life about what's attractive and what you should want.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 yeah, those were my favorite things to work on for sure, like looking at how different racial groups message each other, how they rate each other. So like swipe left, swipe right.

Speaker 2 What's interesting is it's like that phenomenon, for example, of black women getting fewer messages than say Asian or white women.

Speaker 1 It's

Speaker 2 much less a thing outside the United States when you look at the data from other places like the UK.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the UK was like 98%, I think, if I remember correctly. Yeah.
They were getting 98% of the messages. Yeah, exactly.
And then in other parts, they were getting like 97 point something percent.

Speaker 2 And just for your reader's context or listeners' context, I think it's probably

Speaker 2 like 50%, I think, or 60% of in the U.S., the ratio would be of like contacts, I'd say, from black women to a white woman.

Speaker 1 Would you say that dating websites are the most honest space of data that tells us where society actually is?

Speaker 2 I mean, obviously I have, you know, skin in that game, so to speak. It's like I did so much work with it myself.
But I do think so, because like there's no real incentive to like lie

Speaker 2 to the app itself. Like you, you want to find somebody that you're actually going to be attracted to.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 there's no pose, you know, you like on Twitter or whatever, you can say these things. You can kind of take these very strident stances.

Speaker 2 You can make your opinions out to be be something maybe a little different than what they really are in practice. Whereas like on a dating app, it doesn't really do you any good to,

Speaker 2 I don't know, just, for example, pretend that you're really into Asian men if you're not. Because what happens when you do that?

Speaker 2 Well, now you're on a date with a guy that you're not maybe that into, and it makes the app work less well for you. Right.
So

Speaker 2 we always felt very good about our data integrity just compared to the other things that people go and do on the internet where everyone's, you know, everyone's a dog or whatever.

Speaker 1 You You know?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I don't know. I do think dating apps provide an incredible window into

Speaker 3 the thing I found illuminating was age. Oh, yeah.
Your work on age, how men, it was like 20 year olds.

Speaker 2 Yes, just all the way down the line.

Speaker 1 I don't like how you said that in like an accusatory way.

Speaker 3 I think I said it.

Speaker 1 Your inflection way. No, your inflection went accusatory.

Speaker 3 I'm trying to be less judgmental.

Speaker 1 Your eyebrows seemed just to me like 20 year olds.

Speaker 3 No, because it was like women with age.

Speaker 2 I don't want to get this wrong, but it was just like women, age corresponded with their age sure so if they're like 25 they're into 25 year olds if they're 30 it goes with time men it didn't matter what age right the average age was 20 in terms of exactly like like a kind of an important extra point on that is like so if you ask women like part of signing up for okay cupid and tinder all these things is like kind of what is the age range that you're into also right so the app can kind of filter and show you stuff so if you ask women They give you the very sensible answer.

Speaker 2 If you're 30, you're maybe up open to 28 year old guys to 35 year old guys, whatever it is, some range, right? And men actually do the same kind of thing.

Speaker 2 They sort of, they take their age and they subtract a few years and they add a few years. They're like, all right, cool.
I'm good with this band.

Speaker 2 So both men and women answer that question more or less the same way. Like, what age are you into? If you ask them that.

Speaker 2 But then if you look at who they actually go out and message, like you were saying, like for women, well, they actually know themselves better.

Speaker 2 They're more honest with themselves or more honest with the app. Like, you know, if you're 25, you message 25 year olds.
If you're a 30 year old, you message 30 year olds.

Speaker 2 But men, yet, like, like we were just saying, like, it's all 20 year olds, even for 50 year old dudes.

Speaker 1 You've had to work so much with data, you know, and there's something you do in the book, and I'd love to know if you still have these opinions, like you, you, you're very honest about acknowledging the limitations that data has, because data can only tell us what has happened, but we don't necessarily know why the thing has or hasn't happened, right?

Speaker 1 And I think at one point, you even talk about it, like the compounding effect, I think, that you speak about, like where you go, everything that you're measuring is within the context of something else.

Speaker 1 You know, so if you say,

Speaker 1 I think the analogy you gave is like, if you stand at the corner of like Fifth Avenue in New York, Fifth Avenue and like 50 something or 60th Street, and you say, what do people in New York look like?

Speaker 1 You'll say, oh, they're all pretty slim and wealthy and they're all a lot of Louis Vuitton and that's New Yorkers. It's like, no, but that's where you were measuring from.

Speaker 1 And so in interpreting where you measure from or in understanding where you measure from, you come to realize the limitations of the information that you have. Right.

Speaker 1 And so let's let's jump into this example. Because I racked my brain thinking about this.
First of all, because I defend men fiercely.

Speaker 1 I defend men fiercely because I know where Christiana is going to go with this. And I was like, I have to fight.
I have to fight for my brethren. Right.
Mandem need me. Right.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 here's what I was intrigued by. And it's, I mean, joke society in terms of defending.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Does the data tell us? that men think 20-year-old women are the most attractive

Speaker 1 and women generally date in and around their age range or they find the men around their age more attractive?

Speaker 1 Or is the data telling us that society doesn't allow for a woman to date like whatever age man she wants?

Speaker 1 It seems to me there's a possibility that a woman, to exactly what you said, don't just know themselves better, but know the world better.

Speaker 1 And I can only say this from personal experience with the women in my life, like friends, they go like, I can't date a 20-year-old man. What will people say? What will my friends say?

Speaker 1 I don't want to come up with a 20, 25-year-old guy. I'm 40.
I'm rolling up with like this little toy, even the word toy boy. Yeah, yeah.
You know, I'm rolling up with this little toy boy. What am I?

Speaker 1 Sugar mama. And I, what does he know about the world? And what is he going to help me with my kids? He's one of my kids.
And there's all these other frames. So, but you get what I'm saying?

