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Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They call me Ben.
We are joined as always with our super producer Andrew Treforce Howard. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Folks, we are at the end of the calendar year of twenty twenty four. A lot of people are dealing with love hard won, love heard lost, and it's often said the course at true love never did run smooth? Make that up?
That shakes man.
He's no slouch. Sorry, maybe he didn't make it up either. Isn't there a whole thing that maybe he didn't write any of his own stuff.
I think that's been pretty well debunked though.
Right we have an episode on that as well. But it's something everybody can agree with, Noel. It's one of the few consistent patterns across all of humanity's strange experiment. You know, most of us tuning in tonight have at
one point or another sadly encountered heartbreak. And it's it's weird to think about how privileged we are here in the modern age because back in the day, romance, like the person you would spend your life with, it was primarily decided by your physical and socioeconomic proximity.
Oh, things have changed.
Not not well in your family, right, They just say, wow, that's this other family. It's going to be strategic for us, So you're going to take one for the team.
It's interesting though, like you know, in terms of things one might google like how to make a million dollars and how to fall in love or probably on equal footings in terms of things that there is no magic answer for.
Yeah, And to Matt's earlier point, that was still an improvement based on the previous stuff, which was, Hey, I know this is technically your cousin, and I know there are some recessive traits, but the Habsburg Empire must continue.
Yes, and there's some land acquisitions that are tied to the soul nuptial thing.
So huge tracks of land, yes, huge tracks of land.
That's what I think is amazing about him or her. They're huge tracts of lands. So nowadays across the world. As you know, fellow conspiracy realist, more and more people are turning to technology in the eternal search for affection for love. In a very short span of time, dating apps and services have exploded. Some people hate it, some
people love it. Tonight is not about dating advice, but if we could, you guys, in case this ends up being a two parter, could we recommend some dating applications for people well.
In terms of hating it or loving it.
It really just has kind of become an inevitable reality. It's kind of the way a lot of people, mean, young people coming up. It just seems like this is just how it's done. I met some people in the past through Bumble. In the early days, I used Tender, but then, like you know, different apps start to get different reputations. Tenders become like something more of like a hookup kind of market show, and Bumble is maybe more for like older folks or middle aged folks.
And I think the big one is Hinge these days.
I've heard tell of Hinge. I've seen that's the only one I've seen actually looked at. I've never seen anybody open Tinder on their phone and like look through it. Or have downloaded it or any of those. It's weird. I need to need to get on that. The only one I know of is Lumberjack Dating dot Com, which uh sure, I haven't actually used it. I just went to their website and it says ready to meet a genuine lumberjack who knows how to treat a woman.
Hey this baby or year, Matt.
I mean you got to have a certain circumference of bicap to even qualify though.
If I'm not, that's the right shout out to Paul Bunyan xx six x X. Also, I'd like to highly recommend Night Walk. It does not have any of the vowels. You'll find it if you need it.
Is that your your app Ben, that your that you've piloted.
No comments.
That sounds so safe, guys. Can I just say though, that Paul Bunyan bit of a babe.
You're thinking a bit of Babe the Blue walks.
That's right, That's right. It was. It's an online dating joke.
So do check out Babe the Blue Ox available now wherever you find your favorite applications. Listen, what we're telling you is there is a conspiracy afoot with all this dating Shenanigan, Rea online.
And we're going to tell you all about it after a word from our sponsors.
Here are the facts. First, let's define online dating. It's an umbrella term for, as you can tell, folks a wide range of services. They specialize in any number of preferences, demographics, ages, incomes, personal situations, occupations. One thing that's interesting I would say about dating apps in the modern era is that it is can completely okay on a dating app to say I only prefer a certain demographic of people.
Sort of the whole point, right, It's like a feature, not a bug. It's kind of the thing that differentiates some of the apps from one another.
You're not a lumberjack GTFO. Oh you're not a farmer. This is farmer's only.
Well, yeah, it is weird too, pulling up the rude begas get out of town.
And as we're going to discuss in the episode, that kind of set of circumstances, using an algorithm to match the user with their preferences ends up getting spun and turned around and flipped. So now it's just who are you? Who are you? And what will people like about you? And then it just it gets tangled up in itself really quickly.
