July 31, 2019 • 45 mins
Love, Sex, and Bad Jokes. Tinder has swiped its way to icon status in an amazingly short amount of time, but mating and technology go back hundreds of years. In this episode of Bizogprahy we explore the history of technology enhanced love from the 1600s to Tinder, and we look at the bro culture and mishaps of a company that could be here to stay or is maybe just a cultural moment.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It only took two years for Tinder to get to
around fifty million users and over a billion swipes per day.
Oh and then there's that pesky reputation for being all
about the hook up. Tinder makes you gross. There was
a time when you'd be more selective when you were
horny and feeling irrective. Now one swipe and this thousands
(00:23):
to phone, all from a sex app you use on
your phone. That's the tender, gross or not. When Family
Guy is doing multiple episodes about you, it's safe to
say you've reached icon status. This is Bhisiography, the show
(00:56):
where we dive into the strange but true stories of
iconic companies. Whether they're a current bright star, in the
midst of a massive dumpster fire, or settling into the
dust heap of history, they all have a past worth knowing.
I'm Dana Barrett. I'm a former tech executive, an entrepreneur,
and a TV and radio host, and over the course
of my career, I've interviewed thousands of business leaders and
(01:19):
reported on the bright beginnings and massive flame outs of
the brands we know and love. Some of their stories
are inspiring, some get my blood boiling, and some have
changed the way we live today. We're swiping right on
the story of Tinder, and with me as always is
my producer, new guy Neck. All right, So I do
have to ask, though, Dana, have you ever used or
(01:39):
been on Tinder? I have not. I have not ever
swiped right or left, and you young millennial sir. I
tried it for a short time, and I did a
couple swipes, but I never really got into it very much.
So I would say technically, no, okay, wait, you can't.
There is no there's no gray area here. It's either
yes or no. Yes, yes I have, and yes I
swiped and left. Fair enough, all right, So I just
(02:02):
have to ask for some details here. How old were
you when you were swiping? Right after high school? So
like twenties maybe, okay, and be honest, were you looking
for a girlfriend or a hook up? I was looking
for a girlfriend, which is part of the reason I
stopped using it. Okay, Okay. This is one of those
(02:23):
moments where I wish this was a video podcast, because
your facial expressions in this moment are truly priceless. By
the time Tinder came out, I was in a serious
relationship which I did actually start via online dating. So
I probably would have at least tried it if the
timing had been different when it first came out. But
(02:45):
I actually don't think it's aimed. It's really aimed at
a pretty young audience. Absolutely, It's definitely aimed more towards
the millennial whose first instinct and that's why you just
pop it right or poppet left, just go right off
the field, pop it right or pop it left. So
it sounds like a new song, I see. I think
that's kind of the initial thought though. It was less
of the swiping right for confirmation and swiping left to
(03:07):
deny them and more just like no no, So it
was real quick. Right, Well, we're gonna get into all
of that because that's the gamification part of it. That's
what made it, I think part of what made it
what it is. Well, the reality is Tinder is not
an old company. A lot of the companies we're talking
about in phisiography are these companies from the eight hundreds.
This is a brand new company. Tinder was launched in
(03:27):
September of so it was hardly the first online dating tool.
It wasn't even the first app. So what elevated Tinder
over its competitors. What elevates one brand to icon status
over another, And today's icon could be tomorrow's fond memory.
(03:48):
So is Tinder here to stay? As I said, I
actually we met my last boyfriend on an online dating site,
and when people would ask how we met, I would
always jokingly say the old fashioned way online. I was joking,
(04:10):
But when I started doing research for our tender episode,
I realized I was actually more right than I thought.
People have been using technology. I'm air quoting it for
a long time to find love, right, I think that's
kind of the norm. You're right that you don't do
the bar thing anymore, and it's been since I was
probably in middle school. I remember seeing the TV commercials
(04:31):
for find love Online, right, But I think you you're
sort of saying like you don't even you saying you
don't do the bar thing anymore makes it seem like
there was this time when we all met and you know,
fell in love in person, you know, or our families
like arranged marriages, or your friends introduced you to people,
or maybe everybody met in high school all Greece. As
(04:51):
a millennial, I've always known the online dating being the
main way that's not how you guys did it before?
You just walk into bars and well we did, we
did when we walked into bars and found something. Um,
but sometimes it was an STD. I'm just saying, not
me personally, just saying, but really the reality is that
(05:11):
ever since there was any kind of technology, people found
a way to use it to find love and sex.
It started, believe it or not, all the way back
in Yes, well that there was like a what l
low macho dot com from way back then. I couldn't
even think I would you even say that the old English? Yes, ye,
(05:33):
old man dot comy. I don't know. But but here's
the reality. The printing press was the technology of the time.
Um that was high tech. Before that, they were handwriting,
you know, any kind of public messaging, and then the
printing press came along and in sive, that's the earliest
known personal ad was actually in a British agricultural journal
(05:54):
of all things. You know, the farmers, they get horny,
and the publisher of that periodical real lies pretty early
on that this was going to be a nice little
revenue stream for him. So that continued on and of course,
of all the early ads, you know, think about the
times as much as we know about them. All the
ads were placed by men, but it turns out even
(06:15):
gay men back in the really early days we're in
on this, back in the seventeen hundreds, gay men we're
using personal ads to find each other. But of course
they had to use coded messages because homosexuality was mostly
illegal at the time all of the western countries essentially,
so they had to refer to themselves as wait for it,
musical or unconventional. Those were some of the code words
(06:37):
they used to find each other. That's really interesting though,
that they had that kind of little secret coding back
and forth and right, so they might say something like,
you know, businessman looking for unconventional mate or something like that,
or unconventional businessman looking for companionship or something like that.
That's really interesting to think of. That's how they had
to go about, because I don't wonder how many of
(06:59):
them had to very gently kind of let down the
women that responded, right, because obviously that's going to appen.
I assume it did happen. In the first woman decided
to give the online dating of the day the personal
ads a try. Her name was Helen Morrison. She was
an English woman, and she placed an ad in the
Manchester Weekly Journal. It just said something really simple like
(07:22):
seeking someone nice to spend her life with. That's all
she was looking for, Oh Helen. If that were now,
it might have gone something like this, Leonard Hofstetter, will
you marry me? Um? Did you seriously? Just say? But
(07:44):
instead the man that responded to Helen was not the
man of her dreams. In fact, it was the mayor
who had her committed to an insane asylum for four weeks.
Come on, man, what a block. I want to say
the other word for decency's sake, but come on, man, yeah,
can you imagine? Think about that now? I mean I
(08:04):
want to digress here for a second and just get
your take on this, because I still think it's a
little bit controversial for a woman to ask a man
out what do you think of? That? Probably much more
less today than ever before, but right there is still
that just little of did she ask him? O? Really? Yeah?
We can move past it, I think a little better,
but the initial kind of what is still there. But
(08:26):
at least we don't get committed to insane asylums for
that that is true, and you don't have the authorities
putting you away for having an online dating profile, right.
Suffice it to say women didn't act as the aggressor
too much after poor Helen, But dating through the personal
ads continued. In the eight hundreds, personal ads for the
purposes of finding a romantic partner became pretty mainstream and
(08:47):
certainly became acceptable for both the aristocrats, you know, the
upper crust, and the working class. And then, like all
good things, it became a little ugly. Like all technology,
there's good users and bad users, and same was true
for the personal ads and the printing press and the
late eighteen hundreds, the grifters got involved, the scammers, and
(09:09):
they realized that they could, you know, prey on these
poor loveless folk advertising and the personal ads. So the
scams started to happen, and the population overall became more cautious,
and the popularity of dating via the personal ads or
finding love via the personal ads caused the popularity of
said ads to kind of drop. Ah, that's so disappointing
(09:33):
that they had the first, you know, big way to
go find love and then jerks had to go ruin
it for everybody. Well, it just goes to show you,
like we think about the scammers and the email era.
You know how early on it was like the Prince
of Nigeria needs a ten million dollar check, and if
you could just start by writing him a thousand dollar check,
he'd be really you know, grateful, and you might even
become royalty yourself. I just need that to wire you
(09:54):
the rest of the money, right. I think it's just
it's sort of calming to know that those scammers have
been It wasn't just the first Prince of Nigeria like
it was happening even in the late eighteen hundreds. In
the early nineteen hundreds though, the personal ads had a
little bit of a resurgence, but again it was back
to the agricultural community was poor, lonely farmers. They, of course,
(10:14):
you know, didn't have as an easy of a time
as meeting people as as the folk in the city.
But in those days it was far less about the
hook up than it was about actually trying to find
not love, but housekeepers. Yes you heard me, housekeepers. I
found a reference to an ad from the early nineteen hundreds.
It was a wanted ad and this is what it said.
(10:35):
Housekeeper eighteen to thirty years of age, wanted by widower
forty have prominent position with the rail company. Have seventy
five acre ranch, also house in town. Matrimony for object
if suited, have boy thirteen years old, would not object
to housekeeper having child can give best references. Wow, that
(10:56):
sounds much more like an advertisement for a job. But
you know, you can just come in and clean my
house and maybe have my kids right, and I will
be having sex with you. Very strange. Yeah, that was
but glad. I'm glad. I'm not you know, I didn't
grow up in the early nineteen hundreds, but there you go. Also,
of course, in the early nineteen hundreds to mid nineteen hundreds,
personal ads became popular with soldiers starting in World War One,
(11:20):
sometimes looking for love, but almost more often looking for
pen pals, just looking for someone to keep in touch
with when they were overseas in the trenches fighting the war.