Speaker 2 I mean, I do think there's something to your point about

Speaker 2 there's like some enablement of guys going after 20-year-old girls or liking them. It's like fine if you're 40 and you're dating a 25-year-old.
I mean, sort of. And

Speaker 2 i can see why that wouldn't be the case if you flipped the genders and and

Speaker 2 you can't know everything about love and i know we're not talking exactly about love here but you can't know everything about that and like these the data and therefore like the algorithms that are sort of grinding it all up like they just ultimately don't know you as well as you know yourself just looking back on where the world is now and where it was when in 2015 when i left okay cupid like We actually had a kind of like machine learning program to try to improve our algorithm and try to find people even more perfect matches that we actually ended up shutting down because we felt like in our tests, like

Speaker 2 no matter how much work we put into improving the algorithm, like the ultimate arbiter was always the person who was going on the date or sending the message or whatever. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 And we stopped trying to guess what was going to, you know, make people into pebbles or to, you know, to use your metaphor, like, because people don't change so much and there's so many weird things about people, like how they laugh or the way they carry themselves or like a look in their eye that you just can't get to

Speaker 2 through a computer, at least yet. And so,

Speaker 2 yeah, we just kind of, we always tried to be aware of what we couldn't know, I guess, if that makes sense.

Speaker 2 And I know I'm kind of ranging from your initial question, but like, I do think it's, it's interesting what people go and do in these sort of bite-sized units of like just clicking on someone.

Speaker 2 And yeah, guys click on 20-year-olds.

Speaker 2 They're hotter, I guess. And women don't do that.

Speaker 3 Because you were doing all of this machine learning stuff pre the AI advancements we have now, which are like kind of mind-blowing and terrifying. And you know, that's a different conversation.

Speaker 3 How do you think now, using the technology we have now, do you think you guys could have different results? Like, how, how can the algorithm be game to us in ways that aren't expected?

Speaker 2 I mean, if I were to start a new dating app like today, you would have to use some kind of AI.

Speaker 2 But I don't, again, I don't think I would try to make, you know, the perfect match, have, you know, Chat GPT figure out exactly the right person for me in the world because i just think that's like a losing game like

Speaker 2 i mean we've all been set up by friends that think oh my god jenny's perfect for you you got to meet her and you know you sit down and you're just like

Speaker 2 or whatever and or maybe she hates you you know who knows i think the ai component would be better served where like the app can like have a conversation with you to get to know you better so that it can let you control more of your own experience rather than making the algorithm stronger.

Speaker 2 I guess it makes your voice in the algorithm stronger.

Speaker 1 Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 Like that's what I'd like to see happen.

Speaker 2 Because I I think kind of getting back to what we were saying a second ago, with the Tinders and Bumbles of the world, the algorithm is all powerful.

Speaker 2 It's just like, to use your potato chip example, like if you think of Tinders like an infinite can of Pringles, you're just taking one off the top.

Speaker 1 You just sit and just once you pop, you can't stop. Right, exactly.

Speaker 2 So like, and it just does all the work. It's the, it's the silo, right?

Speaker 2 But I think if you can make the algorithm make you, your voice and your thoughts and what you really want more subtle and more powerful within the mix of how it's showing you people, I think that would be really cool.

Speaker 2 Almost like a life coach, like if people could put up with that.

Speaker 2 I think it'd be pretty cool.

Speaker 1 We're going to continue this conversation right after this short break.

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Speaker 1 You know, in a lot of the stuff you do, whether it's your writing or whether it's your work, and even speaking to you now, you have a very human quality to you that I don't necessarily associate with a lot of people in the world of tech.

Speaker 1 Right? Well, thank you.

Speaker 1 No, but I noticed this even in your writing.

Speaker 1 Your writing is full of doubts.

Speaker 1 Your writing is full of...

Speaker 1 like assuming that you don't know what's going to happen, assuming that you don't have the answer, assuming that the thing could be wrong.

Speaker 1 It seems like you are cut from a different cloth because now we live in a world where tech tells us they know everything. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Like when you talk to Sam Altman, we had an episode with him on the podcast. Sam, I did not see like even like a hint of doubt.
He was like, AGI, baby, we're getting artificial general intelligence.

Speaker 1 It's going to make the world better. No more cancer, no more poverty.
We're doing it. And I was just like, wait, wait.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, no, no, really.

Speaker 1 He just has that you, you approach that differently. You, you have like a doubt.
So I'd love to know, like, what doubts do you have about tech in dating? Wow.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 2 tech in dating.

Speaker 1 I mean, I do

Speaker 2 doubt, probably like most people that have used these apps, whether it's like healthy to have that infinite can or just know that if I don't like this person or choose not to talk to this person in front of me.

Speaker 2 well there's always somebody else

Speaker 2 and you can just go through like it that i'm definitely can admit that might not not be healthy psychologically over like the 10 years of doing that or something right like it'd be very hard to settle down with someone if at least theoretically there's always a possibility that there's someone better i also doubt there's going to be a significant improvement in

Speaker 2 an algorithm that's going to be better than people's like personal tastes as you guys all know like there's just style and all different kinds of things about a person that you just can't reduce and hopefully never can reduce to some radio buttons or whatever it is, like on a, on a phone.

Speaker 2 The one thing I like and I'm proud of even still, I mean,

Speaker 2 10 years of distance between me and working in the industry is like,

Speaker 2 I love that dating apps, even for all their flaws and as frustrated as people get with them now,

Speaker 2 they're trying to create something in the real world, you know, like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, the goal of all of those things always, it's just to get you use TikTok more, right?

Speaker 2 Or eventually to make more money or whatever.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like, yeah, keep you digital.

Speaker 2 Thank you. Twitter wants to keep you, or ex wants to keep you there, right? Arguing with someone, if that's how it goes, but whatever.

Speaker 2 Whereas Tinder, even the shallowest possible experience, the goal isn't, they don't want you, the people sitting in the office working on the app, they don't want you to sit there and just swipe infinitely.

Speaker 2 That doesn't really get them anywhere either. They want you to go out and find someone that you like, you know, and you go home with them or have a relationship with them or whatever it is.

Speaker 2 And I love that about it.

Speaker 2 Like, I think that's something that I'm proud of, that it's, it's created, you know, a lot of, a lot of frustration and a lot of like heartbreak and a lot of, I'm sure, very douchey behavior out there in the world, but it's also created families and couples and all of these things.

Speaker 2 And like, and obviously, I'm not saying any of these things are perfect. They're frustrating.
And people have always hated dating and being single. And people have always hated dating apps.

Speaker 2 They hated OKCupid at the time. It's just like the complaints would just pile up, you know, just like they hate Tinder or they hate Bumble now.

Speaker 2 You know, it's like that's a common permanent thread, I think, of the thing. But it's cool that it does create something

Speaker 2 actual, real in the world.

