Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode, we consider the extent to which the reaction to the release of apparently manipulated photo of Kate Middleton may preview the world we're entering where reality, real reality, and synthetic realities are impossible to distinguish. And later on, we'll consider the evolution of dating apps in light of the recently filed class action lawsuit that contends that dating apps now are more about engagement and keeping you hooked onto the actual app than actually connecting you with other people.
Hello, welcome to the call like I see it podcast. I'm James Keys. Riding shotgun with me today is a man who likes to drop lots of good stuff for the people in every episode. Tunde. Ogunlana Tunde. Are you ready to make it rain today?
[00:01:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
Get your umbrella.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: Right.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: All right.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: Now, before we get started, if you enjoy the show, I ask that you please hit subscribe on YouTube or in your podcast app that helps us get the message out to more people to get the signal out that they should come check us out.
Now, recording this on March 19, 2024 in Tunde last week, there was a huge media firestorm following the release of a portrait by the UK royal family. It was released by the royal family with Kate Middleton. It was showing Kate Middleton and her kids. Now, the photo was released on Mother's Day or Mother's Day in the. You know, that would seem pretty innocuous, but what made this have a big reaction was that the photo, once people looked at it, was apparently manipulated. And that, combined with the fact that Middleton has been out of the public view for the past few months due to a medical matter or a health matter, has led people to kind of make up their own or come up with their own reasoning for why they would release a manipulated photo and so forth. And more notably, with no one who's doing all the speculating or doing all the discussion on this, having any objective way to distinguish between whether what they're saying or to prove what they're saying, or to disprove what anybody else is saying. So, tunde, with looking at this, do you see this Kate Middleton potential Photoshop thing as kind of a preview of the world that I guess we're in know where? We have improving tech like generative AI and deepfakes. And it really comes down to the idea that people can no longer believe or cannot believe what they see, and everyone kind of just operates in this create your own reality mindset. You see what you see and you decide whether you'll believe it or how you want to interpret it on your own, as opposed to saying, okay, well, this is what this means or whatever.
[00:03:00] Speaker B: It's interesting because as you're talking, it makes me think of, like, the metaverse. And for those who may have seen it, the film ready player one that came out almost a decade ago. No, but this idea that, yeah, we can all just put on our own goggles and live in our own fantasy, that in a sense, when it's in that environment, it's not as dangerous as one that happens in the real world. Because if we run into and collide with someone in the metaverse or in that Internet reality, that stays in there. But when you're dealing with colliding with people, let's say, on your own block, who see a totally different reality than you do, that can have real world consequences.
[00:03:47] Speaker A: Hold up, man. Did you even see the movie? I thought the whole point of the movie was that the things that they did in the metaverse started having real world consequences.
[00:04:02] Speaker B: And I think this Kate Middleton thing to me is another layer, another example in this recent kind of era that we're in the recent years where something that doesn't seem that important on its face, like we haven't seen the lady for three months, and that's her business, just somehow gets this viral fire, and we have now, I'd say, at least a quarter of the world talking about it. And like you said, with a lack of clarity, it allows for the human mind, for many people to go to the most negative or conspiratorial things instead of maybe the lady had surgery and she wants some privacy. Right. I think that's why it's just fascinating for me to watch this from the outside looking in, because there's a lot of things think about with the royal family. They're a public family, all that. But then it's also like, well, who are we as the public to sit there and demand someone show themselves after a surgery, and we have to.
[00:05:11] Speaker A: Of the royal family is not. I don't think that point applies to everyone across the board. The royal family is kind of like celebrity culture in the UK. So part of their bargain with the public is that they do all this public facing stuff. So, I mean, that piece, but I want to look at the tech piece, because part of this was that once the photo was released, the manipulation, the apparent manipulation, was so crude that people recognized it and realized it right away. To the extent that news organizations pulled it and said, hey, we're not going to distribute this photo anymore because we don't see it as authentic. And that, to me, that happens. What's interesting to me about that is that that's almost in converse to, like, we operate in this world now where we are aware that there are these generative AI that can create things, or deep fakes. And kind of the defining characteristic of those as that tech gets really good, is that you can't really tell the difference, like, by visually. You can't visually. Or it's very difficult, as that tech gets better, to really tell the difference. In this instance, kind of the tip off was how easily we could see the difference, or that people that study these kinds of things, I wasn't looking at it, but the people who look at these things and are like, oh, yeah, your sleeve here. And you're all this other stuff. And so it was almost like, I'm sure they didn't do this on purpose, but if they wanted to kind of bring a lot of attention to themselves and stuff, it would be kind of like, hey, they left the breadcrumbs already. But more so the analogy of, okay, well, we're entering a world now where they released this photo, and then x amount of people decided, I don't believe that this photo was legitimate. And then from there, once you've knocked down the kind of initial premise, then without an alternate premise, you can create your own, or you can buy into this person's premise or that person's premise. And so I think it was a very good preview of the world that we're entering, where something will be released now, whether or not it obviously can be distinguished or not, and say, okay, well, this is real, this isn't, but something will be released. And then absent some other intervening factor, people will just have to decide what they want to believe based on either what that makes them feel good or all these other factors. This has been looked at, but they'll just have to decide and say, okay, well, I want to believe blank because I can't prove that what I'm saying is true objectively. Like, I can give you arguments for it, I can give you reasons, but I can't prove it, and you can't disprove it. Now, I guess presuming you choose the right few shared realities that can not be disproved, it'll just be a matter of choice. What to believe will become a matter of choice. And so I think this does really illustrate that even though in this case, it wasn't done in a way that actually makes the fact of the matter unknowable, news organizations were able to conclude that they thought this thing was manipulated sufficient that they would pull it from circulation.