Like it makes sense, I mean, you know, you're just
looking for companionship. Sometimes it's romantic, sometimes it's just general. Yeah.
The other thing I think is when we look at
modern times, we think that data and algorithms didn't really
start until the nineties. Maybe they're only two thousands. No,
(11:43):
algorithms have been in the mix since wait for at
There was a company in nineteen forty called Introduction. They
were the first company known to use data to match people.
The company was based in Newark, New Jersey, and they
used data to create matches or what they called them
social equivalence. Imagine that. And it cost a whopping quarter
(12:08):
for someone to receive their suggested matches contact information. Suffice
it to say, this is a little tibet that is
lost in history because there weren't that many people using
it at the time, but it really did exist. And
then in nineteen fifty nine, some Stanford students created an
automated matchmaking service for a school project. That one used
(12:29):
the old punch cards and a questionnaire and the IBM
six fifty main frame. It paired up about a hundred
i'll call them kids, men and women college kids. But
it never went mainstreams, just an early version. And then
in n there was a service called Operation Match that
became the first computer dating service. Of course, it's just
(12:50):
a few years after that Stanford project, but this time
it was Harvard students that created it using an IBM
fourteen oh one, and this time it cost three dollars
UH to use the service, and it was based on
the similar likes and dislikes of the men and women participating.
Believe it or not, Operation Match was used by more
(13:10):
than one million daters during the nineteen sixties. Wow. Interesting
that that's not something we would know a little bit
more about. Yeah, I know, almost forever lost to history
until we now have preserved it. Right hair on phisiography,
you gotta love it. From five though to nineteen ninety
it was the imprint personal ads that really kept this,
(13:30):
you know, intermediary between men and women going as a
air quote technology at the time until the nineteen nineties,
and that is when technology and the creation of the
Internet really changed the game for the way we date now.
We all know that the Internet was invented in the
eighties by Al Gore, but putting that aside, the nineties
(13:54):
is really when it became more prominent with the Web
and A O L and Craigslist and Prodigy. Can you
believe Craigslist was around all the way back then? Yeah,
that's crazy. I didn't know it had been around that long,
but I guess it makes sense. That's, you know, where
you find personals and really weird stuff. And it still
looks exactly the same yeah, that was really when people
(14:16):
started I'm just going to say it this way, hooking
up online. Remember this, you've got mail. Meg Ryan and
Tom Hanks had an innocent A O L romance, but
lots of people were getting far racier in the chat rooms.
Remember the chat rooms. Do you even know what a
chat room is? The what was? I think it was
(14:38):
a I M the time, check rooms, AOL, Instant Messengers,
that's right, And there were all kinds of different chat
rooms on all the different services. I remember in the nineties. Now,
in the nineties, I was, I think just getting married,
so I wasn't really looking for dates at the time,
but I remember looking just to check it out and
see what people were doing and being sort of like, oh,
(14:58):
you know, that was made some of the first evidence
that when you had a little bit of an anonymous
online profile, you were willing to take it two levels.
You never would in real life, right Like I would
venture into a chat room and some creepy mccreepenstein would
be like hey baby, and I'd be like, oh my god,
and I've run out of the chat room, and the
ones who I have a question You may or may
not remember. Do you remember a slash s slash l
(15:19):
age sex location. That's what they remember that all the time,
a s l age sex location. So that was like
a question that was like how you asked somebody exactly
you'd be in the big chat room and then someone
would send you a private message and the first thing
was usually a s l And it was also it
wasn't no correct me if I'm wrong, But wasn't the
instant messenger or the A O L logo like a
little guy running. Yeah, it was a little I think
just like the white yeah, paper cutout looking things. Yeah.
(15:42):
I think that was actually based on me running out
of a chat room. I'm sure you were not the
only one. Yeah, I think that's actually maybe it was
all of us. Maybe that's why they you know, they
didn't actually use my picture because we were all running,
you know, terrified fear out of those chat rooms. In
any case, people started hooking up even in the mid nineties.
(16:02):
Kind of brings us up to the dating and mating
world that we recognize today. It was when match dot
com launched as the first online dating site. Even though
all of those other companies existed in the past, this
one was very specifically for online dating and Match of
course streamlined the process that was going on already on
a O L. And you Craigslist just saying they, you know,
(16:26):
of course allowed singles to select their matches based on
things like age and what did you say, sex and
locations a s L. I'm learning something right here on
the show. Recent numbers though, show Match having thirty million
members and getting over thirteen point five million visitors a month.
And even though there's all the competitors out there, like
Tinder and all the others, they say still that Match
(16:48):
is responsible for the most dates, relationships, and marriages than
any of its competitors. But I'm still gonna say Match
is not the icon that Tinder is. No, I don't
think it is, especially not through all the age ranges.
I think, you know, it's it's geared, especially now, and
I think even before was geared towards a little bit
of an older audience, not necessarily the twentysomethings of the world.
(17:11):
I don't know if it's started that way, but in
fairness it and it isn't. Perhaps you could call it
an iconic brand, but it's certainly not an icon in
the sense that it's not you know, as nearly as
socially relevant. It's not in every movie and every TV
show and in songs, and it just doesn't have the
same cultural dominance that Tinder does. Absolutely. I think that's
(17:33):
just because it's it's considered a quote un traditional website,
so they have an app. But I'm sure right, so
that's Match And of course we know Tinder is a
whole other way of looking at things. But then you
also had in two thousand e Harmony coming into the picture,
taking things even sort of to a more innocent and
tame So if Tinder went the wild direction, the Harmony
(17:54):
went the super safe, sweet direction, if you will. With
that whole quiz that they gave you before you even
join to sort of figure out what your personality was
all about, it is really interesting. They get really in
depth with some of the things they ask you. Yeah,
and it was started by Neil Clark Warren, who we've
all seen on TV a million times. He's probably more
of an icon and more made fun of than the
(18:16):
Harmony or Match right, absolutely, with his random little sitting
behind the desk ye too excited about other people's love. Right,
But in addition to his work as a relationship counselor
and a psychologist. He's a Christian theologian and a seminary professor,
and so the harmony is very sweet. I have to
tell you another this is all about this episode is
(18:37):
all about my personal stories. I have to tell you
another personal story. In the nineties, I got married in
the early nineties, divorced in the mid nineties, and I
decided to go on e harmony. Lots of my friends
were doing it. They were like, this is the way
to go. So I spend the time. You know, I'm
a single mom. I don't have a lot of time.
But I get on the computer and I fill out
all the answers to all the questions and I get done,
(18:58):
and it comes back and says, you have been rejected
by e harmony. Out. Yeah, we there is not a
single human being in the entire world that we can
match you with. Basically, it just said lives there. You know. Well, well,
just you know the person was not on the harmony,
(19:19):
That's what it was. Sure, No, But I think, actually,
I mean, I'm actually this really did happen to me.
I'm not making this up. And I know a few
other people that happened to as well. And I think
it's because I actually answered the questions honestly. So it
asked you things about being happy, and I wasn't that happy.
I was recently divorced, I was a single mom, I
was working my ass off. I'm not happy. Sorry, I mean,
I might be happier maybe if I met somebody. Thanks
(19:42):
for sending me, you know, off a cliff e harmony.
But I think this it's an important point, and I
think it leads to sort of the creation of a Tinder, right,
because you could lie on those things, and people did
lie on Match and on the harmony. I tried the
harmony like six months later. I was like, all right,
I'm gonna beat this thing. So I came up with
new profile, you know, email address, and I went back
on there and I answered like I was the little
(20:03):
happiest sunflower in the in the world. And then then
they took me that was a lie, and so you know,
Tinder went the whole opposite direction, saying we're not we're not.
We don't care about what your your fake nonsense that
you're We just want to know what you look like.
Do you look like? That's it? Uh? In any case,
that was the harmony again. Launched in about two thousand.
(20:25):
In two thousand four, we got okay Cupid with it's
sort of unique questionnaire, which one a different route, more
like asking you a question and I think asking you
how important that question was to you and what you
wanted a potential mates answer to be. That seems also
like a lot of fakery. It was really interesting. I
think I got I've jumped on okay Cupid to try
(20:47):
it once and it was really weird. It would ask
you a question where do you want to live, for example,
you know, farmhouse beach, and then you would answer, and
then would ask what do you want from a partner,
and you're thinking and in a lot of the cases
you're like, well, I would prefer a person to just
answer the same as me. Right. Wells sensibly for that one,
because if they want if they want to if you
want to live at the beach and they want to
(21:07):
live in the mountains, you're gonna have a problem exactly.
But it was interesting some of the questions that they
would have pop up, kind of relating to income and
where you see yourself on a political kind of spectrum
and things. So uh, the most interesting was that you
could be okay with someone with a completely different answer
than you, and that you would actually seek that. I
thought that was weird. Right Again, this all I think
is leading to why Tinder was able to do what
(21:29):
they were able to do. So of course that was
again two thousand four when okay Cupid came along, and
uh then two thousand seven happened, and that was not
the first, of course, smartphone, but that is when iPhone
was launched, and that is really when we saw the
app world start to blossom. And so for dating, the
(21:50):
first real dating app was Zeusk. I will be honest,
I've completely forgotten about Zeusk and Zoosk is still around.
Not an icon, would not be an episode of phisiography.
It's interesting, never caught on very much. And there again
(22:10):
we're building up to why Tinder is Tinder. Zeus went
a different route, and they all sort of have been
trying different routes. Zeus went the route of let's connect
to your Facebook and your social networking sites and so
you can meet friends of friends that kind of thing.