Speaker 1 So i think that makes a lot of sense like

Speaker 1 i think people hate dating and they'll hate dating apps because for the most part as humans we hate searching but we love finding yeah but we don't realize that finding is the conclusion of searching yeah and the rejection component is obviously pretty heavy yeah yeah our little monkey brains love to finish a task yeah so we love to know we got to the end of something You know, it was a book, you know, there's that feeling and you may not even realize you feel it, but when you get to the last page of a book, there's a there's a strange sense of relief and completion and peace that comes with it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the peace for sure.

Speaker 1 It has ended. Yeah.
Watch a TV show and see how you feel when they write to be continued.

Speaker 1 You don't live. If we're honest about it, you don't live.
You like go into the world just a little, a little like left on edge. You know,

Speaker 1 you don't have the

Speaker 1 it's it's the same, it's the same reason I feel like we have funerals.

Speaker 3 Yeah, like the finishing of it.

Speaker 1 Can I tell you, like, I remember when

Speaker 1 it was my grandmother's funeral, I remember thinking my whole life, I was like, funerals are stupid. The person's dead.
Why are we going anywhere with them? They're dead.

Speaker 1 Let's just carry on with our lives. And it was only when I, when I, because I didn't get to go because during COVID, but during my grandmother's funeral that I realized what a funeral really is for.

Speaker 1 It's the closure.

Speaker 1 It's like the final confirmation that this person is in fact no longer with us and you're going to see them go away to be no longer with us right right so when you're on a dating app

Speaker 1 and to your point there's three more right yeah who would stop looking why would you stop looking yeah what kind of person would you be that you you you stopped whereas before it was like who are you dating oh i'm dating christiana why well she's the only girl in the village

Speaker 1 we're done

Speaker 1 we're done there's only five girls in the village and four of them are married all right christiana let's do this thing yeah you were the and then the village got a little bit bigger sure And it got a little bit, but now we've made it infinite as well.

Speaker 2 And so I wonder, like, yeah, it's hard to make, like, almost any decision you make feels like settling.

Speaker 1 Yes, right. Yes, but I, but I wonder, if you were to start a dating app, can you make a healthy dating app in a world that demands that the apps make as much money as they do?

Speaker 1 Because everything's about the money now. Right.

Speaker 2 And I think that's like, you know,

Speaker 2 yeah, they're all like Grindr, Bumble,

Speaker 2 Tinder, which is all owned by Match, which also owns OKCupid and tons of other things. Like, yeah, they're all public companies.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 IEC, which at that time owned Match and Tinder before it was spun off into a public company, bought OKCupid in 2011.

Speaker 2 They were great partners. I really liked everyone there, but definitely the timbre changed overnight of, you know, how did you do yesterday? Yes.
How did you do this week?

Speaker 1 What's your earnings, baby?

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, but it comes down to the day. Like information is coming in real time about how much money you're making.

Speaker 2 So I do, yeah, I think, I think for there to be a healthier dating app, I think it would have to be privately held.

Speaker 3 I actually, on this new,

Speaker 3 this thought experiment we're doing with a new dating app, right? How does that look in this time where I think politically people are so polarized?

Speaker 3 Because like 10 years ago, if a woman goes on a date with a guy and he says he's a Republican. It means very different things in like a post-Roe v.

Speaker 1 Wade

Speaker 3 red hat universe.

Speaker 3 You sit across from a guy and he says he's a Republican in the red pill of you're like right and they that guy theoretical guy would also probably be disgusted by a lib or whatever how does that even look in this like where people really wear their politics now in ways that i i think can be quite cumbersome to just even fam families don't even want to get along well let alone strangers i mean i think that's actually a really good insight into maybe why current

Speaker 2 the current leaders are on the decline because they just don't really gather much of that information at all.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you can put it in your profile, I guess, but like, at least as far as I know, you can't search by politics, just for example. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Hinge, I think you can, is one of the few.

Speaker 2 And Hinge, I think by no coincidence, is kind of ascendant now. It's past.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they actually are doing that. It's been the number two.

Speaker 2 Kind of out of out of, really from nothing. Like 2019, Adapt was tiny and it's just grown.
And so I think leaning more into that Hinge style model of learning more.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you would have to have, you would have to gather more information,

Speaker 2 ask people questions, have them slow down.

Speaker 2 Like I remember when we were trying to compete with Tinder at OK like it was tough because we tried to ask all these complex things, like, you know, how religious are you?

Speaker 2 It's like a pretty complicated question. And also, there's some religious people that don't care if their partner is religious.
And there's some

Speaker 3 atheist. Yeah.
And I'm a Christian.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. Right.

Speaker 2 And so, and so neither of you, both of you are okay with the other way, right? And, and some people are very religious and need the other person to meet them there, right?

Speaker 2 And you just have to start gathering that information.

Speaker 2 and then segmenting your matches, you know, or, or maybe you find someone who's MAGA and is okay okay with someone who isn't, you know, for example, you know, people are unpredictable in some ways.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 there's a part of your work that speaks to how we don't actually know what's good for us, right? And a lot of research has shown us that humans are terrible predictors of the future. We generally are.

Speaker 1 But in some of your work, when you looked at some of the data, there's a part of the book. that I remember that I really, really loved.
And it said,

Speaker 1 you found in the data, it was less important whether or not a Republican was dating a Republican or a Democrat was dating a Democrat.

Speaker 1 What was more important was whether or not both people agreed on whether or not they should be engaged in politics. Right.

Speaker 1 And that became a greater determining factor for whether or not those people would actually get along. And I thought that was a beautiful insight into like how we see these things.

Speaker 1 Like you just said now, oh, I'm with an atheist and there's a Christian.

Speaker 1 I would argue what will happen over time, whether he likes it or not, is your husband, Lewis, is going to be, he's, he's, there's going to be spirituality that comes into his life, whether he likes it or not.

Speaker 1 I mean, my youngest daughter is always like, Jesus, my youngest daughter is like, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

Speaker 1 Amen.

Speaker 1 But what I mean is, like, you, you, I, I have yet to see a world

Speaker 1 where people are not affected by the people around them. Yeah.
They rub off on you.

Speaker 3 Yeah. He's made me more rash, like, interested in reason and there you go.
What I would contribute to a witch now, I might, I say, you know, it's just, you know, I just have a stomach virus.

Speaker 1 No one has cursed me.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, I think. But yeah, and so, like, when I look at that, I look at that work that you did there, right? And I see the data,

Speaker 1 I almost go,

Speaker 1 how much should we trust what we think connects us to people and what separates us? Because it seems like from the work you were doing, the data show that that wasn't true.

