How Online Dating Is Reshaping the Entire Economy

you ever? But here's the thing. Did you ever do online dating? No? Is this another is this a new definition of millennials that you're going to start using? Kind of? I mean, don't necessarily, but I do think that's pretty important. And the fact that you never did online dating and neither did I it kind of makes us both not

really millennials. Yeah, I think. I mean, I'm definitely not one, But I also kind of think maybe that's another thing where I'm like, that is a pretty big thing in the world that really divides people by a few years,

wouldn't you say? Yeah? I think so, And I have to admit I have absolutely zero personal experience with online dating, although I don't know about you, but I've always been sort of curious about it, and whenever I meet up with my single friends, like I would sometimes borrow their phones and look through their Tinder profiles and the Tinder app and just sort of play around with it, which was kind of interesting to see how it works. Do you swipe for them? I do? I do? I swipe

on everyone and then just see what happens. Yeah, I've heard that's like a thing like people who never did online dating vicariously swipe it on behalf of their friends. I think that's like a phenomenon. Anyway, I do really think this is a pretty big bright line dividing one generation from the next, and especially because there will never probably be another generation in history that didn't have online dating.

It's kind of a big thing and kind of makes me and you more similar to boomers and previous generations too than millennials and so forth, so forth. But it seems like the implications of the rise of online dating are probably still at this point underappreciated and under explored. Yeah, it kind of gets to a point that has been brought up on previous Odd Lots episodes, which is this notion that a lot of the economic models that we still use today are sometimes based on really outdated notions

of society. So the idea that we're all going out to say a bar or a restaurant and meeting our future partners or spouses does seem pretty out of date given the rise of online dating, and the same for you know, meeting your future partner through friends, Like nowadays you're just as likely to meet them through an online platform, if not more so. So definitely something new that would need to be sort of factored into a lot of

economic models, I think absolutely. You know, like an essence of the economy is sort of predicated on people getting married and having kids and buying a house and all of that stuff, and if that process is going to change in some way, then you would imagine there would

just be all kinds of ripple effects. So anyway, obviously we're going to talk about online dating today, but specifically we're going to be talking to a hedge fund manager who I guess and his spare time or maybe as part of investing Will find Out has done a lot of research into the world of online dating and even put out a very entertaining note on the subject. Examining uh from a very from very US data points. So, without further ado, let's bring in Dan McMurtry of Tyro Partners. Dan,

thank you for joining us. Hey, guys, thanks so much for having me. So Dan, before we get started, or I guess to get us started, why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and uh, why this was the subject that you thought was worth spending your time on going through charge, collecting data and even sort of writing up a note on

the subject. Sure. So I run a small long short fund out of Manhattan, UM, and our approach is to look for what we think are big thematic drivers that are gonna play out over five or ten or twenty years. UM. There's a million things you can research, and so when we think about how to best allocator research time, UM, we don't necessarily want to focus on you know, chief

socks or expensive stocks from amentum stocks. So much is what we think are qualitative angles that are really um starting to show up in data but I haven't really been discussed. And we especially like things that are kind of validated but are not appreciated for the magnitude of

the change. You know, I'm twenty eight, and so as somebody in my age bracket, I've kind of observed this shift where it's not just that online dating has become popular, it's it's killed all other forms of how people meet. And so it's now you know, sev of relationships depending on where you live, UM and in some cities, I mean, it's it's become completely dominant. And so this is interesting and kind of in every part of my life became interesting.

One in terms of dating, it was the only option and trying to figure out, you know, how the hell does his work. And at the same time at work, we were looking at, you know, how is that impacting consumer spending, How is that impacting household formation, How is it impacting you know, any number of other things. And we've observed this shift, and so as we started to dig into it and get some data, we realized, wow,

this is a much much bigger deal. So we've been working on it for about three or four years UM. And one of the as we do as we sort of partner with people who are entrepreneurs or other things like that and uh talk to you on kind of the startup scene in private markets, and we were actually looking at potentially starting a dating company several years ago. So we did a lot of work and we spoke to a lot of engineers. We were thinking about poaching

some for it for a little startup. We decided not to do it because we saw it was a kind of network effect business. But this day that's really kind of came together. I spent some time in Asia and in the Middle East this summer and kind of seeing how these apps have affected culture globally really kind of clicked into a place of view of what was going on and how this was a much much bigger deal

than anyone really thought. Dan. First of all, let me just say that this paper is really amazing and very very funny, and part of the thing that makes it so special is it's sort of written in this very dry way, and it includes sentences like, you know, men struggle more in the dating market when young and overtime adjust expectations as the market prices their deficiencies more shrewdly,

