The Perfect Algorithm for Finding Love? with Christian Rudder

Trevor and Christiana are joined by Christian Rudder (co-founder of OkCupid and author of Dataclysm) to try and determine: Is a healthy dating app possible? They talk through how online dating has shifted since the “hope and change” moment of the early 2010s, and how data and technology can help and hurt our attempts at finding love.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Trevor Noah?

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• 0:35Trevor Noah?

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• 1:20Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, booked forever, forever. This episode of What Now is brought to you by Starbucks.

• 1:27Trevor Noah?

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• 2:11Trevor Noah?

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

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16Trevor Noah?

  Do you think that like forty something year old men are more attractive than twenty something year old men?

• 2:24Speaker 01

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

• 2:25Trevor Noah?

  No, say what you're gonna say.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  How tall is he when he stands on his wallet?

• 2:43Trevor Noah?

  This is What Now with Trevor Noah.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  I was saying to Trevor before you got here that like, the OkCupid married success rate is like higher than the Tinder.

• 3:02Trevor Noah?

  But Bima said when we're recording.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  Oh, we are recording, we're rolling.

• 3:04Trevor Noah?

  No, we're waiting for this thing.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I thought we were rolling.

• 3:07Trevor Noah?

  We are, we are saying this.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:09Trevor Noah?

  We are.

• 3:10Speaker 02

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

• 3:19Trevor Noah?

  Wait, why?

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Why would we want you?

• 3:21Speaker 02

  No, not for, no, I didn't think it was real.

• 3:23Trevor Noah?

  Okay, help me understand why you say, because in my head I go, Christiana, this is, oh, this is the other thing that you said right, right before you walked in, Christian, was we were going, you are probably not credited for a shit ton of the work that has given us insight into things that we previously didn't have insight into.

• 3:42Speaker 02

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

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Which we know is because we're like, he's been quiet for the last ten years.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Tried to lie very low.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  And what prompted that? I'm curious.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  I mean, you all must have much, much, much, much, especially you, such a thick skin, like I just, I was just like, I just can't deal with Twitter and like all of this stuff, just like people talking at you and about, it just bothered me. So I was like, you know what? I'm good.

• 4:08Trevor Noah?

  Okay, well, you know, we should, we should jump into that, but I, I just wanna set the scene a little bit, you know, for, for people who aren't familiar with you. I think. There are a bunch of people who won't be familiar with you.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Of course, yeah, for sure.

• 4:21Trevor Noah?

  But then there are a ton of people who should be not just familiar with you, but almost grateful to you.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  Super grateful.

• 4:27Trevor Noah?

  Because they are probably in a relationship, or they are married, or they could even be the product of the work that you've created, do you know what I mean?

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:38Trevor Noah?

  So, ju- just so I don't butcher it, like, you know, you, you're one of the people who basically started OkCupid.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 4:44Trevor Noah?

  So help me break this, this down, like you, because we live in such an app age now.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 4:48Trevor Noah?

  Take us, take us back a little bit. What was OkCupid when you started it? And like, what was this world?

• 4:54Speaker 02

  Oh, gosh. So, we started OkCupid in 2003, um, and it had its, which is obviously like so old for the internet. And it actually had its origins. We all worked at Sparknotes, the like study guide site before, and we had a little part of Sparknotes called Sparkmatch, which was just like, because we were like, Sparknotes is for kids who aren't doing well in school, or like high school, college, like what else can we do to keep them occupied on our website? And so it was just, you know, you look at, you fill out a profile, almost like a bio type of thing, you know, old school. And you can just browse human beings instead of like content on the internet. And that's like, in 1999, that was something that just didn't exist, right? And, um, Sparknotes was super popular, it actually crashed because we didn't know what we were doing. And so we kind of like bookmarked that in our minds. And then when we left Sparknotes,

• 5:39Speaker 02

  we decided to relaunch OkCupid, or launch OkCupid, which is basically just like the same thing with a different name.

• 5:45Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  And it was just, you know, a place to message and find other people, uh, which in 2003, you couldn't really do online. I used to try to like find someone I knew in high school or something in 2002 or 2003, and just couldn't do it.

• 5:58Trevor Noah?

  I didn't, I didn't dare do that because when I was using the internet around that time, first of all, we had dial-up.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure.

• 6:04Trevor Noah?

  You know, the whole like

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I remember that well.

• 6:07Trevor Noah?

  Like that whole thing. Yeah, yeah.

• 6:13Trevor Noah?

  Like your computer was fighting everything to get into this place called internet.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:17Trevor Noah?

  So I didn't search for anyone. I would go to one webpage if I was lucky and just stay there. And then the closest I came to it was like chats.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:25Trevor Noah?

  Just like chat.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Like IRC or

• 6:27Trevor Noah?

  Exactly.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  AOL Messenger.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 6:30Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, we didn't really have, I think we had IRC.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:33Trevor Noah?

  Like it was the lightest chat clients that you could imagine, because the computers were so, they were so basic, of course.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:39Trevor Noah?

  They're so basic. But that's, that's part of the reason that I wanted to talk to you specifically, and I wanted to have you on is because You know, we're in twenty twenty five. We are living in a world where everyone feels like they're inundated by everything and most of it seems to be digital.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:59Trevor Noah?

  You know, so our politics, our matchmaking, our work finding, our working. You know, if it's not from the office, our connecting, our talking to our parents, kids, our, everything is in this world. And I thought, who better to have this conversation with than somebody who was sort of like at the genesis of it all? And in many ways, one of like the forefathers of the thing that we're now in. You know, like I always wish you could actually go and get like Benjamin Franklin and and all of those people. No, just to to actually.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Edison, Edison, all the inventors.

• 7:31Trevor Noah?

  Yes, but you know why? You know why? Because everyone has ideas of what they would want or what they would say. Well, the founding fathers never intended the founding fa- if you look at their writing. But it would be so great to sit with them and go, hey, did you intend this?

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:45Trevor Noah?

  Like, OK, look at the world now and tell me what you intend. And in a way, I feel like you're one of the founding fathers of the way the internet has connected people. You know, so maybe we start with this because Cristiano, you were saying something interesting just before Christian got here. You you were talking about OkCupid and and the matches in particular.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Oh, I was saying that now looking at it compared to maybe like the Tinders and the Bumbles and on the Grinders and, you know, the swiping, like those type of things. OkCupid kind of had like this analog feature in this digital world because you had to write about yourself.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, to write about yourself, yeah.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  What your music, you were into, your interests, what's your favorite books? I mean, do people even read books now? You go to ChatGPT. And you're like, no, but it's just like, you know, it was, you had to be really intentional and thoughtful and creative. And it showed so much about yourself by creating that profile. And I think I think a lot about MySpace, like MySpace and stuff like that. And then then somebody would have to come and read about you. It wasn't like, you know, it's different when you go on tweets.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, you had to put in some time.

• 8:44Speaker 01

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

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Right, it's an interesting thing to watch happen because. It's definitely the case that in kind of OkCupid's heyday, and just for, I guess, background, you fill out a profile, you write about your favorite books, you write about, I don't know, what do you want out of life, just, I don't know, whatever, how you describe yourself, what you're looking for. And then there's photos, and then there were also match questions where it could be things like, do you want to have kids, or, you know, how do you feel about abortion rights? Yeah. Or, and including also crazy things, like what kind of humor you might like, or whatever. And everything's sort of like compacted down to just the photo with Tinder and Bumble. And I think, you know, the online dating industry is, is kind of hurting. And I think part of it is that, that you've lost so much. Yeah, it's compressed.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it made it like this quick, quick hit, you know, and people can go through and be, look through tons of hot people and have these like pinging and all of this stuff. But it's delivering probably worse matches or something now. So it's, it's an interesting topic of conversation with my friends, you know, who helped me start OkCupid. If the time is right to try to do something else and kind of read like telescope it all back out again, where you actually ask people to do more and say more about themselves and just like a cool selfie or whatever.

• 10:03Trevor Noah?

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

• 10:11Speaker 02

  I mean, first, well, online dating is way more popular than it ever was.

• 10:16Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  OkCupid is at its prime. But, I know, I just don't want to sound like a hater.