[00:08:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's where this is proof that we are still in the early stages of us figuring this out. Because you're right.
[00:08:27] Speaker A: In this case, they're thinking this is like a photoshop or a photo editing. And then they acknowledged, I think, that the royal family did acknowledge later on that they did manipulate it, but not for just kind of touch up was what they were claiming.
[00:08:39] Speaker B: Well, but let me just address where you were saying is that the news organizations spotted something fake because they have their own ways of detecting things.
I'd doubt that at first was a human being that showed it. They probably have their own AI and algorithms that will quickly alert them to say, hey, have a human check this because it looks fake. And then people go and check it. And I think that's interesting because they did that to the actual source of the fake information that was trying to put it out themselves versus we often think of the threats of these deep fakes, AI generated stuff and all that as coming from maybe a third party that's trying to damage the reputation of maybe the targeted person, let's say in this case, Kate Middleton. So I found that interesting, that the news organizations automatically rejected something that actually legitimately came out of the royal palace, even though it was an illegitimate, legitimate photograph. Right. The second thing is, and just to finish off on the royals, because I know our show will be greater than just this specific topic on this family, but I do think, and I agree with you, I feel like this is more a sign of incompetency than some vast conspiracy of the royal family. Because kind of like we discussed and joked around with the COVID vaccine, if the government was really trying to put nanobots and 5G into people's injected into their arms, they'd probably use something like the flu shot or tetanus shot.
[00:10:08] Speaker A: They would use something people were already doing. Yeah, they wouldn't do it in. It's something new.
[00:10:13] Speaker B: Exactly. And so I think if the royal family really tried to deceive the public for real, if they went into this saying, all right, we got to put a campaign, for whatever reason, Kate's not going to show up for another six months, we got to make it. I'm sure. I mean, they have the resources, right. They'd hired the best digital media companies out there and stealthily and quietly, and they would have created some real content that looks great. The fact that all of us laymans out there could see this and spot it very quickly tells us that, yeah, it was probably them rushing to respond to public pressure and they had some people in the royal office that are not that great at technology do Photoshop stuff.
[00:10:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting point in the sense that the existence of all these other tools, the fact that theirs was done in kind of a mid 2005, 2006 Photoshop way, people manipulate photos better on Instagram than this. Yeah. Think about it.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: I'm thinking in my mind, like, Bernie Madoff made up fake statements that looked real. Right. And that was 20 years ago. So all I'm saying is, and Photoshop has been around for 30 years, so some of this stuff are not necessarily new.
The ability to just make things that look fake or we've seen it used in, let's say, by certain media companies where it looks like there's all these hordes of people climbing across fences on the border, on the southern border. And then I learned later those were pictures coming out of, like, Morocco. But it just looks scary because a bunch of brown guys going through, like, barbed wire fences.
[00:11:44] Speaker A: And I wanted to get to that, actually, in the sense that what we're talking about here, you can find analogs to this throughout history, actually, or at least recent history, the photographic history, in the sense that people think the moon landing was fake and that that was a staged, I don't know how many people, but nonetheless, it exists. That that was a staged production.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: That's another show, by the way.
[00:12:08] Speaker A: Sorry to open that.
[00:12:09] Speaker B: The audience, we'll do that one, one day.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: Yes, I'm sorry to open that up for anybody. I'm not trying to go all the way down that road, but just saying that it doesn't necessarily have to be a quote unquote, altered photo. It could be a misattributed or something that someone thinks is staged is the same kind of an issue. So this isn't completely new in that sense. But what the discussion really gets to is how, as the tools for this stuff get better and better and better to wear, a discerning eye may not be able to tell the difference. Like, you can't get in and analyze it and say, okay, yeah, if you look at the sleeve here, if you look at the way the hair is cut there or something like that, or the tile, you wouldn't be like, as it gets better and better and better, you may not be able to do that.
And then the point you made about the idea of misattributing, having actual footage and then saying that it's something that it's not is akin to this as well. And say, yeah, we got photos from 2015 and a news organization can show it and say, yeah, this is happening last week. And it's like, well, that's deception. And from that you wouldn't know necessarily what to believe. The difference there, again, the same kind of thing is that that could be refuted. Somebody could show the actual photograph or video from 2015 and say, see, it's the exact same thing. And then you can go from there. But the next piece I wanted to get to actually was the larger point overall in dealing with this and the concept of truth decay. This is a term that's been studied and so forth and a concept that's been studied in the sense that just not knowing there not being an objective truth that you can believe in and that we can agree on, so to speak, and how that is becoming more prevalent and how that's going to affect our ability for things like self governance and just a society where people can get along, how that's an increasing threat. So do you think that what we're seeing here, or just in general, your comments on truth decay and what do you think that that presents for us as challenges moving as we move forward further into the 21st century?
[00:14:15] Speaker B: I think we've already seen those challenges. And that's what I was saying.
As I was preparing my mind for this discussion, I realized that we've already, through the fracturing of information ecosystems, these are things that have been talked about. But I'll just regurgitate a few. Like when you and I were kids, there were much fewer sources of media outlets. So we all kind of sat there and watched the evening news and only had about four or five different serious versions of it, or sorry options in terms of TV channels and all that.