which is just an amazingly entertaining sentence. But I'm curious when you started doing research for this paper, like how much was anecdotal or based on your own experiences versus sort of rigorous academic research. In other words, did you go out and sort of do your own field research for this one? Let's say, well, we wrote it. We wrote it. We thought it was a very funny subject matter to write. It's a strange topic to write about in any sort of professional context, so we wanted to

write about it. We were gonna be funny to sort of ironically write it very straight, and then um, you know, put little jokes in there. Um, But yeah, all of the above. I mean it started out. You know, the interest in this started out because it's the way people in my age age bracket date, and so everyone's sort of commiserating about, um, their problems and their successes and things like that. I've used all of these apps and

all of my into have and it's something that's frequently discussed. Um. As those of you followed my Twitter will know, I'm a bit of a comic, and so a lot of people in the comedy community talk about It's just been

a frequent discussion. And so what I was interested interested in was I was hearing a lot of opinions that sort of up close, maybe conflicted, and a lot of people on average were frustrated with the experience, and I was I was fascinated to see everyone simultaneously be frustrated and yet they continue to grow and grow and grow, even though a lot of people would say, oh, you know, I'm just generally disillusioned with using dating apps. And I've

also seen great successes. I know people have gotten married off of Tender, which leads to amazing best man toasts and things like that. And I've seen people have terrible experiences. But it's one of the things where everyone seemed to be talking about it, but I haven't seen any And it's become a very serious day to day part of almost everyone's lives who's under maybe thirty five and some over, and yet there hasn't been a lot of serious research

done it lead in the financial economic community. So I said, okay, what literature exists? So we first the first thing we do when we're looking at any subjects at work is we do a thorough literature review. So we've looked at, you know, a number of nonprofit think tanks, university research entities, and there's a lot of good sociological research done on

dating and health information, marriage and all of that. Divorce and one of the things that was very interesting to me was as we look through these papers, it was kind of like, you know, at one point, we could find a lot of data showing that online dating had now become the dominant factor in dating, and at the same time, all these papers still sort of treated it like a footnote, it is kind of owned by the way some people are dating online, even though eighty or

ninety percent of the data inputs into those papers were being heavily influenced by that factor. So we said, that's a really interesting set up for further research. So at that point, we spoke to people at pretty much every dating company you can imagine, ranging from e Harmony to Okay, cubid to match too, Tender or Facebook dating, all of them, and we also spoke to people that ran actual matchmaking business is kind of old school and those tend to

be higher end. It was a very editive research process where we kept having different hypothesies about how this market was working, and then as we did more research, we kind of kept invalidating them until he came to something that made a lot of sense, and and then we started going back out and when we had an idea what we thought was going on, we started going and doing specific polling UH and then looking in specific geographies because we had a sort of view that essince you

what happens is an online dating site goes up, goes up. Men immediately join it because dudes are going to do that. Women slowly go onto the platform. There's a lack of trust at the beginning, and over time what tends to happen is the women are actually in a position of control. Even though that that is what what would is initially like scary about online dating, particularly for women, is the unknowns and the lack of feeling safe and things like that.

But particularly looking at markets and the elite East in an Asia where women have significantly less agency than they do in the United States, we saw happen with this very clever dynamic of women all of a sudden realizing, okay, wait, I can see unlimited guys I might want to go out with. I can say no to as many many of them I want without any possible repercussions, and I can be very very choosy about who I want to go out with. But that also means I don't have

to go out with whoever my dad wants. Signatures introduced me to I don't have to participate in these sort of weird pseudo arrange structures that I don't really like. And also instead of having to date within my immediate social circle, which can have bad ramifications of things don't work out, I can date everyone in this city or everyone within fifty miles at least level the playing field, if not put women in a dominant position, particularly in

those markets. And that's the first time that's ever happened in you know, most of the Middle East, in a lot of places. And we think that's a really interesting dynamic, just looking historically, because dating for women is so much riskier than it is for men. And so we did a lot of interviews with women using these apps in

different countries and their experiences. And I think that Americans have a very Americans and Europeans probably have a very skewed opinion of what dating is like globally, and I also think men tend to have a very skewed opinion

of what dating is like just in general. So it was this iterative process of you know, we've used them all, We've talked to a lot of people, We've done the academic research, we've talked to people at companies, uh, and then we've kind of iterated that with question list we had, and then we've tried to test our hypothesis against new incoming data, and really we got to a point where all the new incoming data was sort of confirming our model,

so to speak. And that was where we got very comfortable with the overall thesis, and we shared the these are the few people, and they everyone was very very interested in most of the stuff we write about as hedge fund guys nobody cares about, and so we made a decision to publish it. We just wanted to put out, you know, not a stock pick so much. It's just

here's our general framework on this market. We think it's a very big deal, and we think people aren't really appreciating that this is not a fad and this is not a niche app. I mean, this is the number one grossing app on the Apple Store and Google Play for you know, forever, and it needs to be taken seriously.