• 10:20Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Hey, let me say something. Biggest hater in the world. So if you want to become a hater, you have an ally.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  We got, we got a tag team.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Lots of hateration in this dance room, so.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Hateration is a great word.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Don't, don't, don't, don't hold back.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Best new verb I've heard in a long time. You know, I would give it like a C minus, I guess. I, I think with, with points for being more popular, which is, there is something inherently good about that, like more people are using it. It meets more people's needs to some degree, right? But I feel like there's a lot of people that are very dissatisfied. And if you go look at like the, the monthly active user numbers, like Tinder was at, I think, 13 million in 2019, and it's like eight now, which is like a massive drop off, you know, that's like kind of Facebook levels of. Sort of becoming a dinosaur.

• 11:07Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  And that's like, it's just interesting. It's a weird thing because there's definitely just as many single people as there ever were. And it's not like there's a plan B. The other apps are not really absorbing those missing, say, five million people like the industry is just shrinking overall. Whereas you have, if you look at, say, Facebook and it's declined, then you had Instagram to sort of replace it. You have TikTok and like, social media is as strong as ever.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, people migrating.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, they just, they just change where they're going. But here, people are, when they change what they're doing, they're just like, I'm out.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  I give up.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, or whatever. I'm just gonna meet people at work or like in real life, which is, you know, or, or through TikTok.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Or not meeting people at all.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  If I speak about like, a lot of my friends who, every one of my close girlfriends who's single, I get a text like, I'm quitting the apps.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  I'm quitting the apps. And it's not like they're meeting people in real life because you go out and the men are swiping. You know what I mean? So it's just like, a lot of people just surrender to be like, maybe I won't meet somebody.

• 12:02Trevor Noah?

  So I'll, I'll, I'll, speaking from personal experience, as someone who's used the apps, right? I'm young, Cristiano, not like, not like you married people. I'm young. As someone who's used the apps, I'll, I'll tell you what I think it is. I think oftentimes, we'll make it seem like it's this nefarious thing that people do. Oh, people can just swipe, people can just, but I think in a way, it's a byproduct of the culture that we live in. In the same way that Amazon makes people shop more, because you can shop more.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:30Trevor Noah?

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

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:38Trevor Noah?

  It's just like what we're gonna do as people. The same thing goes for the dating apps. And it's that you, you aren't in this thing because you're an asshole. Most people are using it because they're searching for something. They're looking for this magical love story that they've all been told about.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:54Trevor Noah?

  And now someone said, hey, here's an app to help you find it. Here's the app that you're looking for, right? And so what you do is, you then start to swipe. And in a weird way, I think a lot of people experience this. They go, if I do it more, I'm more likely to get to my end goal.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 13:09Trevor Noah?

  You know?

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:09Trevor Noah?

  Put in the work.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:10Trevor Noah?

  So you can't like swipe three people. What? You've only swiped three people?

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:14Trevor Noah?

  No, there could be more. Keep on going, keep on.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Right, yeah, yeah.

• 13:17Trevor Noah?

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

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:24Trevor Noah?

  Connections aren't efficient. You know, when I think of every solid friendship that I have in my life, like where I love the people dearly. It was a gradual game of attrition. You know, like rocks bumping into each other in like a tumbler. And slowly over time, we became pebbles in each other's lives. But it was not like instant and all of a sudden we're there, you know. And I, and I actually, you know, I'm shocked that you're shocked that we wanted to have you on. No, because I'll, I'll tell you why. You took data that really no one had taken before. And you didn't just, you didn't just look at the data, you synthesized it. And I, I, you know, in, in your book, Deciclism, you wrote something really poignant for me. And you said, and I'll paraphrase it, so forgive me if I, if I butcher it.

• 14:09Trevor Noah?

  But essentially what you were saying was you were going, for a long time in society, we've relied on how people feel. How they think and how they feel. So you, you do a survey. How do you feel about a woman president? And people will tell you how they feel, or they'll tell you how they want you to think they feel.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  Or how they wanna think that they think.

• 14:28Trevor Noah?

  Exactly, exactly. But then data shows you what they feel. You know, data doesn't show you, like, people go like, oh, I'm a healthy eater. I eat this many meals a week, or I eat this much ice cream. No, the data actually shows you what people do or don't eat and what they actually do or don't do. And, and so I think, you know, when we look at like what you did with data. Christiana said it so beautifully before you came. She said, she said, this is the man who's responsible for so many of the studies that have revealed the world to us in ways that we didn't previously know.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  In particular, your work around racial preferences and dating.

• 15:02Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Which was so illuminating to black women and it's, it's sparked so much discourse.

• 15:07Trevor Noah?

  It really has.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  You talked about how, um, black women and Asian men were like the least matched. And you were digging into that. And I, I don't wanna paraphrase you wrongly, but you, you talk about like, we can't take racism out of this. There's no way of algorithmically gaming that, that the site just revealed how people really felt.

• 15:26Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  In ways that were, maybe some people felt before, like some black women felt like, maybe I'm unlucky in love. Asian men felt, you know, I'm being overlooked in ways. And you showed the data that proved that that was true.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's very nice to hear because, you know, like, publishing that stuff, it feels dicey to be talking about race in a public way, a white dude, it's not like I have any firsthand experience of any of this stuff. And we just decided to put it out there in the world. And we did get feedback from people that were like, very grateful that we were just helping, maybe put a, not a name, but maybe a number to their experience of like, you know, my, whatever, my friends are having a different kind of experience than I am on your app, and this helps me understand why. Because it's nothing with me, it's like this, it's the people who come to the app that bring all of their prejudices, or just like, this kind of sociological, like, baking that goes on for your entire life about what's

• 16:19Speaker 02

  attractive and what you should want. And, yeah, those were my favorite things to work on, for sure, like, looking at how different racial groups message each other, how they rate each other, so like, swipe left, swipe right. What's interesting is, it's like, that phenomenon, for example, of black women getting fewer messages than, say, Asian or white women. It's much less a thing outside the United States, when you look at the data from other places like the UK.

• 16:46Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, the UK was like, 98%, I think, if I remember correctly.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:50Trevor Noah?

  They were getting 98% of the messages.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 16:52Trevor Noah?

  And then in other parts, they were getting like, 97. something percent.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Right. And just for your readers' context, or listeners' context, like, I think it's probably, probably like, 50%, I think, or 60% of, in the US, the ratio would be of, like, contacts, I'd say, from a black woman to a white woman.

• 17:06Trevor Noah?

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

• 17:14Speaker 02

  I mean, obviously, I have, you know, skin in that game, so to speak, it's like, I did so much work with it myself.

• 17:20Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  But I do think so, because like, there's no real incentive to, like, lie to the app itself. Like, you want to find somebody that you're actually going to be attracted to. So, there's no pose, you know, like, on Twitter or whatever, you can say these things, you can kind of take these very strident stances, you can make your opinions out to be something maybe a little different than what they really are in practice. Whereas, like, on a dating app, it doesn't really do you any good to... I don't know, just for example, pretend that you're really into Asian men if you're not. Because what happens when you do that? Well, now you're on a date with a guy that you're not maybe that into. And it makes the app work less well for you.

• 17:57Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 17:58Speaker 02

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

• 18:08Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 18:08Speaker 02

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

• 18:14Speaker 01

  The thing I found illuminating was age.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Your work on age, how men, it was like 20 year olds.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  Yes, just all the way down the line.

• 18:22Trevor Noah?

  Okay, first of all, I don't like how you said that in like an accusatory way.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  I think I said it in a curious way.

• 18:27Trevor Noah?

  No, your infliction went accusatory.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  I'm trying to be less judgmental now.

• 18:30Trevor Noah?

  Your eyebrows, you're gonna listen to me like 20 year olds.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  I know, because it's like women with age, I don't want to get this wrong, but it was just like, women, age corresponded with their age.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  So if they're like 25, they're into 25 year olds. If they're 30, it goes with time. Men, it didn't matter what age.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  The average age was 20 in terms of attractiveness.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Exactly, like, like a kind of an important extra point on that is like, so if you ask women, like part of signing up for OkCupid and Tinder, all these things, like kind of what is the age range that you're into also, right? So the app can kind of filter and show you stuff. So if you ask women, they give you the very sensible answer. If you're 30, you're maybe up open to 28 year old guys to 35 year old guys, whatever it is, some range, right? And men actually do the same kind of thing. They sort of, they take their age and they subtract a few years and they add a few years. They're like, all right, cool, I'm good with this band. So both men and women answer that question more or less the same way. Like, what age are you into? If you ask them that. But then if you look at who they actually go out and message, like you were saying, like for women, well, they actually know themselves better, they're more honest with themselves, they're more honest with the app. Like, you know, if you're 25, you message 25 year olds. If you're a 30 year old, you message 30 year olds.

