Lately, we’re breaking up with dating apps for good…this time…maybe… Why the online dating industry is crashing and what it means for your love life.
Dating apps got costly, creepy, and exhausting. Users are fleeing and the industry is anxious. But how did dating apps change us? And if you haven’t given up on connection, what comes next?
Our guest is Marina Adshade, an economist who looks at how the market affects our love lives. She’s the author of Dollars and Sex: How Economics Influences Sex and Love and teaches at the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver School of Economics.
Also, Vass and Katrina talk about the war room tactics Vass used to find her (now) husband.
This is Lately. Every week, we take a deep dive into the big, defining trends in business and tech that are reshaping our every day.
Lately is a Globe and Mail podcast.
Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad.
The show is hosted by Vass Bednar and produced by Andrea Varsany.
Our sound designer is Cameron McIver.
Subscribe to the Lately newsletter, where we unpack more of the latest in business and technology.
Find a transcript of this episode here.
We’d love to hear from you. Send your comments, questions, or ideas to lately@globeandmail.com.
Katrina Onstad [00:00:00] We're just getting started on lately and we'd love to get your opinion. There's a brief survey at the end of the episode, and as a thank you for taking it, we'll give you a chance to win some prizes. More details at the end of the show. I'm going to get you to tell a little love story.
Vass Bednar [00:00:16] Oh my gosh.
Katrina Onstad [00:00:17] Because I really like the story of how you met your partner because it involves such a vast things technology, data, intelligence.
Vass Bednar [00:00:26] Sleuthing online.
Katrina Onstad [00:00:27] And a big heart.
Vass Bednar [00:00:29] I feel like I started taking a bit more of a data driven approach. This is like 2014 and early days ish. The early days I was on OkCupid before you had name verification, and one of the co-founders of OkCupid wrote a book called Data Classism. And it was all about behaviors that people exhibit online and how more polarizing pictures are actually more attractive, or the differences between what we purport to want, like who we say we're looking for and then who's profiles we actually spend time kind of gazing at so very much this moment, remember, like big data was hot and I had a high percentage match with someone who I thought was quite cute, who ended up living 800m away from me. You know, I'd recently worked in a political war room, so I was really ready to take information that I found on OkCupid and prepare myself a bit of a dossier.
Katrina Onstad [00:01:23] Oh, I love this
Vass Bednar [00:01:24] So, of course, before my first date with my husband, I knew where he worked, where he had lived previously. And now I sound creepy. Anyway, he messaged me back in a timely fashion and honestly, I was like, this guy's great.
Katrina Onstad [00:01:38] That's enough for me.
Vass Bednar [00:01:41] Not taking two days. He's messaging me. He seems charming. Let's go have a beer. And you know, the legend continues. But it was a very efficient way for me to match with someone. That turns out I really like.
Katrina Onstad [00:01:53] I feel like we don't hear that many of those happy ending stories around dating apps anymore.
Vass Bednar [00:01:57] Not enough. What we're hearing is people being exhausted, frustrated, angry, and just depleted. If anything, beyond this kind of overly trite gamification of online dating, it's become parody. Right? You're with friends, you're appraising people. You're letting people swipe for you. For one of my girlfriends I have the privilege of, I can swipe for her like on her behalf. I love to look for matches for her or send messages.
Katrina Onstad [00:02:24] Wait, why do you do it?
Vass Bednar [00:02:26] I don't know, just to help out.
Katrina Onstad [00:02:28] She doesn't want to because she's so burnt out?
Vass Bednar [00:02:30] You just tired of it.
Katrina Onstad [00:02:30] Right.
Vass Bednar [00:02:31] And she's seeing the same people right across different apps?
Katrina Onstad [00:02:34] Definitely. I mean, there is a reaction. There's been a lot of reporting about how the dating app industry is floundering. Last fall, the Bumble CEO founder that one time billionaire, Whitney Wolfe Herd, stepped down from her position at Bumble. But there's still going to be a celebrity biopic about her. And I am definitely gonna watch that.
Vass Bednar [00:02:53] Me too.
Katrina Onstad [00:02:54] And we're also seeing stocks sliding significantly from Match Group, which is the behemoth that owns many apps like Tinder, OkCupid, Hinge, etc. together, match Group and Bumble, which make up nearly the entire industry by market share, have lost more than $40 billion in market value US since 2021.
