Transcription
You've been single for a while, and it's starting to eat at you a little. Time is slipping by quickly, and it's not coming back. You should have found the one by now. Your friend is getting married soon. Your roommate's going out on a date tonight with a girl from Hinge. So maybe you should be on one of those apps. That's just how people meet nowadays. It's normal, and you're not going to find someone any other way. So why keep on waiting?
So you download Hinge, and at first, you see beautiful, perfect women. This is amazing. The dope means flying, and hours go by, and you drift in a haze, hypnotically swiping left and right, waiting for the next match notification. Over time, any matches you do get become worse and worse. Suddenly, those beautiful, perfect women don't show up anymore. But you continue, and you message these girls to no response. Sometimes you'll have a conversation, and then it fades away, but one of them continues. At least it's something.
So, you meet up as two strangers connected by an algorithm. You pretend it's not awkward or unnatural, and you go on the same mid dates at the same mid restaurants and bars with the same mid people. Over time, you realize you have nothing in common with any of these people. If you don't try to force it, you're left with the gut punch that maybe this wasn't as easy as it seemed.
The solution comes with a notification ping. Hinge Plus subscriptions are now on a discounted summer rate at the perfect time. So maybe it really was just a case of not swiping enough. So, you go back to the app over and over and over. Every day you use it, day and night. Over time, the subscription discount fades away, and now you're paying full price while the matches begin to dry up. So, as soon as you're on Hinge, Tinder, Bumble, Ryar, for subscriptions now draining you weekly. You know this isn't really how it's supposed to be, but there's no other way out. It's just normal.
But there is something deep inside of you that you can't shake off. Who is behind these apps? Who is it who's deciding your future partner? Well, it turns out that you've landed in the trap of one man's quest for total power. A man who is single-handedly changing how love, human connection, and families are made forever. But when I tried to figure out who this man behind all of these dating apps really is, I started to realize this was going to be a lot harder than I thought.
But it's an important question to ask because right now, one in five people under 30 meet their long-term partner with dating apps controlled by one company, Match Group, who owns all the major dating apps like Tinder, Hinge, OKCid, Match.com, etc. And then there's The League, which makes you apply and wait in line to be accepted. There's BLK for black singles, Jisper for Latino singles, and Our Time for people over 50. It extends its group worldwide. In much of Europe, there's Meetic. In Japan, there's Pairs. Across Asia and the Middle East, there's Azar.
So, it would seem at the surface level, the man deciding your next girlfriend must be the chief executive of Match.com, Spencer Rascoff. It's important. It's existential. There's a loneliness epidemic and a mental health crisis globally. And it's driven by the fact that people don't have human connection. And I took this job because Matchgroup is one of the only companies globally that can make a dent in it. And it's important work, and I'm having a great time.
"If you feel lost or lonely," he says, "his apps are the answer. This is the loneliest generation. It's the most digital generation. They actually need our types of services more than anyone."
Now, they don't even want you to make the selection yourself. Their latest idea is Overtone, a dating app where you're interviewed by an AI model that determines your matches. But he only took the job at the start of 2025. And he's the latest in a chain of executives who are constantly replaced. For once, the CEO is not the answer to who's responsible for assembling this monster.
You see, the Match Group is a monopoly inside a monopoly much bigger than itself. Peel them back to the board of directors, and you find a connection to a vast monopoly called the IAC. It has owned more than 200 companies. Expedia, Ticket Master, Vimeo, Lending Tree, Investopedia, All Recipes, Very Well, and more than 40 of the country's biggest media brands. It's the largest digital publisher in America, and you've probably never heard of it. And it also owns roughly a quarter of the casino empire MGM Resorts, with connections to Disney, Paramount, Universal, The Washington Post, and Coca-Cola.
When I was a kid, what I imagined of love was definitely not this. Where the most beautiful thing in life is reduced into a mundane function. It's like how you can reduce the beauty and supernatural awe of a butterfly wing into a scientific byproduct by stripping the eternal mystery and richness from its beauty, just labeling it with scientific terms. This reductionist view is taking over everything. It's why love is now becoming a series of statistics optimized for a profit-extracting algorithm for something that should really not have an algorithm involved. I mean, just take a moment to think. Love, family, and marriage. The bedrock of civilization is being altered by one man.