• 19:34Speaker 02

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

• 19:39Trevor Noah?

  You've had to work so much with data, you know? And there's something you do in the book, and I'd love to know if you still have these opinions, like you, you, you're very honest about acknowledging the limitations that data has, because data can only tell us what has happened, but we don't necessarily know why the thing has or hasn't happened, right? And I think at one point you even talk about it, uses like the compounding effect, I think, that you speak about, like where you go, everything that you're measuring is within the context of something else. You know, so if you say, uh, I think the analogy you gave is like, if you stand at the corner of like Fifth Avenue in New York, Fifth Avenue and like fifty something or sixtieth street. And you say, what do people in New York look like?

• 20:20Trevor Noah?

  You'll say, oh, they're all pretty slim and wealthy and they're all a lot of Louis Vuitton and that's New Yorkers.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:25Trevor Noah?

  It's like, no, but that's where you were measuring from. And so in interpreting where you measure from or in understanding where you measure from, you come to realize the limitations of the information that you have, right? And so let's, let's jump into this example. Uh, cause I racked my brain thinking about this. First of all, cause I defend men fiercely. I defend men fiercely, cause I know where Cristiano's gonna go with this. And I was like, I have to fight, I have to fight for my brethren, right? Man them need me, right? So here, here's what I was, I was, I was intrigued by and it's, I mean, joke society in terms of defending.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:00Trevor Noah?

  Does the data tell us that men think twenty year old women are the most attractive? And women generally date in and around their age range, or they find the men around their age more attractive? Or is the data telling us that society doesn't allow for a woman to date like whatever age man she wants? It seems to me there's a possibility that a woman, to exactly what you said, don't just know themselves better, but know the world better. And I can only say this from personal experience with the women in my life, like friends. They go like, I can't date a twenty year old man. What will people say? What do my friends say? I don't wanna come up with a twenty, twenty-five year old guy. I'm forty, I'm rolling up with like this little toy, even the word toy boy.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:45Trevor Noah?

  You know, I'm rolling up with this little toy boy, what am I, sugar mama? And I, what does he know about the world? And what is he gonna help me with my kids? He's one of my kids and there's all these other frames. So, but you get what I'm saying?

• 21:56Speaker 02

  I mean, I do think there's something to your point about. There's like some enablement of guys going after twenty year old girls or liking them. It's like, fine, if you're forty and you're dating a twenty five year old, I mean, sort of. And and I can see why that wouldn't be the case if you flipped the genders and and you can't know everything about love. And I know we're not talking exactly about love here, but you can't know everything about that. And like these, the data and therefore like the algorithms that are sort of grinding it all up, like they just ultimately don't know you as well as you know yourself. Just looking back on where the world is now and where it was when in twenty fifteen, when I left OkCupid, like, we actually had a kind of like machine learning program to try to improve our our algorithm and try to find people even more

• 22:40Speaker 02

  perfect matches that we actually ended up shutting down because we felt like in our tests, like, no matter how much work we put into improving the algorithm, like, the ultimate arbiter was always the person who was going on the date or sending the message or whatever. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we stopped trying to guess what was gonna, you know, make people into pebbles or to, you know, to use your metaphor, like, because people don't change so much. And there's so many weird things about people, like how they laugh, or the way they carry themselves, or like a look in their eye that you just can't get to through a computer, at least yet. And so, yeah, we just kind of, we always tried to be aware of what we couldn't know, I guess, if that makes sense. And I know I'm kind of ranging from your initial question, but like, I do think it's, it's interesting what people go and do in

• 23:25Speaker 02

  these sort of bite sized units of like, just clicking on someone and yeah, guys click on twenty year olds. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're hotter, I guess. And women don't do that.

• 23:32Speaker 01

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

• 23:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:45Speaker 01

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

• 23:56Speaker 02

  I mean, if I were to start a new dating app like today, you would have to use some kind of AI. But I don't, again, I don't think I would try to make, you know, the perfect match have, you know, ChatGPT figure out exactly the right person for me in the world. Because I just think that's like a losing game, like. I mean, we've all been set up by friends that think, oh, my God, Jenny's perfect for you. You got to meet her. And you know, you sit down and you're just like, or whatever. And or maybe she hates you, you know, who knows? I think the AI component would be better served where like the app can like have a conversation with you to get to know you better. So that it can let you control more of your own experience rather than making the algorithm stronger. I guess it makes your voice in the algorithm stronger. Does that make sense? Like, that's what I'd like to see happen. Because I think, kind of getting back to what we were saying a second ago,

• 24:42Speaker 02

  with the Tinders and Bumbles of the world, the algorithm is all powerful. It's just like, to use your potato chip example, it's like, if you think of Tinder as like an infinite can of Pringles, you're just taking one off the top.

• 24:52Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, once you pop, you can't stop.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. So like, and it just does all the work. It's the silo, right? But I think if you can make the algorithm, make you, your voice and your thoughts and what you really want, more subtle and more powerful within the mix of how it's showing you people, I think that would be really cool. Almost like a life coach, like if people could put up with that.

• 25:12Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  I think that'd be pretty cool.

• 25:14Trevor Noah?

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

• 25:19Trevor Noah?

  Some of the most interesting things you learn happen while you're doing something completely ordinary. Maybe you're cooking dinner while watching a history video. Maybe you're on a flight catching up on a long form interview. Or maybe you're trying to figure out how to fix something in your house because apparently owning a screwdriver means you're an electrician now. But you see, that's one of the things I love about YouTube Premium. I travel a lot, so I download videos before a flight. That way, I'm not leaving my entertainment in the hands of airplane wifi. Yeah, I've made that mistake before. You think you're going to watch something in 4K and suddenly everyone's face is pixels. But one of my favorite features is smart downloads.

• 26:00Trevor Noah?

  You see, YouTube Premium can automatically download recommended videos for you based on what you already watched. So sometimes I'll get on a plane, I look at my phone, I'm like, ah, I didn't download anything. And it's like, no, YouTube already thought about this. They packed entertainment for me in my little lunchbox. And with background play, I can lock my phone, switch apps, and whatever I'm watching just keeps on going. So. If you like YouTube, you will love YouTube Premium. Sign up now for your free trial at youtube.com/premium. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. Pretty much every brand offers rewards these days. But most of them, let's be honest, they aren't that rewarding. Well, starting now, Verizon's doing rewards different.

• 26:44Trevor Noah?

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• 27:28Trevor Noah?

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• 28:12Trevor Noah?

  Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.

• 28:24Trevor Noah?

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

• 28:38Speaker 02

  Well, thank you.

• 28:39Trevor Noah?

  No, but I noticed this even in your writing. Your writing is full of doubts. Your writing is full of like assuming that you don't know what's going to happen, assuming that you don't have the answer, assuming that the thing could be wrong. It seems like you are cut from a different cloth because now we live in a world where tech tells us they know everything. You know what I mean? Like when you talk to Sam Altman, we had an episode with him on the podcast. Sam, I did not see like even like a hint of doubt. He was like AGI, baby. We're getting artificial general intelligence. It's gonna make the world better. No more cancer, no more poverty. We're doing it. And I was just like, wait, wait.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  See you on the flip side.

• 29:21Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, no, no, no, really. He just has that you you approach that differently. You have like a doubt. So I'd love to know like, what doubts do you have about tech in dating?