Vass Bednar [00:03:12] And the value drop is cultural, too. It does seem like we're in a bad moment for dating apps where people maybe they've been long disillusioned, but again, way more transparent about it, way more willing to articulate it, and just sort of fed up with how these apps work or frankly, don't work. Right. Are they offering something that people still believe they're capable of delivering on? Are we even messaging someone who's real? Right? Generative AI, fake profiles, scams, not to mention harassment, unwanted interactions, photos that may be sent, ways you may be discriminated against.
Katrina Onstad [00:03:50] Yeah, and we were looking on Reddit where people air their grievances and under one thread someone wrote: "Are dating apps ruining online dating?" And someone wrote in response, "Yes."
Vass Bednar [00:04:04] All right. Put that in the notes.
Katrina Onstad [00:04:06] And the person wrote, because it makes people feel like something better is just a swipe away.
Vass Bednar [00:04:11] Yeah. We're looking we're chasing that.
Katrina Onstad [00:04:12] Paradox of choice.
Vass Bednar [00:04:13] Paradox of choice, chasing that dopamine hit and feeling like you have to just keep searching or sifting through.
Katrina Onstad [00:04:21] Right. Or pay more to...
Vass Bednar [00:04:24] Get better matches.
Katrina Onstad [00:04:26] Yeah. Which is something these companies are going to ask of their users in order to survive and pay their shareholders. Yeah. Since many of the apps have moved from a kind of freemium model to this tiered systems that can cost, you know, hundreds or even thousands for the more elite apps of dollars a month.
Vass Bednar [00:04:41] You can see the companies scrambling a little bit just by the way that they're trying to evolve their businesses. So Bumble has Bumble Bizz. That's B-I-Z-Z.
Katrina Onstad [00:04:51] Of course.
Vass Bednar [00:04:52] Yeah, this it's a new mode on its app for professional networking. Definitely a place I'd go. And Grindr just announced that it's expanding into...Wait for it, travel and health, helping people find doctors when they take a pause from swiping for a hookup.
Katrina Onstad [00:05:11] Was one way to optimize your time?
Vass Bednar [00:05:13] Absolutely. I'm Vass Bednar the host of Lately.
Katrina Onstad [00:05:16] And I'm Katrina Onstad the producer of Lately. And this week we are going to be talking about breaking up with dating apps.
Vass Bednar [00:05:23] Yeah, we're just, you know, taking a break. Maybe not being exclusive. I'm being so silly.
Katrina Onstad [00:05:28] Stuck in a toxic relationship with them. Yeah, we could keep going. And yet apps are still a really significant part of how we love and how we connect with one another big part of our social fabric. According to Pew, 1 in 10 partnered adults met their current significant other through a dating site or app.
Vass Bednar [00:05:44] Yeah, that's a lot.
Katrina Onstad [00:05:45] So who are we going to talk about this with today?
Vass Bednar [00:05:47] I've swiped right on a really cool economist who looks at how the market affects our love lives. Doctor Marina Adshade describes herself as a techno optimist, which I love. I need to be around people like that techno-optimist
Katrina Onstad [00:05:59] We need more of those.
Vass Bednar [00:06:00] We need more. She's the author of The Love Market and Dollars and Sex How Economics Influences Sex and Love. She teaches at the University of British Columbia's Vancouver School of Economics. And I'm not going to lie, I'd love to take one of her classes. They seem really fun.
Katrina Onstad [00:06:13] Yeah, I really liked how she talked about dating apps, not just as a social phenomenon, but as a real economic problem that needs to be taken seriously, and that there are maybe solutions for the dating app problem.
Vass Bednar [00:06:25] Yeah, I really appreciated her reframing and how these companies may overstate what that market actually looks like to us.
Katrina Onstad [00:06:32] And I also like that she told us about an app we did not know existed.
Vass Bednar [00:06:36] Our new favorite app. Farmers only.
Katrina Onstad [00:06:38] Farmers only. We got to get in there.
Vass Bednar [00:06:40] Let's dive in. This is Lately. To kick off, I wanted to ask you a little bit about how people are experiencing dating apps today, or at least the activity of dating as mediated through our phones.