We all had more of a shared kind of reality, whether that reality was true or not. Because in preparing for today, I was thinking about things like, and again, not to go on a tangent, but just to mention things like the lost cause, the fact that we still have two narratives about the civil war. Right. Some people really genuinely believe it wasn't about slavery. It was all about the state's rights and all that other people believe. Yeah, it was about the states that were slave owning states, ability to expand that, and it was about slavery. So the fact that we have conflict that's 150 plus years old in the United States and we still have enough disagreement that these things are still being talked about. Where again, we just had a presidential candidate two, three months ago that didn't feel comfortable expressing what the real cause of the civil war was, tells us that this competition for reality is not new but yes, the ability for us to have such fractured sources of information now, I think this is unprecedented because for people listening and not watching, I'm grabbing my cell phone here. Just the ability for us to have reality now here in our face is something new to humanity. And I think that's whether a historical meme or idea was truly factual or not mattered less than the cohesiveness of everybody believing it so that the society could continue to move in a direction and have less conflict. And I think the issue now is whether things are true or not. We have more people that believe in many different things. And it's harder for us to kind of get on the same page, especially with big decisions. And I'll finish up this. I think part of it is the complexity of our societies too. Now, just a lot of things are very complex. And it's hard to understand everything.
[00:16:40] Speaker A: Which leads in the sense that there's more interaction.
[00:16:43] Speaker B: Conspiracy?
[00:16:44] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I was going to say that's an objective statement in the sense that there's more interaction between people and between groups of people and cultures.
There was less of that. And so there's going to be less large scale cultural disagreements or different perspectives and so forth. As the world becomes smaller, so to speak, you're going to have more of that. I want to define truth decay. The Rand Institute has done a lot on this. And the way they define it is they say truth decay is defined in part by an increasing disagreement about objective facts. And they excite this as something that's increasing. And it's a trend that they haven't seen in scale in american history.
We'll have some stuff in the show notes on this.
The way I look at it is there's two ways. You can kind of see what's happening, or there's more than two ways, but two ways that I point to in particular, and that is. And you cited to it. But I want to give kind of a why there's more sources of information. Well, why is that? Because the reason is that if you wanted to get information out 150 years ago, you had to publish books. You had to have access to book publishing equipment if you go back 100 years, or radio and then 80 years, TV, and you still had to have this broadcasting equipment, you can jump to the 80s or so and cable.
The barriers for entry to being a distributor of information was still very high. Now the barriers for entry, for distributing information is very low. And so anyone can distribute information and can present it in a certain way and be persuasive with it. And so forth. So that necessarily just leads to more sources of information. So you have a wider group of people, just more people putting stuff out there. And the second piece on this is, I think we'll see this more in the future, and we're seeing it now, but the algorithmic ability or the way through algorithms that information can be presented now, I think plays a big role in it as well.
The idea of curation of information and how that's been done, whether that's been done from a journalistic standpoint or an entertainment standpoint. And I say, like, the difference between the New York Times versus People magazine, they're still curating information, they're deciding what to put in front of people, and that's a human being making those decisions. And they might do surveys and stuff like that, but it's a human mind that's trying to work through that. Well, now you're letting algorithms and the computers that are making these decisions, millions and millions and millions of times per second make these decisions, and with real world feedback in terms of what actually either will keep you hooked or what's more persuasive and so forth. And so the rate in which we're being hit with and then led down certain, it's led into certain realities has increased as well. So to me, I think that you have a confluence of factors that's led to the idea where, okay, we can be siloed very easily because there's all these sources of information, and it can be presented to us in ways that will tickle our brain a certain way, that will get us to walk down the path or hold the hand and walk down the path with a stranger, so to speak. And when you see that, it almost appears, when you look at it then the whole picture, it almost appears inevitable that we're entering this phase. And so it's going to be something that society is going to have to reckon with, particularly societies that aren't built around the highest priority maintaining order. If you're looking at kind of a dictatorship, the highest priority is maintaining order. And the dictator just will shut things down. They want to shut down. But if you have an open society like we have here in the United States, or we try to have here in the United States, it's going to be more and more difficult to get people talk about this in the rand piece to see, ok, here are the problems we're dealing with. Here are the factors we need to consider. So therefore, let's then make value judgments on what we should do. Well, if we can't get those first two steps. What are the problems and what are the factors of those problems? Then how are we going to get to the idea of addressing these problems collectively in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people? So to me, this is kind of a fun and games way. You can kind of see how this can play out, this multiverse of realities all happening at the same time amongst people in the same neighborhood or in the same state or whatever. But how far this can go, it can get really unwieldy very quickly.
[00:21:00] Speaker B: Also, kind of following on our theme here, this is where I'm getting at, where I'm concerned about how this goes. Because when I say going back to the kind of complexities of our societies, and you're speaking to it too, is like this fracturing of information also creates distrust because we're fracturing expertise. And what happens, I think the COVID experience, let me put it that way, just that whole kind of period of the pandemic showed us this a lot, where for the first time in my lifetime, medical doctors and scientists were not trusted by, I don't know if I'm going to say a majority of our population, but enough that it felt disruptive. I mean, remember, we had people that on purpose wanted to listen to, people like me and you, podcast hosts that aren't medical professionals, that aren't steeped in scientific research about pathogens and how they work and all that, taking them, being instructed to use drugs that are used on horses, right? And human beings took that advice and went on it. I mean, that hydroxychloroquine stuff and all that. And some of it, I felt wasn't even about the information itself. It was that they just felt like, well, I just don't want to be told what to do by the system, by the experts and the elites, quote unquote. So I'm just going to go look over here. And so that's my concern because as I wrote a few notes here, just thinking about it, I've heard this just in my regular life professionally, as well as just dealing with, talking about other things, think about the stock market just conceptually is very complex.
I've heard people tell me, oh, the government has these secret accounts where they manipulate the stock market and all that. And I'm just thinking like, the government doesn't have that much money. The amount of $100 trillion worth of treasury bonds out there, the capitalization of the Dow Jones I think is 60 trillion.