But sort of, why do I need Zeus when I
can just do that via Facebook? Exactly? You could just
(22:31):
go through and say, hey, you know that person, and
if it's a friend of a friend, like theoretically right,
Like if one of your friends thinks I'm cute, first
of all, that'd be really weird, but you know, cougar
and all it works. They would just say it that
to you, and you would say it to me, and
then I would meet them and problem solved right to
be like, hey, my buddy, here's can they send you
a private message? Also, can we talk about branding for
(22:53):
a second, because zeus, I can't even say that with
a straight face. What does it even mean? I don't know.
Something to do with the zoo animals and skiing, I
don't know. Yes, you know, when it comes to dating
zoom animal things probably not that far off. So I
get what they're poting for lions and tigers and bears.
Oh my, I don't know. Anyways, Zeusk is still out
there and it was one of the first that it
has a certain following, and over the years it's added
(23:15):
features and that are kind of Tinder like to try
to stay relevant. But ultimately that brings us up to Tinder.
It's when Tinder is born. So with all these predecessors,
what made Tinder so famous so fast? We'll talk about
it right after this. So, Dana, why do you think
(23:41):
that with all these other ones already, all these other
dating services already out there and pretty successful, why do
you think Tinder became the icon that it is now.
Well it's a good question, but before we get to
why they became the icon, let's look at how they
got started, how they became the icon, and who they were.
Because the holl on who matters. Tinder, as we said,
(24:01):
was launched on September twelve. It was founded by essentially
a team. So I'm gonna list the names. Some of
them may mean something, some of them may not. But
it's Shaun Red, Jonathan Badeen, Justin Martine if that's not
confusing enough, Joe Muno's Denish More Johnny and Whitney Wolf
and they all had sort of different roles to play
(24:23):
in this. But Tinder was not sort of a standard
startup like we think of now. It wasn't just like
a techie who had an idea and then sort of
recruited a team of friends, looked maybe for some venture money,
launched a minimum viable project, and you know, made history.
It didn't. It didn't go that way. Tinder was actually
the result of a competition at a short lived tech
(24:46):
incubator called Hatch Labs. So Hatch was interestingly enough, there's
a lot of incubators all over the country. I'm here
in Atlanta. Where we are you know, we've got Atlanta
Tech Village. There are you know, coworking spaces. Now, I
think people are really familiar with this, but this was
at the very beginning I think of the world of
incubators and Hatch Labs wasn't just somebody who had an
(25:07):
idea to start an incubator. It was launched by a
giant corporation called I a C. Interactive Corps, who, by
no coincidence, is the parent company of wait for it,
match dot com Go. Yes, now, I a C is
actually a huge company and it is not solely focused
on dating apps. There's like, I think a hundred and
(25:29):
fifty or so more apps and brands that they own
and actually started as a media company, USA Networks, things
like that, So it's not only a dating company. But
by no coincidence is it that they also have this
whole dating division essentially smell another episode of physiography coming.
Your your nose is working well. Your your nose is
(25:50):
working well as I was researching I A C for this,
I was realizing that there is quite a story of
characters in that story as well, so you never know,
maybe this is preview for that episode as well. But um,
based on all of that, you can see that Tinder
wasn't that sort of normal entrepreneurial endeavor. Was sort of
like an entrepreneurial endeavor. But like with training wheels, I
(26:12):
think that's a fair assessment. Right, they built the bike
on their own, but they used parts that someone else
had already built for them, right, and they had help.
It's like it's like when you know, it's like riding
the bike when your dad's still holding onto the back
and the sides and you know you're not gonna fall.
I mean, when you're doing it under the umbrella of
a giant company. There's nothing wrong with it. It's a
great way to get started. Um, But it doesn't to
me have the same sort of risk. You don't get
(26:35):
the same heroes who risked everything to create something absolutely absolutely.
I think they also maybe allows a little bit more
of just kind of throwing it against the wall and
seeing if it will stick sometimes, right, And that's a
lot of what happens at these incubators, a lot of
the ideas don't stick. On this case, Sean Rad, who
was sort of the most well known founder of the group,
had landed a role as general manager at Hatch Labs
(26:57):
in New York, and in the first week there, he
learned that they were doing this company wide hackathon and
he would have to compete in it. So he replies,
first of all, this just gives you some insight into
his personality. He doesn't reply all message to all these
people who he's just meeting because he's brand new, and says,
can't wait to meet you all at the hackathon after
I destroy you guys, I'm going to win this thing,
(27:20):
all right. Yeah, that's kind of that's that. I think
that that passes the lene from confident confidence into a
little bit of arrogance, especially when you're the new guy.
Is it Is it weird that it reminds me of
Charlie Sheen, say winner, hashtag winning or something. That's what
it reminds me, maybe with a little less drugs um
In any case, Sean Rad, a team's up with another
(27:41):
Hatch Labs engineer that's Joe Muonio's, and the two win
the competition. Behind the scenes, though, Sean Rad and his
buddy Justin Mattine, who grew up together they met when
they were like thirteen or fourteen years old, also had
sold a small tech company, or sold his portion of it,
and had gone to work for Labs in California, and
the two of them had already sort of been talking
(28:03):
about putting together some kind of flirting app, which is
interesting when you think about it. They didn't start it
as a dating app. They had in the back of
their heads that it would be a flirting app, which
is code word for a hook up app. Yes, and
I want I wish we had some visuals here, but
(28:24):
I'll paint the picture for you. These are two young twentysomething,
good looking guys who have no problem flirting and I'm
assuming hooking up. That's just a little bit of who
they are. And they also come from pretty wealthy families
out in l A. Shawn Rad drops out of college
after two years, it goes back home. His parents are
(28:45):
fine with it. He has a safety net, if you will,
as he's going into all of this. In any case,
they go in. They build this version originally called Matchbox.
I think that became tender Get it Matchbox tender and
they went they in that hackathon, and that's when they
decided to throw some more weight behind this project at
(29:05):
Hatch Labs, and they brought in uh justin from California,
and then a bunch of these other folks who had
been working on other projects with Shawn at Hatch Labs
are assigned to work with him. And so the only
person that sort of doesn't fit that description is Denish,
and he is the guy who was already working at
I a C. And founded Hatch Labs, So he's a
(29:27):
partner from that standpoint. He's sort of like represents the money,
if you will, because he represents I a C. And
part of the way Hatch Labs worked is that they
funded these projects to a certain extent and then they
hope that they would spin off into their own companies,
perhaps get more funding from I a C. Over time,
also from other investors, and then ultimately could potentially be
(29:49):
even bought and owned fully by I a C. At
some time, which would be an advantage for everybody, right,
So the founders get to be treated like entrepreneurs. They
own a portion of the come any and then if
and when it becomes massively successful. I a c also
a shareholder makes an offer to buy the company, the
founders take their money and run, and everybody wins. Well,
(30:09):
that's a pretty smart incubator idea. Right from the start theory.
I can see how things would be popping up and
successful from that right. So ultimately, you know, it's not
just that they had this safety net to start or
the training wheels that made Tinder iconic, because lots of
companies have started with a backup that way. But it's
more than that. It's the combination of the traits of
(30:34):
the people that were a part of this. So you
had seen Rad and Justin Mattine, and then you had
Whitney Wolf, who's twenty two at the time she gets involved.
These are all young, good looking, privileged people who are
building an app for themselves, essentially one that they and
people like them will use and like. And in fact
(30:59):
they have the ability. Look they were all. I'm making
them sound less than they were by saying that they
were young and good looking and privileged. They were also
really smart. And one of the things I think that
is sometimes forgotten when you're teaching business is the ability
to see a niche or see a problem in a
way that someone else hasn't seen it. And these guys
(31:19):
looked at all the other dating apps out there and
dating sites out there, and they said, this is not
following human behavior. It's not the same. It's not people
interacting the way that humans interact. In fact, I think
Sean Rad explains it best himself, Meeting new people is
a challenge, and one of the biggest challenges. You either
have to put yourself out there and walk up to
(31:39):
somebody and you feel like you're about to be rejected,
or on the other end, somebody's coming after you and
it's just overwhelming. So there's just like natural friction between people,
and we just wanted to break that down and make
it simple. And it's simple when you know that somebody
you want to meet also wants to meet you back.
It just um it's almost like that moment when you
walk into the room and you look at somebody across
the room and they look at you back. Everything just
(32:00):
becomes a lot more simple. But in the room, you're
actually in person and you're you're just swiping through people's pictures, right,
But I mean in the room you're sort of doing
the same thing. You're looking at people across the room,
and you're making these initial impressions, saying yes and no
in your head. So Tinder is meant to emulate the
real world. So the looks based first impression. Matching closely
(32:22):
mimics what people do at bars. This is what Sean
and Justin and Whitney and all of their friends are
doing every time they go hang out at the bar.
