Transcription
You see these women who like, morbidly obese, saying “I need a man who’s 6 feet tall, makes six figures a year.” That’s also what’s happening, um, the online dating thing. How did it work? Like, what was the—there was right swipe, left swipe. What was your original idea with Zus?
No, it was not right swap, right swipe, left swipe at the beginning. It was more about, uh, data-driven matchmaking. That was the core of the idea. There’s a ton of studies on if people can predict what kind of—what they’re looking for in a mate and how, uh, uncorrelated what they think they’re looking for is to who they actually end up with.
Absolutely, yeah. So, uh, I was like, okay, so instead of having a form—at the time, all online dating sites, they had forms. So you went and filled out, “I’m looking for…” So we were like, “None of that.” So let’s just take your data—who you approach, who approaches back to you—and then put that in a model and just try to predict who’s the best match for you. So we called it behavioral matchmaking.
So incredible. Yeah, we were kind of a pioneer in that.
Very nice. Now you see a lot of those dating sites, and it’s just like short-term up.
Yeah, I know. And, and, and like every year the girls on there, just it gets worse and worse because women like, don’t want to be on this, and it’s like six to one guys to girl ratio on some of these websites. It’s really weird how that whole ecosystem—it started off kind of being 50/50 and then just it went on to where it’s like very difficult to use some of those apps. Almost all women have a bad experience, and 80% of men have a bad experience. 20% of men are doing great.
Yeah, so that—it’s interesting that you bring up, so, uh, you know the recent survey—Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge—they, they talked about 80% of men deemed unattractive on dating apps. The top 10% of men on a dating app—so if you stratify by right swipes—they get 63% of the right swipes. I mean, if you guys know anything about stats, that’s ridiculous, like ridiculous. That’s an absurdly high number. The top 20% get 83%, so that’s one and a half standard deviations—that go to 20% of men, right? But when you compare it to, uh, women, or when you compare it to men—men, the top 63% of right swipes for men go to 43% of women. So men do still have a little bit of like, you know, inflation. So like, if you live in San Diego or Los Angeles, a girl who might be an eight in Waco, Texas, is like a six in Las Vegas, for sure. You’re going to have a little bit of that. But for the most part, men find fives to be fives, sixes to be sixes, sevens to be sevens, whereas women find eights to be fives, sevens, nines to be sevens, and there’s only one 10—it’s Drake and like Chris Hemsworth. Those are the only tens that exist, right?
It’s one of these things where social media has, has made it to where a lot of women—where they date one movie star and then eventually, or they go, they sleep with one movie star, and then they, they compare every man they date to that because they had access to it because of social media. I was reading somewhere—6,000 swipes to get one date for a woman—some crazy number like that. And the vast majority of women on these dating apps are not even going on dates; they’re just doing it for attention or to get people to go down their own funnel so that they can get subscrib—it’s pretty amazing how that whole thing changed. It was very—like when it first started, it was very like, you know, people had a very positive idea of how this was going to work—the idea—but actually—still some validity to it—but I think Instagram is probably the biggest dating app in the world now.
You know, living in LA for a while and, and being around—you’re Puerto Rico now?
Yeah.
What have you noticed about the dating scene since you moved here to now? Cuz for me, I’m, I’m 46, uh, from the time like I was managing a strip club back in like 2003 to now, the world has totally changed, and the most specific reason why is because of social media, right? What have you noticed different?
Well, I’m married now, so it’s a little different, but, but, um, I want to say online dating—probably changed—online dating as in like, dating apps—probably changed the dating dynamics for the worse. I, I can tell you that. So I think we as humans were not designed to have access to so many other potential mates so quickly and easily. It just, it’s not our DNA—are—is not designed to handle it. So I think that is creating an issue because you can always have a date whenever you want on your phone. You can now pay to boost your profile, pay to—boost your profile—like the super hot girls don’t have to pay, they don’t have to pay to boost their profile. I was the first person to actually bring virtual currency to online dating apps. I mean, and I’ve never—the concept didn’t exist, and we did the Boost, and, um, yeah, I kind of regret having added that feature, but, but, uh, a lot of people have—um, a lot of apps have it, and it’s essentially, it’s pay to play.
