But Bernie was the one who swiped and matched with her and put her at the top of my inbox. So this was facilitated by an AI.

That girl is now Justin's girlfriend who he's been with for three years, and he has Bernie to thank for it. He wasn't the only one either. Justin says that Bernie AI was pretty accurate. Basically most people were accepting the matches that Bernie made for them. But ultimately in June 2017, Bernie AI shutdown after Tinder kicked them off the platform.

Would I start another Bernie again? My answer is no. Like I said I believe I solved my own problem when it came to online dating, and I'm quite happy with the person I'm with and I think that was my biggest success out of it.

Hi, I'm Claire Evans and well I'm not opposed to it. I did not meet my partner with the help of AI. Welcome to the first episode of You, a podcast about the intersection of technology, humanity and identity brought to you by Okta. This is our first season. We're taking a look at artificial intelligence, virtual reality and blockchain, and how they're changing the way we relate to ourselves and to one another. We're talking science, art, philosophy, and music with some super interesting people and we'll hear all about the amazing, terrifying and downright weird thins we have to look forward to as technology becomes more and more intertwined with our lives.

So let's get started. Today we're talking about love in the time of technology. We're diving deep into dating apps. We're sliding straight into your DMs and we're using AI to calculate the algorithm of your heart. I actually met my first boyfriend online. It was 1998 and we were pen pals on a Weezer message board, I'm a little ashamed to say, we made plans to meet up in real life in southern California where he lived, and my parents blessedly allowed me to do that even though the prospect of meeting someone online back in those days was genuinely terrifying. And I imagine much more terrifying to parents of teenagers, but we met and he wasn't a murderer, but he was a bad boyfriend.

Since my early online dating days it's fair to say things have gotten a bit more extreme, from dating apps to sexting to fertility trackers, nowadays our love lives are inextricably sinked to our computers. On the positive side it's easier than ever to find a date, but at what cost, what do we gain from all these rapid advancements in the pursuit of love and sex and everything in between, and what have we lost? To find out how things have changed since my long ago message board days, I decided to talk with a dating and relationship expert. A quick editorial note since we recorded this interview, Doctor Jess Carbino has left Bumble and struck out on her own.

Hello. I am Doctor Jess Carbino and I am the sociologist for Bumble. My job at Bumble is to understand how people who are using the app interact with it, and is informing all areas of the app, whether it be product marketing, press, and all of the different strategies that go into making the experience for people using Bumble the best it can possibly be.

How did you get into this?

I was studying for my PhD at UCLA in Sociology in 2009 and I was 23 years old at the time, and I didn't know a single person who lived in the greater LA area other than the 10 other people in my cohort. And I really wanted to find somebody and date. So like every nice Jewish girl, I signed up for dating and I was fascinated by how people were presenting, what people were saying about themselves, what they thought would be meaningful and attractive in trying to find a potential partner. And I told my dissertation chair that I wanted to study this empirically, and people thought at the time that I was sort of insane. I understood that it would be a challenge to try to go about collecting this data as a PhD student who had no street cred at the time.

But fortunately I was able ultimately to connect with somebody and to get data to do my dissertation. And ultimately I got to my first job at Tinder, which was able to launch my career.

Wow. So what kind of data were you looking to collect when you were doing your dissertation?

I wanted everything, as a scientist you want all of the data because if you have limited data then there are all these unanswered questions, that could be affecting the outcomes of your studies. So in exchange for helping this startup company, which is now defunct, I told them that I would help them with their algorithm, develop the sociological underpinnings of how they were trying to create connections between people.

What were you hoping to find out? I mean, was there a big question that was driving this research?

What do men and women want? I think that's the question that fundamentally motivates not only my research, but most people's pursuits generally. How do we find somebody to spend our lives with? How do we find somebody who we're attracted to? What makes us attractive and what do people want and what do they desire? And I think it's really consistent and I think there's a lot of variants across people as well.

Is what people say they want the same as what they actually want?