And I think it's it's fascinating to me how I think it's just psychological bias against something that is still categorized as being sexual in nature that is causing people not to really think big picture about what's going on here?

So you mentioned that if you look through existing literature, sociological literature on household formation and so forth, that dating apps, the rise of dating apps is often treated as a footnote, even though much of the data and much of these new households are being formed by dating apps, and so they're being simultaneously they formed the core of the new information,

but also they're dismissed. What is the error that that leads to when you see people dismissing the significance of dating apps or treat partnerships relationships that form via dating apps as being exactly equivalent to partnerships that formed via any other form, whether it's meeting in a bar or through churches or work or whatever. What kind of errors

does that lead to in terms of analysis? Yeah, So, so it's really about if you think about any sort of analysis of a process like this, there are gating items. So before you get to a question of who somebody might want to date, the first question is who is the what is the available pool off of which they're making those decisions. So, particularly in America, UM and in other places you America is not a very densely populated country.

So in America, especially if you're dating within your social circle, and you know, particularly before you know, seventies of the sixties,

people generally less mobile. The actual dating pool people are selecting from is quite small, um, so it might be a few hundred people, and then you filter for people who are available, people in the appropriate age range, people who are from good families, things like that, and there's a lot of other variables that get upweighted around the social standing within that given sort of click or tribe, and so that's there's a lot of variables to get

thrown out. So the first effect that online dating happ has is that your dating pool size effectively becomes unlimited. So it's going from realistically several hundred people. I mean, let's say it's the people at work, it's the people at the bar after after work, it's your church, and it's a couple of social activities you're not going to interact with in any material way more than several dozen people.

It's not a few hundred people. People go through that many people on a dating app in like an hour. The average time somebody spends looking at another profile and a dating app is two to three seconds. So the initial pool being drawn upon goes up massively, and so then the question is if somebody has millions of people to choose from instead of a hundred, do the variables they're selecting people on change? And most of the historical um pay as we've seen, really try to take a

really really rational approach to dating. And I don't know if either of you know anyone who's ever dated, but it's not the most rational process. I've met people who have dated. And so we've seen a lot of things where these papers are sort of arguing that men and women's create like a spreadsheet in their brain of Okay, this person went to this college, this person has this income power, they sorted and then they select based on that.

Most people have had very small actual available dating pools, particularly in smaller towns. Of your work, you have your afterwork activities, church, a few other things. Particularly historically, that pool gets very small. You're talking a few hundred people at most when you would justust for appropriate aid range and uh, you know, correct gender for your preferences and things like that. Online dating flip sets and now the

pool side is unlimited. In addition to that, a lot of the historical studies and still a lot of studies really focused on academic attainment and things like that, as if people are using a ranking algorithm in their head and that just tends to not be true. It can give me true in certain populations in cities, which is tends to be the people doing the academic studies, but it doesn't really bear out over broad populations, with the

exception of sort of minimum gating items. So you know, if you don't have a high school degree, or if you're in a college educated area you don't have a college degree, it does get harder. But beyond that you're looking at now, so basically going from a few hundred

people being your choice set to millions. And then when people are looking at profiles, they're spending between two and three seconds deciding yes or no, And so that means that that the decision about swiping it left or right, are saying yes or no is a lot more about kind of the visual element of the profile, and so you can get there's different elements in there which might correlate with college education, but it really comes down to how can you present yourself with photographs in some text

Each platform, individual platform uses a slightly different user interface so that people can either find different information about potential matches they value or showcase and or showcase information they think is valuable. So it's leading to kind of an instagrammification of dating, people making very quick snap judgments and then people chat. But the other thing is that the

match ratios for men and women are radically different. Women are getting a minimum of five times and in many markets twenty five times the inbound like that a male account is getting, And so that introduces a lot of other gamifying elements around Look, you could be the greatest person ever, but if you if you come into some of these methods Q and your forty back, you're probably

not going to get seen. So then it introduces elements of a random chance around what time of day like or a message is sent, and how do you really draw attention? So also rewards behaviors that draw attention so you can stand out because there's just so much volume, and it's very similar to a lot of things in markets right now. And you know a lot of people right now are looking at you know, a few high profile CEOs. They're doing some very flashy things and wos

what people saying? They're getting all of the attention and that's really the same thing that's happening right now in dating is if you are not able to draw attention to yourself to stand out because the pool is so much larger, you have a big problem. So that's leading to people going on, people having to change their strategies