Marina Adshade [00:07:10] Yeah. So over time, I think, as we all know now, that dating has been treated more and more as a market, which of course this is why is of interest to me as an economist. But I think that it is seen more like shopping than it was in the past. This isn't particularly new because we've had online dating for a long time. You know, we've had it since the mid 1990s. We had the original websites that, all of your parents grew up with, I guess. But now online dating, of course, moved into the apps with Grindr. And so and it became more app based. You really ramped up the kind of shopping element of it where you're just literally going through profiles and swiping and swiping and swiping. There's actually a maximum number of profiles you can swipe on any day, and it's a large number. It's like 120. And some of my students report to me that they will max out on their daily swipes. And so it's kind of been a real shift with the movement to apps and the evolution of the technology.
Vass Bednar [00:08:09] And the volume of people that you can be exposed to through that mediation. You mentioned Grindr. I think Grindr just had its 15 year anniversary. So that is a bit of a milestone and an app that, for all its downsides, has been remarkably sticky in terms of a dominant vehicle for particular daters.
Marina Adshade [00:08:28] One of the things that made Grindr special, you know, when it was originally devised, it had this locational element so that you actually didn't just see somebody's profile, but you knew where they were relative to you. So if you were in a bar at night, you could go on your Grindr app and see who else was in the bar with you. And that was a real game changer. Grindr was really the first one that took I'm out in a bar and I'm meeting people. I have technology and brought them together in one place.
Vass Bednar [00:08:58] I think that's a really good element to highlight because that's an example of mediating those worlds. Whereas when online dating was first introduced, it really seemed like it was something you did complementary. It was in kind of the suite of tactics you had for meeting people. Whereas now it does seem like that dominant, almost gatekeeping to setting up a date. You mentioned markets at the gate and of course you're an economist, but what is a dating market? How is it different from the marketplaces that we're used to experiencing?
Marina Adshade [00:09:27] Yeah. So any other market you have, you have money to smooth the way. Right? I have something to sell. Somebody gives me money, then I take that money and I buy something that I want. Whereas dating is a different type of market, it's more like a barter economy because you don't have money to smooth the transaction. I have to both find somebody who has the qualities that I want, and who is looking for the qualities that I have to offer. In economics, we call this the double coincidence of wants. Barter economies are very difficult to resolve because it's hard to find somebody who both has what you want and wants, what you have to offer. And it becomes even more complicated with dating because nobody's just looking for one thing. I mean, traditionally, dating markets were very different when we lived in smaller communities where people married at a younger age to go back to the 1960s, where half of all women were married by their 20th birthday. Those markets were different because people didn't search as intensely as they did today, because the markets were so small. People kind of settled. I know people don't wanna hear that, but they did. They just made it work over time. You know, people moved in the cities. We get technology, get women moving in workforce, we get women going to university. All of a sudden the markets become much, much bigger and then they become much harder to solve, in part just because there's so many choices. And then along comes online dating.
Vass Bednar [00:10:50] Yeah.
Marina Adshade [00:10:50] You would think in some ways online dating resolves this issue of this double coincidence of once, but at the same time, there's so many options that people start getting very overwhelmed, then limit what they're looking for. I'm only going to date somebody who's over six feet tall.
Vass Bednar [00:11:05] Right?
Marina Adshade [00:11:05] I'm only going to date somebody who has a certain income, and then you start narrowing your field down, which then makes it more complicated.
Vass Bednar [00:11:12] I read an interview where you said that online dating apps can solve what you referred to as a thin market problem. Can you just pick up on what a thin market is for me?
Marina Adshade [00:11:23] So a thin market problem exists when there's just not very many buyers and sellers. With dating markets, its that when markets are really thin, people actually really lower what they're looking for. He seems like a good man. He will be a good father. These are the decisions that were made in the past. But there's an opposite of thin markets and that is thick markets and thick markets are good in the sense that they resolve the thin market problem. But you can also get congestion where the market is just so thick. There's just so many buyers and sellers. Everybody has raised their value so high that it becomes more difficult to clear the market.
Vass Bednar [00:11:59] Fascinating. Maybe some of that happens with people's elasticity around the ages that they'll date, and how they self-declared the markets that they're looking in. I want to put this moment in a historical context. What was the early days promise of dating apps? They were novel out the gate, and sometimes people were even a little bit shy about using them in the first place. That seems to have changed.
Marina Adshade [00:12:21] Yeah. So back when dating apps started, nobody wanted to admit that they were using it. Couples would make up stories about how they met because they didn't want to admit that they had met online. The original dating websites were for people who had very specific needs. There were markets were even thinner than everybody else. There were dating sites for people who were disabled. There were dating apps for people who had sexually transmitted diseases. There are dating apps for people who had a certain religious. And the one that is really persisted, which is one of my favorite dating websites, is Farmers Only.