Guys, it's everything you hate about dating in real life and everything you hate about auditioning in real life, and so now you can have them together, and it's everything you hate about social media. Whatever specializations these services may focus on, they have one thing in common. They require the Internet to function. Fifty years ago, this sounded bonkers, right, this sounded absolutely nuts. Can you imagine you, guys have ancestors.
Can you imagine going back in time to your ancestors and attempting to explain tender what would you say?
They'd probably kill you, kill me dead on site, at least, you know, once I, once I started speaking, I think it was witchcraft.
You'd have to start by explaining, like what a classified ad is, because they might understand a newspaper or you know, something like that. Maybe not, maybe you'd have to explain the newspaper then classified ad. Then Now imagine if you did this on.
Mass how far back I guess I'm picturing I guess so I'm saying, I guess I'm picturing ancients. Very difficult conversation, but you know your results may vary depending on how far back you go.
To Ben's point, well, like how far back do you go? You know, you go far enough back, and you're saying, hey, did you ever wonder if those Neanderthals over in the next horizon are cool? Did you ever think about, you know, cuddling up. We're gonna leave that there.
But also, I mean the question also then kind of begins to surround the nature of partnership and the nature of like what is someone looking for? In the olden days, it would have been, to your earlier points that both of you fellas much more about acquisition, about land, about family, about tying into a dynasty your wife and child, oh well,
of course. And then further back than that it would have been more about protection, you know, and about this kind of almost tribalism as opposed to you know, who was going to be the big spoon?
Mm hmm, yeah. Yeah. As we said in previous evenings, the escalation of human society is best portrayed as this. One you have the family, right, everybody's related. Two you have the tribe, everybody has this common interest. Three you have the religion. Four you have the state, Five you have the company right, and maybe six you have the galaxy or the solar system dream galaxy brand yeah, so
you're absolutely right. No, in terms of the modern day, right now, people seem to be in the West, I wouldn't say rejecting, but perhaps interrogating traditional social norms, romantic norms. The US Census Bureau found in twenty twenty three that in their estimation, nearly fifty percent of the US population forty seven percent, they said, considers itself single. The data doesn't always agree. It makes me think there were a couple folks maybe putting themselves as single with someone at
home who would have a problem with that. It's complicated, Yeah, shout out Facebook.
Oh gosh, must we The.
Few research centers says that three and ten Americans are single either way you slice it historically, that's a lot of people, right.
Right, Well, I believe that forty seven percent consists of just over one hundred and seventeen million people in the United States that consider themselves single. Slash.
It's complicated, Yeah, single slash. It's complicated. Working it out. Here's the sad truth that we have to admit a lot of folks right now who are listening this evening are single and perhaps maybe not happy with that.
They may want to.
Be booed up or cuffed. As hip Hop says. This is where the statistics show us the popularity of dating apps. In the United States alone, nearly again three and ten US adults used a dating site or app, and more than forty percent of people interviewed. They state that online dating has made dating easier. Now you don't just have to rock up at an art show, you know what I mean. Now you don't just have to pretend that you're at that tree planting or soup kitchen or museum every day.
Yeah, you just say, hey, you're cool, we matched be at my house at ten.
Flighte whoa super.
Lightt mess I get. Look this, I have no experience with it. That's what I've been hearing through several of the sources we were looking at today that it just becomes at times because there are so many human beings out there, it's like you gotta just meet who you can and see if.
And you know, being a dude as well.
Like I've navigated through multiple of these and I've met some people that were great and some people that were awful. But there is some comfort in knowing that if you're there for the same reason, you're not gonna accidentally put your foot in your mouth, or you know, even worse, get the wrong idea and have someone think you're being a creep because you know what the stakes are, you know what the score is.
You're both there for the same reason.
Not to say that there aren't tons of creeps on these online dating sites, but that was sort of a selling point for me, was that it took some of that that's unknown out of the equation because I am just, you know, extra concerned about anyone thinking that I have any intention other than you.
Know, normal wace is that the I guess it. We'll talk about it varies by the app, like what the app sells itself as what you will be selling yourself as when you use the app, right, but I guess yeah there, and they call those the hookup apps versus some of the other ones that we'll get into.
Well, I just mean like, if you're matching with somebody, you know that you're in an early kind of getting to know you phase, as opposed to having to rock up to Ben's point, to somebody at an art show or a bar and feel like you're, you know, peeing in the wind for lack of a better term.