Speaker 1 Republicans and Democrats actually could make a really good couple, but it was the fact that they thought that they couldn't that made them not be able to.

Speaker 2 Sure, sure, exactly. And that's very well said.

Speaker 2 But I think, I guess that's where computers can kind of do a lot of work that a normal human being couldn't do, where it's like, you can gather all this information, your political affiliation.

Speaker 2 You can also gather how much that matters to you, how engaged you are politically. And then behind the scenes,

Speaker 2 the server or the algorithm.

Speaker 2 can learn what actually makes a difference yeah you know and then act on that um but unless you have that information, you know, even in the kind of like primitive days of 2014 or whatever, we did tons of experiments and tests and we're always sort of honing our match algorithm until we decided we had it to where the best that we could get it.

Speaker 2 But you have to start, you have to take in that information to make that even possible.

Speaker 2 And like you might end up with unexpected sort of predictors of relationship success, or at least conversational success, which is all these apps can really, you know, manage or measure.

Speaker 2 But there are predictors, you know, like you just said, like how strongly you feel about politics does it turn out, it turns out matter. But if the app doesn't know that question,

Speaker 2 then it can't use it. And so I think that's what you've lost in the sort of swiping model now that Hinge is bringing back a little of.
And I think

Speaker 2 at some point, another app will figure out a way to make that sort of palatable to a busy person on a phone today

Speaker 2 to learn more about them and then figure out what is going to matter in a relationship that person is going to have.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense, actually.

Speaker 3 And this is where maybe algorithms could be quite useful. Like maybe because of like the culture I grew up in, I realized that like personalities don't really matter when it comes to relationships.

Speaker 3 It's always been about like the values you have and how you rank them.

Speaker 1 Okay. So like yeah, it's like a worldview.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so it's like if you value, like imagine it's family, kindness.

Speaker 1 Oh, damn, I like this.

Speaker 1 So it's like if we both value money, number one,

Speaker 1 we're more likely to get along.

Speaker 3 It's not just the values. There's a match in values and how we rank them.

Speaker 3 Because often, like I thought my cultural background, I saw that marriages that didn't work, it was a ranking of those values was a complete mismatch.

Speaker 3 So maybe the man only cared about money and the woman cared about family, right? But she also cares about money. But maybe money was like number five and it was his number one.

Speaker 3 So I always find couples, you know, like they're like opposites attract. I'm like, what are their values? How do they rank them?

Speaker 3 If there's a matching in the rank of those values, that's a couple that's going to last for a long time. And I think what the algorithm can do is figure out.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's what like computers will be.

Speaker 3 Yeah, what do the values, what does Trevor value? What is this imaginary person?

Speaker 3 How do they rank them? Let's cause a match. And the reason arranged marriages, I think, were so successful back in the day is because you're in this very insular world.

Speaker 3 You're likely to have the same values because you're raised in similar. environments.
But now in this world where it's like, we're so global and cosmopolitan, we're porous.

Speaker 3 We're being influenced by different things just on our phone. And I think what an algorithm can then do is like bring it back is bring, do that work for you.

Speaker 3 Because that's the thing I asked my husband before we got married. Like, what do you value? He's like, oh, you know, family, kindness, community.

Speaker 3 And I was like, okay, so in those things, like, what do you feel most strongly about? And when I passed that out, we matched, even though, like,

Speaker 3 again, I'm not sure about dinosaurs and this man is like very,

Speaker 3 very historical and science-based, right? but

Speaker 3 but ultimately like we both value family community and kindness and we will hold ourselves to and a sense of duty so he's just like i'm always like you're my best friend he's like you're not my best friend you're my wife i can get rid of friends i can't get rid of a wife and i'm like from a background where duty is i'm the eldest daughter i take that duty so seriously sounds like you and your husband both know yourselves really well too which is important but i think like just again working on our theoretical dating app here like what you could do is you ask people to do essentially that same ranking that you you described, kindness, religion, whatever it is.

Speaker 2 People can order little tiles just for our own mental model.

Speaker 2 But then over the course of maybe continuing to use the app, you can ask, like, there's questions you can ask about family, for example, that will help us understand how important family actually is.

Speaker 2 How much time do you spend doing this or whatever? How often do you talk to your mom?

Speaker 1 Would you let your mother-in-law move in with exactly?

Speaker 2 You can ask these like sort of components of that value, right? And kind of get

Speaker 2 insofar as you can approximate the observed, like the real truth behind whatever this person's saying.

Speaker 2 Because most people probably will say family or whatever, because they think of themselves as a good person. And generally, that's kind of how society works.
Right.

Speaker 2 And then you could kind of have the sort of true value ranking underneath the hood. And then you'd also have a third measure.
And now you'd know how well that person knows themselves, too.

Speaker 2 You'd have what they say their values are, what their kind of inferred values are, and then how well those two things match. It would be an interesting way to understand somebody.

Speaker 1 How much do you think,

Speaker 1 I mean, for lack of a better term, the focus on pictures and the sort of like display of ourselves, how much do you think that that has negatively affected our ability to partner up with people?

Speaker 1 Because I know in the early stages of OKCupid, the picture was really tiny.

Speaker 1 It was a tiny, tiny picture. And you found that while people who were, let's say, quote unquote, better looking attracted more matches and more people messaging.

Speaker 1 For the most part, it was like a gentle curve in a way.

Speaker 1 And then when the picture blew up, all of a sudden, the attractive people got way more interest.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they get like more leverage on the pixels, so to speak, right? Yeah. I mean, it's definitely affected it.

Speaker 2 I think in a lot of ways, the focus on photos on dating apps for sure is a negative thing. Like,

Speaker 2 we've said a couple of times here, there's so much more to a person than. I don't know, just their face, like a headshot, basically, right?

Speaker 2 At the same time, like we've discovered, we actually tried to turn the pictures off of ok cupid for a day just to see what would happen and like they turned the pictures off like totally off on the okay this was like 2013 maybe really as an experiment right shut them all down all the all the thumbnails everything went away and as you'd expect like the messaging environment was actually a lot healthier um definitely attractive attractiveness wasn't a component because you couldn't tell what the person looked like that you were trying to talk to at the same time people hated it uh and we got so much feedback that day uh we knew we were going to turn them back on but people were just freaking out Even though we explained it wasn't broken, we were doing this on purpose.