That's far closer to human behavior than what match does
and what zoosk does and what he Harmony does. I mean,
when's the last time you walked up to someone in
a bar and asked them to answer fifty six questions
(32:42):
about whether or not they're happy. Yeah? Never, that doesn't happen, right,
So that was one of the reasons. Now we're starting
to get to why Tinder is iconic. That's one of
the reasons, right. The second reason is the double upt
In all of the other sites. You've read a profile
and you reach out to somebody, Hi, um, I really
(33:04):
liked your profile and especially the part about your dog,
and um, so maybe we could date each other if
you're interested, And then you wait around and the person
either ignores you or rejects you, and you feel like
a loser and it sucks and tender saw a way
around that. That's true, Yeah, right, because that's the one
(33:25):
I think that that's the biggest obstacle for people in
dating in general, though, is the rejection aspect. It's not
a matter of finding a long term partner of you
click right, it's God, I really hate when they go
and they walk away. That hurts so bad. Right, Yeah,
so they got rid of the rejection, by the way,
didn't start with swipes. It started with clicks and if
(33:46):
both people clicked yes, essentially, and now that means we
know swipe right, which came a little bit later, then
you got matched, and then you made the approach. You
didn't make an approach unless you knew the other person
was already interested. I think that does make a big difference, though, sure,
with the whole way that that operates. Yeah. Now here's
the other thing about the app. It was gamified. It
made it. It was faster and easier than any of
(34:09):
the other apps out there. Back in two thousand six,
Chip and Dan Heath wrote a book called Made to Stick,
And it's really more about ideas being sticky than applications,
and sticky meaning you know it sticks in your brain.
Get your mind out of the gutter. I know we're
talking about hooking up and I'm going down the road
(34:31):
of using the word sticky. Let's just get it all out,
get it all out you. I know, it just makes
me think of Craigslist. What can I tell you? We
can't do that on Craigslist anymore. Okay, that's in any case.
The concepts in the book Made to Stick can really
be applied to what Tinder did, right. I mean, one
of the most important concepts in the book is simplicity.
(34:55):
If you can keep it simple, people will understand it,
they will like it, they will want to use it.
So there's a lot to that, and that is a
lot of what Tinder did. There's also branding. We talked
about zeusk and what that. What does that mean? Tinder?
You get it? It's fire that the icon, the logo
shows it. You get it right away. It's a good
way to spark the flame. The whole point of it.
(35:15):
There you go, right, And so I think a lot
of what they did, both from a marketing standpoint and
from the product itself, was just really easy for people
to understand. It was fast. The idea of just swiping
quickly through and doing it on your mobile phone while
you're waiting in line at the grocery store is a
whole different thing, far easier than sitting in front of
(35:38):
your computer for hours on match trying to weed through profiles. Absolutely,
like you said, it mimics real life in that sense,
because you walk into a bar and in your mind
you're swiping yes yes, no, no, yes no no yes,
with all the people that you're looking at in the bar. Absolutely, yeah,
that's exactly right. And frankly, you're doing that if you're single,
you are doing that at the grocery store too, right,
(35:58):
Like you're looking wherever you are, you're looking around for
that cute man or woman or whatever it is you're
looking for, and you're mentally swiping right and left. Absolutely.
I mean, I think everyone has at one point in
time been in the grocery store or something and caught
that person in line of the cashier whoever, and you
just sneak a glance at the left hand just to see,
of course a ring or not. You've already swiped right
(36:21):
on them in your mind. Everyone's done it. Then there's
the marketing strategy, and the marketing strategy was also genius.
They didn't start doing mainstream commercials. They went to the
people that were just like them. They went back to
USC where Shawn rad had gone to college and dropped out,
and where Justin I believe had also gone to college,
and they started promoting to the sororities and fraternities, the
(36:42):
people that they knew who were like them, who were
pretty privileged people who could attract someone with their looks.
And the rest is kind of history. All of the
elements that made the program work were there, So where
are they now? We'll talk about it next. The nature
(37:08):
of the app. The nature of Tinder has always sort
of corded controversy. It was it was sort of set
up to do nothing but as a hot hook up app.
I mean, it's an app with a flame as the icon,
and of course it has. There are claims of the
app sexualizing dating. There are claims of links between Tinder
(37:30):
and increased infidelity, and there are even stories of Tinder murders,
which is horrible. The nature of the app, though, can't
be held responsible for the corporate culture and the huge
entanglement of lawsuits, some that are now over and some
that are going on to this day. The most well
known of the lawsuits was in in June of that
(37:50):
year when Whitney Wolf, who we've already talked about, one
of the co founders and the now former VP of marketing,
biled sexual harassment charges against the parent company That's I
a c Her claim had to do with interactions between
herself and Justin Mattine, who was her former boyfriend and
at that stage the CMO and also really Shawn Rad.
(38:14):
She claimed that her title of co founder was stripped
away from her because of her gender, and she said
that Justin had told her that having a female co
founder devalued the company. That was the reason he gave.
She then allegedly complained to Sean Rad, who basically either
ignored her or called her a dramatic or emotional girl.
(38:37):
Kind of sounds a little bit like the mayor who
put poor Helen Morrison in jail back in the day.
But when they broke up, Justin Mattine went on to
call Whitney Wolf a desperate loser, which would be bad enough,
but he did it in a marketing meeting in front
of others. He also told Shawn Rad that she was
an alcoholic, sent her harassing texts which was his biggest mistake,
(38:58):
because she kept them and Shawn Rad really didn't do
anything about it. Ultimately, whitney Wolf resigned in because Justin
went too far this time and called her a whore
at the company party. Man, what's wrong with this guy? Well,
all of them, That's what I mean about the culture
and about who they were then for the time after that,
(39:19):
the years after that, Justin and Sean were sort of
kicked out of their positions and then came back in,
and then kicked out and came back in and all
of that, And ultimately whitney Wolf took a one million
dollar settlement to walk away, and the agreement the settlement
was never really fully disclosed, and we don't really know
what she agreed to accept for that. She got a
million dollars, and clearly it didn't keep Shan Rad or
Justin Matine from continuing to be involved in the company,
(39:42):
because they were now a lot of people know. What
whitney Wolf did next was go off and start Bumble,
which is a successful dating site on its own, but
more stuff went on, even starting in ten that made
the company sort of a symbol of well sickness. Forget
sticking us they've also got ickiness. That same year, after
(40:03):
Whitney Wolf came forward, other former Tender employees also came forward,
went to the press and saying that there was a
ton of sexism and sexual harassment in that company. And
to make matters worse, there started to be cyber security issues,
data privacy issues, and even public health concerns about Tinder. So,
(40:24):
for example, public health officials in Rhode Island and Utah
said that Tinder and similar apps were responsible for STDs
on the rise, and researchers in New York found a
flaw that allowed people to find the locations of other users,
which is kind of scary in that kind of stuff continued,
(40:46):
and Sean rad even gave a really awful and infamous
interview to the London Evening Standard that kind of got
him in some more trouble. It was even more sort
of browy and gross than some of the earlier stuff.
And all of that sort of research continued about how
ugly the new world of Tinder sort of was. We
(41:07):
even had to report as recently from the Department of
Communication Studies at Texas Tech, where they looked at how
people were using the app and how infidelity was tied
to the app, and results were showing that close to
sixty of people had seen somebody on Tinder who they
knew was in an exclusive relationship. Seventy one percent of
(41:28):
people reported that they knew male friends who used Tinder
while in a relationship said they new female friends who
used Tinder while in a relationship, So it wasn't just
the boys being bad. One of the other things that
has sort of come to light about the app is
that it is far more male dominated than female. I
don't think that's much of a surprise, though, I think
(41:49):
probably most of the dating sites were that way probably,
So then the question is as a guy, I mean,
I know that you can answer honestly because you're not
single right now, so you're just talking about other people.
But how would you feel about that? I mean, if
you know that there's way more men on it than women,
don't you feel a little bit like why bother? Well?
I think the mail men tellies generally just you get
out there and you put it out there and eventually
(42:11):
something will come of it. So even if there's more
men than women, not all the women are gonna be
taken by another guy by the time might get there.
So I'll find one. Yeah. So in any case, all
of this to say that while the app continues to
be popular, and while a lot of people aren't aware
of all of the lawsuits and entanglements, and there are
others I a C Is suing Bumble and and now
(42:32):
the original founder Shawn rad and just A Mattine and
some of those guys are actually suing I a C.
Saying they didn't get their fair share the money. So
the whole thing is very fraught. But a lot of
the users don't know about that, don't care about that,
but I think they do worry about are some of
the stories about safety, whether it's data safety, cyber safety,
or personal safety. The tender murders stories are pretty scary.
(42:55):
Rolling Stone magazine did an expose a on a variety
of tender murders, and there's not just one, there's a
whole host of them. So you know, even though you
know and now moving into Tinder is ostensibly doing very well.
The Match Group last year said that Tinder had over
three point seven million paid subscribers and that that number
(43:17):
had gone up eighty one percent in a year. While
all that's going on, you do have to wonder how
long Tinder will remain popular and if there might not
be some historical lessons that we now know about that
might tell us otherwise, What are the ups and downs
that we've seen in the public trust in dating overall,
(43:38):
and will those affect Tinder in the long run. If
people stop trusting it, will they stop using it? If
they're not sure if it's safe personally to use it,
if they're not sure if their data is safe, will
they continue to use it? And if they're not sure
there's any real women on it, will they continue to
use it? And then there's the technology changing. For example,
(44:00):
I'm pretty sure the gen z r is out there
will have no idea what this is. You've got mail.
So the future remains to be seen. But for nowown
blown people are enjoying and Tinder, uh And they're enjoying
making fun of Tinder obviously, so it's going to be
(44:22):
part of the cultural story of the early two thousand's
forever it's minted into history. But the future does remain
to be seen for now. Over forty nine million people
are said to have used online dating overall. There are
about eight thousand sites out there. At the end of
the day, we humans love love and sex and having
(44:44):
stuff to make fun of, and as long as that's
the case, there will be companies out there to sell
us new ways to find it. That's our show for today,
See you next time. Physiography is produced by the iHeart
Podcast Network. I'm your host Dana Barrett. My co host
and producer is Nick Bean. Our executive producer is Christopher Hassiotis,
(45:05):
and Josh Than provides audio production. Have questions I want
to give us feedback or have a company you'd like
us to cover. Email us at info at physiography dot show,
or contact us on social I'm at the Dana Barrett
on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or just search for me
on LinkedIn. Thanks for your support.