Well, what we're really talking about there, gentlemen, is the concept of information asymmetry. To your point, Noel, knowing what is expected by both parties, what is informed consent? Yes, that can be a huge win, and there are quite a few deep economic structures at play. We do know that it appears the Western world for a while for
super dug they superl liked dating apps. They swiped right on that stuff because in twenty twenty three in the United States alone, for people in the dating market in twenty twenty three in the United States, when asked their preferential milieu or medium for meeting a partner, thirty two percent said I'm going to meet them at a concert or a festival, which I take to mean some sort of social event. Thirty three percent said I want to
be connected via a friend, a known trusted entity. To your earlier point, let's grade down on that information asymmetry if we can. Here's number one with a bullet. Forty two percent said online dating apps. That's where I get my kicks.
Oh boy, And with that, we're going to take a quick break. Hear a word from our sponsors and we'll be right back with more. And we've returned.
So where did this all begin.
I mean, we certainly know, you know, things like the personals ads and sort of more historical predecessors to online dating. Right, these actually date pretty far back, but not maybe as far back as I might have thought. To the late fifties and early sixties. Stanford students Jim Harvey and Phil Filer used a questionnaire and an very whole school probably incredibly large IBM six fifty computer to match up forty nine men and forty nine women.
Oh yeah, picture the transistors, you know what I mean. And they they hit a good Vin diagram on forty nine C and forty nine B or whatever, and then all of a sudden, the transistors burst like like you're creating Frankens. We've gone to match.
It's a love I can never forget guys.
When we all went to Vegas together and we were just obsessed with that Frankenstein slot machine.
That that voice rings in my head constantly. It's alive, It's alive. Sorry, unrelated, but you triggered me there.
Ben lost a lot of money on that thing, do you guys remember? Greater great expectations or greater expectations is the VHS dating SNL spoof? Right, Lle was that Chappelle.
I don't know exactly where it came from, but I definitely remember the little theme tune for sure.
The real thing was called Great Expectations, and it was like VHS dating very eighties sign up. But because like how I kept trying to imagine, like how the heck would you actually get a hold of the VHS tapes of all the people that are going on aagistics.
Also, it's self selecting at that point for people with access to certain kinds of technology, which we'll see as even crooked, which is a word I made up. It's American emlash. I'm still learning it.
Tuned into an upcoming episode of Ridiculous History to find out more on the history of.
American My gosh, who buddy, So, I would say, our collective favorite example of early technology or you know, computer technology beating the Long Road to love is a guy named Ed Lewis back in nineteen sixty three. This guy also got a pretty old IBM computer. It was new at his time, and he made a questionnaire and it was entirely so that he could quote optimize the meeting potential at dances for himself.
That's fun, nothing weird, you know, what's funny about that, Ben is I was just recently thinking about the old expression I don't have room on my dance card, to which I kind of looked that up, and that was a thing man there was like, you know, women dances, social gatherings or whatever, would have this thing that has resembled like the little ticket you'd find at the inside of a library book, and you would kind of schedule the boys that you were gonna cut a rug with,
and that you could say if you didn't want to do something or didn't want to dance, you say, I'm sorry, I don't have room on my dance card, which is where that expression comes from, for like not having time to do something with somebody.
Wow, amazing, And it's weird because we don't have dance cards. Now we should get them.
We don't have dances, we should dance, so we should we should take take Maud's advice.
From Harold and Maud, it's a really interesting point. I don't want to jump ahead with it, but it reminds me of the Atlantic article that I think we all read for this that was talking about the difficulty of
getting women to use these apps. Again, we're gonna have to talk about it in a moment, but thinking about the dance card as a thing where and maybe I'm wrong here, correct me, guys, But in my mind, the historically it's often been, often not always been males chasing after a female is in like, I'm going to pursue that pretty lady and I will attempt to date.
That she will be mine, oh yes, or it will be mine.
Or in this case, I will dance with her. I want to dance with her. But oh, and then it is in the woman's position to say no, no, no, I don't know.
But also the stakes were so much higher back then. If you got on that dance card, you might have a one out of ten shot of marrying that gal.
You know what I mean?