It's difficult to know whether or not people's preferences, or stage preferences match up with reality, because some of the things that they claim they want are not necessarily universally applicable to every person. So for example, you could say you want to be with somebody that's fun or smart or interesting or that you think is funny, but most people are not Robin Williams. I think most people would objectively agree that Robin Williams is very funny, but I think that I'm really funny, but I'm sure that there are many people who do not find my sense of humor to be quite up their alley.

So I think that most people have an idea of certain things that they want and they know what they look like. That said, people don't always necessarily attract the right people or go after the right people, they may be attracted to things that are not necessarily healthy for them.

Do you think that dating apps have affected the way that we perceive ourselves?

Well, I think that people may think about how they are doing in the dating market, based upon how they are doing on an online dating app. I think online dating also if people are thoughtful about it, gives them the opportunity to really think about who they are and what they want. The question is are people capable of thinking about that in a very deep and probative way, and I think that some people are and I think some people aren't, but I then think that many people are not very self aware and many people are not good at self reflection. So I think that if you are self aware and pretty reflective that you're able to use online dating as a tool to reflect upon who you are.

There's definitely a lot of reasons why I think that online dating apps have complicated the dating scene, but certainly one way that they've made it easier for someone like me who doesn't like to approach people in bars, or on the street or whatever. I just for whatever reason I just don't really feel comfortable doing that. It's made it a lot easier to meet sort of like minded people, and I guess vet them before you actually go on a date with them.

I really hate online dating, I don't think I'm alone in this. It's just really uncomfortable sometimes, I hate swiping. Swiping is the worst, you're making all of these quick judgments about people and I never know if I'm doing it right. Like what if I swipe on my soul mate because they had the wrong photo up, or what if someone swipes left on me because I had the wrong photo up. It just seems as though there are so many chances to do it wrong.

I met my boyfriend on online dating, so I guess I'm kind of for it, but I don't know. I feel like I would vibe with a lot of people online who then I just knew within five minutes of meeting we're like not gonna work out. And I actually got to the point after a couple of years of this, just being frustrated where I would suggest to meet halfway on the subway platform, and then if we didn't like each other, we would both just get back on the subway and go home and not even like waste our time on a date.

So I think there's a perception that dating and the dating process has changed a great deal over the last 10 years. Would you say that that's an accurate perception? I mean, has dating really changed? I mean is having a profile on something like Bumble really that much different than having a personal ad in the classifieds?

Well, it's super interesting. My mother actually was an executive at a dating company that helped people create video personals and she really enjoyed the process, and I watched her as a seven year old, going through the videos seeing what she thought would work, what she thought wouldn't work and making comments to herself. And I think to me as well, that this person wasn't doing very well, this person was doing well. And I think it was something that helped me really understand and appreciate self presentation from a very young age, at least in the romantic context.

But I think over time we've always been engaged in the process of self presentation, whether it was by ourselves or by a proxy, our families. So they may have been presented to somebody through a sister, a brother, a matchmaker or what have you, but we've always had a representative or a proxy for most of us to find a connection. Obviously we are doing that ourselves now, but I think that we've always been constructing new identity of sorts. Whether or not it's an identity that's consistent with reality, but at least it's consistent with the reality of that we are presenting ourselves or somebody is presenting ourselves in the manner that's most potentially appealing to another individual.

How have dating apps changed the way that we date and how do you think our ideas of love, and romance evolved since the inception of dating apps?

I think there have been really broad changes in how we think about partnership over the past 30, 40 years. So many scholars like Andy Cherlynn have talked about the idea of an all fulfilling relationship, a relationship in which people have to be fulfilled sexually, emotionally, spiritually, financially in all aspects of relationship. I find it highly unrealistic that people are going to find all types of emotional, intellectual, spiritual stimulation, I think historically scholars have posited that there are these two versions of love. Romantic love, which is what we consume in film, television, music, etcetera.