• 29:31Speaker 02

  Wow, uh, well, tech in dating, I mean, I do doubt probably like most people that have used these apps, whether it's like healthy to have that infinite can or just know that if I don't like this person or choose not to talk to this person in front of me, well, there's always somebody else. And you can just go through like that I'm definitely can admit that might not be healthy psychologically over like the 10 years of doing that or something, right? Like it'd be very hard to settle down with someone if at least theoretically, there's always a possibility that there's someone better. I also doubt there's gonna be a significant improvement in an algorithm that's gonna be better than people's like personal tastes. As you guys all know, like there's just

• 30:15Speaker 02

  style and all different kinds of things about a person that you just can't reduce and hopefully never can reduce to some radio buttons or whatever it is like on a phone. The one thing I like and I'm proud of even still, I mean, 10 years of distance between me and working in the industry is like, I love that dating apps, even for all their flaws and as frustrated as people get with them now. They're trying to create something in the real world, you know, like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, the goal of all of those things always, it's just to get you to use TikTok more, right, or eventually to make more money or whatever.

• 30:48Trevor Noah?

  Keep you digital.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, yeah, keep you digital, thank you. Twitter wants to keep your, or X wants to keep you there, right? Arguing with someone if that's how it goes, but whatever. Whereas Tinder, even the shallowest possible experience, the goal isn't, they don't want you, the people sitting in an office, working on the app, they don't want you to sit there and just swipe infinitely, that doesn't really get them anywhere either. They want you to go out and find someone that you like, you know, and you go home with them, or have a relationship with them, or whatever it is. And I love that about it, like, I think that's something that I'm proud of, that it's, it's created, you know, a lot of, a lot of frustration and a lot of like, heartbreak and a lot of, I'm sure, very douchey behavior out there in the world, but it's also created families and, and couples and all of these things and like, and obviously, I'm not saying any of

• 31:31Speaker 02

  these things are perfect, they're frustrating and people have always hated dating and being single and people have always hated dating, and dating apps, they hated OkQ, but at the time, it used to, like, the complaints would just like pile up, you know, just like they hate Tinder or they hate Bumble now, you know, it's like, that's a common, permanent threat, I think, of, of thing, but it's cool that it does create something actual, real in the world, so.

• 31:53Trevor Noah?

  I think that makes a lot of sense, like, I think people hate dating and they'll hate dating apps because for the most part, as humans, we hate searching, but we love finding.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:07Trevor Noah?

  But we don't realize that finding is the conclusion of searching.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the rejection component is obviously pretty heavy too.

• 32:12Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, our little monkey brains love to finish a task.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:16Trevor Noah?

  So we love to know we got to the end of something, you know, it was a book, you know, there's that feeling and you, you may not even realize you feel it, but when you get to the last page of a book, there's a, there's a strange sense of relief and, and completion and peace that comes with it.

• 32:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, the peace for sure.

• 32:31Trevor Noah?

  It has ended.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:33Trevor Noah?

  Watch a TV show and see how you feel when they write "to be continued." You don't live. If we're honest about it, you don't live. You like go into the world just a little, a little like left on edge. You know, you don't, you don't have the, the, the, it's, it's the same, it's the same reason I feel like we have funerals.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're like the finishing of.

• 32:56Trevor Noah?

  Can I tell you, like, I, I remember when it was, when, when was my grandmother's funeral. I remember thinking my whole life, I was like, funerals are stupid. The person's dead. Why are we going anywhere with them? They're dead. Let's just carry on with our lives. And it was only when I, when I, cause I didn't just get to go because during COVID, but during my grandmother's funeral that I realized what a funeral really is for. It's the closure. It's like the, the final confirmation that this person is in fact no longer with us. And you're going to see them go away to be no longer with us, right?

• 33:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 33:26Trevor Noah?

  So when you're on a dating app and to your point, there's three more.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:31Trevor Noah?

  Who would stop looking? Why would you stop looking?

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:35Trevor Noah?

  What kind of person would you be that you, you, you stopped? Whereas before it was like, who are you dating? Oh, I'm dating Christiana. Why? Well, she's the only girl in the village. We're done. We're done. There's only five girls in the village and four of them are married. All right, Christiana, let's do this thing. You were, and then the village got a little bit bigger.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 33:53Trevor Noah?

  And it got a little, but now we've made it infinite as well. And so I wonder like.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's hard to make like almost any decision you make feels like settling.

• 34:01Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:02Trevor Noah?

  Yes, but I, but I wonder if you were to start a dating app, can you make a healthy dating app in a world that demands that the apps make as much money as they do? Cause everything's about the money now, right?

• 34:14Speaker 02

  And I, and I think that's like, you know. Yeah, they're all like Grindr, Bumble, Tinder, which is all owned by Match, which also owns OkCupid and tons of other things. Like, yeah, they're all public companies.

• 34:27Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 34:28Speaker 02

  I C, which at that time owned Match and Tinder before it was spun off into a public company, bought OkCupid in 2011. They were great partners. I really liked everyone there, but definitely the timbre changed overnight of, you know, how did you do yesterday?

• 34:41Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  How did you do this week?

• 34:42Trevor Noah?

  What's the earnings, baby?

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, but it comes down to the day, like, information's coming in real time about how much money you're making. So I do, yeah, I think, I think for, for there to be a healthier dating app, I think it would have to be privately held.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  I, I actually, on this new, this thought experiment we're doing with a, a new dating app, right? How does that look in this time where I think politically people are so polarized? Because like 10 years ago, if a woman goes on a date with a guy and he says he's a Republican, it means very different things in like a post Roe v Wade,

• 35:17Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  red hat universe, you sit across from a guy and he says he's a Republican, in the red pill of, you're like,

• 35:24Speaker 02

  Right. And they, that guy, theoretical guy would also probably be disgusted by a lib or whatever.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. How does that even look in this, like, where people really wear their politics now in ways that I, I think can be quite cumbersome to just, even fam- families don't even want to get along, let alone strangers.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  I mean, I think that's actually a really good insight into maybe why current, the current leaders are on the decline because they just don't really gather much of that information at all. Yeah, you can put it in your profile, I guess, but like, at least as far as I know, you can't search by politics, just for example.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:55Trevor Noah?

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

• 35:57Speaker 02

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

• 36:01Trevor Noah?

  They actually are. Yeah, they actually are doing better than,

• 36:03Speaker 02

  to be the number two. Kind of out of, really from nothing, like 2019, Adap was tiny and it's just grown. And so I think leaning more into that Hinge style model of learning more, yeah, you would have to have, you would have to gather more information, ask people questions, have them slow down. Like, I remember when we were trying to compete with Tinder, at OkCupid, like, it was tough because we tried to ask all these complex things, like, you know, how religious are you? It's like a pretty complicated question. And also, there are some religious people that don't care if their partner is religious. And there's some people.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  I'm married to an atheist and I'm Christian.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Right. And so, and so neither of you, both of you are okay with the other way, right?

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  And, and some people are very religious and need the other person to meet them there, right? And you just have to start gathering that information and then segmenting your matches, you know, or, or maybe you find someone who's MAGA and is okay with. Someone who isn't, you know, for example, you know, people are unpredictable in some ways, so.

• 36:59Trevor Noah?

  There's a, there's a part of your work that speaks to how we don't actually know what's good for us. Right? And a lot of research has shown us that humans are terrible predictors of the future. We generally are. But in, in some of your work, when you looked at some of the data, there's a part of the book that I remember that I, that I really, really loved. And it said, you found in the data, it was less important whether or not a Republican was dating a Republican or a Democrat was dating a Democrat. What was more important was whether or not both people agreed on whether or not they should be engaged in politics.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:35Trevor Noah?

  And that became a greater determining factor for whether or not those people would actually get along. And I thought that was a beautiful insight into like how we see these things. Like you just said now, oh, I'm with an atheist and it's a Christian. I would argue what will happen over time, whether he likes it or not, is your husband, Louis, is going to be, he's, he's, there's gonna be spirituality that comes into his life, whether he likes it or not.

• 37:58Speaker 01

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

• 38:06Trevor Noah?

  But what I mean is like, you, you, I, I have yet to see a world where people are not affected by the people around them.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:15Trevor Noah?

  They rub off on you.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's made me more rash, like interested in reason.

• 38:19Trevor Noah?

  There you go.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  What I would contribute to a witch now, I might, I say, you know, I just have a stomach virus. No one has cursed me. So, yeah.

• 38:29Trevor Noah?