how to get dates. And then when you go on the date, you have to stand out because everyone knows that in ten seconds you can go on your phone and you can have another date, or you may know that you have five, ten, twenty alternatives waiting in the wings on your phone. So if there's a red flag on date one, there probably is not a date two. People are not hanging around on Overall, in the whole population, people are not hanging around in bad relationships as long. Wait, Dan,

can I ask a real quick question. But whether it's on the profile itself, like on one's profile, or whether it's showing up, is it smart strategy to be wearing cargo shorts. I am an advocate of a cargo shorts all the time, but my cargo short oriented dating app is not doing that well. And I just think there's a conspiracy against me at Apple from the top, and uh, Tim Apple himself does not want this to happen, but

I think it's just an inevitability. Everyone's gonna wear nothing but cargo shorts in the kind of huge I just wanted to clear that up. Yeah, are you a B testing? Like is there one profile where you're wearing cargo shorts and another one where you aren't? You know you joke, But we did several years ago do some a B testing with dummy accounts, and I think one of them did have cargo shorts on. We made an account called Chad that was the worst person ever, and it did

way better than I thought it would. It was really offensive. I think it actually outperformed my actual account, which is just crushing um. But it comes back to like attention, like if you make if you if you have like a shirtless dude in cargo shorts, that the entire profile is ridiculous, you're gonna get some percentage of people saying yes because they say, oh that's funny. They're actually such

a thing. It's like a hate like some people will match with somebody just to say mean things to them in the d M. You know, you get a lot of that, but yeah, you can. We did a bit

with cargo shorts. So before we get onto more of the economic implications, I just wanted to ask you're you're talking about online dating basically making the whole dating market more efficient, so you have greater access to a bigger pool of potential mates, which is a terrible word, but like, I just wonder how much of that efficiency is actually offset by having an enormous amount of or a number of people to actually choose from and and having to

go on dates with with various people. In other words, like, how much of the efficiency from online dating is actually offset by the stress and burnout of doing this constantly? Excellent questions. So I think it's important to understand that

stress and burnout is a huge factor in dating. That's the least romantic thing to say, ever, But at some point you're making a judgment of I really like this person, you know, we're in loved at it up, but you know, I think there might be somebody else that could convince you to break up with them and go with somebody else in a lot of circumstances, and historically, when you know, if you live in a small town like I'm from Richard, Virginia, if you know three people and there's really like twenty

that you think are potential long term life partners. At a certain point, you're gonna say, do I really want to risk this good thing for you know, five or six other potential options? When the clock is starting to run down, it starts to be an illogical, interrrational decision the real differences, and so that still exists as you get older, you get to a certain point, like at some point you're gonna say, I'm really tired of playing this game. I'd really like to you know not. And

that's not true for everybody. Some people enjoy dating. I think that's insane. I think dating is stressful, especially early dating. But um, there are people who like that. But what's important understand is that it's more about during like specifically during your twenties and early thirties. This is providing at any point in time, you have an escape pass you can pull, you can always go, and you have hundreds, if not thousands, of potential options. And so you're gonna

you're gonna try on this is not bad. You're gonna try on more pants. You're gonna you're gonna have more options to try out. You're gonna go on more first dates that are gonna end badly. And I think what's happening is that's allowing people to sort of build a database of what their deal breakers are, which you know, I'm gonna include all thirty Rock references in that because I love that show. You you're gonna figure out that doesn't work for me, that doesn't work for me. This

is a problem. And now of those ethics are going to be good. But you're not going to stick around in a relationship if there's a clear red flag off the bat, because you can be on another day tomorrow, So you're not gonna go out with, you know, a sketchy person two or three or four times again. Overall, obviously, individual people will make terrible decisions. It's what America is

all about. But it's the massive increase in alternatives and so as you go through more and more dates, and one of the things that's been studied quite a bit. I'm gonna post some more papers about this is that between about the nineteen nineteen fifties and now, the median person when they get married is having seven to twelve times as much dating experiences as their parents. I think that numbers low balls. I think people still, uh I

don't want to sound promiscuous. So people are when they are making a decision to get married, they're coming in with way more information, They've seen a lot more. They're also more aware of how stressful it is to date, so there isn't that factor of, oh, I wonder what else is out there. You're like, no, I know what else is out there. I'm really good, Like this is solid. So you're just making a more informed purchasing decision, if you want to sound like an economist about it. And

that's really really changing things. And as a result, I think this is driving a reduction and divorce. The other issue is that absolute marriage rates, particularly marriage rates below twenty five, are going down a lot, and in my personal opinions might offend some people. I think getting divorced before your brain is fully formed around twenty five years old is kind of crazy because you have very little life experience. You said getting divorced before, did you mean

getting married before? I mean both, but yeah, I mean yeah, getting married before is statistically a worse idea because you're not at a point where you're not a point of stability personally. You don't have a lot of life experience. You haven't all the dating experience. You're making a huge decision with very little information going in. You're gonna generally be unable to withstand kind of shocks better than you know.