I mean, well, sure courtship. What we used to say back in I guess we call it the eighteen hundreds is a man pursues a woman until she catches him fair enough. This is obviously not a thing that has aged well. But I think what you're proposing here, Matt, is a sort of Newtonian association right of chaser and chase. Right, one must be one or the other. And we see that this is to your point, Noll a function of the economic and survival realities, the situation, the environment at
the time. Over, if we go back to ED in nineteen sixty three, spoiler worked out, but not the way he wanted. Over the next few decades, we see this continuing trend of computer assisted questionnaires. Now you don't have to just publish a classified advertisement. Now you don't have to just say, you know, mail eight hundred and seventy three years old in tonight walks looking for interesting company. Now you can just say you tell me, you can put the onus on the person that you want to meet.
You can say, give give me your answers for this sort of stuff. And at the same time we see the rise of things like mail order brides to your earlier point, we see video dating services. In the nineteen eighties, we see the rise of dating what are they called BBS's.
Well message boards right or well yeah, but like physical right, they would have been actual.
There was no Internet yet, right, this is not online.
No, they got out there. There were early.
Early versions of subscription based kind of almost like newsgroup kind of situations, very early Internet, that makes sense.
And then you get the first modern dating site, by which we mean a website built entirely to get people together. It's called kiss dot com. In a burst of creativity, it hits the net in nineteen ninety four.
Surprised Kiss the Band didn't have that lockdown already.
Where were you.
G he's a vase, very litigious too. I don't know if you he's usually on the top of that I would have thought. I mean, I'm surprised we haven't read some sort of lawsuit kerfuffle with kiss dot com against the Kiss or the Kiss organization.
You guys, let's check it out right now. Kiss dot com just says kiss dot com see photos of singles near you. Oh, and there's a button that says match and.
Then it takes you to match.
Maybe you got the vintage landing page with nothing on it other than a link out to the modern version.
So fast forward a little bit.
Uh.
We know that yid y id dot com launched in South Africa just shortly after Kiss dot com, and yid dot com was a specifically Jewish dating site. Other countries, other demographics followed.
Suit.
The world knew there was this crazy horizon ahead. Investors knew there was a crazy horizon ahead, and dating platforms only grew more and more and more popular. The real thing that changed the game.
Aim was a message sorry sorry. That's what changed the game for me. That's how I've ended up meeting a bunch of people.
Online in flirtation machine and random chat rooms.
What's your asl bro?
Uh oh that People ask me that all the time, and I pretend like I was a twenty year old. And then I remember just being like feeling, I like, I was so cool because I could talk to people.
So you were like in your teens, but you were pretending, liked, pretend to be older.
Everybody my age, our age, was in middle school just acting on the internet like they're everybody and anybody, just to be weird with it, I think, and we were trying to figure out stuff.
It was full school.
It was so much fun and weird, the humans gregarious. It's neat to talk to strangers.
It didn't feel scary at all until we realized it was terrifying.
What you're describing is pretty, you know, charming and naive pretend to being at middle school.
I pretending to be older.
But what of course ended up happening was old people pretending to be middle schoolers.
And that's where it kids gross exact.
Yeah, and that continues today. So the seeds of the evil trees were planted long ago. If we go past aim Messenger to the early two thousand's twenty ten's, the revolution is the smartphone. We have a thing called Grinder, which was very forward facing for its time, not just because it was designed for the LGBTQ plus community, but also because they took the E out of the word you know, So now it's they kind of set the tread on that one.
One hundred percent, I mean, and again, like you know, it's not something that I've experienced directly, but that's another app that part of its selling point is almost like very quick geolocation of people who just want to hook up. It is largely looked at, by my understanding, to be less of a long term meeting my soulmate kind of app and more of like a casual kind of thing.
Yeah. And one of the major I would say revolutions moving away from a laptop or desktop back in the day largely to the phone, like that is that you're mobile using this thing, so you're not at home talking to somebody. You're now at the club or you are you know, at a restaurant and you can open your app and see who's nearness.
Yeah to the earlier statement there, you know, dating pre technology or technological innovation was requisite on socioeconomic or physical proximity. And to your point, Matt, now with your proximity visible and approachable, now you can see whomever is near you wherever you may go.
And to me, that, to my understanding, that is a pretty I'm sure there are others you know that have this feature, but that's a pretty Grinder specific kind of thing. Whereas you know, if you have an app like Tender or Bumble or Hinge or whatever you might put in, I only want matches with people that live within thirty miles of me, you know, but you're not going to see them as a blip on a map where you can walk right.