  But yeah, and, and so like, when, when I look at that, I look at that work that you did there, right? And I see the data, I, I almost go,

• 38:39Trevor Noah?

  how much should we trust what we think connects us to people and what separates us? Because it seems like from the work you were doing, the data showed that that wasn't true. Republicans and Democrats actually could make a really good couple. But it was the fact that they thought that they couldn't, that made them not be able to.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Sure, sure. Exactly. And that's very well said. But, but I think, I guess. That's where computers can kind of do a lot of work that a normal human being couldn't do. Where it's like, you can gather all this information, your political affiliation. You can also gather how much that matters to you, how engaged you are politically.

• 39:11Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  And then, behind the scenes, the server or the algorithm can learn what actually makes a difference.

• 39:20Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  You know, and then act on that. But unless you have that info, and you know, even in the kind of like primitive days of 2014 or whatever, we did tons of experiments and tests and we're always sort of honing our match algorithm until we decided we had it to where the best that we could get it.

• 39:37Speaker 02

  But you have to start, you have to take in that information to make that even possible. And like, you might end up with unexpected sort of predictors of relationship success, or at least conversational success, which is all these apps can really, you know, manage or measure. But there are predictors, you know, like, like you just said, like how strongly you feel about politics, does it turn out, it turns out matter? But if the app doesn't know that question, then it can't use it. And so I think that's what you've lost in the sort of swiping model now.

• 40:05Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  That Hinge is bringing back a little of. And I think at some point, another app will, will figure out a way to make that sort of palatable to a busy person on a phone today, to learn more about them and then figure out what is going to matter in a relationship that person is going to have.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  Does that make sense?

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:24Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, it makes complete sense, actually.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  And this is where maybe algorithms could be quite useful, like, maybe because of like the culture I grew up in. I realize that like personalities don't really matter when it comes to relationships. It's always been about like the values you have and how you rank them.

• 40:40Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  So like.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like a worldview thing.

• 40:42Speaker 01

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

• 40:47Trevor Noah?

  Damn, I like this.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Um.

• 40:48Trevor Noah?

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

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, money.

• 40:51Trevor Noah?

  We're more likely to get along.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  It's not just the values, there's a matching values and how we rank them. Because often like, I thought my cultural background, I saw that marriages that didn't work. It was the ranking of those values was a complete mismatch. So maybe the man

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Damn, I like this.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  only cared about money.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  And the woman cared about family, right? But she also cares about money, but maybe money was like number five and it was his number one. So I always find couples, you know, like they're like opposites attract. I'm like, what are their values? How do they rank them? If there's a matching in the rank of those values, that's a couple that's gonna last for a long time. And I think what the algorithm can do is figure out.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what like computers are perfect for.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  What do the values, what does Trevor value?

• 41:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  What does this imagine? How do they rank them? Let's cause a match. And the reason arranged marriages, I think, were so successful back in the day is because you're in this very insular world. You're likely to have the same values because you're raised in similar environments. But now in this world where it's like, we're so global and cosmopolitan, we're porous, we're being influenced by different things just on our phone. And I think what an algorithm can then do.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  Is like bring it back.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Is bring, do that work for you? Because there's a thing I asked my husband before we got married, like, what do you value? He's like, oh, you know, family, kindness, community. And I was like, okay, so in those things, like, what do you feel most strongly about? And when I passed that out, we matched, even though like, again, I'm not sure about dinosaurs. And this man is like, very, very historical and science-based, right?

• 42:24Speaker 02

  That's amazing.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  But ultimately, like, we both value family, community and kindness. And we will hold ourselves to, and a sense of duty. So he's just like, I'm always like, you're my best friend. He's like, you're not my best friend, you're my wife. I can get rid of friends, I can't get rid of a wife. And I'm like, from a background where duty is, I'm the eldest daughter, I take that duty so seriously.

• 42:43Speaker 02

  Sounds like you and your husband both know yourselves really well too, which is important. But I think like, just again, working on our theoretical dating app here, like, what you could do is you ask people to do essentially that same ranking that you just described, kindness, religion, whatever it is. People can order little tiles just for their own mental model. But then, over the course of maybe continuing to use the app, you can ask like, there's questions you can ask about family, for example, that will help us understand how important family actually is. How much time do you spend doing this or whatever? How often you talk to your mom?

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Would you let your mother-in-law move in with you theoretically?

• 43:15Speaker 02

  You could ask these like sort of components of that value, right? And kind of get. Insofar as you can approximate the observed, like the real truth behind whatever this person's saying. Because most people probably will say family or whatever, because they think of themselves as a good person. Generally, that's kind of how society works, right?

• 43:35Speaker 02

  And then you could kind of have the sort of true value ranking underneath the hood. And then you'd also have a third measure. And now you'd know how well that person knows themselves, too. You'd have what they say their values are, what their kind of inferred values are, and then how well those two things match. It would be an interesting way to understand somebody.

• 43:52Trevor Noah?

  How much do you think, for lack of a better term, the focus on pictures and the sort of like display of ourselves, how much do you think that that has negatively affected our ability to partner up with people? Because I know in the early stages of OkCupid, the picture was really tiny.

• 44:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was tiny.

• 44:14Trevor Noah?

  It was a tiny, tiny picture. And you found that while people who were, let's say, quote unquote, better looking, attracted more matches and more people messaging, for the most part, it was like a gentle curve in a way.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:27Trevor Noah?

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

• 44:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, they get like more leverage on the pixels, so to speak.

• 44:34Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  I mean, it's definitely affected it, I think, in a lot of ways. Focus on photos on dating apps, for sure, is a negative thing. Like, like we've said a couple of times here, there's so much more to a person than, I don't know, just their face, like a headshot, basically, right? At the same time, like we've discovered, we actually tried to turn the pictures off of OkCupid for a day, just to see what would happen.

• 44:56Trevor Noah?

  And we could turn the pictures off.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  Like totally off.

• 44:59Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 44:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, this was like 2013, maybe. Really as an experiment.

• 45:02Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  Shut them all down, all the thumbnails, everything went away. And as you'd expect, like, the messaging environment was actually a lot healthier. Definitely attractiveness wasn't a component, because you couldn't tell what the person looked like that you were trying to talk to. At the same time, people hated it. And we got so much feedback that day. We knew we were going to turn them back on, but people were just freaking out. Even though we explained it wasn't broken, we were doing this on purpose. And I just, people are visual and they kind of have, yeah, they have to have the photo. So it's like, you kind of got to meet them.

• 45:34Trevor Noah?

  You have to meet them.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  Like, a dating app can only meet people where they are, right? Like, we can't force people. We actually tried another adventure into this world, like... We tried to launch, this was, this was, we tried to launch a blind dating app, like where we would take a photo and we would scramble it digitally, right? This is so stupid in retrospect, but, but like, you know, we, we thought that you could have a scrambled photo and you, people could browse and, you know, you could, you would learn a lot more about people and you could set, it was, it was very slightly pre Tinder, so it was like a little bit more immediate. You could see the scrambled photo and somebody and maybe even go see them that night, meet them that night. It was a total bomb, like.

• 46:10Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, like what, 10,000 people I think who tried it?

• 46:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Well, we had, we had a quarter million downloads and it was like 10,000 dates or something like that. Yeah, it was just, it just was terrible. And yeah, people just don't, they're just not up for it, you know?

• 46:23Trevor Noah?

  But what I, what I liked about the learnings was, this, this, this is probably one of my favorite things to discover from the data. You turned off the pictures, right? People, there was like a dip for a moment, people just didn't message anyone. Then at some point it became normal. It was like almost at the same rate of messaging. And then people actually started exchanging numbers and people started hooking up and et cetera. And this is only in like a space of, I don't know, 24, 48 hours or something like that. It's a tiny amount, amount of time. But then all the people who didn't exchange numbers and didn't agree to hook up, once the pictures came back on, they just ghosted each other.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was like, it was like the lights coming on at Last Call or whatever, where everyone's like, whoa.

• 47:06Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, that was my favorite story. I was just like, wait, what?

• 47:09Speaker 02

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

• 47:16Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, picture came on and people were like, nope.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  And this leads me, see, I love this imaginary app we're making, right? Because when I was on the apps, long before, I've been married like, I don't know, seven, eight years now, I remember feeling that.