It's just too big. I've heard people tell me things about the health care system that I don't know are true or not. We all know that our health care system is a black box in terms of how our health insurance companies get reimbursed. All that, it's just confusing and all that. Then you got things like immigration, the big topic now. And when you start talking to people and trying to drill down, it's complex, the asylum laws and why people can stay or can't stay when they're seeking certain things and what qualifies for that. So it leaves a lot of room in all these topics for people to put in disinformation, and our minds just want to go to what's comfortable. So we usually regress back to confirmation bias. Whatever we believe before coming into that conversation is like we're a deer in the headlines. Get so complex that you're kind of like, well, you know what? I'm just going to regress to what I already believe because this stuff is too much.
I want to see that getting any better, either. That's going to get worse.
[00:23:52] Speaker A: Human element, one of the ran pieces, like I said, that we'll have in the show notes, they put out four main drivers, and the first one is cognitive biases, as you just pointed out there. They also talk about changes in the information ecosystem, which, as I was kind of talking about previously, also the demands of the educational system and political and social polarization.
To me, I think that the trust piece that you mentioned, though, is very important. And the trust piece, see, trust is a two way street. And I think part of that now, there are definitely actors who have been, and there's been a concerted effort to break the trust between quote unquote experts and the public. That's been a concerted effort. But at the same time, I think the experts, they're not just a pure victim there. It's their job to figure out ways to engage and interact with the public. And I think they've let the public down in that, that they haven't done enough.
The way you establish credibility is by doing things that help the public. And so this wasn't an issue, let's say, in the 1960s or 70s or whatever, because the experts were curing polio and they were doing all these very amazing things and building superhighways and all this stuff. And so it's easier to trust when you can look around and see, okay, well, these people are really advancing society and then also the level of outreach that you need, you got to meet people where they are. If you want to sit in an ivory tower and just drop commandments down. And then it's going to be difficult to establish that two way street of trust, particularly in an environment where bad actors are trying to break that bond of trust. But it is something. And actually, we'll have another piece in the show, notes from the Atlantic, talking about this in terms of the role experts play when you're dealing with complex issues or things that you can't read a paragraph on and then be able to make intelligence decisions on in a society how important it is to have experts from that standpoint, because these are people that look at this stuff and whose job it is to understand this type of stuff, but also whose job, and this is the piece that I think we can't let them off the hook on, is to take these complex things, be able to drill them down for people, and then say, okay, here's what you need to know, here's why, and then meet people where they are again. So that piece in society, there is room for improvement on that end as well. My point is not to say that the experts are all bad or that they shouldn't be trusted, but they have room for improvement as well, considering the information environment that we live in now and the competing agendas and the fact that people are attacking it. So my question for you, and I guess we'll get to this because we're not going to go, it's a surface level discussion, generally speaking. But are there any solutions that you've seen proposed that you find to be things that society should be looking at as far as to try to reverse or at least stop the spread of truth decay.
It's something that's important to do if we're going to again, maintain a government of the people, by the people, for the people, because the people need information that they can make decisions on. And this isn't 100% of the people need it, but a large number of people need information to be able to make decisions on in order to keep the society working, or else we're going to be making decisions based on fabricated realities which may not work out in the favor of the populace.
[00:27:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I think you hit it. Things already that I think would make sense in terms of outreach, people that are concerned about this, that take it serious, trying to meet people where they are.
[00:27:27] Speaker A: For example, real quick, you mentioned how people were believing podcast hosts like, well, why aren't these experts going to all these popular, like they should be presenting themselves? Hey, again, it's not every expert, but the ones who are good at the public relations piece. They need to be going to these places, too.
Again, it can't be sitting in an ivory tower, but go ahead.
[00:27:47] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I think, look, we have a lot of problems that are in the way of that. And I say problems, not that they're bad things, but they're just hurdles. Maybe that's a better word than problems, like the freedom of speech.
There's a certain level of freedom that we all have that we can say certain things. Right. And then private ownership of corporations. So, for example, there's people like the guy that bought Twitter, for example. He seems to be, like, provocative things on his site, and he doesn't seem to welcome the type of experts that you and I would consider to be experts in their field, because it goes against the grain of the ethos of what he believes in, which is unless.
[00:28:32] Speaker A: They agree to get.
[00:28:36] Speaker B: No, this whole thing about. I want to let everyone say what they feel, to your point, unless I disagree with it, like the recent interview he did with Don Lemon, then he cancels the whole thing. Right. So that's one of the problems, is that we have corporations that are controlled by people that want to continue this fomenting of misinformation and disinformation. Because I got from one of the articles we read from preparation for today, I got a new term. They call them conflict entrepreneurs. And that they gain power and wealth by deepening divides through attacks on, you know, I'm not even going to drop names. I mean, there's a lot of people, podcast hosts, cable news hosts, there's politicians in the Senate and the Congress that behave this way. Right. That experts aren't to be trusted.
And so what do we do? How do we change that? I'm not sure, because I think it would take, actually, at a regulatory and legislative level, two things. One is maybe because of freedom of speech, you can't tell people they can't say things, but we could almost deal with things. And you've mentioned this in the past conversations, like false advertising. You just can't call yourself news anymore. If you're not somehow bringing up real factual stuff. You could just call yourself opinion.
[00:29:50] Speaker A: Or if your majority opinion. Yeah, I've been making that point for years. If your majority opinion, if what you do is opinion, work primarily, then you shouldn't have in your name that you're a news organization. That, to me, is deceptive. And actually, we've seen that. One of the pieces that, again, is in the show notes talks about, and I jumped on this, forcing better disclosure in terms of helping people decipher the difference between what presentations are factual and what presentations are opinion. And that's the heart of the point I've been making. And I'm an intellectual property attorney, so to me that stands out. It's like, oh, hold up, that's false designation of origin. If you're saying, hey, I'm a news organization, but then the majority of the content that you put out there that gets consumed is opinion, then that's deceptive.
