What Now? with Trevor Noah
The Perfect Algorithm for Finding Love? with Christian Rudder [VIDEO]
Thu, 22 May 2025
Trevor and Christiana are joined by Christian Rudder (co-founder of OkCupid and author of Dataclysm) to try and determine: Is a healthy dating app possible? They talk through how online dating has shifted since the “hope and change” moment of the early 2010s, and how data and technology can help and hurt our attempts at finding love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the Perfect Algorithm for Finding Love?
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Yeah.
Do you think that like 40 something year old men are more attractive than 20 something year old men?
I was going to say something. I don't want to say what I'm going to say.
No, say what you're going to say.
How tall is he when he stands on his wallet? Yeah.
This is What Now? with Trevor Noah.
Well, I really appreciate y'all inviting me on. I was like, I was telling Lindsay when she let me in. At first I was like, is this a scam? Am I going to get mugged if I show up to this thing? Wait, why? Because I was just like, no, not for, I didn't think it was real.
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Chapter 2: How Did Online Dating Evolve Over the Years?
Definitely.
Because also men are seeing more hot people than they've ever seen before. Women too. I'm like, my gosh, it's gorgeous. You're just scrolling all these beautiful people. And I think it changed dating because it was just like, I can actually, there's physically somebody that's fine-tuned to what I precisely want.
And I definitely, you know, Gia, who was on the show, who wrote Instagram Face, talked about like the proliferation of this beauty standard on Instagram, changing what women did in real life with their bodies and their faces to match this beauty standard. And I'm interested in about this app. Could we...
Game the algorithm in a way that plays to countering that, countering the fact that, like, depending on how much time a man spends on Instagram, right? Oh, this is interesting. Or even a woman's use of certain sites informing how they behave. Because, you know, I know all the apps talk to each other and they're spying on us. Yeah. No, you never did that, of course.
But like, then create this machine learning algorithmic thing that can shape a man's preferences in a way that nudge him in the right direction, accounting for that. Or if it's a man that is not on Instagram at all, you're like, oh, you haven't been destroyed.
Right, a clean mind. Yeah. I mean, that might work. Something that gets very hard is when the app tries to do something, tries to change people's behavior. And actually, we got a lot of criticism or commentary, I guess I'd say, about this in the wake of publishing the racial data that we were talking about at the very beginning.
And be like, well, why can't you guys do more to make, again, Asian men more attractive to white women or whatever it is, you know? And the fact is, there's very little you can do to like... move people because first of all, they've had whatever, however many years of their life or however many hours scrolling through Instagram, super hard to undo that.
And also if you don't deliver to people what at least they think they want, they're just going to leave. It's not like you have to use a dating app or Tinder or whatever. You just do something else. And so, like, if you're showing some guy's been on Instagram hardcore and is looking for that look, and you're like, hey, man, check this out. This is better. However you want to frame that.
Yeah, this is different.
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Chapter 3: What Is OkCupid's Unique Approach to Dating?
Obviously, you're reinforcing some negative shit that way, right? But otherwise, you just end up with a situation where people are gone.
That's so interesting to me because I've always felt, and the public discussion is that these apps are changing our behavior.
Oh, I think that's definitely true.
And they can... That's definitely true. It's making you angrier. It's making you argue more. It's showing you this stuff that...
But it's like almost in unpredictable ways. Like I think – I don't know any of the founders of say Twitter or Facebook. But I think if you had asked them in 2006 or whatever, is Facebook going to make people really angry and is it going to become the world's like greatest propaganda tool of all time? Mark Zuckerberg probably would have been like, what are you talking about? I don't want that.
I just want to like have – he probably genuinely wanted friends to meet friends or whatever or make money, you know, and be powerful, which a lot of people are like that. Yeah.
apps definitely change the world so I definitely wouldn't say that they change behavior but there has to be some component of them that is delivering what what those people want yeah they like amplify the crap that you already bring to the table culturally we already are like it's you know don't go anywhere because we got more what now after this
As a data expert, I'd love to know how much you allow the data to influence how you then move in the world, you know?
I definitely try to live more by intuition and just... Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I think just getting back to this like perfect love algorithm or whatever, like I just, I genuinely think that's impossible to create a computer program that's going to predict with any real defensible set of certainty, like...
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