• 47:35Speaker 01

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

• 47:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Sure. Does that make sense?

• 47:43Speaker 02

  Oh, definitely, yeah.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Because also, you men are seeing more hot people than they've ever seen before. Women too, like, I look, I'm like, my gosh, she's gorgeous. You're just scrolling all these beautiful people. And I think it changed dating because it was just like, I can actually, this physically, somebody that's fine tuned to what I precisely want. And I, I've definitely, you know, um, Gia, who was on the show, who wrote Instagram Face, talked about like the proliferation of this beauty standard on Instagram, changing what people, women did in real life with their bodies and their faces to match this beauty standard. And I'm interested in about this app, could we game the algorithm in a way that plays to countering that?

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Countering the fact that, like, depending on how much time a man spends on Instagram, right?

• 48:33Speaker 02

  Oh, this is interesting.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Or even a woman's use of certain sites informing how they behave. Because you know, I know all the apps talk to each other and they're spying on us.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  No, you, you never did that, of course. But like, then create this machine learning algorithm, rhythmic thing that can shape a man's preferences in a way that nudge him in the right direction, accounting for that. Or if it's a man that is not on Instagram at all, you're like, oh, you haven't been destroyed.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  Right, a clean mind.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  Um, I mean, that might work. Something that gets very hard is when the app tries to do something, tries to change people's behavior. Um, and actually, we got a lot of criticism or commentary, I guess I'd say, about this in the wake of publishing the racial data that we were talking about at the very beginning and be like, well, why, why can't you guys do more to make, again, Asian men more attractive to white women or whatever it is, you know? And the fact is, you, there's very little you can do to like. Move people because first of all, they've had whatever, however, many years of their life, or however many hours scrolling through Instagram, super hard to undo that. And also, if you don't deliver to people what at least they think they want, they're

• 49:45Speaker 02

  just gonna leave. It's not like you have to use Yeah. A dating app, or Tinder, or whatever. You just do something else. And so like, if you're showing some guy's been on Instagram hardcore and is looking for that look, and you're like, hey, man, check this out. This is better, or however you want to frame that.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is different.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  This is different.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  Which you may also find attractive, yeah.

• 50:03Speaker 02

  I think you'll really like her. Some people might be up for that kind of thing, but a lot of dudes are just gonna be like, with all the girls in here, ugly, I'm out. You know what I mean?

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  And like, it's hard, it's very hard to, you kind of have to let the users drive what you give them, which is can be bad. Obviously, you're reinforcing some negative shit that way, right?

• 50:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  But, but otherwise, you just end up with a situation where people are gone.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  That's so interesting to me, because I've always felt, and the public discussion is that these apps are changing our behavior.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  Oh, I think that's definitely true.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  And they can

• 50:35Speaker 02

  That's definitely true.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Like, it's making you angrier. It's making you argue more. It's showing you this stuff.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  But it's like, almost in unpredictable ways. Like, I think, I don't know any of the founders of, say, Twitter, or Facebook, but I think if you had asked them in 2006 or whatever, is Facebook gonna make people really angry, and is it gonna become the world's greatest propaganda tool of all time? Mark Zuckerberg probably would have been like, what are you talking about? I don't want that. I just want to like, have, he probably genuinely wanted friends to meet friends, or whatever, or make money, you know, and be powerful, which a lot of people are like that. Apps definitely changed the world, so I definitely wouldn't say that. They changed behavior. But there has to be some component of them that is delivering what, what those people want. Yeah, they like amplify

• 51:20Speaker 01

  Amplify.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  The crap that you already bring to the table.

• 51:22Speaker 01

  Culturally, we already are, like, it's, you know.

• 51:26Trevor Noah?

  Don't go anywhere because we've got more What Now after this. Some of the most interesting things you learn happen while you're doing something completely ordinary. Maybe you're cooking dinner while watching a history video. Maybe you're on a flight catching up on a long-form interview. Or maybe you're trying to figure out how to fix something in your house because apparently owning a screwdriver means you're an electrician now. But you see, that's one of the things I love about YouTube Premium. I travel a lot, so I download videos before a flight. That way, I'm not leaving my entertainment in the hands of airplane wifi. Yeah, I've made that mistake before. You think you're gonna watch something in 4K and suddenly everyone's face is pixels. But one of my favorite features is smart downloads.

• 52:10Trevor Noah?

  You see, YouTube Premium can automatically download recommended videos for you based on what you already watched. So sometimes I'll get on a plane, I look at my phone, I'm like, ah, I didn't download anything. Then it's like, no, YouTube already thought about this. They packed entertainment for me in my little lunchbox. And with background play, I can lock my phone, switch apps, and whatever I'm watching just keeps on going. So, if you like YouTube, you will love YouTube Premium. Sign up now for your free trial at youtube.com/premium. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. Thanksgiving is one of those meals where every dish carries a little more meaning because the table is rarely about the people around it.

• 52:52Trevor Noah?

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• 53:37Trevor Noah?

  artificial colors, and high fructose corn syrup, helping the flavors you want stay at the center of the table. Shop Thanksgiving favorites with higher standards at Whole Foods Markets. Therapy is one of those things lots of people talk themselves out of without even realizing it. Like, it's too expensive or it's too overwhelming figuring out even where you're gonna start. But Rula is one way to make that first step feel a lot more doable, offering accessible, affordable therapy that fits your needs. Sign up in just a few minutes and get matched with a therapist who fits what you're looking for. Need to talk to someone quickly? Appointments are often available as soon as the next day. And with insurance, sessions average around a $15 copay.

• 54:22Trevor Noah?

  You can also see estimated costs upfront, so there's a lot more clarity going in. And in terms of outcomes, 93% of Rula patients report symptom improvement. If therapy's been sitting in the back of your mind, Rula is a pretty simple way to take that first step. So, turn off the talk track that's keeping you from progress and head to rula.com. That's R U L A dot com to find a therapist the easy way.

• 54:57Trevor Noah?

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

• 55:05Speaker 02

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

• 55:09Trevor Noah?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think just getting back to this like perfect love algorithm or whatever, like I just, I genuinely think that's impossible to create a computer program that's gonna predict with any real defensible set of certainty, like who person A is, which, which of all the person Bs out there, who A is gonna love, you know? I just don't think it's possible. And I think there's just a lot more to life. I mean, hopefully for, you know, maybe for not that much longer, but like than like a phone or whatever, you know? And, and the internet for sure. And so I just, I really try to... Honestly, I am one of those type of people who try to stay away from all of that stuff. I like the like ability of data to like tell stories. I was actually just working with my child on an assignment about the Beatles' evolution as songwriters.

• 55:55Speaker 02

  And, you know, we have Hard Day's Night from 64, Sergeant Pepper 67, Abbey Road 69. And you can actually go through and see in the data of the songs like how how they've grown, how they grew as songwriters and just looking at the complexity of the instrumentation and the chord changes. And you can actually quantify it was like a little mini dataclism was fun to do.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:13Speaker 02

  So I do enjoy that stuff, but back to one of your points, like I think you can be overly certain about a lot of things if you're just looking at numbers because numbers aren't very subtle. Right. They're just sort of facts that can be easily compared and you can decide which one is bigger or better or whatever it is. But so little in life can actually be quantified down to a number like outside of the world of sports. You know, you can try and you can pretend that like a 9.3 really captures how attractive someone is. But we all know that's not really true, right? Like two 9.3 is there's going to be a different opinion from every person that sees these two theoretically identical people, right? So I just, yeah, I think that's I also try to stay away from that from data for that sense of the false sense of certainty about things.

• 56:55Trevor Noah?

  What do you think it was that you got from the data that made you want to share the data with the world? Because that's that's something I found anomalous. One, because it had never been done before, and then two, because it hasn't been done since.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a weird time.

• 57:09Trevor Noah?

  It's interesting to me that you you had all of this data that told so many truths and you put it out. It's arguably like one of the biggest studies on dating, on relationships, on race, on gender, on age, way bigger than any Gallup or Pew research. Because those are like a few hundred people, thousand people if you're lucky.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Also accurate.

• 57:32Trevor Noah?