Up to them.
That would be considered privileged information and you do not want to give that kind of information out unless you are ready to meet somebody in person, and usually then you meet it like I mutually agreed upon kind of public place. But Grinder is very specifically I think geo centric. That's very real time data driven.
Which requires yeah, as you said, Noll, the data and you know folks, it may be a bummer to say the love of my life is in me and mar I will never meet them because I don't have my settings correct. We have to understand that the appearance of Tender in twenty twelve reshape the landscape because a gamified sex and love you swipe right to like you, swipe left to pass. For a while, this was a free action. I'm sure it continues now. I have never dated online.
I meet you know, I mean, my lover's the old school way getting deported suddenly finding finding finding a date becomes more like playing a game or taking a survey. Then it becomes like meeting someone and knowing them. It's a weird, weird audition process to put.
People in and it really does kind of in many ways, cheapen the experience. You know, it can sort of like make you a little bit jaded when everything is just a picture that you are swiping. It is a pretty surface level kind of exercise, you know, for the most part.
And with the advent of Tinder, what you also begin to see. And again only with hindsight do we realize this, but we all anyone who is using Tender, who began that process started to see that there is an endless stream of individuals out there. So you now get you start to get into the problem of well, if I swipe right on that person, I might be missing the next, you know, person that I really want to date, or I really would match with her I think would be
super sexy. Yeah, if I'd swipe right on that, maybe I'm I'm screwing up. I should just swipe left until I find the perfect one.
I only got so many swipes. What am I gonna do? Pay this app?
The app says, Yeah, that's gamified as well, because like a lot of like quote unquote free games, you know, phone apps, there are in app purchases you can you gotta buy more hearts or in game currency or whatever, and like in tender, you can get buy the super swipe again the things that things that obviously changed. I'm
sure I have since I'm that's with it. But all you do run up against you know, you've run out of swipes and you have to wait, or you could pay X number of dollars an upgrade to the premium version.
The freemium model, yes, which we'll get to. The thing is there is little to no stigma attached to online dating today. You know, not too long ago it was considered somehow inappropriate to meet someone through a classified advertisement in print, and some of us in the audience tonight
realize how recent that was. Dating online is a normalized tool nowadays a lot of people have met for casual flings or they've found themselves in lifelong, committed, happy relationships having issue I mean by which I mean creating children. Last year, the boffins at Pew Research found get this, I think this is an amazing statistic. One inten partnered adults people are married, living with a partner, or in
a committed romantic relationship. One in ten of those folks met their current partner through a dating site or through an app. So those are good results.
Yeah, I mean I met my current partner through a dating app, no question about it. And the previous couple that I've had before that again varying degrees of success. Obviously I'm not with them anymore, but some of them were fine relationships I met through those apps as well, So I'm very much part of that demographic.
And obviously, folks, when we are saying something is normalized, we do not mean it is above criticism. This new genre of romance has garnered tons of controversy, plenty of complaints, a couple of heinous crimes, and countless broken hearts along the way. But the deal is, the need is too great. Some people would pay anything for the promise of true love and the money, oh, the money, you guys. The profit potential that is likewise too great for the companies
to ignore. Every dating app is swiping right on profit potential. Morgan Stanley found dating app users who go to what you're saying, no, they cross the rubicon of freemium to pay. They end up spending between eighteen and nineteen US dollars per month on subscriptions or one off purchases.
Yeah, it is very odd to imagine that every one of these dating sites, dating apps, whatever they are, start as free, and especially Tinder if you think about its origins, fully free for years until company realized, oh, we actually need to be profitable. At some point, we're moving out of a venture capital stage and into the we're going to go public, so now we need to have a revenue.
Because I know a lot of those things that you know when they pop like that too, they're just all about developing a user base. And they're not always thinking about the profit motive up front. We'll get to that, but first we have to get to a place where we have this unimpeachably massive user base.
And this is what we are investigating this evening, folks, dating as a business romance, as a digital empire. We kid the not fellow conspiracy realist, there is a conspiracy afoot.
Okay, let's take a quick pause in this chat about online dating. Here a word from our sponsors, and then come back with more.
And we've returned.