Vass Bednar [00:12:56] What? Okay. Why is it one of your faves?
Marina Adshade [00:12:59] My students always laugh because I like to sing the jingle for Farmers Only in my class. I'm not going to sing it for you, but it's, "you don't have to be lonely when there's Farmers Only." And it's a dating site for men who are living in rural areas. And, you know, the thing about the modern economy is that because so many women are educated and because educated people are paid so much more in cities, you just get a lot more single women in cities.
Vass Bednar [00:13:25] Right.
Marina Adshade [00:13:25] You get a lot more single men in rural areas. And so there's this market problem where these people are just not meeting each other. So Farmers Only was intended to resolve that issue. Somebody told me once that they asked farmers what was the most important technological advance in farming in the last ten years. And they said Farmers Only.
Vass Bednar [00:13:44] Wow.
Marina Adshade [00:13:44] Because it made it possible for them to keep people in rural areas. Anyway, so the point is that originally these dating sites were very specific. They were focused on very specific markets trying to solve very specific problems. But over time that kind of opened up and they just started to envelop everyone. There's also this gamification element to the apps, right?
Vass Bednar [00:14:05] Absolutely.
Marina Adshade [00:14:05] Where it's almost addictive behavior, where you're just kind of hooked into playing this game that is online dating.
Vass Bednar [00:14:12] I think some people do get a little bit addicted. There's been research on the design, you know, Tinder, letting the second card underneath kind of peek out prompts your brain to swipe faster and more often so you can see something. So you've touched on the impact that a dating app like Farmers Only has had for the economy, helping match people. You've also touched on as people became more educated over time, people tend to match with or seek people that have a similar or higher education level that has implications for matching. Are there any other impacts you want to shout out that apps have had on dating and matchmaking overall?
Marina Adshade [00:14:48] Actually, the last point you make is really important. So there's this concept in economics that we call marital sorting. And it just basically means that people have a tendency to match with people who are very similar to themselves. In the past, actually, there was to some degree less marital sorting than there is today. Today, I think the apps have really kind of ramped up the idea that you're going to I have a certain amount of income. I need to find somebody with the same income. Why that didn't happen before, right? I have this education. I need to have some of this education. Gone are the days where, like, a lawyer would marry a high school graduate, right? And then over other things like height and weight and physical fitness. And then we get into other categories, like your political beliefs.
Vass Bednar [00:15:32] Yeah.
Marina Adshade [00:15:32] Your religion, culture, family background.
Vass Bednar [00:15:36] Vaccination status.
Marina Adshade [00:15:37] Vaccination status, previous number of sexual partners. I mean, it becomes really, really fine tuned. eHarmony was the first website that did this. So back in the day you did a 300 questions survey and they basically plunked you in a box, and then they only introduced you to people who were sitting in the same box as you. I remember this distinctly because the first time I did the survey, eHarmony came back and said I was unmatchable.
Vass Bednar [00:16:05] What?
Marina Adshade [00:16:06] Yeah, they said I was unmatchable. I was like.
Vass Bednar [00:16:08] Get your moneh back/
Marina Adshade [00:16:08] But we don't need eHarmony do that. We do that anyway. We put people into boxes just to make the search simple for ourselves. And then this just leads to way more marital sorting, way more people finding people who are very similar to themselves and contributes to some polarization to some degree.
Vass Bednar [00:16:23] I want to touch on a lawsuit against Match Group, which is the parent company of most dating apps. It's been referred to as the Valentine's Day lawsuit. It's in California, and what's going on there is that six dating app users have claimed that Match Group uses a predatory business model that deliberately employs psychologically manipulative features to ensure that people actually remain on the app perpetually as paying subscribers. So they're saying that actually it's not in dating companies interest to have us match up whether we're unmatchable or not. Does this suit have merit?
Marina Adshade [00:17:01] I can't really speak to the suit as having merit, but the one thing that I know that the apps do, and I can say this pretty definitively, is they tend to overstate how big the market is. And so when they overstate how big the market is, people tend to stay. Or maybe people leave their relationships. You know, every once in a while you'll read this, 'Oh I was having this tough time with my boyfriend. And I fired up Tinder, and then I saw that like 5000 people had swiped right on me in the time that I was gone. Look, I have all these other options. I don't have to put up with this guy.' But I think that it does do that. And that keeps people looking because they think, okay, this person's fine, but there's literally hundreds of other people who would suit me, whereas in those numbers are just randomly generated.