It only took two years for Tinder to get to
around fifty million users and over a billion swipes per day.
Oh and then there's that pesky reputation for being all
about the hook up. Tinder makes you gross. There was
a time when you'd be more selective when you were
horny and feeling irrective. Now one swipe and this thousands
(00:23):
to phone, all from a sex app you use on
your phone. That's the tender, gross or not. When Family
Guy is doing multiple episodes about you, it's safe to
say you've reached icon status. This is Bhisiography, the show
(00:56):
where we dive into the strange but true stories of
iconic companies. Whether they're a current bright star, in the
midst of a massive dumpster fire, or settling into the
dust heap of history, they all have a past worth knowing.
I'm Dana Barrett. I'm a former tech executive, an entrepreneur,
and a TV and radio host, and over the course
of my career, I've interviewed thousands of business leaders and
(01:19):
reported on the bright beginnings and massive flame outs of
the brands we know and love. Some of their stories
are inspiring, some get my blood boiling, and some have
changed the way we live today. We're swiping right on
the story of Tinder, and with me as always is
my producer, new guy Neck. All right, So I do
have to ask, though, Dana, have you ever used or
(01:39):
been on Tinder? I have not. I have not ever
swiped right or left, and you young millennial sir. I
tried it for a short time, and I did a
couple swipes, but I never really got into it very much.
So I would say technically, no, okay, wait, you can't.
There is no there's no gray area here. It's either
yes or no. Yes, yes I have, and yes I
swiped and left. Fair enough, all right, So I just
(02:02):
have to ask for some details here. How old were
you when you were swiping? Right after high school? So
like twenties maybe, okay, and be honest, were you looking
for a girlfriend or a hook up? I was looking
for a girlfriend, which is part of the reason I
stopped using it. Okay, Okay. This is one of those
(02:23):
moments where I wish this was a video podcast, because
your facial expressions in this moment are truly priceless. By
the time Tinder came out, I was in a serious
relationship which I did actually start via online dating. So
I probably would have at least tried it if the
timing had been different when it first came out. But
(02:45):
I actually don't think it's aimed. It's really aimed at
a pretty young audience. Absolutely, It's definitely aimed more towards
the millennial whose first instinct and that's why you just
pop it right or poppet left, just go right off
the field, pop it right or pop it left. So
it sounds like a new song, I see. I think
that's kind of the initial thought though. It was less
of the swiping right for confirmation and swiping left to
(03:07):
deny them and more just like no no, So it
was real quick. Right, Well, we're gonna get into all
of that because that's the gamification part of it. That's
what made it, I think part of what made it
what it is. Well, the reality is Tinder is not
an old company. A lot of the companies we're talking
about in phisiography are these companies from the eight hundreds.
This is a brand new company. Tinder was launched in
(03:27):
September of so it was hardly the first online dating tool.
It wasn't even the first app. So what elevated Tinder
over its competitors. What elevates one brand to icon status
over another, And today's icon could be tomorrow's fond memory.
(03:48):
So is Tinder here to stay? As I said, I
actually we met my last boyfriend on an online dating site,
and when people would ask how we met, I would
always jokingly say the old fashioned way online. I was joking,
(04:10):
But when I started doing research for our tender episode,
I realized I was actually more right than I thought.
People have been using technology. I'm air quoting it for
a long time to find love, right, I think that's
kind of the norm. You're right that you don't do
the bar thing anymore, and it's been since I was
probably in middle school. I remember seeing the TV commercials
(04:31):
for find love Online, right, But I think you you're
sort of saying like you don't even you saying you
don't do the bar thing anymore makes it seem like
there was this time when we all met and you know,
fell in love in person, you know, or our families
like arranged marriages, or your friends introduced you to people,
or maybe everybody met in high school all Greece. As
(04:51):
a millennial, I've always known the online dating being the
main way that's not how you guys did it before?
You just walk into bars and well we did, we
did when we walked into bars and found something. Um,
but sometimes it was an STD. I'm just saying, not
me personally, just saying, but really the reality is that
(05:11):
ever since there was any kind of technology, people found
a way to use it to find love and sex.
It started, believe it or not, all the way back
in Yes, well that there was like a what l
low macho dot com from way back then. I couldn't
even think I would you even say that the old English? Yes, ye,
(05:33):
old man dot comy. I don't know. But but here's
the reality. The printing press was the technology of the time.
Um that was high tech. Before that, they were handwriting,
you know, any kind of public messaging, and then the
printing press came along and in sive, that's the earliest
known personal ad was actually in a British agricultural journal
(05:54):
of all things. You know, the farmers, they get horny,
and the publisher of that periodical real lies pretty early
on that this was going to be a nice little
revenue stream for him. So that continued on and of course,
of all the early ads, you know, think about the
times as much as we know about them. All the
ads were placed by men, but it turns out even
(06:15):
gay men back in the really early days we're in
on this, back in the seventeen hundreds, gay men we're
using personal ads to find each other. But of course
they had to use coded messages because homosexuality was mostly
illegal at the time all of the western countries essentially,
so they had to refer to themselves as wait for it,
musical or unconventional. Those were some of the code words
(06:37):
they used to find each other. That's really interesting though,
that they had that kind of little secret coding back
and forth and right, so they might say something like,
you know, businessman looking for unconventional mate or something like that,
or unconventional businessman looking for companionship or something like that.
That's really interesting to think of. That's how they had
to go about, because I don't wonder how many of
(06:59):
them had to very gently kind of let down the
women that responded, right, because obviously that's going to appen.
I assume it did happen. In the first woman decided
to give the online dating of the day the personal
ads a try. Her name was Helen Morrison. She was
an English woman, and she placed an ad in the
Manchester Weekly Journal. It just said something really simple like
(07:22):
seeking someone nice to spend her life with. That's all
she was looking for, Oh Helen. If that were now,
it might have gone something like this, Leonard Hofstetter, will
you marry me? Um? Did you seriously? Just say? But
(07:44):
instead the man that responded to Helen was not the
man of her dreams. In fact, it was the mayor
who had her committed to an insane asylum for four weeks.
Come on, man, what a block. I want to say
the other word for decency's sake, but come on, man, yeah,
can you imagine? Think about that now? I mean I
(08:04):
want to digress here for a second and just get
your take on this, because I still think it's a
little bit controversial for a woman to ask a man
out what do you think of? That? Probably much more
less today than ever before, but right there is still
that just little of did she ask him? O? Really? Yeah?
We can move past it, I think a little better,
but the initial kind of what is still there. But
(08:26):
at least we don't get committed to insane asylums for
that that is true, and you don't have the authorities
putting you away for having an online dating profile, right.
Suffice it to say women didn't act as the aggressor
too much after poor Helen, But dating through the personal
ads continued. In the eight hundreds, personal ads for the
purposes of finding a romantic partner became pretty mainstream and
(08:47):
certainly became acceptable for both the aristocrats, you know, the
upper crust, and the working class. And then, like all
good things, it became a little ugly. Like all technology,
there's good users and bad users, and same was true
for the personal ads and the printing press and the
late eighteen hundreds, the grifters got involved, the scammers, and
(09:09):
they realized that they could, you know, prey on these
poor loveless folk advertising and the personal ads. So the
scams started to happen, and the population overall became more cautious,
and the popularity of dating via the personal ads or
finding love via the personal ads caused the popularity of
said ads to kind of drop. Ah, that's so disappointing
(09:33):
that they had the first, you know, big way to
go find love and then jerks had to go ruin
it for everybody. Well, it just goes to show you,
like we think about the scammers and the email era.
You know how early on it was like the Prince
of Nigeria needs a ten million dollar check, and if
you could just start by writing him a thousand dollar check,
he'd be really you know, grateful, and you might even
become royalty yourself. I just need that to wire you
(09:54):
the rest of the money, right. I think it's just
it's sort of calming to know that those scammers have
been It wasn't just the first Prince of Nigeria like
it was happening even in the late eighteen hundreds. In
the early nineteen hundreds though, the personal ads had a
little bit of a resurgence, but again it was back
to the agricultural community was poor, lonely farmers. They, of course,
(10:14):
you know, didn't have as an easy of a time
as meeting people as as the folk in the city.
But in those days it was far less about the
hook up than it was about actually trying to find
not love, but housekeepers. Yes you heard me, housekeepers. I
found a reference to an ad from the early nineteen hundreds.
It was a wanted ad and this is what it said.
(10:35):
Housekeeper eighteen to thirty years of age, wanted by widower
forty have prominent position with the rail company. Have seventy
five acre ranch, also house in town. Matrimony for object
if suited, have boy thirteen years old, would not object
to housekeeper having child can give best references. Wow, that
(10:56):
sounds much more like an advertisement for a job. But
you know, you can just come in and clean my
house and maybe have my kids right, and I will
be having sex with you. Very strange. Yeah, that was
but glad. I'm glad. I'm not you know, I didn't
grow up in the early nineteen hundreds, but there you go. Also,
of course, in the early nineteen hundreds to mid nineteen hundreds,
personal ads became popular with soldiers starting in World War One,
(11:20):
sometimes looking for love, but almost more often looking for
pen pals, just looking for someone to keep in touch
with when they were overseas in the trenches fighting the war.
Like it makes sense, I mean, you know, you're just
looking for companionship. Sometimes it's romantic, sometimes it's just general. Yeah.