Here's where it gets crazy. What are we talking about? All right, let's just name guys. Let's name every dating app we know, just so we can all hear how very they appear to be. Maybe take a deep breath together, because I'm sure we got a lot to go through.
Her hymns.
No, that's that's that's yeah, Ashley mad O, Tender Tinder.
We mentioned a lot of these already, Hinge, Okay, the.
League Yeah, a's are b LK Hakuna pairs, et cetera, et cetera. Which is a thing I made up, but I think it's a good idea for a very lazy dating app. Just et cetera, et cetera. What are you into? What's your profile now?
No?
Coffee meets Bagel is one that I like the name of.
And then you have like things like Jday, which has been around for a very long time that is again specifically for you know, people of the Jewish faith.
Mm. Yeah.
And then you have Christian mingle is that one.
Plenty of Fish, which I think is a Christian thing too because of the fish symbol or is it not? No, it's not oka. I always assume that it was.
It's like plenty of fish, yes, but I guess I.
Always assumed that. I don't know why I thought that the fish thing just just threw me interesting.
Can you can you date citations of plenty of fish? That's unfair.
They're mammals, I mean, and it's you know.
I think the point of this list, including some made up ones, are to show just how specialized, uh and varied and seemingly completely different the apps in this massive world that is online dating can be.
Right specialized across any number of variables, some more specialized than to others, each with their own unique reputation. You have a love of your life and mind, you will find that demographic on insert site here, welcome to et cetera, et cetera dot org. We're not. Ok yeah, right, well, that's why we can't get investors because of the profit. Most dating apps are ultimately owned by a single company.
That's right, fellow conspiracy realist. There is one dating app to rule them, moll an Illuminati of online romance, a cable of digital dating. Can we get a drum roll? Tri force.
Match dot Com Incorporate LLC.
Incredibly Corporation.
Yes, they're a bill litigious.
And when we say most, let's let's give that listens tender hinge. Okay, but plenty of fish. The League metic asar or As are Chispa b LK, Hakuna Pears. There's uh, there's more. Well, no, I think that's it. I was on their website just a moment ago looking at all of the the different.
ICI forty five plus. Those are the ones they brag about there.
Yeah, they're they're like topped here, and if you go on their website you may think, oh, that's all they've got.
No no, no, no no no.
No no no no no no. Officially known as Match Group Incorporated, this company is based in Dallas, Texas. For anybody not from the United States, Dallas is a pretty big deal here. President got shot there back in the day.
I think I read something about them, Yeah right, we did.
Au We looked into it as the our buddies, Rob Reiner and Solidad O'Brien. The idea of match dot com or what becomes match dot com is pretty fascinating. It's created way back in nineteen ninety three by a guy named Gary Craven, Simon Glenski, and pangte Oong in San Francisco. And at the beginning to the earlier point about classified ads, that's all they were trying to do. They were taking the personal classified ads to the Internet and they were
calling it. You love this electric classifieds incorporate breaking to electric bugaloo.
Oh yeah. And there's a there's one individual dude that ended up buying up a ton of different domains. They were like match dot com, super simple URLs that you could get to and he didn't have anything on him yet, but he's one of the you know, there's that time on the Internet where that was a that was a viable business plan.
Just by sting dot com.
It still is still is, my friends, I mean, I think of the show Matt riddle aboutty money.
That's he does this forget for laughs.
He bought the URLDJ COVID nineteen just when COVID nineteen was kicking. Justis in case they're like, you know, when it's like not too soon anymore that somebody comes out and wants that artist. There is a story on NPR not terribly long ago about a dude who truly made good by just buying up combinations of different political figures in the hopes or you know, in the case in the event that they ended up running mates and he made good and sold some of those to some serious tickets.
Yeah, And in this case, this person bought a bunch of these and then put them together, and all of them had classified ads essentially for different things. Someone were for autos, for cars, someone were for this type of thing. And it is just amazing that somebody had that idea, created this thing, and then almost immediately it reminded me a lot of Marshall Brain actually, the founder of houset
works dot com. Where you start this huge thing and you have an idea for it, and then as soon as it starts to blossom, it doesn't get taken away. But there are now investors and board members and they can make decisions in metastasizes.
Yeah, would be a way to look at it, an all priest, dude to Marshall brain, Let's go to David Kusher who puts it this way writing for The Atlantic. We got we've got a great origin story for our buddy Gary, and it will introduce the director of marketing that we were talking about later who really really changes the game. This is a field of dreams. If you
build it, they will come kind of moment. This will also ultimately be familiar to anybody who's tried to throw a house party and get their ratio right.