We could wield miss team to Leven here and he could explain it, but you're not gonna be able to withstand shocks very well. One of the things that's happening as a result of that is that people are are are dating a little bit longer. People are also moving in together more, and the probability that if you live together, if you cohabitate, you do get married is dropping because people are moving in for six months, twelve months, two years and just saying, okay, can we actually live together.

We might really love each other, but are we going to kill each other if we live together? Which is an important question to ask, uh if you think of getting married, So you're seeing you know, you're just seeing a lot more trials, and so you could you could comp that to the market and say you're seeing a lot more trading volume, which tends to lead to more efficient pricing. And so what we think is happening is people are basically going on more bad dates, figuring out

more of what doesn't work for them. They're living with people before they get married, and then when they do get married, and all of that up until the marriage decision is is can be very stressful and hard, and that I think that's why all the dissatisfaction is there. But when do actually finally find somebody, they have way

more information. They're making a much more informed decision overall, and you're seeing better marriage outcomes where people are actually you know, they know what they're getting into and they actually can make it. They're making an educated decision about whether or not they think this is gonna work. I think it's important to note that on a statistical basis, marriage is a lot more about downside risk and upside.

I mean, you you can't really predict if you're going to be the most happy you've ever been, but you can probably predict if, like this person is going to kill you with an AX. So you need to really you want to avoid the ax murder situation as much as possible, more than you want to have like the notebook happen. Right. That's yeah, it's really like kind of depressing and unromantic though that like, okay, yes, maybe there are fewer divorces now. But basically that's just about eliminating

the left side of the tail. Basically, it's not that marriages are per se better, it's just that there are fewer of the really bad sounds like yeah, but I mean I think you know, I'm from a only that had I'm from a divorced family, and I can tell you that you know, the left tail is not fun. And people getting into these decisions of like where like you see this a lot investing people optimize, people in their head optimize to this dream scenario that it's really

really dangerous. It's kind of a siren song. You're thinking about perfection. You're not thinking about something that is consistently good and consistently positive. And I think overall it's better for people, and people are happier if they have something that is consistently good. Then if they make these moonshot bets. Now, I will say that the moon shot bet thing is huge in this because because the dating pools are so large, people are a lot pickier, particularly women when they're under

call at twenty five. Everyone is trying no matter you know, who you are, what you look like, whatever, everyone is trying to punch above their weight because statistically, it will probably happen given you have unlimited swipes, right, so you have unlimited at at that's never been the case before, and so everyone is trying to punch above their weight, and that's actually causing there to be more competition in

the market. But people tend to find that that doesn't actually work so well, that doesn't you know, you're probably going to get to go on a few dates with people that are way out of your league, and you know, if you make that happen, great for you. But over time, people sort of, you know, get their expectations, your expectations get priced to a reasonable level in the market over time, and all this sounds very, very unromantic. I'm just kind

of describing what's happening dispatched. I think that's part of the issue also, is it's very hard for people to describe this market is passionately because it says something about you. I don't want to sound like a psychopath describing people falling in love as a pricing function, but the data looks the hell of a lot like a pricing function, and using a pricing function is the only way we've

been able to actually solve this. So I kind of got to, you know, put on my psychopath hat and and talk like one for a minute to understand what's going on. I'm but then there are strategies, you know, you can use to get outcomes that you're happy with. Here. I mean, it's not this is not a circumstance where everybody's doomed. It's just people are going to go through a period of struggle and then the bright side is

people are finding what they're looking for. And then the great thing about online dating also is that there are all the big properties, but there's increasingly more and more deep niche categories where people can find very specific traits if they want a certain type of partnership. So it might be considered abnormal or or or interest oriented, or ethnicity oriented or something like that. People can select into that,

you know. So for example, you know, we have a friend of the firm is Orthodox Jewish family, and he was talking about how, you know, when he was a kid, it was all family introductions and now all the kids are on you know, Jase Wipe and things like that, and it's it's like, it's weird because I don't understand it at all. But there's still dating within the pool that i'd like them to date with so great. So you know, people are getting the outcomes that they want

and they are limiting the left tail. So it's kind of like it reminds me a lot of when people get into an investing and they start thinking, Okay, I'm going to pick some genius stock. I'm gonna be the guy who buys Amazon at a dollar a share, and I'm gonna make all this money, and they realize over time, like, you know, if I can do a solid like on my retirement portfolio over thirty or forty years, like that's great, But that's not a fun process of adjusting your expectations,

you know. And I think it's a lot like that. Well, since you're talking about dating um from a slightly psychopathic, numbers based slash investing strategy perspective, I'm wondering, given that online dating is sort of the dominant form of dating now, is is real life dating where the alpha is Like, is that where you could maybe find some interesting matches and maybe outperform the broader market? If that makes sense?