  Yeah. And this is and this is like, that's what I mean. But like, what made you put it out? Because, you know, Facebook guards it with their lives. You know, until they're testifying in front of Congress, they don't tell us any of their data. Right. You know, we only find out they knew that Instagram was bad for young girls when they're in trouble.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Do you know who else tells us the truth?

• 57:49Trevor Noah?

  Who?

• 57:49Speaker 01

  Pornhub.

• 57:50Trevor Noah?

  Oh, Pornhub does, yeah.

• 57:51Speaker 02

  They do do that, yeah, yeah.

• 57:52Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, they'll tell you.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  That's the only people like, people in Nigeria are searching this.

• 57:56Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, this is actually what you're searching.

• 57:58Speaker 01

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

• 58:03Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but what do you think it was? What like, what were you hoping to achieve by revealing something that has been kept secret for so long?

• 58:09Speaker 02

  I, you know, and I guess there was like that period, 2009, 2010, where data seemed revelatory. And this is pre Cambridge Analytica and the whole kind of engineering of the first Trump candidacy and fake news and all of that stuff. And, and there was just, it was like, it sounds corny, it was like a hopeful period, I guess, for the internet, you know, there was like Airbnb.

• 58:29Trevor Noah?

  Hope and change.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  Airbnb, yeah. Yeah. Uber, you mean, I can just get a car and I don't have to like wait 20 minutes?

• 58:34Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 58:35Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? Like that whole vibe, especially in New York, was, it's just different. And so that we had all this data, we thought it was really interesting about how, what people thought was attractive, about how different races would interact on our, on our website or our app. And, you know, we kind of didn't have anything to lose either. Like, we were just like, all right, let's just do this. Like, Facebook is a billion dollar or whatever, trillion dollar company, maybe now. They obviously have a lot to lose and they're heavily scrutinized. And in 2010, we were sort of under the radar. Online dating wasn't even remotely as cool as it is now. And obviously, it's not even that cool now. So, so it was like mostly weird, even in 2010, you know? And so, we figured it would just be, it would be interesting. It was like the perfect like cocktail party conversation,

• 59:18Speaker 02

  you know? And, yeah, it was, it was, I guess it was just like, um, it was like a view into people that was just only coming into existence, you know? And the internet obviously had been around for a while, but like, there weren't websites that did the kinds of things that we were doing until 2010 or whatever. And so, um, you couldn't have learned these things in 1999, uh, even though the internet existed then. And like, we just thought it was cool and we could find out what people thought was hot and talk about it and maybe make fun of it a little bit and make fun of ourselves. Um, yeah, I don't know. It's, it's weird though to look back because it totally, the door completely closed.

• 59:56Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  Basically, right after data clausm came out. And that was one blind spot in the book where it's, I was thinking about this on the way over here. The entire tone of the book is like how interesting data is, how great it is, how it could lead to these different understandings of couples, of people, of systems, whatever.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  But you know, come 2015, 2016, I was completely ignorant of the fact that data could be used. It always had a marketing component for Facebook or whatever. They use their data to sell ads to people, but I never thought it could be used to like sell ideas or sell like a worldview, like en masse to people as it was in 2014, 15, 16 by like Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon and it's still to this day is going on.

• 1:00:37Trevor Noah?

  Now it's full on.

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. And so like it just never occurred to me that you could have these macro political changes, for example, through data and through these algorithms that could be manipulated in that way. So, you know, and I, in some ways, maybe it's good that these companies are locking their stuff up because then nobody else can go, I don't know if I would want Facebook to publish, publish all of their data because then people could go manipulate more people.

• 1:01:03Trevor Noah?

  Okay, that's interesting because you, you think when we know the data behind something, we're then more able to go in and manipulate those weak points.

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. Yeah, that which you can then go spin or whatever.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. What I did love about your book is for me, you're reading the data and stuff. It made me think about how we can like interrogate our choices, like, because the data is like this truth serum telling us things about ourselves that we deny. It made me think about when I look at my screen time use on my iPhone. And when it's just like, just shows me the hours, you know, like the colors and the, you're like, I spent that much time on Instagram. You see it, it shows you yourself in a way.

• 1:01:44Speaker 02

  And it helps you be real with yourself too, right? Which is like always good.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  And I think culturally, we can be quite delusional, like every side is very high minded right now. Every side has got it right. But what data just says, well, this is what you say and this is like what you're actually doing. And it leaves you to just interrogate your choices, whether you change or not. I still think that's a useful exercise.

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  Change is going to be to do the interrogation, right? So, yeah, like I'm the same way too. I'll, whatever, screen time and you're like, God damn it. And then you go and do the same thing, but at least it's there. At least you understand what's going on.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  It's undeniable.

• 1:02:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. You can't like argue with your phone. Right, exactly. So, yeah, I like that part about it.

• 1:02:20Trevor Noah?

  The one part of it is deniable. I have a qualm with them. If you have your phone open on like car play or if you, it counts it as screen time, but it's not screen time.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:02:31Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, so let's say you're navigating.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:34Trevor Noah?

  It counts that as screen time. And for me, that's not what I mean by screen time. I don't want you to tell me, Trevor, you used your phone for four hours today. Yeah, I drove for four hours. Now I'm sitting there depressed because I think, because no, that's the other side of data that we have to be careful about, right?

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's true, it's true.

• 1:02:47Trevor Noah?

  I think of how many people data has made them, ah, ten thousand steps, it's not true. It's not a real thing. Yes, walk. And better, it's better to walk more than to walk less. Eight glasses, where's the data? It's not the data. Do you get what I'm saying?

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Well, it's the dark side of it. I like, I have a little baby and we use a monitor, which I won't promote the company because they didn't give it to me for free. But basically it tells me her heart rate, her oxygen saturation, tells me how long she sleeps for.

• 1:03:17Trevor Noah?

  Your what?

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, oxygen.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  Is it like a pad that she sleeps on?

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  No, it's on her foot.

• 1:03:22Trevor Noah?

  This is insane.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

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

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was gonna say, do you find that useful? That just seems entirely inducing.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  I'm always worried my babies are gonna die, so I like.

• 1:03:40Trevor Noah?

  Okay, well, she is.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  Trevor knows me, I'm like a hypochondriac. So I like, I like going into this thing, but like, I remember before I had that with my first son. If I wanted to know if he had a good night's sleep, I was obviously there, eh? But I look at him, I'd be like, oh, he seems a bit cranky. Now my immediate instincts is like, let me go into this app. Some, because sometimes it'll tell me she's wiggly on that, the app, and I'll go upstairs.

• 1:04:04Trevor Noah?

  Huh.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  Whereas I would probably just leave her to be wiggly, wake up, she maybe cry a bit and go back to sleep. Like, that's probably what would have happened in my mother's time. But now I have this app that I'm looking at, oh my god, she's got ninety-eight percent oxygen saturation, which is perfect! Why is it not a hundred? Now I have this information that is actually.

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  No, it can be confusing.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  Yes, confusing, it's actually making me more paranoid and I think from a, that that's how this hyper data world can like be quite dark for.

• 1:04:34Trevor Noah?

  I would actually love to know, so when you're designing an app, we're all users, most people have used a dating app. How do you find the balance between putting the person in front of us? Who you think we should see? Versus putting the person in front of us that we want to see?

• 1:04:53Speaker 02

  That is a great question, and that's something I think most people don't really.

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  They don't understand how the back end of these things works. Because also, we have to think about the person that we're like, their experience too.

• 1:05:05Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  Like the woman that we're showing you. Yeah, exactly. So. One of the very first things we learned about having a dating site is that there's this thing we call the focus problem. So guys just want to see the hottest women, right? And so if you just go by what? The guys are sort of telling you they want, they want to see the highest rated women and just a giant stack or grid or whatever it is. But if you go and do that and you kind of. Try to meet their need without any other consideration. Well, what happens? Those women get tons of messages from tons of randos. Their inbox explodes. It feels gross and they leave. And then now you're left with, if you just showed all the tens, now you're left with nines and eights and so forth. And you end up in this death spiral because also the guys don't get any messages back.

• 1:05:49Speaker 02

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

• 1:05:57Trevor Noah?

  So everyone is in relation to another person?