The anthropologist Dunbar, uh, came up with the idea—Dunbar’s number—it’s about 115 people. If you look at US military units, uh, they’re about that size, and that would be about the size an ancestral tribe would exist. Once they got past that size, they would bifurcate into two different tribes, right? And so what happened is the choice—the ability to choose from a certain set of partners—if I’m, you know, going through puberty, I’m 15 years old, there’s only maybe 10 to 20 people in my age group, half of them are female, and I know one of those people are who I’m going to breed with, period. And if I make a fool of myself in front of them, then I’m going to be unapologetically—weeded—my genetics are going to be weeded out of existence. Which is why men have approach anxiety. And then also women understood—if they slept with the wrong man and had a child by the wrong man, they were going to be ostracized from the tribe, they and their child would die. Which is why women have apprehension whenever they sleep with someone.
Stive, for sure. That’s where it comes from—the concepts in evolutionary psychology—the idea that like you’re right, we have so much choice again. You remember Steve Jobs? He took all those different iPods and turning them into just one iPod. He’s like, “There was too much choice.” And even if you go—now there’s only like three sizes of MacBook or two sizes of iPhone—that’s the whole kind of thing is like, you have too much choice. But here’s where I think it—I’ll take it one step further—is that people are—they’re confused or bewildered by choice that they think they have, but they don’t actually have. Meaning men liking photos of women who would never piss on them if they were on fire, right? And then comparing their current mate to that person. David Buss talks about this in *The Evolution of Desire*. If you show men pictures of really attractive women and then ask them about their spouse, they have more negative things to say about their spouse. It’s like crazy stuff like that—the delinquent or the dilemma of choice—it just makes it makes it much more difficult in all aspects. And it’s not just that you can swipe and have a date—even if you can’t—you, you see these women who like, morbidly obese, saying, “I need a man who’s six feet tall, makes six figures a year.” You don’t, you don’t understand what I’m saying—like they, they’re doing that kind of stuff. And then men sitting there complaining about women, and these men haven’t had sex in like four or five years. That’s also what’s happening, and I think the online dating has made that a problem as well.
It is a huge problem. So if you think about it, we had a dam—our desires—like we were like, okay, so this is my dating pool, and within that we played inside that dating pool. So when you blow it up, then what happens is that—well, women all go for the top male—men are not as selective, so they’re like, not committing, and they’re spreading their seeds, so to speak. So I mean, that it makes sense. If you open it up like that, then all the things that are programmed in us from an evolutionary perspective are no longer playing the purpose that we’re supposed to play.
So for sure, if I’m in a tribe—let’s just say like, let’s say high school—you’re in high school with a thousand people—the, the head cheerleader, you know, the hottest cheerleader is dating the quarterback of the football team—like this, the, the trope we’ve all seen a million times. And what happened is the quarterback of her football team—not the, not the neighboring school—what’s happened is there is no Waco dating—there is no Waco dating scene, there is no Des Moines dating scene, there is no Wichita dating scene. It’s one global dating scene. And when a woman turns 18, if she’s sufficiently attractive enough, mm, or looks so because she’s using artificial intelligence to make her pictures look better, right? She gets scooped up, and she’s at Dan Bilzerian’s party or Ty Lopez’s party in Los Angeles, and she’s meeting famous people. And so now that that heart surgeon or accountant or a lawyer or doctor who lives in Wichita, Kansas, who was supposed to marry the cute girl has no one to pick from, and all the cute girls in those smaller cities are now in—they’re living in Brickell, or they’re living in Los Angeles, or living in Las Vegas. And then so that we’ve get this like huge disparity, and then you have 33% of men under the age of 30 having zero sexual partners in the last year, and 26% of men under the age of 30 are a virgin.
Yeah, that’s where that, that whole thing—so, so at Zus, I did an experiment. I tried to solve that problem a little bit by preventing people from changing their zip code or location, so—and when they traveled, I didn’t allow them to change it too often. So the—so I tried to make dating local because I was like, okay, but we are—we, we’re doing—we’re going to do—the problem is you lose to the competition, yeah, because the competition is, is essentially handing out candy, and if we’re not doing that, we lose. So you’re trying to make their lives better, and the competition is handing out dopamine.
Exactly right, yeah.