You're confusing people on that.
[00:30:42] Speaker B: And that's what I'm saying. That the other piece I was going to say, and you're kind of alluding to it, is really, what do you call it? Regulation. Right? And again, that's a word. And I feel like regulation is like anything else in an ecosystem. Too much of it can be detrimental and catastrophic. It could suffocate growth and a capitalist system and all that, but too little of it is also catastrophic. And so you need a healthy equilibrium. And what's happened, I mean, this goes back to my thing on education, but I can say this happened with the regulatory environment as well. The Internet exploded so quickly that, and there were so many new things to kind of think about and tackle that by the time the regulatory apparatus of the government could even think about catching up with the lightning speed of the growth of some of these companies, like meta and Twitter and all these other type of Internet and YouTube through Google, it's kind of been too late because they already occupy such a dominance in our lives and also in their lobbying, right? They've become now bigger than fossil fuel, bigger than tobacco and the food industry, like the trans fats and the salts and sugars. So now we've got another industry that's huge, that's affecting us negatively and that now we're going to have to play this game about fighting an uphill battle against very moneyed interests who are conflict entrepreneurs. They're making a lot of profit by having this stuff proliferate through our society. So it's going to be an uphill battle.
[00:32:18] Speaker A: I think you got to remember, and the point has been made in discussion on truth decay, is that you don't stop it, you chip away at it. And there's a lot of things that need to be done when I talk about this type of stuff, because I'm a person that thinks that freedom of speech from a governmental regulation level is very important. But I also think that deception is not something, deception, things like that, is not something that should be permitted under the guise of freedom of speech. Tricking people fraud, stuff like that, defamation, those are the natural checks on freedom of speech that are already in place. But what I'm always reminded of, because a lot of times these things seem overwhelming, is just the old wisdom that you can fool all the people some of the time, some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time. And so implicit in that is that some of this stuff is going like whatever the mechanism, some of this stuff is going to be here with us at all times. And so there are some people who don't want the truth. They will be more comforted by a subjective reality, a synthetic reality that centers them or centers whatever worldview they have. And that validates that there are people who think the world is flat.
That's not going away. That's not a problem of truth decay. You're always going to have people to staking out positions that are contrary to what is observable. Or again, the problem that we're going to run into is what is observable may not be trustworthy either. But nonetheless, I think when you're looking at a concept like this, the biggest piece is going to be, and there have been a lot of things thrown out. But the biggest thing is there's going to have to be some outlets, some organizations are going to have to outwardly hold themselves to a higher standard and then have transparency. And that's with whether it's media organizations that are going to have transparency as far as what are their standards, what are they doing, but also government organizations, expert groups, trade associations, transparency. Hold yourself to a high standard and then be clear what that standard is. And then if you don't live up to that standard, then you have to do something about it. Somebody has to get fired or somebody has to step down, even though it might be overall a good person. And that's the way that you have to rebuild the trust and maintain the trust is to have these transparent expectations and standards that you hold yourself to and then be willing to live up to that. Because inevitably people will cross these lines. And sometimes it'll be painful. It won't be something that you're happy about or that you might think people go overboard. The example, to me, I thought that, again, it's something that some people would consider overboard. It's just that in the heat of the me too movement, when the Democratic Party was like, okay, yeah, we're going to take a harder look at this stuff. And Al Franken gets accused of something that many considered pretty innocuous. It wasn't sexual harassment as it's been defined, typically. But he stepped down and he was like, all right, well, then I'm out. A lot of people were like, whoa, wow, that's kind of extreme. But the point was to try to set a high standard and then live up to it, even if it was to your own detriment. And I'm not saying that to put him on a pedestal or anything like that, but I do think it was a good illustration of something that many people, not all people, some people thought it was appropriate, but many people who were in the Democratic Party were like, whoa, whoa. That's a little much, isn't it? Let's kind of vet this. See, you know, is this stuff credible? Or if what you're saying is true, or what she's saying is true, is that something that warrants this or whatever, but the idea of holding yourself to a higher standard, one out there, and if you can behave like that consistently, that is how you build and maintain trust. But it has to be based on transparency and actually living up to the standards.
So, any last thoughts before we get out of here?
[00:36:07] Speaker B: Yes, I was going to say you landed that plane very well because I thought you were about to step in a huge landmine when he brought up me too. And Alfred.
[00:36:16] Speaker A: No, where is he going? But I thought that was an interesting one begin because there were people disagreed on whether he should do that. But the point of trying to hold yourself to a higher standard was what he was trying to do.
[00:36:28] Speaker B: And I was going to joke and say, yeah, after you got done with your rant here. Yeah, that's if you care about this stuff like transparency and as a point about the conflict entrepreneurs.
[00:36:37] Speaker A: Well, but that's my point is that you're never going to get them in terms of to stop doing it. And you better be careful trying to regulate them out of existence beyond defamation, beyond deception. But like those things, obviously, if you.
[00:36:52] Speaker B: Really try to outlaw the whole thing, it's going to maybe get worse in a certain way. So if you let it just be legal and regulated like you're saying, there's always going to be people that believe the earth's flat. And we can't change that. We just don't need 80% of the population believing it, and we need the.
[00:37:07] Speaker A: People who want the real information to know where they can find the real information. That's really the bigger thing is that the people who want the fake stuff, there's little you can do about that. But the people who want the real stuff make sure that they know. Here's where you can find the real stuff. Here's the justification for it. Here's how we conduct our operations. Here's why you can trust us so well. Thank you for joining us on part one. We'll wrap it up from here, and we'll get back part two here shortly.