The other thing I think is when we look at
modern times, we think that data and algorithms didn't really
start until the nineties. Maybe they're only two thousands. No,
(11:43):
algorithms have been in the mix since wait for at
There was a company in nineteen forty called Introduction. They
were the first company known to use data to match people.
The company was based in Newark, New Jersey, and they
used data to create matches or what they called them
social equivalence. Imagine that. And it cost a whopping quarter
(12:08):
for someone to receive their suggested matches contact information. Suffice
it to say, this is a little tibet that is
lost in history because there weren't that many people using
it at the time, but it really did exist. And
then in nineteen fifty nine, some Stanford students created an
automated matchmaking service for a school project. That one used
(12:29):
the old punch cards and a questionnaire and the IBM
six fifty main frame. It paired up about a hundred
i'll call them kids, men and women college kids. But
it never went mainstreams, just an early version. And then
in n there was a service called Operation Match that
became the first computer dating service. Of course, it's just
(12:50):
a few years after that Stanford project, but this time
it was Harvard students that created it using an IBM
fourteen oh one, and this time it cost three dollars
UH to use the service, and it was based on
the similar likes and dislikes of the men and women participating.
Believe it or not, Operation Match was used by more
(13:10):
than one million daters during the nineteen sixties. Wow. Interesting
that that's not something we would know a little bit
more about. Yeah, I know, almost forever lost to history
until we now have preserved it. Right hair on phisiography,
you gotta love it. From five though to nineteen ninety
it was the imprint personal ads that really kept this,
(13:30):
you know, intermediary between men and women going as a
air quote technology at the time until the nineteen nineties,
and that is when technology and the creation of the
Internet really changed the game for the way we date now.
We all know that the Internet was invented in the
eighties by Al Gore, but putting that aside, the nineties
(13:54):
is really when it became more prominent with the Web
and A O L and Craigslist and Prodigy. Can you
believe Craigslist was around all the way back then? Yeah,
that's crazy. I didn't know it had been around that long,
but I guess it makes sense. That's, you know, where
you find personals and really weird stuff. And it still
looks exactly the same yeah, that was really when people
(14:16):
started I'm just going to say it this way, hooking
up online. Remember this, you've got mail. Meg Ryan and
Tom Hanks had an innocent A O L romance, but
lots of people were getting far racier in the chat rooms.
Remember the chat rooms. Do you even know what a
chat room is? The what was? I think it was
(14:38):
a I M the time, check rooms, AOL, Instant Messengers,
that's right, And there were all kinds of different chat
rooms on all the different services. I remember in the nineties. Now,
in the nineties, I was, I think just getting married,
so I wasn't really looking for dates at the time,
but I remember looking just to check it out and
see what people were doing and being sort of like, oh,
(14:58):
you know, that was made some of the first evidence
that when you had a little bit of an anonymous
online profile, you were willing to take it two levels.
You never would in real life, right Like I would
venture into a chat room and some creepy mccreepenstein would
be like hey baby, and I'd be like, oh my god,
and I've run out of the chat room, and the
ones who I have a question You may or may
not remember. Do you remember a slash s slash l
(15:19):
age sex location. That's what they remember that all the time,
a s l age sex location. So that was like
a question that was like how you asked somebody exactly
you'd be in the big chat room and then someone
would send you a private message and the first thing
was usually a s l And it was also it
wasn't no correct me if I'm wrong, But wasn't the
instant messenger or the A O L logo like a
little guy running. Yeah, it was a little I think
just like the white yeah, paper cutout looking things. Yeah.
(15:42):
I think that was actually based on me running out
of a chat room. I'm sure you were not the
only one. Yeah, I think that's actually maybe it was
all of us. Maybe that's why they you know, they
didn't actually use my picture because we were all running,
you know, terrified fear out of those chat rooms. In
any case, people started hooking up even in the mid nineties.
(16:02):
Kind of brings us up to the dating and mating
world that we recognize today. It was when match dot
com launched as the first online dating site. Even though
all of those other companies existed in the past, this
one was very specifically for online dating and Match of
course streamlined the process that was going on already on
a O L. And you Craigslist just saying they, you know,
(16:26):
of course allowed singles to select their matches based on
things like age and what did you say, sex and
locations a s L. I'm learning something right here on
the show. Recent numbers though, show Match having thirty million
members and getting over thirteen point five million visitors a month.
And even though there's all the competitors out there, like
Tinder and all the others, they say still that Match
(16:48):
is responsible for the most dates, relationships, and marriages than
any of its competitors. But I'm still gonna say Match
is not the icon that Tinder is. No, I don't
think it is, especially not through all the age ranges.
I think, you know, it's it's geared, especially now, and
I think even before was geared towards a little bit
of an older audience, not necessarily the twentysomethings of the world.
(17:11):
I don't know if it's started that way, but in
fairness it and it isn't. Perhaps you could call it
an iconic brand, but it's certainly not an icon in
the sense that it's not you know, as nearly as
socially relevant. It's not in every movie and every TV
show and in songs, and it just doesn't have the
same cultural dominance that Tinder does. Absolutely. I think that's
(17:33):
just because it's it's considered a quote un traditional website,
so they have an app. But I'm sure right, so
that's Match And of course we know Tinder is a
whole other way of looking at things. But then you
also had in two thousand e Harmony coming into the picture,
taking things even sort of to a more innocent and
tame So if Tinder went the wild direction, the Harmony
(17:54):
went the super safe, sweet direction, if you will. With
that whole quiz that they gave you before you even
join to sort of figure out what your personality was
all about, it is really interesting. They get really in
depth with some of the things they ask you. Yeah,
and it was started by Neil Clark Warren, who we've
all seen on TV a million times. He's probably more
of an icon and more made fun of than the
(18:16):
Harmony or Match right, absolutely, with his random little sitting
behind the desk ye too excited about other people's love. Right,
But in addition to his work as a relationship counselor
and a psychologist. He's a Christian theologian and a seminary professor,
and so the harmony is very sweet. I have to
tell you another this is all about this episode is
(18:37):
all about my personal stories. I have to tell you
another personal story. In the nineties, I got married in
the early nineties, divorced in the mid nineties, and I
decided to go on e harmony. Lots of my friends
were doing it. They were like, this is the way
to go. So I spend the time. You know, I'm
a single mom. I don't have a lot of time.
But I get on the computer and I fill out
all the answers to all the questions and I get done,
(18:58):
and it comes back and says, you have been rejected
by e harmony. Out. Yeah, we there is not a
single human being in the entire world that we can
match you with. Basically, it just said lives there. You know. Well, well,
just you know the person was not on the harmony,
(19:19):
That's what it was. Sure, No, But I think, actually,
I mean, I'm actually this really did happen to me.
I'm not making this up. And I know a few
other people that happened to as well. And I think
it's because I actually answered the questions honestly. So it
asked you things about being happy, and I wasn't that happy.
I was recently divorced, I was a single mom, I
was working my ass off. I'm not happy. Sorry, I mean,
I might be happier maybe if I met somebody. Thanks
(19:42):
for sending me, you know, off a cliff e harmony.
But I think this it's an important point, and I
think it leads to sort of the creation of a Tinder, right,
because you could lie on those things, and people did
lie on Match and on the harmony. I tried the
harmony like six months later. I was like, all right,
I'm gonna beat this thing. So I came up with
new profile, you know, email address, and I went back
on there and I answered like I was the little
(20:03):
happiest sunflower in the in the world. And then then
they took me that was a lie, and so you know,
Tinder went the whole opposite direction, saying we're not we're not.
We don't care about what your your fake nonsense that
you're We just want to know what you look like.
Do you look like? That's it? Uh? In any case,
that was the harmony again. Launched in about two thousand.
(20:25):
In two thousand four, we got okay Cupid with it's
sort of unique questionnaire, which one a different route, more
like asking you a question and I think asking you
how important that question was to you and what you
wanted a potential mates answer to be. That seems also
like a lot of fakery. It was really interesting. I
think I got I've jumped on okay Cupid to try
(20:47):
it once and it was really weird. It would ask
you a question where do you want to live, for example,
you know, farmhouse beach, and then you would answer, and
then would ask what do you want from a partner,
and you're thinking and in a lot of the cases
you're like, well, I would prefer a person to just
answer the same as me. Right. Wells sensibly for that one,
because if they want if they want to if you
want to live at the beach and they want to
(21:07):
live in the mountains, you're gonna have a problem exactly.
But it was interesting some of the questions that they
would have pop up, kind of relating to income and
where you see yourself on a political kind of spectrum
and things. So uh, the most interesting was that you
could be okay with someone with a completely different answer
than you, and that you would actually seek that. I
thought that was weird. Right Again, this all I think
is leading to why Tinder was able to do what
(21:29):
they were able to do. So of course that was
again two thousand four when okay Cupid came along, and
uh then two thousand seven happened, and that was not
the first, of course, smartphone, but that is when iPhone
was launched, and that is really when we saw the
app world start to blossom. And so for dating, the
(21:50):
first real dating app was Zeusk. I will be honest,
I've completely forgotten about Zeusk and Zoosk is still around.
Not an icon, would not be an episode of phisiography.
It's interesting, never caught on very much. And there again
(22:10):
we're building up to why Tinder is Tinder. Zeus went
a different route, and they all sort of have been
trying different routes. Zeus went the route of let's connect
to your Facebook and your social networking sites and so
you can meet friends of friends that kind of thing.