So, who are we allowing to alter these very important things? Well, it turns out that Barry Diller is one of America's many elite monopolizers with a net worth of over $5 billion. When Diller [snorts] talked about Match, he didn't describe a company that helps people find each other. He described a cash flow machine. Its margins were, in his words, extraordinarily high. This is what it comes down to for them. Your dating life, your romantic chances, your potential of building a family is just a cash flow machine. It's not lost on us that the tech elites is funding the loneliness epidemic they are profiting from. Even if it is lost to them, you can see how they don't understand.
"In this interview," "There's been some criticism of dating apps like Tinder. A Vanity Fair called this the dawn of the dating apocalypse. I wonder if you're worried that, you know, the hookup culture and the tyranny of choice might be ruining dating."
"Is this the end of anything? Is this the coldness of anything? You cooling down of intimacy or any other or the endless hookupness that is, you know, that is laid at the feet of dating programs. That's all drill."
He describes romance as an inefficiency to be solved.
"So if you were my age, you'd be on these apps. You'd be using Tinder."
"Of course I would. Do you think I want to, as I did in my distant youth? Do you think I want to go out and wander around, you know, inefficiently? And and by the way, world is not a efficiency or not. [music] It's just it's a boring process."
Nobody's asking for efficiency with this stuff, and it's a mask they hide behind. And Tinder is the proof. First of all, your innermost feelings and sensitive conversations are saved and centralized there. On just Tinder alone, people swipe around 1.6 billion times a day. Roughly 48 billion swipes a month, producing about 26 million matches every single day. Every swipe, every tap, every pause is recorded with a timestamp. And one estimate puts the data a single user generates at around 1.5 GB a year.
A French journalist called Judith Deportell used European privacy law to request everything Tinder had about her life. After a grim battle, they sent back around 800 pages of her Facebook likes, her Instagram photos from an account she'd already deleted, her education, the age range of the men she went for, and the time and place of every conversation she'd ever had with a match. The secret was her desirability score, the thing that determines where you're put in the algorithm. If you rate highly, you're pushed to the front. If you rate poorly, your dating life will continue to get worse. [snorts] And it's probably something that's controlling you right now.
You've been on the apps for months, if not years now. You've had matches, you've had dates, you've spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on all of it. So, what are you left with? Well, there's two options. You're either isolated, afraid of speaking to people in real life, constantly overthinking your photos. "Maybe my funny vanilla prompt is the problem. Maybe I don't look cultured enough, but I am cultured. If only they could see the real me." So, you keep changing your profile, agonizing over your new intro lines, your new game strategy as your matches get worse and worse. You know you can do better than this, but the algorithm says no. This is what you deserve. You deserve to beg for the response of someone you're not even attracted to.
Or secondly, maybe you're one of the lucky ones and finally struck it off with someone. They then become your partner. In the back of your mind, you're always aware that they weren't the top choice or the one you actually wanted, but you're the one the algorithm made you settle for. And as you begin to fall in love with them and imagine your future with them, sometimes a thought will occur to you. "Man, was I lucky to find her. Or was I? How long had she'd been on the app for? How many people had she been talking to? How many profiles did she go through? How easy was it for other men to do the exact same thing as me? Besides, I'm not really that special or attractive. So, if I could do it, what about everyone else? And if that's the case, then how easy will it be when we have an argument, things go bad, or distance pushes us apart for her to be taken away by those same people on that very same app?" Or you think about all the other women you've seen on those apps. What if the one you chose wasn't actually the best one? You know, there were hotter people with better personalities who were more thought-provoking, kinder, smarter, more empathetic. What if you matched them instead? Why are you committing to this one if you could have done better? There's thousands of people waiting for you to message them. [music] So, why are you putting all of your chips on this one if you're not even sure they're that great to begin with?
The honeymoon phase slowly passes, and you argue more. You shout at each other. You lose the attraction and eventually break apart. And as you sit in your room where you started, you're alone, isolated, and bored, [music] feeling time slip through your fingers. So, you download Hinge and begin the process again.