Okay, and here is that quote about Gary kremin and again is from the Atlantic, David Kusher quote. There was a no four letter word for love he knew, and it was data, the stuff he would use to match people. He could gather data about each client, attributes, assling interests, desires for mates, and then compare them with other clients data to make matches. With a computer and the Internet, he could eliminate the inefficiencies of thousands of years of
analog dating, the shyness, the mist cues, the posturing. He would provide customers with a questionnaire, generate a series of answers, and then pair up daters based on how well their preferences aligned.
It's perfect perfect, It's a littleical. I don't know. I you know there there might be a diminishing return at sub point, Like we've all been in situations where someone feels like they're predeciding and interaction, you know what I mean. Have you guys ever had that moment where you're dating someone and I'll be a little personal here, and in the first or second date they described to you the marriage you're going to have.
Yeah, maybe you know what not yet, Yeah, you got better.
You got better luck in love than me and.
Mad Hey guys, spoiler didn't work out.
Oh dang, come on man, Well, I want to talk about a personal thing towards the conclusions of these episodes or this episode. But uh, it was something an insight that I've discovered through learning about all this stuff. But I do not I do not have that experience. I
do think this is one of those beautiful dreams. Right, you see a problem I can imagine in this person's world, Gary's world, and then you can see, well, I know how to do X, Y and Z. Maybe if I apply that to this big problem, I can save the world.
Maybe by Excel spreadsheet was the answer all along.
And the thing is I mean, and you know, again I mentioned earlier the idea of like you know, there's no magic bullets to finding love, but the closest thing that you can sell as that is something like this.
And the reason that people are buying it is because it does have a relative success rate to some degree.
Remember the you remember those E Harmony of course, the real testimonials, right sure, the guy.
That would come on, I can hear his voice, I can't see his face right now in this moment, but the guy who would say compatibility compatiity, not compatibility. Compatibility is the number one thing that's gonna find you true love. And that's why E Harmony.
Only we can sust that out for you with all of the day.
Also, also let us let us admire from the from the higher elevation. Let us admire the absolute aspiration of this, the idea that you could one could quantify the unquantifiable things like love for anybody. Right now, if you are listening to this show and you are head over heels in love, and that love is reciprocated. You can't really put numbers on it. Come on, man, that's a different part of the brain. So there is this idea. It's again like the like the concept of how science answers
how and spirituality answers why. Love is a ven diagram between those two things. So is it not a bit cold to say if you answered X to the following Z questions, then we are why compatible?
Sure? Touch, Sure.
But also it's like if you think about people kind of romanticizing the idea of like finding your soulmates. If you think about logistically, which is the absolute you know, massive amount of possible soulmates that are out there, what are the chances that you found the one best person for you? Yes, they might be great, You guys might be completely compatible. But what systems like this do is widen that net in a way where maybe I could actually find that person statistically.
But I would say also to take it a step three steps further. First, that reduces people to quantifiable aspects, which is an unholy thing to attempt. Second, uh, the idea of a soulmate naturally includes the concept of people who were born and died before you were here and are going to be alive and die after you have passed, such that you know, cloud Atlas becomes an awesome job. People believe in reading.
But that's because if you think about it, though, I mean, I understand what you're saying, Ben, But the idea of a soulmate is about compatibility, is about a match of various characteristics. The question is to what percentage, to what degree are you nailing those matches? And is there a better version out there you know of the one that you've already found.
Right, that's the third point, the idea to keep people eternally chasing the better possibility. When human beings were largely living and dying within about thirty miles of where they were born, their choices were limited, right, as were their resources. Your questionnaire became something like, can you create children? Can we have child labor on the farm? Do you agree with my idea about God? Because I certainly cannot disagree with it, So we cannot have a discourse about this.
This is what our buddy Gary's dealing with. He starts off the same way we are. He's beginning from his own lived experiences, his own preferences, and he builds his questionnaire. He tries to sum the human heart up in a spreadsheet, right in quantifiable terms, and he realizes all of a sudden, hey, I'm not the golden goose. And then thank god he doesn't have an ego, because he says, wait, no dudes, no straight dudes here are going to be the golden goose.