All right. Part two of our discussion today, we want to take a look. There's been a recent lawsuit filed against several of the dating apps, and it's basically accusing them of, as the apps have evolved, they're more about the buzzword social media engagement and keeping people on the site or on the app and doing stuff on the app. They're more about doing that, designing the apps to make people want to stay on the app, as opposed to actually finding connections and matching with people and so forth. And it's an interesting kind of accusation. It opens up an interesting window in the idea of the dating apps and how they've changed our society and how they've been used and so forth. So first, before we get into the societal piece, just your thoughts on the accusation that the dating apps are now more interested in engagement and how long they can keep your eyeballs versus matching. Just your thoughts on that. And then also the monetization of it as well.
[00:38:30] Speaker B: I'm not surprised.
The part one of this discussion that we just did, we talked about a concept called conflict entrepreneurs. So if they exist in other parts of the Internet, why don't they exist in dating apps? And by that, I don't mean they're trying to make conflicts between people that are trying to date, but just this ability of keeping people on your platform to monetize, engage their existence.
I'm not surprised that tech firms that decided to just go into dating space versus other areas of industry and society are using the same tactics. Those tactics appear to work very well.
[00:39:11] Speaker A: There's a greed involved, though, because the dating apps aren't like social media app, for example. Its stated purpose is for help you waste time and to kind of just scroll around and stuff.
If the social media app does that, that's kind of part and parcel. That's what you go to the social media. Like, the dating app doesn't. You don't go to the dating app, presumably, to just scroll photos of old classmates you're trying to actually match with. It'd be like if Chase made their banking app something, gamified it, and you're like, oh, trying to do this. So if you want to get to your money, they're not working on that.
Yeah, don't want to get any idea.
[00:39:51] Speaker B: Chase wants me more engaged, too, with my bank account. I'm sure they want me in and out of there and get my balance. Below a certain point, they can charge me $25 a month. All that stuff.
[00:40:00] Speaker A: No, again, that gets back to the deception piece. Like, if you say you're about something, then presumably you should be about that.
But I agree with you that there's a certain level. Absent some other force, whether it be regulatory or competition, these apps have also consolidated in terms of ownership, so that lessens competition. Competition would be a guard against this as well. In our market system, we're supposed to believe in robust competition. But if you start having only a few players, then these are the kind of thoughts and mindsets cutting corners. You get a worse quality product and at a higher prices and stuff. So it becomes, with the trends of the industry, it almost appears like it would have been inevitable. Like, oh, okay, well, you got people on there and they're looking at faces and stuff. That's what Facebook was originally about, right? It was looking at people's faces and stuff. But I do think this is something that we shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking, oh, well, this is inevitable. This is just people doing what people do. Everybody wants engagement because that's not what these businesses hold themselves out at. So I'm happy that there's a class action going here, and I'm not one on a dating app, but again, I have an aversion, or I'm hostile to the idea of deceiving consumers. I think that that's something that's bad. As a market person, as a person who believes in the market and free enterprise, I think that when you see deception in the marketplace, that hurts the market. That hurts all of us in that sense. So the deceptive aspect of this is very harmful. And I think that it's something, it's good that people have identified it and are going after them for this. And obviously, I also think that there's probably too much consolidation in the industry for something like this to happen, because if there's more competition, then people naturally are going to go to the product that gives the best experience. But if there's not a lot of competition, they all give kind of similar experiences, then the public doesn't have much of a choice.
[00:41:57] Speaker B: Yeah, this is one where I'm a little bit less sympathetic to the public on this one, because in the end, people are paying for the service of these apps in a lot of examples, or they can get the free version which may not be as experiential. The article actually talks about a young man who's complaining because he paid $50 a month over the past year. So let's say he paid $600 for a year to get, and he went on 65 dates, and none of them panned out. So I'm thinking, like, all right, it worked.
That's a lot of dates in a year, 65.
[00:42:36] Speaker A: But I don't know that you're supposed to extrapolate industry wide trends from that one person's experience, though.
[00:42:40] Speaker B: No, but what I'm saying, the reason why I'm bringing it up is he's complaining. He's complaining that the app sucks and it all sucks. And I'm just saying, well, it seems to have worked for him. He's just looking at it in a way that it sucks. And even one of the article, I mean, part of the article stated, and.
[00:42:56] Speaker A: This is an article, by the way, that we'll have in the show notes.
[00:42:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
The highest level of dissatisfaction was amongst women over a certain age who were not paying for the premium service. And so what it made me think of, honestly, was other types of businesses that are similar, maybe not dating apps. And I thought of LinkedIn.
I paid for LinkedIn Premium, like, two years ago, for one year, and I barely used it, so I stopped paying for it. So now when I get the thing and it says, look who looked at you on LinkedIn, and I'm curious, who's checking me out on LinkedIn? But every time I go to that, now it wants me to buy the premium package, but I don't buy it because I don't use LinkedIn like that. And that's just not how I conduct my business.
[00:43:43] Speaker A: You're not that.
[00:43:45] Speaker B: And I'm sure that if I wanted to use LinkedIn, I would have to dedicate my time and bandwidth. I'm sure if I paid for premium and used it a certain way, it would probably benefit my business in a way, but I'm just not there. So you can choose to go on a dating app, or you can choose to go to a bar or other ways to meet people. And so I just think that we shouldn't be surprised that the tactics used by other players in the Internet space and this whole interfacing with people online are being used by these services. That's really my point, reading this article, for sure, these people are signing up for something you can just sign off in if you would all want it.