As for your data, well, that's moved at will across the entire monopoly. A 2020 investigation found Tinder was sharing user information with at least 45 companies owned by Matchgroup, and that OkCupid was passing users' sexuality, drug use, and political views to an outside analytics company. Each of those apps sorts you in a slightly different way, but the goal is always the same: rank people and decide who gets placed in front of who. Tinder does it with a desirability score. OkCupid asks you hundreds of questions and turns your answers into a compatibility percentage. Hinge uses a Nobel Prize-winning economic theory from the 1960s called the Gale-Shapley algorithm, in which everyone in the pool ranks everyone else, and the app pairs people off in rounds.
Here is the current CEO explaining how the monopoly appears to give you freedom of choice.
"So you have a portfolio of dating apps, and one of the things I've always been curious about [music] is, and look, I'm married, so I have, I don't know, what is the distinction in your mind between the different apps? How do [music] you, what's the, what, what's the differences?"
"Two biggest apps are Hinge and Tinder. So, Hinge is for the intentional dater. The tagline is 'the app that's designed to be deleted.' It's supposed to be your last dating app. Tinder is supposed to be your first dating app. Tinder is for possibilities. You might find your soulmate there. You might find a short-term relationship. You might find anywhere in between."
So, as you continue using these apps, as you continue to go on dates with people you don't even really like or care about, once your relationships end and you realize there was no spark or magic to begin with, you wonder about your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, the generations of humans for thousands of years that formed relationships with the spark of magic in real life. Looking across the room, making eye contact, working up the courage, the resilience, and the mental fortitude to take what you want and risk it all for a future together. But instead, you're falling into this man's plan for you, where the meaning and beauty of your life essence is replaced with simulations of it, decorating your cage so that you think your place in the servant class is freedom. You outsource your thinking to AI. You outsource your experiences to videos at home. You outsource your yearning for companionship to a subscription. And in the process, forget the basic skills of life: how to signal interest, escalate, move through dating to marriage. Then be happy in marriage. I mean, just look up, stop for a moment and reflect on it yourself. Take in the psychological dependence you have given to the screen in front of you. It's unprecedented, and unprecedented things have unprecedented consequences.
So, I have to ask you, was all this prosperity worth it? Did you really want these changes? Or are you beginning to realize that maybe the endless choice and consumption is destroying you? Maybe there's a reason successful people who get everything they want destroy themselves again and again. Maybe there's a reason the richest countries in the world are euthanizing their own people. Maybe the convenience is making you dependent. Maybe it is why you feel numb and never really free. Maybe that's why they keep you addicted to the work-from-home, AI best friend, dating app addict, Uber Eats, consuming constant dopamine-fried lifestyle without substance or meaningful life satisfaction.
So, the question is, what sort of man would be designing this world for us to live in? Before creating the IAC, Barry founded Fox Broadcasting with Rupert Murdoch. He was a director at Coca-Cola and spent over a decade on the board of The Washington Post alongside Warren Buffett.
"When I met Rupert, I had always wanted to start a fourth network because I thought the three networks were boring." And he said, "Great." I said, "What do you mean great?" He said, "Do it." Well, we have to buy these stations that cost a billion 150. And he said, "Do it." [laughter] What could be better?
Despite being 84 years old, look at how many companies he's still part of. He started his career at a Hollywood talent agency called William Morris. By 32, he was running Paramount's Pictures as the youngest studio chief executive in Hollywood history. He oversaw Saturday Night Fever, Grease, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and many other iconic films and TV shows. He was even responsible for bringing The Simpsons onto the TV at 20th Century Fox. This is an old-school entertainment tycoon through and through, someone you don't become through kindness and goodwill alone. His ferocious style frightened his colleagues, who fondly knew him as "Killer Diller." According to Time magazine, his style was allegedly to be blunt, brutal, and quick to humiliate. He tested people by dropping them into jobs far bigger than they were ready for and watching whether they sank or swam.
"I discovered fairly early that the best organizational process was to get smart, snappy people in a room who have opinions and get them clanging against each other with [music] their opinions. The ones who swam became the most powerful executives in Hollywood. His deputies were called the killer Dillers."
"I have always thought [music] that the best arranging room for that is a a a a group of people who are in conflict with each other, [music] usually past their point of endurance. Meaning the longer you push it, I found over time that when you push people somewhat past their endurance, when they like say, 'Oh, [music] please can I go home?' And you won't let them go home, interesting things happen after that."