• 1:05:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, you have to think of it like that because otherwise, you know, I, we could show you the N hottest women in the database. But that's not going to be good for you ultimately. And it's definitely not going to be good for them if we do it for everybody, right? We, and I think most apps do this at this point too. We would do sort of like.

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  A hotness sort of caller. So if you're an eight or whatever, like.

• 1:06:23Trevor Noah?

  This is picture, just on the picture, right?

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  This would be one of the components. We would, we would show you nines, eights and sevens with maybe a few tens and maybe some fives and whatevers, you know, just to really reduce people. That way they're seeing someone like themselves. You're seeing people like yourself and that's the optimal sort of band for, for there actually being a productive conversation between the two of you. And then we would also throw in information and, you know, like the kind of classic matching stuff of like. You know, how important is religion to you or how important is politics or whatever, those kinds of things? That would be maybe. A third would be the questions about the two of you. A third would be this attractiveness matching. And then we would throw in a healthy dose of just like randomness. You can't just give people what they want. Cause your apple explode. You'll end up with this focus problem thing where you're just showing everybody. You know, women like seeing hot people too.

• 1:07:09Speaker 02

  And you'd have the same problems sort of in the reverse. So you've got to be careful and manage your, your stack of profiles. If you're doing it that way.

• 1:07:17Trevor Noah?

  I've always been interested by how, you know, the data shows us that most people grade other people's attractiveness by where they think their attractiveness is.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  It's funny.

• 1:07:28Trevor Noah?

  Just generally like every, cause everyone will, and again, we live in a world where depending on how people say it. Some people will be crude and just like assholes about it.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  Sure, sure.

• 1:07:35Trevor Noah?

  And then some people will be like overly sort of fake about it. No, I, I don't even see whether someone, to be honest with you, until I know them, I don't. Whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever. But for the most part, when you just look at the data and the honesty, get it away from what people tell you. There is generally that ban. Where people go, oh no, I'm out of their league. And they're out of my league. So, okay, let me ask, let me ask you then a few things before we let you go. It's like, um, you on the back end of this. Everyone is trying, I assume everyone's trying to find their fairy tale, their story, their journey, whatever it may be.

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:08:10Trevor Noah?

  What are some of the tips that you would give somebody who is on a dating app? To try and maximize the experience, not maximize their hookups, not maximize, you know, but just.

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  Something real.

• 1:08:21Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, something real where you go like, oh, hey, you know, this thing you do. So let's start with like the picture.

• 1:08:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:08:27Trevor Noah?

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

• 1:08:36Speaker 02

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

• 1:08:42Trevor Noah?

  Some people love the group one.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  That I know.

• 1:08:44Trevor Noah?

  I'm always intrigued by that.

• 1:08:44Speaker 02

  It's a mistake, yeah. I guess it's like you're trying to flex that you have friends, which is kind of like the reverse of what you're really trying to do. You know, I think in general, my advice would be. Something that we've talked about already and it's just like you really are, you just need that one vote. You're running for office and you just need one vote. So being yourself is super corny, but it's also true. Kind of accepting the fact that maybe you're going to get a lot of no's out there and being okay with that. Because I think if you start engineering your profile to increase the number of likes or whatever, yeses that you get, it is going to just be more noise. Like, because you're going to have, you are ultimately only going to find

• 1:09:26Speaker 02

  one person, right? So what does it avail you to have a hundred people messaging you at the time? Ninety-nine, that's just ninety-nine more people eventually you're going to have to kind of like, get to know with, right? And so I would just say, really bring out the things that make you unique. I mean, that's just all like grandmother stuff. I mean, like, you know,

• 1:09:43Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, well, grandmothers were right.

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure, sure.

• 1:09:45Trevor Noah?

  There's a lot of where grandmothers were right.

• 1:09:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:48Trevor Noah?

  It's nice to actually see the grandma meets up.

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  Right, exactly.

• 1:09:51Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:51Speaker 02

  There is that like, you know,

• 1:09:52Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, where does grandma mesh with tech?

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  Of, of the ages that I think is a real thing with even my wife's parents are from an arranged marriage and, you know, they're super happy as are all of their siblings and, you know, I think there is something to that shared worldview and, and having, that system was designed to bring together people of a common sociological context, right?

• 1:10:14Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:15Speaker 02

  And they knew that that was what really matters, right? And I think they're right. And, and anyway, to get back to your question, like, I think doing the things that make you unique, foreground those things. Don't try to like bury the lead, so to speak, and don't leave it for that second or third message. I think be willing to take more risks, I'd say, especially for people who tend to get a lot of messages. If you think someone's kind of cute, but maybe they're not normally your type, go for it more. Because I think ultimately, that stuff is so unpredictable, especially people's digital presentations of themselves is so different than what they're actually like when they're sitting in front of you.

• 1:10:51Trevor Noah?

  Many fish have been catted.

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. There's that too. But the opposite is true too, right? Where I'm sure, I'm sure there's a lot of people that are present way more lamely than they would be in real life.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  The first time I met my husband, because We met on Twitter and like I kind of clicked his profile. But then when I saw him walk, I was like, oh my god, he's hot.

• 1:11:11Trevor Noah?

  That's always better.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  He doesn't like his pictures. He's like, it was like a headshot.

• 1:11:16Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  You have projecting kind of thing.

• 1:11:17Trevor Noah?

  That's always better.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  Good looking man. I should have dressed up more. But you know what I mean? So it's just like, it's so interesting that you.

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  You say that.

• 1:11:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I guess anyway, doing it to a few things, I think. Put as much of yourself out there as you're comfortable doing, like your authentic self. Take more risks with the people that you say yes to or at least engage with. And be willing to accept that the process generally sucks. It's not necessarily the app's fault. It's just how being single and trying to date is, right? And that it, part of it is gonna be lame or boring or terrible or awkward or worse maybe. And, and it's just how it goes and you can't kind of give up. And again, like, I think dating apps are very, very far from perfect. And there's tons of very great ways to meet people that you're really gonna, I, I didn't meet my wife on a dating app. So I'm not trying to show for these things, but I think if you're gonna be in that game, so to speak.

• 1:12:09Trevor Noah?

  Which people are, whether we like it or not.

• 1:12:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:12:11Trevor Noah?

  It's just like, it's just like being in the world of, it's like having a phone now.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:14Trevor Noah?

  You can't not have a phone.

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  You can't. Yeah. And so like, just, I guess if you're gonna be in that game, try to de-gameify it as much as you can. Don't, don't sit, don't sit and try to play numbers. Like I know a lot of guys will just be like, well, I swipe right on everybody because nobody writes me back. So I'm just kind of like, you know, spray and pray type of deal.

• 1:12:31Trevor Noah?

  Spray and pray.

• 1:12:31Speaker 02

  You know, just, just like.

• 1:12:32Trevor Noah?

  Wait, actually, actually, on that point.

• 1:12:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:34Trevor Noah?

  Does that change anything in how the app actually sees you? That's something I've, I've always wanted to know. So for those people who are swiping on everything.

• 1:12:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. That, that's a great question. I, I, it should. I doubt it does because I think. I just don't think the algorithm behind a Tinder or a Bumble, they, they put that kind of work into it to make that happen. And that's no slight against those companies. I think they just had different priorities. I think. And that sort of hack developed after I left OkCupid and after OkCupid was a thing of just basically just like power swiping right on everybody and just seeing what happens. But definitely it should. I mean, kind of to our point earlier where you were saying, like, if you have spent an hour on the app and you liked one person, that should be very powerful.

• 1:13:16Trevor Noah?

  I think it should.

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

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

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  We've like workshopped his next business.

• 1:13:28Trevor Noah?

  If you can make it better for everyone, make it better for everyone. Christian, thank you so much. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for not, you know, thinking it was a scam. Thank you. You see, you put yourself out there. You thought it was a risk and you took a chance.

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  Oh, I had a great time.

• 1:13:40Trevor Noah?

  Okay, that's it. And if you regret it afterwards, that's fine.

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  Great first date.

• 1:13:50Trevor Noah?

  What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Spotify Studios in partnership with Day Zero Productions. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jodi Avigan. Our senior producer is Jess Hackle. Claire Slaughter is our producer. Music mixing and mastering by Hannes Brown. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next Thursday for another episode of What Now.

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