Speaker 2 And I just, people are visual and they kind of have, we, yeah, they, they, they have to have the photo. So it's like, you kind of got to meet them.
You have to meet them.

Speaker 2 Like a dating app can only meet people where they are, right? Like we can't force people. We actually tried another adventure into this world.

Speaker 2 Like we tried to launch, this was, this was, well, we tried to launch a blind dating app. like where we would take a photo and we would scramble it digitally, right?

Speaker 2 This is so stupid in retrospect, but like, you know, we thought that you you could have a scrambled photo and you people could browse and you know you could you would learn a lot more about people and you could set it was it was very slightly pre-tender so it was like a little bit more immediate you could see this scrambled photo and somebody and maybe even go see them that night meet them that night it was a total bomb like um you had like what 10 000 people i think who tried it yeah yeah well we had we had a quarter million downloads and it was like 10 000 dates or something like that yeah it was just it just was terrible and yeah people just don't

Speaker 1 they're just not up for it you know um but what I liked about the learnings was this, this, this is probably one of my favorite things to discover from the data.

Speaker 1 You turned off the pictures, right?

Speaker 1 People,

Speaker 1 there was like a dip for a moment. People just didn't message anyone.
Then at some point, it became normal. It was like almost at the same rates of messaging.

Speaker 1 And then people actually started exchanging numbers and people started hooking up and et cetera. And this is only in like a space of, I don't know, 24, 48 hours or something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 It's a tiny amount of time. But then all the people who didn't exchange numbers and didn't agree to hook up, once the pictures came back on,

Speaker 1 they just ghosted each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 it was like the lights coming on at last call or whatever, where everyone's like, oh, oh,

Speaker 1 yeah. Yeah, that was my favorite story.
I was like, wait, what? Exactly.

Speaker 2 No, it was, you would see conversations that, at least based on the data, you would expect to keep going or whatever. And it was just a total dead stop.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Picture came on, and people were like, oh my God.

Speaker 3 And this leads me to, see, I love this imaginary app we're making, right?

Speaker 3 Because when I was on the apps

Speaker 3 long before I've been married, like, I don't know, seven, eight years now,

Speaker 3 I remember feeling that

Speaker 3 the men being on Instagram was really shaping how they thought women should look in real life.

Speaker 1 Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 3 Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 Definitely, yeah.

Speaker 3 Because also,

Speaker 3 men are seeing more hot people than they've ever seen.

Speaker 1 Yeah, women too.

Speaker 3 Like, I look up, I'm like, she's gorgeous.

Speaker 1 And you're just scrolling all these beautiful people.

Speaker 3 And I think it changed dating because it was just like, I can actually, there's physically somebody that's fine-tuned to what I precisely want.

Speaker 3 And I, I definitely, you know, um, Gia, who was on the show, who wrote Instagram face, talked about like the proliferation of this beauty standard on Instagram, changing what women did in real life with their bodies and their faces to match this beauty standard.

Speaker 3 And I'm interested about this app.

Speaker 3 Could we game the algorithm in a way that plays to countering that countering the fact that like depending on how much time a man spends on instagram right oh this is a man or even a woman's use of certain sites informing how they behave because you know i know all the apps talk to each other and they're spying on us

Speaker 3 no you you never did that of course but like then

Speaker 3 create this machine learning algorithmic thing that can shape a man's preferences in a way that nudge him in the right direction, accounting for that, or if it's a man that is not on Instagram at all, you're like, oh, you haven't been destroyed.

Speaker 2 Right, a clean mind. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 2 I mean, that might work. Something that gets very hard is when the app tries to do something, tries to change people's behavior.

Speaker 2 Um, and actually, we got a lot of criticism or commentary, I guess I'd say, about this in the wake of publishing the racial data that we were talking about at the very beginning and be like, well, why, why can't you guys do more to make, again, Asian men more attractive to to white women or whatever it is you know and the fact is you there's very little you can do to like

Speaker 2 move people because first of all they've had whatever however many years of their life or however many hours scrolling through instagram super hard to undo that

Speaker 2 um and also if you don't deliver to people what at least they think they want

Speaker 2 They're just going to leave. It's not like you have to use

Speaker 2 a dating app or Tinder or whatever. You just do something else.

Speaker 2 And so like, if you're showing some guy's been on Instagram hardcore and is looking for that look, and you're like, hey, man, check this out. This is better.
However, you want to frame it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, this is different.

Speaker 3 This is different.

Speaker 1 I think you'll really like her.

Speaker 2 Some people might be up for that kind of thing, but a lot of dudes are just going to be like, with all the girls in here, ugly, I'm out. You know what I mean? And like, it's hard.
It's very hard to,

Speaker 2 you kind of have to let the users drive what you give them, which can be bad. Obviously, you're reinforcing some negative shit that way, right?

Speaker 1 But,

Speaker 3 but, but otherwise, you just end up with a situation where people are gone that's so interesting to me because i've always felt and the public discussion is that these apps are changing our behavior oh i think that's definitely true and they can that's definitely true like it's making you angrier it's making you argue more it's showing you this stuff but it's like almost in unpredictable ways like i think i don't know any of the founders of say Twitter or Facebook, but I think if you had asked them in 2006 or whatever, is Facebook going to make people really angry?

Speaker 2 And is it going going to become the world's like greatest propaganda tool of all time? Mark Zuckerberg probably would have been like, What are you talking about? I don't want that.

Speaker 2 I just want to have he probably genuinely wanted friends to meet friends or whatever, or make money, you know, and be powerful, which a lot of people are like that. Um,

Speaker 2 apps definitely change the world, so I definitely wouldn't say that. Um, they change behavior, but there has to be some component of them that is delivering

Speaker 2 what those people want. Yeah, they like amplify

Speaker 2 the crap that you already bring to the table.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we already are. Like, it's, you know.

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Speaker 1 As a data expert, I'd love to know how much you allow the data to influence how you then move in the world, you know?

Speaker 2 I definitely try to live more by intuition and just...

Speaker 1 Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I think just getting back to this like perfect love algorithm or whatever, like I just, I genuinely think that's impossible to create a computer program that's going to predict with any real defensible set of certainty, like who person A is, which, which of all the person B's out there, who A is going to love, you know, I just don't think it's possible.