But sort of, why do I need Zeus when I
can just do that via Facebook? Exactly? You could just
(22:31):
go through and say, hey, you know that person, and
if it's a friend of a friend, like theoretically right,
Like if one of your friends thinks I'm cute, first
of all, that'd be really weird, but you know, cougar
and all it works. They would just say it that
to you, and you would say it to me, and
then I would meet them and problem solved right to
be like, hey, my buddy, here's can they send you
a private message? Also, can we talk about branding for
(22:53):
a second, because zeus, I can't even say that with
a straight face. What does it even mean? I don't know.
Something to do with the zoo animals and skiing, I
don't know. Yes, you know, when it comes to dating
zoom animal things probably not that far off. So I
get what they're poting for lions and tigers and bears.
Oh my, I don't know. Anyways, Zeusk is still out
there and it was one of the first that it
has a certain following, and over the years it's added
(23:15):
features and that are kind of Tinder like to try
to stay relevant. But ultimately that brings us up to Tinder.
It's when Tinder is born. So with all these predecessors,
what made Tinder so famous so fast? We'll talk about
it right after this. So, Dana, why do you think
(23:41):
that with all these other ones already, all these other
dating services already out there and pretty successful, why do
you think Tinder became the icon that it is now.
Well it's a good question, but before we get to
why they became the icon, let's look at how they
got started, how they became the icon, and who they were.
Because the holl on who matters. Tinder, as we said,
(24:01):
was launched on September twelve. It was founded by essentially
a team. So I'm gonna list the names. Some of
them may mean something, some of them may not. But
it's Shaun Red, Jonathan Badeen, Justin Martine if that's not
confusing enough, Joe Muno's Denish More Johnny and Whitney Wolf
and they all had sort of different roles to play
(24:23):
in this. But Tinder was not sort of a standard
startup like we think of now. It wasn't just like
a techie who had an idea and then sort of
recruited a team of friends, looked maybe for some venture money,
launched a minimum viable project, and you know, made history.
It didn't. It didn't go that way. Tinder was actually
the result of a competition at a short lived tech
(24:46):
incubator called Hatch Labs. So Hatch was interestingly enough, there's
a lot of incubators all over the country. I'm here
in Atlanta. Where we are you know, we've got Atlanta
Tech Village. There are you know, coworking spaces. Now, I
think people are really familiar with this, but this was
at the very beginning I think of the world of
incubators and Hatch Labs wasn't just somebody who had an
(25:07):
idea to start an incubator. It was launched by a
giant corporation called I a C. Interactive Corps, who, by
no coincidence, is the parent company of wait for it,
match dot com Go. Yes, now, I a C is
actually a huge company and it is not solely focused
on dating apps. There's like, I think a hundred and
(25:29):
fifty or so more apps and brands that they own
and actually started as a media company, USA Networks, things
like that, So it's not only a dating company. But
by no coincidence is it that they also have this
whole dating division essentially smell another episode of physiography coming.
Your your nose is working well. Your your nose is
(25:50):
working well as I was researching I A C for this,
I was realizing that there is quite a story of
characters in that story as well, so you never know,
maybe this is preview for that episode as well. But um,
based on all of that, you can see that Tinder
wasn't that sort of normal entrepreneurial endeavor. Was sort of
like an entrepreneurial endeavor. But like with training wheels, I
(26:12):
think that's a fair assessment. Right, they built the bike
on their own, but they used parts that someone else
had already built for them, right, and they had help.
It's like it's like when you know, it's like riding
the bike when your dad's still holding onto the back
and the sides and you know you're not gonna fall.
I mean, when you're doing it under the umbrella of
a giant company. There's nothing wrong with it. It's a
great way to get started. Um, But it doesn't to
me have the same sort of risk. You don't get
(26:35):
the same heroes who risked everything to create something absolutely absolutely.
I think they also maybe allows a little bit more
of just kind of throwing it against the wall and
seeing if it will stick sometimes, right, And that's a
lot of what happens at these incubators, a lot of
the ideas don't stick. On this case, Sean Rad, who
was sort of the most well known founder of the group,
had landed a role as general manager at Hatch Labs
(26:57):
in New York, and in the first week there, he
learned that they were doing this company wide hackathon and
he would have to compete in it. So he replies,
first of all, this just gives you some insight into
his personality. He doesn't reply all message to all these
people who he's just meeting because he's brand new, and says,
can't wait to meet you all at the hackathon after
I destroy you guys, I'm going to win this thing,
(27:20):
all right. Yeah, that's kind of that's that. I think
that that passes the lene from confident confidence into a
little bit of arrogance, especially when you're the new guy.
Is it Is it weird that it reminds me of
Charlie Sheen, say winner, hashtag winning or something. That's what
it reminds me, maybe with a little less drugs um
In any case, Sean Rad, a team's up with another
(27:41):
Hatch Labs engineer that's Joe Muonio's, and the two win
the competition. Behind the scenes, though, Sean Rad and his
buddy Justin Mattine, who grew up together they met when
they were like thirteen or fourteen years old, also had
sold a small tech company, or sold his portion of it,
and had gone to work for Labs in California, and
the two of them had already sort of been talking
(28:03):
about putting together some kind of flirting app, which is
interesting when you think about it. They didn't start it
as a dating app. They had in the back of
their heads that it would be a flirting app, which
is code word for a hook up app. Yes, and
I want I wish we had some visuals here, but
(28:24):
I'll paint the picture for you. These are two young twentysomething,
good looking guys who have no problem flirting and I'm
assuming hooking up. That's just a little bit of who
they are. And they also come from pretty wealthy families
out in l A. Shawn Rad drops out of college
after two years, it goes back home. His parents are
(28:45):
fine with it. He has a safety net, if you will,
as he's going into all of this. In any case,
they go in. They build this version originally called Matchbox.
I think that became tender Get it Matchbox tender and
they went they in that hackathon, and that's when they
decided to throw some more weight behind this project at
(29:05):
Hatch Labs, and they brought in uh justin from California,
and then a bunch of these other folks who had
been working on other projects with Shawn at Hatch Labs
are assigned to work with him. And so the only
person that sort of doesn't fit that description is Denish,
and he is the guy who was already working at
I a C. And founded Hatch Labs, So he's a
(29:27):
partner from that standpoint. He's sort of like represents the money,
if you will, because he represents I a C. And
part of the way Hatch Labs worked is that they
funded these projects to a certain extent and then they
hope that they would spin off into their own companies,
perhaps get more funding from I a C. Over time,
also from other investors, and then ultimately could potentially be
(29:49):
even bought and owned fully by I a C. At
some time, which would be an advantage for everybody, right,
So the founders get to be treated like entrepreneurs. They
own a portion of the come any and then if
and when it becomes massively successful. I a c also
a shareholder makes an offer to buy the company, the
founders take their money and run, and everybody wins. Well,
(30:09):
that's a pretty smart incubator idea. Right from the start theory.
I can see how things would be popping up and
successful from that right. So ultimately, you know, it's not
just that they had this safety net to start or
the training wheels that made Tinder iconic, because lots of
companies have started with a backup that way. But it's
more than that. It's the combination of the traits of
(30:34):
the people that were a part of this. So you
had seen Rad and Justin Mattine, and then you had
Whitney Wolf, who's twenty two at the time she gets involved.
These are all young, good looking, privileged people who are
building an app for themselves, essentially one that they and
people like them will use and like. And in fact
(30:59):
they have the ability. Look they were all. I'm making
them sound less than they were by saying that they
were young and good looking and privileged. They were also
really smart. And one of the things I think that
is sometimes forgotten when you're teaching business is the ability
to see a niche or see a problem in a
way that someone else hasn't seen it. And these guys
(31:19):
looked at all the other dating apps out there and
dating sites out there, and they said, this is not
following human behavior. It's not the same. It's not people
interacting the way that humans interact. In fact, I think
Sean Rad explains it best himself, Meeting new people is
a challenge, and one of the biggest challenges. You either
have to put yourself out there and walk up to
(31:39):
somebody and you feel like you're about to be rejected,
or on the other end, somebody's coming after you and
it's just overwhelming. So there's just like natural friction between people,
and we just wanted to break that down and make
it simple. And it's simple when you know that somebody
you want to meet also wants to meet you back.
It just um it's almost like that moment when you
walk into the room and you look at somebody across
the room and they look at you back. Everything just
(32:00):
becomes a lot more simple. But in the room, you're
actually in person and you're you're just swiping through people's pictures, right,
But I mean in the room you're sort of doing
the same thing. You're looking at people across the room,
and you're making these initial impressions, saying yes and no
in your head. So Tinder is meant to emulate the
real world. So the looks based first impression. Matching closely
(32:22):
mimics what people do at bars. This is what Sean
and Justin and Whitney and all of their friends are
doing every time they go hang out at the bar.
That's far closer to human behavior than what match does
and what zoosk does and what he Harmony does. I mean,
when's the last time you walked up to someone in
a bar and asked them to answer fifty six questions
(32:42):
about whether or not they're happy. Yeah? Never, that doesn't happen, right,
So that was one of the reasons. Now we're starting
to get to why Tinder is iconic. That's one of
the reasons, right. The second reason is the double upt
In all of the other sites. You've read a profile
and you reach out to somebody, Hi, um, I really
(33:04):
liked your profile and especially the part about your dog,
and um, so maybe we could date each other if
you're interested, And then you wait around and the person
either ignores you or rejects you, and you feel like
a loser and it sucks and tender saw a way
around that. That's true, Yeah, right, because that's the one
(33:25):
I think that that's the biggest obstacle for people in
dating in general, though, is the rejection aspect. It's not
a matter of finding a long term partner of you
click right, it's God, I really hate when they go
and they walk away. That hurts so bad. Right, Yeah,
so they got rid of the rejection, by the way,
didn't start with swipes. It started with clicks and if
(33:46):
both people clicked yes, essentially, and now that means we
know swipe right, which came a little bit later, then
you got matched, and then you made the approach. You
didn't make an approach unless you knew the other person
was already interested. I think that does make a big difference, though, sure,
with the whole way that that operates. Yeah. Now here's
the other thing about the app. It was gamified. It
made it. It was faster and easier than any of
(34:09):
the other apps out there. Back in two thousand six,
Chip and Dan Heath wrote a book called Made to Stick,
And it's really more about ideas being sticky than applications,
and sticky meaning you know it sticks in your brain.