I think so. If I'm gonna just put my hypocrite hat on here for a second, but my girlfriend I actually met offline, but it's happening less And I think one of the things is, you know, every one of the common comments about millennials, you go to a barner, everybody's on their phone, So there are less people who actually have the conversational skill to you know, strike up conversation form of connection. The other thing is, as I said, when you're on the apps, people are spending two to

three seconds at most on average on each profile. So if you can actually start a conversation and then you and that person are going to share you know, let's take two or three or four minutes of mutual attention, that's giving you, you know, hundreds of times the exposure that you're getting otherwise. So I definitely think that if there our way, if you can do that without being creepy,

there's definitely a lot of you know, alpha there. I think that things like a friend of friend introductions and family introductions are likely structurally dead because the risk there's such a big risk factor there that now is not necessary.

You know, it's always been the case that well you introduce somebody within your friend circle, be does it may strengthen you know, loyalty within the tribe over time, but if it doesn't work, then it's a really bad thing and it's gonna be awkward as hell, and it's gonna make Christmas parties terrible. And I think everybody has been through that experience. And so because there's unlimited dating alternative,

if nobody's gonna do that anymore. But I do think there's there are a lot of opportunities to you know, do better than you might on the apps by being proactive in real life. And the other thing that you know, we point out is we we joked in the paper about don't ask us about dating advice, and I really don't want a bunch of people ask me about dating advice, but I do have some dating advice. Finally, this is good.

This is probably gonna be one of the first actionable things on odd logever because you know, you we don't normally are in the business of investing or trading advice or anything, but finally someone is going to offer something

substance these apps spark. In many cases, the engineers at the dating app companies are actually programmers who are coming from slot machine programming jobs like gaming relays a Less Vegas like that, so they are incredibly good at manipulating these quick dopen feedback loops basically like you know, the Stanford Marshmallow test thing, and everyone fails it, and everyone fails it, particularly if it has anything to do with sex.

It just overrides everything else and you're you're competing against your lizard brain. You're gonna lose. So it's very hard to draw attention stand out. One of the ways that you can, it seems like you can get around that is if you can target or if you're if you're targeting audiences that have a demonstrated ability to resist that.

And I think a good proxy for that is people who are very passionate about something or some sort of intense hobby or something like that where they're very very focused on you know, long term skill development things like that, so you know, athletes, artists, things like that, people who are very very focused on kind of not immediate payoff work and things like that. So I think a lot of people are having very positive experiences meeting people. You know, a lot of people when they go to a new

city are talking to me. They're like, well, how do I meet people in a new city. I'm like, well, you can do their dating apps. That's gonna work overall, but you know, join a club, go do you know, not to be too share as I go to a cross fit class, go to yoga, go to an art class, go like go do an activity, join some sort of club where it's centered around everybody really enjoying that thing

and being very passionate about that. And that could be a good place where again you can meet people in real life who may share similar character traits that you value and you can do well that way. But you've really got to put yourself out there. And I think the other thing is for people who are especially young professionals, who are trying to you know, make it, and they're grinding and they've got all these things going on. You know,

it is a lot of work. Very easy to hop on your phone and just go swipe slight slip, swipe, and then you've got a date versus you know, spending several hours finding an activity, going to activity, you know, going out and doing something and and so that's that's a strategy that can work. It just takes a lot of work. It's similar to doing kind of fundamental investing. It You're gonna have to do an enormous amount of work. And you're gonna feel really stupid about it a lot

of the time. You know, this is not an efficient market in the sense that you can't achieve your desired outcomes and you can't you know, find somebody. Everybody finds somebody eventually. But I do think that focusing on people who have kind of established delay gratification skills is a really, really good strategy. And then I also think that you know, time of day of when you're when you're using these

apps is very important given the queuing dynamics. And I also I also think people should try out multiple apps and figure out which ones they like, so you know, for example, okay Cube, it provides a lot more information about users. You're getting several pages of text about somebody and you can respond, you can write something in any case you actually care, and it's a lot slower of