Michael Eisner was his second in command at Paramount, who left to take over Disney, then a fading studio, and turned it into the behemoth it is today. Katzenberg was another one of his proteges. He then ran Disney's film studio and co-founded DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg. Another ally, Dawn Steel, became the first woman to ever run a major Hollywood studio when she took charge of Columbia Pictures. He trained the people running Hollywood. He's also a massive Democratic party donor and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the elite foreign policy body once chaired by David Rockefeller. He placed the ex-president's daughter, Chelsea Clinton, onto the boards of two of his own companies. His wife is a princess by first marriage. Old European aristocracy folded into new American money. And his inner Hollywood circle was so powerful that rivals nicknamed it the Velvet Mafia. He also has close allies in the tech industry, as this is what he said about Bill Gates. [snorts]
"Actually, that's not fair to Bill, who I like very much, uh, and I respect a great deal. Usually, I think people do not [music] grow. I think they've kind of by the time they're sentient, they're relatively fully."
"Gates has grown in enormously in so many areas of empathy, but he is, he, he was mean, uh, and relentless. [music] He is no longer that. He's a, he, he's a, he's a solid citizen of today and tomorrow."
This came out in September 2025, not long before Gates was engulfed by the Epstein files a few months later. Diller did also say how he was ferocious and understood leverage.
"Did you ever see anyone more competitive and aggressive than him in his heyday?"
"At that time, he was truly ferocious, and he understood leverage. Anybody [music] who's in any world, uh, of commanding revolutionizing, uh, a world which Gates certainly did, uh, has got that quality."
Through Diller's life, you can see how the dominant corporate forces in this world are created. Often, Diller's behind locked doors that you have no say in. The whole group assembles every year at a party Diller and his wife throw in Beverly Hills the night before the Oscars. [snorts] The guests have included Oprah Winfrey, Bradley Cooper, Diana Ross, and the former head of Google, Eric Schmidt.
The next level up from that is this lockdown resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, where a boutique investment bank called Allen and Company hosts a private invitation-only retreat that the press calls the "billionaire summer camp." No cameras are allowed inside, but the private jets stack up at the local airport, and security seals off the grounds. [snorts] How do you know you found a super secret conference full of millionaires and billionaires in the middle of scenic Idaho? Well, [music] you just count the private jets. This is Sun Valley, Idaho. Population 1,400. But every July, the net worth of this town gets a major boost when the Allen and Company conference, also known as "Summer Camp for Billionaires," is in session.
"The guest list is a roll call of everyone who owns the modern age. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Alex Karp from Palantir, Daniel Ek from Spotify, Rupert Murdoch, Lachlan, who owns Fox News, even former directors of the CIA. The full list published by Forbes is just absolutely mind-blowing."
"The organizers will never confirm who's actually here. So, the only way to know is actually to stand outside and watch them walk in. Tesla's Elon Musk, Disney's Bob Iger, CBS's Les Moonves, and Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone. These are probably some of the busiest people on the planet. So, I had one question: Why are they all here? And that is the question."
The answer is, of course, networking and high-profile deal-making. Diller has been on the list for years, with Hollywood Reporter recently capturing a photo of him riding a bike around the grounds. [music] And everything he'd learned from the elites was primed for the world of online dating.
It began with the TV shopping channel QVC. "I had only known you use screens for telling stories. That's what screens were for. I'd never known interactivity. And there I was seeing it in [music] its primitive emergence at QVC." This was key for not only dating, but the screen-dominated transactional modern era that we live in. QVC was the prelude. And you can see how Diller's instinct told him that human interactions were about to change forever.
"That interactivity, using screens for something other than telling stories, knocked me cold. And then serendipitously, a few months later, I was offered to buy QVC [music] and I said, 'I now know what I'm going to do.'"
Everyone thought he was crazy, but he saw how shopping was about to move onto the TV screen. He knew the direction the world was heading in, and internet dating was the logical next step to establish a bigger stake in that world. He used that same word, "primitive," to describe why he believed online dating would take off too.
"Was there a defining early transaction other than QVC and HSN in those [music] days that you think back on?"