I can get guys to pay for this service, this online dating thing, but my real goal is going to have is going to be to get women there somehow. Otherwise, why will these straight dudes bother paying for this in the first place? And we have to remember context. It's the mid nineteen nineties. People who identify as women are about ten percent of the folks online. The typical computer user is one male, two unmarried three at a computer for hours on end every week.
Well, yeah, imagine the as we're talking about the history of I don't know, companionship or whatever this stuff is, the amount of unwanted male attention man woman experiences and then asking them to go on and sign up and put all this information about yourself so that you can get a crap ton of male attention.
Right, which still continues to do there.
But there is a feature built into this that makes it appealing, which is the idea that you're not going I mean, I forget again. Some of these apps are different, but there are certain ones where you're not going to open up a chat unless the woman consents, which.
Yeah, but Gary has that.
I'm just saying, and I understand what I'm just saying, Like there is a version that we're going to get to that does benefit women, but even that then kind of gets bastardized and becomes its own sort of monstrosity.
So sorry to jump ahead too much, but yeah, where's Gary going with this?
But also in the mid nineteen nineties, most of us were just playing Ultima online and on Aim pretending to be we're twenty Oh yeah them.
Yeah, sorry, it's hilarious, dude, I love it.
I mean, and that's a that's a big part of it, because people are just like Gary, basing the world on themselves. Right, this is me, so this must be logically everybody. Gary is doing a really smart thing. And he says, look, I gotta go figure out people who are not me. I gotta if we want women on my weird thing then and he didn't call this weird thing, then I have to talk to actual women. I have to figure out what people's worlds who are not like me, like,
what's going on with them? What do they care about? And when he had these conversations, the lore of the story goes that he talked to all of his female
relationships or familial members. He talked to people he just found on the street, his friends, and they said, your questionnaire needs a lot of work, because your questionnaire is about you, and they said in particular, I think it was a big cold shower for him when unanimously women said, hey, Bud, your explicit sexual questions are kind of a non starter. That's a turn off. And then they hit him with another one and they said, why on earth would I
want random guys to your earlier point, Matt? Why would I want random guys to see my real name and my photo online? Because that would mean they could find me.
I was listening to that podcast it look Deep into this Land of the Giants. It was like season six or seven, I think maybe.
Episode two Dating Games.
Yeah, well, the entire series it's all about dating apps and they go into in depth. There a bunch of the stuff that was online that people were doing who were actually developing these things, but hot or not do you guys remember that that was a big one of the big pushes there trying to figure out why would to this specific problem, Why would a woman or a female put a picture of themselves online for it to be judged essentially by other people?
Was it hot or not like the early Facebook model, or is it that or is it something like.
Things like that. That wasn't the only one, but that was the big one where it was like, how do you what is the thing that causes someone to put their picture on there for it to be judged to see if people like me? Essentially? Right? That the primary motivation?
Why would you open yourself up to ridicule?
Why would you open yourself up to that kind of judgment and or harassment?
Ginger Well, yeah, exactly, But what is that thing that spark? And trying to capture what that is and then somehow incorporate it into this thing he's building.
And incorporate a sense of safety, incorporate a sense.
Of like, yeah, exactly, what's what's the buy in for someone to be willing to give this kind of information up?
I I don't mean to say that there's negative motivation for any of these things that are being created especially at this time with Gary. It's it is that thing of how do I get people to use this thing?
Right?
It's Field the dreams, Right, it's Field the Dreams. He's a Kevin Costner, you know, is or whomever Kevin Costner was acting as in that He's like, how do I get these people to show up to the ballgame. Eventually he understands the best way to find out what women really want the age old quest. He needs get this
you guys, real life women on the team. So he contacts his former classmate fran Meyer from his time at Stanford and he hires her as the director of marketing, and to her credit, she immediately clocks a secondary issue and she says, Gary, women aren't going to join up for your internet thing unless they know there are already
other women in the sandbox, unless they're already participating. Hold the phone, folks, amid all this discourse ed exploration of monopolization and conspiracy, we hope that you will swipe right on part two of the Illuminati of Online Dating. We can't wait to hear your thoughts. Join us later this week for wait did I say Part two? We'll keep it in We've got a two part episode. We want to hang out with you. Please let us know what's on your mind. We try to be easy to find online.
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