a dynamic. Tender is a very quick lottery type dynamic that really and like I think, unless you're like an eight or above, I don't know why you're on tender personally, You're just you have no shot TINGE has a different dynamic, J swipe, different dynamic, you know, E harmony, things like that, and some of these are really optimized for long term relationships, and some of these are optimized to make you swipe, And so I think you need to, like, you can't

judge the entire category by just doing one, and I would just you know, encourage people to experiment with a lot of them if if that's what they're looking for, because they're very very different experiences app to app. Well, this has been obviously some very useful insight into dating and how to produce Alpha book. But we can't end without talking at least a little bit about how you're

actually using your research. I mean, there's only so many you know, obviously there's publicly traded online dating companies, but not many like Matches one of them. What big picture, this is research that you've done as part of your fund and you talk about investing in dynamics that are going to change the world over the next five to

ten years. So as you continue to build on this research, where are the areas that people might look to see the ramifications of the change in dating or mating habits show up in the world of in the investable universe. So obviously there's the publicly traded dating companies and you know full disclosure we're long one of them. It's not

hard to guess which one. But I think one of the things that really drew me into this subject to dig into it deeper, and we're gonna be putting out more research on this is household formation as a concept has been a major driver of economic spending, you know, purchasing a house, having kids, buying all this stuff, and this is changing that dynamic. It's not eliminating it, but

it's changing it. And one of the things you've seen in the last few year is that you know, a lot of people comment on online all the time, is okay, why are people getting married at different ages? And a lot of people have jumped straight to oh, well, it's just economic uncertainty, And no doubt it is one of the variables in that equation is is economic uncertainty. But

I think online dating is actually very underappreciated factors. So it might be a one percent waiting, but people might have it in one percent waiting, but I think it's probably more like a twenty or waiting because I think when people get in a position where they're looking to

get married, that priorities reshift a lot. So I think adding online dating in with what the income distribution the United States really looks like, particularly among young people, and particularly around housing prices and certain geographies is a very very important explanatory variable. And so we're very focused on another secular theme that we're very focused on. It will

probably be one of our next papers. I'm not sure if it will be the first one or you know, but it really coming out in the near future is around affordable housing. There's a massive structural shortage of affordable housing in the United States, and you could argue it's ten to thirty million people, and you could argue that it's growing. That shortage is growing at twenty to thirty percent a year, and if that isn't solved in the next five years, it's the only issue in every election.

And I'm baffled that this is not a bigger discussion. So we think looking at the affordable housing shortage in conjunction with people getting married later and also is going to be a huge huge issue in terms of Okay, how do families actually form, and then how many kids are people having and what does that do to the demographic kalens the United States, especially with our immigration policy being fairly restrictive, right Now in addition to that, I think,

as I said, it is an instagrammification of dating. And so you're seeing massive shifts and consumer trends. And I don't know if you guys have noticed this, but there's a huge boom and male cosmetics. And I don't mean like just makeup. I mean there's a makeup brand I was told about that's for men. It's called war Paint, which I don't know an think about it beyond that, but I think that's amazing branding. But you're seeing like all these you know, I think they begin with beards.

There's been all these beard oils and waxes, and you know, there's some company called Manscape is selling a male hair trimmer and they have these hilarious ads. And now there's the number of different male moisturizer brands. I was in a target yesterday. There was an entire aisle of just male skincare stuff. And to see that in a target and risk in Virginia five or ten years ago is

completely unthinkable. I mean, it's ridiculous. And so I think you're staying huge trends in particularly the startup market in CPGs based off of people needing to look better on camera to find somebody, and I think it's changing everything else. And I think one of the other things that's not appreciated is, you know, when you look at something like match Group, you know, there's an argument you made that

they have a dominant position in that market. They just did a partnership with Open Table, and so what they're doing is they're going to partner with Open Table and they're gonna place dates at restaurants. The margin that a restaurant earns from somebody who is just going in and buying a few drinks is astronomical compared to any other type of customer they have, so they can actually pay quite a bit for that. So what I'm also interested to see, Okay, what other types of business models come

out of online dating. Did they start selling these cosmetics directly? They start selling seats at bars, they start selling event tickets. Did they start doing them your curated thing. One of the questions that I had that I looked at a lot when I was thinking about starting one was why is there not an app that kind of continues to work with you as you date. Why don't they Because they'll they'll do a promotion and say Hey, you know, five dollars off movie tickets or something. But why are

they not continuing to provide data date ideas? Why is it not you know, the wine and painting thing, or you know, go to Trapez on the West Side and you or or something like that. I think there's a lot of ways that products will be marketed through these online dating platforms. So the online dating platforms are going to change consumer demands. It's going to change how houseful information is working. I think people are gonna start to route a lot of products through online dating because it's