[00:44:22] Speaker A: I agree with you on that. I don't think we should be surprised? I do think, like I said, from a legal standpoint, I do have a problem if it is, in fact deceptive in terms of what you're paying for and whether the design and the concept of whether or not people are getting what out of it, what they want can be weighed against the concept. And this is a separate issue. Deception versus what I'm about to discuss, which is platform decline, which is a concept that, generally speaking, these tech platforms, when they first start or when they first really get going, they have more features and they're less expensive. And then as they get more established, they get less features and more expensive. And I think that's kind of built in. That's kind of a market thing as well. That happens as you get more power, as you get more ubiquitous. You got to work less hard to keep people. And then you can also get into the idea that just basically, these platforms now, we actually were in a unique time in history where for 15 years or ten years or so, just from a financial standpoint, a lot of these platforms didn't need to be profitable in order to operate, and so now they do. So they're going to have to change their behaviors and so forth. But I think it was an interesting point you raised, and I know we talked about this a bit offline, and I wanted to get you on it here in the show as well.
You said, yeah, this is optional. This is an optional service. Like, you don't need to have the dating app in order to meet people. You can go outside and meet people. You can go to a bar or go to a library or a concert or whatever. You can go to places where people congregate and meet people. And we know this for a fact, because the dating apps didn't always exist. There are people, met people before the dating apps. But my question for you is this. Do you think the dating apps, and again, I've never had a dating app, so I can't speak on this. I found the woman I'm married to. Before the dating apps were a thing, so I guess I never had the occasion. If I did have a dating app, that'd probably be a problem, but you're.
[00:46:21] Speaker B: About to step in another landmine. Just keep going.
[00:46:23] Speaker A: Oh, no, I'm just saying, like, I.
[00:46:25] Speaker B: Don'T think we can land this plane.
[00:46:26] Speaker A: If you can, we can land this plane, isn't it? But do you think that the way that dating apps have changed the way people socialized almost kind of makes you have to or would make someone, or make it less likely? It'd be easy for me to say, oh, yeah, just go out to the club or whatever, yada yada, or wherever you want to meet people. But has society been changed by the existence of the dating apps where that's not as viable of an alternative?
[00:46:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's been proven through some of the stats we've read. I mean, I read that six in ten Americans under age 50 use dating apps, so that's tens of millions that are single. Yeah, like you said, those married guys shouldn't be on them.
[00:47:11] Speaker A: Yeah, my wife would have a problem if I was on a dating app, I'm sure.
[00:47:15] Speaker B: As I said, that plane might not be landed that easy.
But on a serious note, the answer is, yeah, I'm going to assume it's made a change. Just like we've said, the Internet has changed how we relate to each other greater in the greater society. So dating, I'm sure, is no different.
One of the things that I think is interesting specifically about this case versus many others as it relates to Internet social media, how we all interface on it, is this one is really subject to market forces. One of the things in looking, I mean, I'll pick on one of the companies, Bumble, which is one of the three major in the space, their stock price year to date. I mean, here we are, like you say, March 19, not even through the first quarter year to date, their stock is down 26%. When the S and P, the broad market is up about six, 7%. So they're way underperforming normal capital markets right now. And then since their IPO a few years ago, less than, well, less than a decade ago, they're down about 84%. So what I'm saying is that it's one of the rare times that I think the market is going to drive this more than the companies, because, like, we're talking about one thing they can't force is human interaction in a certain way. And so it seems that this is an unprofitable way to do this. And to your point, maybe going back to having it free, letting everybody get on there, like Match.com and some of these ones used to do 20 years ago, but then maybe selling data and all that stuff behind the scenes is a better and more profitable way to do it. Because one thing I realized in this, the article did a good job. And you're right, it's been a long time since I've been in the dating scene, because this was not even close to being around this level of manipulation, where that's why it reminded me of LinkedIn premium, that if I really want to get the good stuff, I got to pay for the additional services. But then they also like YouTube. In a sense. The algorithms continue to pigeonhole me into only a certain group of people that it thinks I might like. And what that's doing is that's removing the opportunity for me to really meet a diverse set of people because I might like somebody that's not within what the algorithm thinks I should like. And that's what I realized, like my YouTube feed, the algorithms keep sending us things that it thinks we want, which in one way, I can see a positive to that, but I can see a huge negative long term for all of us. Because think about as a human being, growth really comes through, being challenged. Right?
Like sports, working out, you're challenging, you're pushing yourself a little bit more each time. Think about, like you're saying about going out and dating from when we were a young age, before all this stuff started. We dealt with challenges. I dealt with getting rejected in my face and girls telling me, I don't want to date you at all. I remember being in college, I didn't have a car, driving a car. And some chick told me she liked me a lot, but she just couldn't be with me because I didn't have a car. That's something I wouldn't have experienced in a dating app, right. Yeah, that's what I'm saying is that I think just, I guess there's a long way to answer that initial question of yours. I think that's how it's going to negatively affect society if this continues, is our inability to interact and face any type of adversity, and that will create humans that aren't able to really grow.
[00:50:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I've wondered that as well, in terms of, I go back to my youth, and there was a ritual aspect to like, yeah, you had to approach people, which isn't easy all the time, and you had to strike up a conversation. And so I wonder if you skip all that and you just, hey, we match online, and then we just meet up. You still have to figure out stuff to say, but there's less involved in that.
And so I wonder if there ultimately would result from that less grace in society. Like, people either feel like they have to be more perfect all the time or expect people to be more perfect all the time because you've already been matched, or just that there isn't an opportunity.