"There are the early obvious ones now, but uh, uh, Match.com personals [music] uh, which which was also was something at that time that was uh very, very so early stage [music] and so primitive, and again, just a good idea."
After pouring cash into the Match Group, they built Tinder in-house and went on to acquire OkCupid, then Plenty of Fish, then Hinge, and other global dating brands. Tinder itself was built in 2012 inside Hatch Labs, an incubator the IAC set up and paid for. It had a small team, including a guy called Jonathan Badeen, who came up with the swipe designed to feel like flickering through a deck of cards, which tapped into our compulsive gambling behavior.
And so, really, to understand what IAC does with these companies, let's take a look at one of its other notorious companies: Ticketmaster. IAC owned Ticketmaster for years, then spun it off, and it became part of Live Nation, which dominates event tickets in the West. Everyone points fingers at Ticketmaster for their endless fees and their awful behavioral pricing. But as exposed by an FTC probe in 2024, it's Live Nation who are pulling the strings, locking artists into exclusive deals, using those artists to lock venues into exclusive ticketing contracts, and then threatening venues that try to work with anyone else. Going to any big concert or festival means fighting pricing algorithms and interfaces that rip you off or straight up don't work when you get to the front of the queue.
Tinder was built in the same image. Find something people can't live without. Take over the platform, dominating it, and then squeeze everyone. Ticketmaster is the events you love to attend. Dating apps are literally love itself. Once they own the market, they tighten their grip. Tinder started free, but then it added Tinder Plus, then Tinder Gold, then Boost, a way to pay to jump the queue. Money was flowing from members' pockets into the dividends for shareholders. The IAC's ultimate goal was monopolizing industries and making billionaires. And that is exactly what happened with Matchgroup.
But it gets worse from here. This relationship wasn't going to last. Diller unexpectedly began to cut ties. Though that wouldn't help anything inside the company itself. In 2015, IAC floated Match Group on the stock market, selling a minority stake to the public and keeping control of the rest. In 2020, they then spun Match off as its own company. When the split was completed, Diller personally held 16 million shares and gradually sold them for a total of about $1.9 billion. His timing, as ever, was flawless.
Tinder's own founders had sued Match and IAC for $2 billion, accusing Diller's company of deliberately lowballing Tinder's value to cheat them out of what their stakes were worth. The case settled in 2022 for an insane $441 million. [music] And then within months of Diller's last share leaving his hands, MatchGroup stock fell off a cliff. So, Barry Diller has no stake in Matchgroup today and no say in how it runs. He owned it, grew it, took his billions, and then left at the perfect moment.
So, what did he want from all of this? Well, he told us himself: everything. Your [music] love life, those lonely nights you spend swiping, the partners that you'll meet, it's all just a giant cash flow machine where you're just another insignificant cog to generate him unfathomable wealth. And so, what we're seeing today with people more lonely than ever, with the population about to completely collapse in size, with people having less families than ever before, it all starts to make sense.
You see, back in 2000, two psychologists ran an experiment in a supermarket. On one Saturday, they set out six jars of jam for people to taste. On another, they set out 24, and that big display pulled in far more attention, with people crowding around it. But only 3% of them actually bought a jar. At the small display, 30% did. Barry Schwartz wrote a book called "The Paradox of Choice" on this finding. We assume more options means more freedom, but past a certain ceiling, it inverts. With more options, your expectations inflate because you want to whittle it down to the very best option to invest in. As Schwartz put it, "Choice stops liberating you and starts debilitating you."
In the dating world, this affects men the most. We all know they outnumber women on the platforms massively, meaning the paradox of choice for women is much more intense, which inevitably pushes some men to the margins where they're never chosen. But it gets so much worse than that, because there's also the matter of how they abuse your trust and personal data.
In a case settled in 2025 for $14 million, the Federal Trade Commission accused the Match Group of sending non-paying users fake notifications that someone had liked them, essentially bait to make them subscribe when many of those messages were actually coming from accounts Match had already flagged as scams. Nearly 90% turned out to be fraudulent. Almost 500,000 people bought a subscription within a day of getting one. Darker still, when a 16-month investigation found the Match checks the users of its paid service against sex offender registries but does not do the same on its free versions. There [snorts] are, they admitted, definitely registered sex offenders they can identify to users but simply don't. When Match finally added a way to check a date's background, they remarkably plan to charge for it.