Get your mind out of the gutter. I know we're
talking about hooking up and I'm going down the road
(34:31):
of using the word sticky. Let's just get it all out,
get it all out you. I know, it just makes
me think of Craigslist. What can I tell you? We
can't do that on Craigslist anymore. Okay, that's in any case.
The concepts in the book Made to Stick can really
be applied to what Tinder did, right. I mean, one
of the most important concepts in the book is simplicity.
(34:55):
If you can keep it simple, people will understand it,
they will like it, they will want to use it.
So there's a lot to that, and that is a
lot of what Tinder did. There's also branding. We talked
about zeusk and what that. What does that mean? Tinder?
You get it? It's fire that the icon, the logo
shows it. You get it right away. It's a good
way to spark the flame. The whole point of it.
(35:15):
There you go, right, And so I think a lot
of what they did, both from a marketing standpoint and
from the product itself, was just really easy for people
to understand. It was fast. The idea of just swiping
quickly through and doing it on your mobile phone while
you're waiting in line at the grocery store is a
whole different thing, far easier than sitting in front of
(35:38):
your computer for hours on match trying to weed through profiles. Absolutely,
like you said, it mimics real life in that sense,
because you walk into a bar and in your mind
you're swiping yes yes, no, no, yes no no yes,
with all the people that you're looking at in the bar. Absolutely, yeah,
that's exactly right. And frankly, you're doing that if you're single,
you are doing that at the grocery store too, right,
(35:58):
Like you're looking wherever you are, you're looking around for
that cute man or woman or whatever it is you're
looking for, and you're mentally swiping right and left. Absolutely.
I mean, I think everyone has at one point in
time been in the grocery store or something and caught
that person in line of the cashier whoever, and you
just sneak a glance at the left hand just to see,
of course a ring or not. You've already swiped right
(36:21):
on them in your mind. Everyone's done it. Then there's
the marketing strategy, and the marketing strategy was also genius.
They didn't start doing mainstream commercials. They went to the
people that were just like them. They went back to
USC where Shawn rad had gone to college and dropped out,
and where Justin I believe had also gone to college,
and they started promoting to the sororities and fraternities, the
(36:42):
people that they knew who were like them, who were
pretty privileged people who could attract someone with their looks.
And the rest is kind of history. All of the
elements that made the program work were there, So where
are they now? We'll talk about it next. The nature
(37:08):
of the app. The nature of Tinder has always sort
of corded controversy. It was it was sort of set
up to do nothing but as a hot hook up app.
I mean, it's an app with a flame as the icon,
and of course it has. There are claims of the
app sexualizing dating. There are claims of links between Tinder
(37:30):
and increased infidelity, and there are even stories of Tinder murders,
which is horrible. The nature of the app, though, can't
be held responsible for the corporate culture and the huge
entanglement of lawsuits, some that are now over and some
that are going on to this day. The most well
known of the lawsuits was in in June of that
(37:50):
year when Whitney Wolf, who we've already talked about, one
of the co founders and the now former VP of marketing,
biled sexual harassment charges against the parent company That's I
a c Her claim had to do with interactions between
herself and Justin Mattine, who was her former boyfriend and
at that stage the CMO and also really Shawn Rad.
(38:14):
She claimed that her title of co founder was stripped
away from her because of her gender, and she said
that Justin had told her that having a female co
founder devalued the company. That was the reason he gave.
She then allegedly complained to Sean Rad, who basically either
ignored her or called her a dramatic or emotional girl.
(38:37):
Kind of sounds a little bit like the mayor who
put poor Helen Morrison in jail back in the day.
But when they broke up, Justin Mattine went on to
call Whitney Wolf a desperate loser, which would be bad enough,
but he did it in a marketing meeting in front
of others. He also told Shawn Rad that she was
an alcoholic, sent her harassing texts which was his biggest mistake,
(38:58):
because she kept them and Shawn Rad really didn't do
anything about it. Ultimately, whitney Wolf resigned in because Justin
went too far this time and called her a whore
at the company party. Man, what's wrong with this guy? Well,
all of them, That's what I mean about the culture
and about who they were then for the time after that,
(39:19):
the years after that, Justin and Sean were sort of
kicked out of their positions and then came back in,
and then kicked out and came back in and all
of that, And ultimately whitney Wolf took a one million
dollar settlement to walk away, and the agreement the settlement
was never really fully disclosed, and we don't really know
what she agreed to accept for that. She got a
million dollars, and clearly it didn't keep Shan Rad or
Justin Matine from continuing to be involved in the company,
(39:42):
because they were now a lot of people know. What
whitney Wolf did next was go off and start Bumble,
which is a successful dating site on its own, but
more stuff went on, even starting in ten that made
the company sort of a symbol of well sickness. Forget
sticking us they've also got ickiness. That same year, after
(40:03):
Whitney Wolf came forward, other former Tender employees also came forward,
went to the press and saying that there was a
ton of sexism and sexual harassment in that company. And
to make matters worse, there started to be cyber security issues,
data privacy issues, and even public health concerns about Tinder. So,
(40:24):
for example, public health officials in Rhode Island and Utah
said that Tinder and similar apps were responsible for STDs
on the rise, and researchers in New York found a
flaw that allowed people to find the locations of other users,
which is kind of scary in that kind of stuff continued,
(40:46):
and Sean rad even gave a really awful and infamous
interview to the London Evening Standard that kind of got
him in some more trouble. It was even more sort
of browy and gross than some of the earlier stuff.
And all of that sort of research continued about how
ugly the new world of Tinder sort of was. We
(41:07):
even had to report as recently from the Department of
Communication Studies at Texas Tech, where they looked at how
people were using the app and how infidelity was tied
to the app, and results were showing that close to
sixty of people had seen somebody on Tinder who they
knew was in an exclusive relationship. Seventy one percent of
(41:28):
people reported that they knew male friends who used Tinder
while in a relationship said they new female friends who
used Tinder while in a relationship, So it wasn't just
the boys being bad. One of the other things that
has sort of come to light about the app is
that it is far more male dominated than female. I
don't think that's much of a surprise, though, I think
(41:49):
probably most of the dating sites were that way probably,
So then the question is as a guy, I mean,
I know that you can answer honestly because you're not
single right now, so you're just talking about other people.
But how would you feel about that? I mean, if
you know that there's way more men on it than women,
don't you feel a little bit like why bother? Well?
I think the mail men tellies generally just you get
out there and you put it out there and eventually
(42:11):
something will come of it. So even if there's more
men than women, not all the women are gonna be
taken by another guy by the time might get there.
So I'll find one. Yeah. So in any case, all
of this to say that while the app continues to
be popular, and while a lot of people aren't aware
of all of the lawsuits and entanglements, and there are
others I a C Is suing Bumble and and now
(42:32):
the original founder Shawn rad and just A Mattine and
some of those guys are actually suing I a C.
Saying they didn't get their fair share the money. So
the whole thing is very fraught. But a lot of
the users don't know about that, don't care about that,
but I think they do worry about are some of
the stories about safety, whether it's data safety, cyber safety,
or personal safety. The tender murders stories are pretty scary.
(42:55):
Rolling Stone magazine did an expose a on a variety
of tender murders, and there's not just one, there's a
whole host of them. So you know, even though you
know and now moving into Tinder is ostensibly doing very well.
The Match Group last year said that Tinder had over
three point seven million paid subscribers and that that number
(43:17):
had gone up eighty one percent in a year. While
all that's going on, you do have to wonder how
long Tinder will remain popular and if there might not
be some historical lessons that we now know about that
might tell us otherwise, What are the ups and downs
that we've seen in the public trust in dating overall,
(43:38):
and will those affect Tinder in the long run. If
people stop trusting it, will they stop using it? If
they're not sure if it's safe personally to use it,
if they're not sure if their data is safe, will
they continue to use it? And if they're not sure
there's any real women on it, will they continue to
use it? And then there's the technology changing. For example,
(44:00):
I'm pretty sure the gen z r is out there
will have no idea what this is. You've got mail.
So the future remains to be seen. But for nowown
blown people are enjoying and Tinder, uh And they're enjoying
making fun of Tinder obviously, so it's going to be
(44:22):
part of the cultural story of the early two thousand's
forever it's minted into history. But the future does remain
to be seen for now. Over forty nine million people
are said to have used online dating overall. There are
about eight thousand sites out there. At the end of
the day, we humans love love and sex and having
(44:44):
stuff to make fun of, and as long as that's
the case, there will be companies out there to sell
us new ways to find it. That's our show for today,
See you next time. Physiography is produced by the iHeart
Podcast Network. I'm your host Dana Barrett. My co host
and producer is Nick Bean. Our executive producer is Christopher Hassiotis,
(45:05):
and Josh Than provides audio production. Have questions I want
to give us feedback or have a company you'd like
us to cover. Email us at info at physiography dot show,
or contact us on social I'm at the Dana Barrett
on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or just search for me
on LinkedIn. Thanks for your support.
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