Speaker 1 And I think there's just a lot more to life.

Speaker 2 I mean, hopefully for, you know, maybe for not that much longer, but like

Speaker 2 than like a phone or whatever, you know, and the internet for sure. And so I just, I really try to,

Speaker 2 honestly, I am one of those type of people who try to stay away from all of that stuff. I like the like ability of data to like tell stories.

Speaker 2 I was actually just working with my child on an assignment about the Beatles evolution that songwriters. And, you know, we have Hard Days Night from 64, Starget Pepper, 67, Abby Rhodes, 69.

Speaker 2 And you can actually go through and see in the data of the songs, like how, how they've grown, how they grew as songwriters.

Speaker 2 And just looking at the complexity of the instrumentation and the chord changes, and you can actually quantify it was like a little mini dataclysm. It was fun to do.

Speaker 2 So I do enjoy that stuff. But back to one of your points, like, I think you can be overly certain about a lot of things if you're just looking at numbers because numbers aren't very subtle, right?

Speaker 2 They're just sort of facts that can be easily compared and you can decide which one is bigger or better or whatever it is.

Speaker 2 But so little little in life can actually be quantified down to a number, like outside of the world of sports, you know, you can try and you can pretend that like a 9.3 really captures how attractive someone is.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 We all know that's not really true, right?

Speaker 2 Like two 9.3s,

Speaker 2 there's going to be a different opinion from every person that sees these two theoretically identical people, right?

Speaker 2 So I just, yeah, I think that's, I also try to stay away from that. from data for that sense of the false sense of certainty about things.

Speaker 1 What do you think it was that you got from the data that made you want to share the data with the world because that's that's something i found anomalous uh one because it had never been done before and then two because it hasn't been done since yeah it was a right time

Speaker 1 it's interesting to me that you you had all of this data that told so many truths and you put it out

Speaker 1 it's arguably like one of the biggest studies on dating, on relationships, on race, on gender, on age, way bigger than any Gallup or Pew research.

Speaker 1 Because those are like a few hundred people, thousand people who feel like accurate.

Speaker 1 And this is, and this is like, that's what I mean. But like, what made you put it out? Because, you know, Facebook guards it with their lives

Speaker 1 until they're testifying in front of Congress. They don't tell us any of their data.
You know, we only find out they knew that Instagram was bad for young girls when they're in trouble.

Speaker 1 Do you know who else tells us the truth? Who? Pornhub. Oh, Pornhub does, yeah.
Yeah, they do do that. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, they'll tell you.

Speaker 1 People in Nigeria are searching for

Speaker 1 the people.

Speaker 3 Red Red and blue people are the same. They all like, you know, they're into the same thing.
But that's the only other place like we get that one.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but what do you think it was?

Speaker 1 What were you hoping to achieve by revealing something that has been kept secret for so long?

Speaker 2 You know, and I guess there was like that period, 2009, 2010, where data seemed revelatory.

Speaker 2 And this is pre-Cambridge Analytica and the whole kind of engineering of the first Trump candidacy and fake news and all of that stuff. And there was just, it was like, sounds corny.

Speaker 2 It was like a hopeful period, I guess, for the internet.

Speaker 1 you know there was hope and

Speaker 2 airbnb yeah yeah uber you mean i can just get a car i don't have to like wait 20 minutes yeah you know what i mean like that whole vibe especially in new york was it's just different and so the we had all this data we thought it was really interesting

Speaker 2 about how what people thought was attractive about how different races would interact on our on our website or our app

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 you know, we kind of didn't have anything to lose either. Like we were just like, all right, let's just do this.

Speaker 2 Like Facebook is a billion dollar, whatever, trillion dollar company, company, maybe now they obviously have a lot to lose and they're heavily scrutinized.

Speaker 2 And in 2010, we were sort of under the radar. Online dating wasn't even remotely as cool as it is now.
And obviously, it's not even that cool.

Speaker 2 So it was like mostly weird, even in 2010, you know? And so we figured it would just be, it would be interesting. It was like the perfect like cocktail party conversation, you know?

Speaker 2 And yeah, it was, it was, I guess it was just like

Speaker 2 it was like a view into people

Speaker 2 that was just just only coming into existence.

Speaker 2 You know, the internet obviously had been around for a while, but like there weren't websites that did the kinds of things that we were doing until 2010 or whatever. And so

Speaker 2 you couldn't have learned these things in 1999, even though the internet existed then.

Speaker 2 And like, we just thought it was cool and we could find out what people thought was hot and talk about it and maybe make fun of it a little bit and make fun of ourselves.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I don't know. It's weird, though, to look back because it's totally the door completely closed.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Basically right after data clism came out. And that was one blind spot in the book where it's, I was thinking about this on the way over here.

Speaker 2 The entire tone of the book is like how interesting data is, how great it is, how it could lead to these different understandings of couples, of people, of systems, whatever.

Speaker 2 But, you know, come 2015, 2016, I was completely ignorant of the fact that data could be used.

Speaker 2 It always had a marketing component for Facebook or whatever.

Speaker 2 They use their data to sell ads to people, but I never thought it could be used to like sell ideas or sell like a worldview, like en masse to people as it, as it was in 2014, 15, 16 by like Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon.

Speaker 2 And it's still to this day, it's going on.

Speaker 1 Now it's full on. Right, exactly.

Speaker 2 And so like, it just never occurred to me that you could have these macro political changes, for example, through data and through these algorithms that could be manipulated in that way.

Speaker 2 So, you know, I, and I, in some ways, maybe it's good that these companies are locking their stuff up because then nobody else can go. I don't know if I would want Facebook to

Speaker 2 publish all of their data because then people could go

Speaker 1 manipulate more people. Yeah, that's interesting.
Because you think when we know the data behind something, we're then more able to go in and manipulate those weak points. Right, exactly.

Speaker 2 Yeah, which you can then go spin or whatever.

Speaker 3 What I did love about your book is for me, you're reading the data and stuff. It made me think about how we can like interrogate our choices.

Speaker 3 Like, because the data is like this truth serum telling us us things about ourselves that we deny it made me think about when i look at my screen time use on my iphone and when it's just like just shows me the hours you know like you have the colors and the block you know like i spent that much time on instagram you see it it shows you yourself

Speaker 3 in a way and it helps you be real with yourself too right which is like always good and i think culturally we can be quite delusional. Like every side is very high-minded right now.