One major lawsuit in 2024 claimed the apps were deliberately engineered to be addictive, "and that popular dating apps Tinder, Hinge, and The League are portrayed by their owner, Match Group, as effective tools for establishing off-app relationships while secretly doing everything in its power to capture and sustain paying subscribers and keep them on app." Ryan Clarkson is representing the six plaintiffs. Match used the fine print in its terms of service to force the case into private arbitration away from a courtroom where it ended.
And AI is only beginning to turn the screw on this terrible situation. In late 2025, Tinder announced a new AI system called Chemistry. To use it, you let the app scan your entire camera roll. It then runs facial recognition to find you, then writes up an internal description of your personality, your interests, and your life. Tinder called it a way to "read your vibe," but it's been described as a surveillance system dressed up as a personality quiz, training a behavioral model on your images. Match built it after partnering with OpenAI.
In 2025, the man who built Hinge announced he was leaving to start something that we mentioned earlier, Overtone, and the pitch rejects everything here. There are no profiles, photos, or swiping. The AI just simply interviews you by voice, learns your story in your own words, then tries to pair you off. His words are, "Overtone is not a dating [music] app. They say it's not algorithmic, but of course it is. It just uses AI models instead." And unsurprisingly, Match Group led the round and holds a substantial ownership position. Spencer Rascoff is, of course, on Overtone's [music] board. It was incubated in Sidecar using Match's money and Match's internal data over the course [music] of a year before being spun out as its own company.
So, what's the endgame of all of this? AI companions, AI girlfriends, a world devoid of natural love, while the artificial version is pushed via subscription. Rascoff was actually forced to answer the question himself.
"Do you think that people are going to use AI almost as agents on behalf of themselves to go communicate to the person that they are trying to match up with so [music] that like they make the language exactly what they think the other person wants. And then eventually, are we both going to have agents talking to each other to figure out whether we match or not? Or is that what you're supposed to do on the back end?"
"Yeah. I mean, I don't, that's a bit of a dystopian uh future. I don't think we're headed towards. The way we look at AI is it gets you to the good stuff faster."
Notice here how he says it's not quite as dystopian as is being suggested, which is an admission in itself. So, um, you know, I don't think it'll be my AI talking to your AI, but I do think it'll [music] be my AI helping me, it kind of giving me advice almost like a trusted friend [music] as I'm connecting with people, [music] which can be difficult and scary for people. So, it's not quite as dystopian, but it is AI-infused, AI-informed.
It's telling that they only use AI when it makes them money. Here's an ironic moment when Diller describes his stake in MGM casinos as being a wonderful investment because no tech can get between a human and gambling. "We bought 20, known 24% of MGM, and why does that appeal to me? Because you can't [music] disintermediate. Because you give me any AI equation, and I will tell you [music] irrelevant to this. No one's going to get between going to an MGM resort, let's call it, particularly Las Vegas, which we have a huge share of Las Vegas. We have 11 properties in Las Vegas. No tech is getting between [music] that and a human." He was protecting his fortune from the very thing he spent a career building. That's what the elites do. They hedge their bets against the very things they participate in creating and destroying.
So, let's take a step back from this and think about the barriers between you and another human being. The mountains you have to scale to do the very basics expected of you. The people who write the new rules gather at secret parties, make deals the outside world isn't informed of, and are very often the same group who also decides what fills your feed in the morning and what gets treated as news. Dating has always been uncomfortable and often painful, but it had a well-defined goal for both men and women. That goal is being ripped away. And once you see how the business works, it's obvious why. A world full of happy endings and happy people is not as profitable as this world. The entire experience is built to keep you always close, always hopeful, but always one [music] step away.
One in five adults now don't even have close friends at all. Roughly double the figure from the '90s. A quarter of young men say they felt lonely for much of the previous day. 60% of men under 30 are single. And the technology isn't trying to cure this because when a person feels settled and actually connected in real life and finds someone in real life, a great partner, they close all of these apps and never come back. The industry wouldn't exist if people happily met in real life and developed beautiful relationships. And because of this, we are now all suffering from the consequences.