becoming a central nexus. And I think people below you know, thirty, I think more of them are using Tender and things like that on a daily basis and are using Facebook. The opportunity to sell through there is huge, and so it's gonna be this kind of nexus point between all

these big drivers. And maybe it's not that big of a dollar category right now, but I think when you think about it demographically going forward, particularly if you assume that you know, people are not going to stop online dating as they get older, if they're single again or remain single, And that's what we're saying is they're seeing

older in order cohorts get online dating. So if you think that this is gonna be the way people date twenty years from now, and I do, then this is going to be a massively important area to watch because it's gonna give you leading indicators on household formation, it's going to give you leading indicators on consumer brands. It's gonna give you leading indicators on you know, what's cool what's not cool. I mean you can see this on

Instagram all the time. People on Instagram are showing off what they think are cool products, are cool things to do, or this that or whatever. But online dating is a super condensed version of that. You're not putting a picture of yourself or content of yourself on an online dating platform unless you think that is attractive to people. So it's very very interesting the data and the insights that can come out of this, and I think it has

huge implications for most of not all sectors. And it's one of my favorite macro indicators actually looking at what's going on in this dating market, not on a short term basis, but I mean on a long term agrift demographic basis. And I think it's also going to completely reshape the entire societies in more conservative areas of the world, where women are going to be able to step out from behind a patriarchal society and have agency around their sexuality,

agency around their dating, agency around their marriage. You know, it's not gonna happen all at once, and it's not going to allow them to immediately snap the fingers and be all good, but it's going to have this net effect of starting a ripple process. It's just not going to stop. And so I think that what's the biggest point about online dating this interesting to me is what

is it going to do to emerging markets? And so a lot of the big these emerging markets right now is basically, other than plumbing, which is a huge issue, smartphones are having this completely revolutionary idea. A lot of people look at protests and things like that and they say, oh, well, these protests are happening because the people are tired of the corruption, and you know, I think they've been tired of the coruption for a long time. The reason they're

protesting is they can coordinate, so they have smartphones. So smartphones this vector that's changing every country in the world, in the US as well, but not as much as it's changing other countries. And I think that the specific subvector within smartphones that's mattering the most emerging markets is actually online dating, because it's going to unlock the value and the agency and all the power of all the women, which is half the damn population, and it's just gonna

be it's gonna be a much bigger issue. This is not about people looking go out get laid at the bar. This is a huge deal. Dan McMurtry, that was great. Really enjoyed that conversation so much richer and thought provoking than I had previously thought about the subject, which I guess is kind of the whole reason you got into this. But really appreciate you joining us. Thank you guys so much, Really appreciate it. Happy to come on anytime. Thanks Dan.

Thanks Dan. That was great. Tracy. That really was, as I said at the end, sort of far more interesting in terms of the ramifications and follow on effects of online dating than I had ever really thought about before. I don't know about you, but it kind of has me thinking about what my Tinder, my hypothetical Tinder profile

would actually look like. And I think, based on Dan's observations and his dating advice, I would have to put something about like I'm really good at delayed gratifications skills, like that's what he might. Oh wait, that actually sounds really bad. No. I think the idea is to demonstrate that you have to pursuit right. Oh yes, that's right,

demonstrates that that attracts people who have delayed gratifications. So the other thing that comes through from it is just he mentioned the gamification of the entire dating strategy, which is why, like they say, for guys on Tinder, you're just supposed to swipe right constantly just to increase your chances of getting a match. I didn't realize that the time at which the time of day at which you

do it actually matters as well. That I was wondering about that too, because maybe that would be my one edge because I always get up at four am, So I was thinking like, well, if I were getting up at four am, I wonder if that would help me. Like in the queue, you also have to wonder what kind of people you're matching with it four am, I can only imagine. But on his areous note, I mean this notion that our economic models aren't really taking to

taking into account. What is a sweeping change to the way society works. I think is a really interesting one, and Dan made a very very good case for why it matters in the broader economy and in the broader consumer market as well. Yeah. Absolutely people should read the paper and follow him. Yeah, for sure. The paper is highly amusing. As mentioned earlier, this has been another edition of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe

Why Isn't All? You could follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart and you should definitely follow our guest today, Dan McMurtry. He's at super Mugatu on Twitter. He's really great because actually for a long time he was tseudonymous and then at the time that he unveiled his dating paper, he revealed his name to the public. Everyone should go check it out. You could find links to the paper or is there and all the other insights, all of which are worth following. Be sure to follow our producer

on Twitter, Laura Carlson. She's at Laura M. Carlson, and follow all of the Bloomberg podcast on Twitter at podcasts. Thanks for listening.