Speaker 3 Every side has got it right. But what data just says, well, this is what you say.
And this is like what you're actually doing.

Speaker 3 And it leaves you to just interrogate your choices, whether you change or not. I still think that's it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, the first step to change is going to be to do the interrogation right. So, yeah, like I'm the same way too.
I'll,

Speaker 2 whatever,

Speaker 2 screen time, you're like, God damn it. And then you go and do the same thing, but at least it's there.
At least you understand what's going on. It's undeniable.

Speaker 1 Like, right, you can't like argue with your phone.

Speaker 2 Right, exactly. So, yeah, I like that part about it.

Speaker 1 One part of it is deniable. I have, I have a qualm with them.
Um, if you have your phone open on like car play,

Speaker 1 or if you, it counts it as screen time, but it's not screen time. Oh.
Yeah. So let's say you're navigating.
Yeah. It counts that as screen time.
And for me, that's not what I mean by screen time.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I don't want you to tell me, Trevor, you used your phone for four hours today.
Yeah, I drove for four hours.

Speaker 1 Now I'm sitting there depressed because I think, because no, that's the other side of data that we have to be careful about. We have to be careful about that.

Speaker 1 I think of how many people data has made them

Speaker 1 10,000 steps.

Speaker 1 It's not true. It's not a real thing.
Yes, walk. And better, it's better to walk more than to walk less.
Eight glasses, where's the date? It's not the data. Do you get what I'm saying?

Speaker 3 What's the dark side of it? Like, I have a little baby and we use

Speaker 3 a monitor, which I won't promote the company because they didn't give it to me for free.

Speaker 3 But basically, it tells me her heart rate, her oxygen saturation, tells me how long she sleeps for.

Speaker 1 Yo, what? Yeah, oxygen.

Speaker 2 Is that like a pad that she has?

Speaker 1 No, no, it's on her foot. This is on her foot.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Oxygen saturation. It tells me if she's having wiggly sleep.
It tells me if she's having like restless sleep. It tells me when she's in deep sleep.
And this is like the dark side of data.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I was going to say, do you find that useful? That just seems like.

Speaker 1 Oh, I'm paranoid.

Speaker 3 I'm always worried my babies are going to die. So I like,

Speaker 1 Trevor knows me. I'm like a hypochondriac.

Speaker 3 So I like going into this thing. But like, I remember before I had that with my first son, if I wanted to know if he had a good night's sleep,

Speaker 3 I was obviously there, A, but I look at him. I'd be like, oh, he seems a bit cranky.
Now my immediate instincts are like, let me go into this app.

Speaker 3 Some, because sometimes it'll tell me she's wiggly on that, the app, and I'll go upstairs.

Speaker 3 Whereas I would probably just leave her to be wiggly, wake up, she maybe cry a bit and go back to sleep.

Speaker 1 Like, that's probably what would have happened in my mother.

Speaker 3 But now I have this app that I'm looking at, oh my God, she's got 98% oxygen saturation, which is perfect. Why is it not 100%? Now I have this information that is actually

Speaker 3 not so

Speaker 3 confusing, it's actually making me more paranoid.

Speaker 1 and I think from a that that's how this hyper data world can like be quite dark for I would actually love to know so when you're designing an app we're all users most people have used a dating app

Speaker 1 how do you find the balance between putting the person in front of us

Speaker 1 who you think we should see

Speaker 1 versus putting the person in front of us that we want to see?

Speaker 2 That is a great question. And that's something I think most people don't really think, they don't understand how the back end of these things works.

Speaker 2 Cause like, also, we have to think about the person that we're like their experience too, right?

Speaker 1 Yes. Like the person

Speaker 1 that they're showing you. Yeah, exactly.
So

Speaker 2 one of the very first things we learned about having a dating site is that there's this thing we call the focus problem. So guys just want to see the hottest women, right?

Speaker 2 And so if you just go by what

Speaker 2 the guys are sort of telling you they want, they want to see the highest rated women and just a giant stack or a grid or whatever it is.

Speaker 2 But if you go and do that and you kind of try to meet their need without any other consideration, well, what happens? Those women get tons of messages from tons of randos. Their inbox explodes.

Speaker 2 It feels gross and they leave. And then now you're left with, if you just showed all the tens, now you're left with nines and the eights and so forth.

Speaker 2 And you end up in this death spiral because also the guys don't get any messages back.

Speaker 2 So you have to kind of look at it as a pair of people always, not just what are we doing for Trevor today? It's like, what are we doing for Trevor and this person and Trevor and this person?

Speaker 1 Everyone is in relation to another person.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you have to think of it like that, because otherwise, you know, we could show you the N hottest women in the database, but that's not going to be good for you ultimately.

Speaker 2 And it's definitely not going to be good for them if we do it for everybody, right?

Speaker 2 And I think most apps do this at this point, too.

Speaker 2 We would do sort of like a

Speaker 2 hotness sort of collar.

Speaker 1 So if you're an eight or whatever, like this is a picture just on the

Speaker 1 right. This would be one of the components.

Speaker 2 We would show you nines eights and sevens with maybe a few tens and maybe some fives and whatever you know just to really reduce people um that way they're seeing someone like themselves you're seeing people like yourself and that's the optimal sort of band for for there actually being a productive conversation between the two of you and then we would also throw in information and you know like the kind of classic matching stuff of like you know how important is religion to you or how important is politics or whatever those kinds of things that would be maybe a third would be the questions about the two of you a third would be this attractiveness matching.

Speaker 2 And then we would throw in a healthy dose of just like randomness. You can't just give people what they want

Speaker 2 because your app will explode. You'll end up with this focus problem thing where you're just showing everybody.
You know, women like seeing hot people too.

Speaker 2 And you'd have the same problem sort of in the reverse.

Speaker 2 So you've got to be careful and manage your

Speaker 2 stack of profiles if you're doing it that way.

Speaker 1 I've always been interested by how, you know, the data shows us that

Speaker 1 most people grade other people's attractiveness by where they think their attractiveness is.

Speaker 3 That's funny.

Speaker 1 Just generally, like every, because everyone will, and again, we live in a world where, depending on how people say it, some people will be crude and just like assholes about it. Sure, sure.

Speaker 1 And then some people will be like overly sort of fake about it. No, I don't even see whether someone,

Speaker 1 to be honest with you, until I know them, I don't be there. Whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever.