Vass Bednar [00:18:00] I want to pick up on gamification. Gamification is part of how these apps get us addicted. Take something that's very valuable from us, our attention and our time. Specifically, I want to touch on the roses on a Hinge. So a rose is kind of an enhanced form of a like button, and it indicates that you are especially interested in a person, just like if you were to give them, just casually, a physical rose in an analog world. And if you send a rose, it elevates you in that person's feed. But you only get one free rose each week. It's precious to share with other users, but you can buy more starting at the low price of 3.99 each. What's gamification doing here?
Marina Adshade [00:18:42] Yeah, so that's interesting because you talk about the idea that the market is so large that people get overwhelmed. And so what they're trying to do is they're trying to essentially segregate the market, right? Oh, there's all this noise in the market, but there's this quiet space where you could exist and you'll be with people who are just like you. Maybe it's like the VIP room in the strip club, and then you go into that space, and then you can interact with people who are more along your lines. And I think that that's not that surprising. That's a moneymaker. And this is a huge industry, right. And it's a huge industry that is dominated by a very, very small number of players. You know, economists like me, Match.com and these companies, they are hire people who are just like me. They hire people who are experts in this area, experts in analyzing data to come up with these algorithms in order to find ways to maximize their profits. And though it's not necessarily going to be done in a way that makes you closer to your happy ever after.
Vass Bednar [00:19:45] I also want to touch on the dilution of what used to be, or seem to be more distinct identities of each and every app, and it strikes me that Tinder used to be known primarily for hookups, Hinge or Bumble for romance. And you mentioned eHarmony earlier. To my mind's like eHarmony. That's where it was like, you're serious. Like you're looking for a serious capital S relationship and you have pretty good photos. So that's the platform that you're on. But now it kind of seems like one big murky pool where people are just on every app and you see them again. You may have matched on one app, but you didn't on a different platform. So what happened?
Marina Adshade [00:20:25] I actually thought of a great business idea, is that somebody should come up with an app that actually puts you on all of the apps, and you monitor it all from one app. That would be actually the dream, right?
Vass Bednar [00:20:35] Control room.
Marina Adshade [00:20:35] But you're right that it used to be really segregated. Actually, eHarmony, you know, it's onset was very much intended for people who are religious.
Vass Bednar [00:20:42] Okay.
Marina Adshade [00:20:43] I'm a spiritual person. I need to find a spiritual person. And it really branched out. And then people have, you know, they'll be running Bumble and Hinge and Tinder and then also the Facebook dating app, which is a little bit of a different creature. And then on top of that, it's become so much easier to find people in their other spaces. For example, maybe I find a picture of somebody on Tinder, I can take that picture, and maybe this is just me who knows, to do this takes a picture, do a reverse image search and find that person on Instagram, right?
Vass Bednar [00:21:14] Oh yeah, we all have the super sleuth in our friend group who can quickly come back to you with like a dossier on somebody based on their photo. But often these apps are also inviting you to link to your other forms of social media, which allows people to maybe overshare or frame their online life as one big advertisement.
Marina Adshade [00:21:35] I think the word is curate. You're curating your existence. And then on top of that, there is professional photographers here...my guess is in every city across the country, who all they do is take photographs for dating apps. You talk about the money being spent on the apps, but there's these additional branch-out industries where you can hire somebody to write your profile now, although I guess you could just use AI and that would be easier.
Vass Bednar [00:21:58] AI is not going to catch that fish for my profile picture.
Marina Adshade [00:22:02] It's going to show you with the Stanley Cup?
Vass Bednar [00:22:03] No, actually, AI can maybe show me with the Stanley Cup. I want to ask about choice. And this is very much asking for a friend, but to what extent are users to blame here for a failure to match? Because we're all conditioned to kind of keep swiping? Does too much choice mean that we're never actually choosing at all.
Marina Adshade [00:22:25] I'm kind of an optimist, just to be perfectly honest with you, people are actually ready to go back to real life meeting. We're seeing more branching out, like when people complain on Reddit that they're single. I actually literally never see anybody say, hey, you should get on a dating app. Everybody's like, why don't you go join a club, right? What do you talk to the people in your classes? And I think that actually, I really do think this next generation that's coming up, the Gen Z's and I guess are being quickly followed by the Gen Alphas coming up behind us. They're actually pretty connected.
Vass Bednar [00:22:58] Yes.