You go up. If somebody says, hey, yeah, you pointed to it like, yeah, you're not the one for me, because of this reason or that reason. It's like, all right, well, for you, you have to keep moving on, and you can't then become trigger shy or whatever. You have to learn how to deal with that. And the person who said that to you, while that might be cold also, that was to your benefit, like, okay, well, then I personally can move on. I don't have to sit here and pine about this anymore. I can go on to the next one. And so a lot of that motivated.
[00:51:49] Speaker B: Me to get a much nicer bike.
[00:51:51] Speaker A: Hey, man, that's why you're such a big success now.
Never again.
[00:51:56] Speaker B: Yeah, but got me a Schwinn mongoose.
[00:52:02] Speaker A: And so I think that one, my concern would be that I've heard young people say, oh, well, the aversion to talking to people that they don't already know, that could be shyness, or that could be. I don't know if that you point that as a change in society or just shyness. It could just be a person who's shy. So I'm not going to take that as just what everybody's feeling. But I do wonder, and I think it's a fair question to ask, that when everything is curated for you. Like you pointed out with the algorithm, you might never get a chance to know what you like, because all you're going to be presented with is what an algorithm thinks that you eat based on your certain characteristics you should like, based on what other people in similar situations to you like, or something like that. And so there's an experience aspect that it seems like it might narrow, and not for nothing, it seems like the way that the algorithm would set it up is that you would become to need it like that. You would need that, and that you kind of lose the ability to do it, to be discerning without it. And so that would be my concern. And that the companies have already started going down this path where they're doing stuff that is deceptive and it isn't in your best interest to try to better monetize you shows that they're not above that. And so it could become kind of a black hole that you get lost in, and their goal is to keep you there forever. You never get married. You just stay in the dating app for 30 years and whatever. So something to watch out for. But I agree with you. The market is really the place that.
[00:53:43] Speaker B: Needs to deal with it, or they'll just get married people to go on the dating apps and really screw up their personal lives. But that's a whole different discussion.
[00:53:51] Speaker A: Wasn't there one a few years back?
There was something where it was like a dating app for married people. I can't remember the name.
[00:53:58] Speaker B: I know, you're right. I think there was, but then it got hacked. Yeah, I remember.
Luckily we weren't on there.
Pretty sure my wife would have been the first one on that thing. Scrutinizing if I should go and ask her, like, hey, a couple of years ago, did you go look through all the 38,000 names just to do a search for me?
No, but it's interesting because I think that it's just interesting how this all is an offshoot of our real life, in a sense, because the impact of industry and our happiness. So I was thinking, like the article makes the case that kind of people are going to these data sites and they feel miserable. And then I'm thinking about all the conversations we've had of regular social media, how people are just miserable and their amounts of depression and the suicide attempts and all that by young people.
And then I read an article this morning, a totally test, separate topic, but about how ultra processed foods they're finding now affect our mood, screw up because of the microbiome. And I'm selling. Okay, so now we're eating food that's making us miserable, we're consuming media and Internet stuff that's making us miserable. And I'm just thinking like, it's an interesting model. I'm not going to criticize it because I don't even understand the complexity of it. But we seem to have created a whole economy and kind of ecosystem that is based on wealth generation through misery.
I'm not going to say that an automaker or someone like that is making people. I'm just saying this, the way we consume a lot of things now makes us miserable.
[00:55:36] Speaker A: It's not pure misery. That's a really good point, but it's not pure misery. I think you can trace this back to big tobacco. There's a certain level of. I need this in order to.
You need your daily hit, make it through the day? Yeah. No, so I think you need your daily hit. And so it makes you miserable. Except that first moment when you get the brain chemistry kind of pump, when you first hit the cigarette, or when you first eat that chip, or when you first fire up your newsfeed. That's what it's really doing. And it's intentional. It's like, okay, yeah, like you were talking about the other day. It's a hack of your brain in the same way big tobacco, they figured out they were chemically working on what to put in the cigarettes to make it so it gives you the maximal addictive qualities and everything. And then we know the food companies have been doing that.
[00:56:26] Speaker B: Yeah, just like McDonald's with food.
[00:56:28] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And now the social media companies are doing the same thing. It's like maximum, you need me. And your brain is not right except for that first moment. Just like a drug. That first high, you're chasing that first high. You're chasing the initial high that you get when you first pick it up, when you put it down again. All you want is that initial high again. And so, yeah, that the dating apps would become this or going in this direction is alarming. But there is, as you're talking, that.
[00:56:58] Speaker B: Just makes me feel all those problems created by all these different industries. And then we've got that. As I said in the part one, this big black box called our healthcare sector and industry that's there just to clean it all up for us and sell us a bunch of stuff or.
[00:57:12] Speaker A: At least make us oblivious to it. Whether they clean it up or we.
[00:57:16] Speaker B: Just throw, we don't even feel it to fix it.
[00:57:19] Speaker A: But I think we can wrap from there. I think we lost the grip.
[00:57:23] Speaker B: No wonder why.
But on a serious note, no wonder why our economy just keeps growing no.
[00:57:28] Speaker A: Matter everyone's, no matter what's happening.
[00:57:30] Speaker B: Yeah, it's like, well, that's why. Because the more miserable we get, the more profitable, the more GDP we could produce. This actually is an interesting formula. I just got to figure out how to get out of the middle of that and just own all the stocks of all these companies. So that's my next move. Yes.
[00:57:43] Speaker A: The wealth manager, for sure.
[00:57:45] Speaker B: Yes. How to stop being a consumer.
[00:57:49] Speaker A: But I think we can wrap from there. We appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of call. Like I see it, subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review it, tell us what you think. Send it to a friend. Till next time. I'm James Keys.
[00:57:58] Speaker B: I'm Tunde Oman.
[00:57:59] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk to you next time.