Speaker 1 But for the most part, when you just look at the data and the honesty, get it away from what people tell you.

Speaker 1 There is generally that ban where people go, oh, no, I'm out of their league. And actually, they're out of my league.
So, okay, let me ask you then a few things before we let you go is like um

Speaker 1 you are on the back end of this everyone is trying i assume everyone's trying to find their fairy tale their story their journey whatever it may be right

Speaker 1 what are some of the tips that you would give somebody who is on a dating app to try and maximize the experience not maximize their hookups not maximize you know but just something real yeah something real where you go like oh hey you know this thing you so let's start with like the picture right is it better for somebody to have a Photoshop picture?

Speaker 1 Is it better for them to have a group picture, a sunset picture, a silhouette picture? Let's start with that. Just like the most basic.

Speaker 2 I definitely wouldn't do group. That just introduces the logistical problem of trying to figure out who you're messaging, right?

Speaker 1 Some people love the group.

Speaker 1 I know. I'm always intrigued.
It's a mistake. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I guess it's like you're trying to flex that you have friends, but it's kind of like the reverse of what you're really trying to do.

Speaker 2 You know, I think in general, my advice would be

Speaker 2 something that we've talked about already. And it's just like, you really are you just need that one vote you're running for office and you just need one vote so

Speaker 2 being yourself it's super corny but it's also true kind of accepting the fact that maybe you're going to get a lot of no's out there and being okay with that um because i think if you start engineering your profile to increase the number of likes or whatever yeses that you get it is going to just be more noise like because you're going to have you are ultimately only going to find one person right so what does it avail you to have a hundred people messaging you at the time 99 that's just 99 more people eventually you're going to have to kind of like get to know with right and so i would just say really

Speaker 1 bring out the things that make you unique i mean this is all like grandmother stuff i mean like you know grandmothers were right yeah sure there's a lot of weird grandmothers right yeah

Speaker 2 it's nice to actually see a grandma meets up with grandma exactly yeah there's that like yeah where does grandma mess with of of the ages that i think is a real thing with even my wife's parents are from an arranged marriage and you know they're super happy as are all of their siblings and you know i think there is something to that shared worldview and and having

Speaker 2 that system was designed to bring together people of a common um

Speaker 2 sociological context right and yeah they knew that that was what really matters right um and i think they're right and and um

Speaker 2 Anyway, to get back to your question, like I think doing the things that make you unique, foreground those things.

Speaker 2 Don't try to like bury the lead, so to speak, and don't leave it for that second or third message.

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 2 be willing to take more risks, I'd say, especially for people who tend to get a lot of messages. If you think someone's kind of cute, but maybe they're not normally your type, go for it more.

Speaker 2 Because I think ultimately that stuff is so unpredictable, especially people's digital presentations of themselves is so different than what they're actually like when they're sitting in front of you.

Speaker 1 Many fish have been catted. Yes,

Speaker 1 exactly. There's that too.
But the opposite is true, too, right?

Speaker 2 Where

Speaker 2 I'm sure there's a lot of people that are presenting way more lamely than they would be in real life.

Speaker 3 The first time I met my husband, because we met on Twitter and like, I kind of clicked his profile.

Speaker 1 But then when I saw him walk, I was like, oh my God, he's hot.

Speaker 1 Always better.

Speaker 1 Always better.

Speaker 1 It was like a headshot that you have predicting kind of thing. I know.
He's always better.

Speaker 3 He's a good-looking man. I should have dressed up more.

Speaker 1 But you know what I mean?

Speaker 3 So it's just like, it's so interesting that you say that.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So I guess anyway,

Speaker 2 during it to a few things, I think put as much of yourself out there as you're comfortable doing, like your authentic self.

Speaker 2 Take more risks with the people that you say yes to, or at least engage with, and be willing to accept that the process generally sucks. It's not necessarily the app's fault.

Speaker 2 It's just how being single and trying to date is, right?

Speaker 2 And that part of it is going to be lame or boring or terrible or awkward or worse, maybe. And

Speaker 2 it's just how it goes. And you can't kind of give up.
And again, like, I think dating apps are very, very far from perfect.

Speaker 2 And there's tons of very great ways to meet people that you're really going to, I didn't meet my wife on a dating app.

Speaker 2 So I'm not trying to shill for these things, but I think if you're going to be in that game, so to speak.

Speaker 1 Which people are, whether they liked it or not. It's just like, it's just like being in the world of phone.
It's like having a phone now. Yeah.
Yeah. You can't not have a phone.

Speaker 2 You can't. Yeah.
And so like, just, I guess. if you're going to be in that game, try to de-gamify it as much as you can.

Speaker 2 Don't sit and try to play numbers. Like I know a lot of guys will just be like, well, I swipe right on everybody because nobody writes me back.

Speaker 2 So I'm just kind of like, you know, spray and pray type of deal.

Speaker 1 You know, just like. Wait, actually, actually, on that point, does that change anything in how the app actually sees you? That's something I've always wanted to know.

Speaker 1 So for those people who are swiping on everything.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's a great question.

Speaker 2 It should. I doubt it does because I think,

Speaker 2 I just don't think the algorithm behind a Tinder or a bumble, they put that kind of work into it to make that happen. And that's no slight against those companies.

Speaker 2 I think they just had different priorities.

Speaker 2 I think in that sort of hack developed after I left OKCupid and after OKCupid was a thing of just basically just like power swiping right on everybody and just seeing what happens.

Speaker 2 But definitely it should. I mean, kind of to our point earlier, where you were saying, like, if you have spent an hour on the app and you liked one person, that should be very powerful.

Speaker 1 I think it should.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I agree, as opposed to liking a thousand or whatever. But I doubt that actually gets in there.
But it should. That's another good tweak for dating apps.

Speaker 1 We've like one shop to make business if we if you can make it better for everyone make it better for everyone Christian. Thank you so much.
Thank you for joining us.

Speaker 1 Thank you for not you know thinking it was a scam. Thank you.
You see you put yourself out there

Speaker 1 and they said

Speaker 1 if you regret it afterwards that's fine great first date

Speaker 1 What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Spotify Studios in partnership with Day Zero Productions. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jodi Avigan.

Speaker 1 Our senior producer is Jess Hackle. Claire Slaughter is our producer.
Music, Mixing, and Mastering by Hannes Brown. Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 1 Join me next Thursday for another episode of What Now?

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