Marina Adshade [00:22:58] They're like the large friend group generation, right. I'm so jealous when I see how they interact with each other, and I'm not sure that they're going to have a lot of time for these apps. We might be in a moment here where there's potential for a shift.
Vass Bednar [00:23:10] It has reportedly been difficult for these apps to capture the Gen-Z demographic. What do you think their aversion could be? Is this younger generation kind of reevaluating the whole notion of coupling, and this ideal is losing appeal in an individualistic age, or are people just more adept and comfortable at using other mechanisms both online and off, for instance, sliding into someone's DMs and disposing with the the dating app screen?
Maria Adshade [00:23:39] I actually wouldn't call the next generation individualistic. I actually think they're way more collective. I think that the Millennials were pretty individualistic, but the next generation is pretty collective, which I love about them. They're just more social. They're more likely to touch grass, they're more likely to go out and do things with their friends. But I also think that you're absolutely right in terms of like meeting on other platforms. And I don't think that's anything that's new. People are meeting on Reddit, people are meeting on TikTok, right? People are meeting on gaming sites and stuff like that. You want to see the way people interact with each other, and you don't get that on a dating site. I don't get to watch how one person talks to another person on a dating site, but I get to see it on all sorts of other platforms, and that is actually way more informative than an 80 word blurb on how much you like going to the gym, right?
Vass Bednar [00:24:32] Or do you like your friends and listening to music? Of course you like your friends. That's why they're your friends. That's the definition of a friend, somebody that you like. Anyway. That used to drive me particularly nuts. I was not swiping on that. So it sounds like some of your thinking is that this next generation, they might be the ones who can actually deliver on the dating apps promise, that they're meant to be deleted, because they might for go them altogether. And maybe that's how we're going to get around some of this bad design.
Marina Adshade [00:25:00] I think that people like to look down on the dating apps, and there's good reasons for being judgmental about just how superficial the dating apps and how manipulative they can be. But at the same time, our divorce rates in this country and across the developed world are lower levels now than they have been since the late 1970s. And they really started to decline when you get into the late 90s, when you start getting the access to online dating. Larger markets, I genuinely believe, create better quality relationships. So maybe people search longer, maybe it's super frustrating. But I actually think that when people do find people, I like to think that they find people who make them happier and that is something to be celebrated. The fact that you, you don't have to just give up and say, you know, I want to have children. If I don't marry this guy who's not everything I want, I'll never have a family. I don't think people need to do that anymore. And I think that that's actually something that is important and that we should treasure to some degree about the larger market.
Vass Bednar [00:25:59] I appreciate your optimism there. You're sort of framing the work of online dating, and it is increasingly now a form of labor again, taking our time, taking our energy as something that can be ultimately truly productive and rewarding. But the flip side is people cyberstalking or finding out where you work and being really upset that you didn't write back to their message. Maybe that's what people are also finding frustrating about online dating, the kind of depletion of boundaries and your full self being online.
Marina Adshade [00:26:26] In my ideal dating world, people would have to verify their identity. We have very good tools for people verifying their identity, and I think that that would be really good because there's enormous amount of fraud that goes on in these dating apps. There's legitimate reason why people should be concerned about this.
Vass Bednar [00:26:43] Okay, as a final question, as an economist, how would you design a dating app?
Marina Adshade [00:26:49] Oh, this is such a hard question. And I wish somebody had asked me this 20 years ago, and I'd gone into the dating app business instead of becoming in academia, because there's obviously a lot of money to be made in this industry. I think that I would design a dating app where you actually get to witness people interacting with each other. I just think that's so telling. It's not just how somebody talks to me, it's how somebody talks to the person who is standing next to me, right? So if you go on a date, how the person treats the server actually really matters. Like how is he talking to this person who's bringing us food, right? I think that that's how I would design a dating app where it's more of a group environment where you actually don't just see how they interact with you, you see how they interact with everybody. And I think that I would enjoy that.
Vass Bednar [00:27:38] I'm totally with you. Thank you so much. It was great to talk to you.
Marina Adshade [00:27:41] Thank you.
Vass Bednar [00:27:54] You've been listening to Lately, a Globe and Mail podcast. Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. The show is produced by Andrea Varsany and our sound designer is Cameron McIver. I'm your host, Vass Bednar, and in our show notes, you can subscribe to the Lately newsletter where we unpack a little more of the latest in business and technology. A new episode of Lately comes out every Friday. Wherever you get your podcasts.
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