And it's based upon mythology, the idea of one true love existing, the idea of love at first sight, all of these myths that we consider to be very true and valid, but at the same time there's this more prosaic view of love that is involving the ideas of what we consume through our own everyday experiences, whether that be our own personal relationships or the relationships that we observe, our family, friends, etcetera. And that those two views are sort of melded together when people are going out and making choices regarding romantic partnership.

I have posited that there's a third view, which is sort of a market logic of approaching love and how individuals, while they have these two views in their mind and they inform what they do, that they're more embedded in a marketplace. They are able to understand how they stack up relative to other single individuals in their area, and that they act in an efficient manner and are informed by these ideas. It's an efficient market that works well because if you were in a major metropolitan area, and you're a young person between the ages of 25 and 40, there are hundreds of thousands of people available to you via your phone who potentially could be a match for you.

So I think the idea of online dating in terms of how it's informed our view of love, is that it's made the market logic of love, far more real and meaningful because it's literally at our fingertips.

Do you think that that market logic forces us to be competitive against one another?

I don't think it's made us more competitive because I think that women and men have always been to a certain degree, competitive when it comes to mate choice. I don't believe it's made us more competitive, I think it brought us more inward because it's a very solitary activity for most people.

Today on You, we've been talking about love, what we look for, how we find it, how we keep it, and how technology affects it for better or worse. We're going to take a quick break from our conversation with Doctor Jess Carbino by taking things back, and looking at how an old school method of dating is getting a 21st century update.

A quick brown fox. Me, 28 trained in nuance, good with tools in the kitchen, getting to the heart of it, you flirtatious, gender playful, big on culture. Ready to use your hands. We go to tide pools to readings, to bed. Let's be weird, curious, humane.

That was the personal ad that Aku Ammah-Tagoe submitted to an Instagram account called @_personals_ earlier this year, as in the retro kind of personal ads that people wrote decades before Tinder even existed. The kind that's all words with no photos, no matching, no swiping, the kind that thousands of people are still writing today. Thanks to a woman named Kelly Rakowski. A few years ago, Kelly stumbled on a magazine from the eighties and nineties called On Our Backs, and she was instantly obsessed, but it was the final few pages that captivated Kelly the most. It was an entire section dedicated to personal ads written by lesbians looking for love, sex and everything in between.

What struck me most were how witty people were her and how explicit in their desires, they knew exactly what they wanted and how to define themselves, and how to define who they were looking for but also well written and fun. These women knew who they were and weren't afraid to talk about it.

So Kelly decided to recreate it for the modern age, and well she didn't have any big expectations for personals when she launched the account, it quickly gained a following. At the moment it has over 54,000 followers. Here's an ad titled Mizrahi Babe. Curly, 29, Persian-American, Mizrahi Jew from the Bay to New York City. Sweet as Baklava, Cacti-mom, nineties hip hop lover, solid brows, visual thinker, yoga and urban explorer. In search of a companion for laughs, hikes, coffee-grindin', museum-hoppin', final-poppin' and an appreciation for discovering beauty in all forms. New York City.

Compared to the behemoths of online dating personals feels slow, almost quaint rather than having to make a snap judgment based entirely on looks, on personals what you see first is text. The idea is that you're getting out of that personal ad exactly what its author intended. It's up front. You know right away what kind of relationships someone is looking for or what they're looking for in a potential partner. Then it goes to show that in a world of what can sometimes feel like infinite options, infinite apps, infinite potential partners, there's always room for one more and regardless of which app or site or account you pick, the challenges are still the same.

How do I present myself? Who do I want the world to see? Who am I trying to find? Back to my conversation with dating and relationship expert, Doctor Jess Carbino. Do you think that the volume of choice, I mean the fact that if you set your radius, you can essentially be swiping through essentially limitless list of potential suitors. Has that made things more complicated than perhaps in earlier times when we only had access to members of our immediate community?

I actually don't agree that more choice is actually better in the context of romantic relationships, because I think that the type of choice that we're making when selecting a romantic partner is very different. Unless you're allergic to strawberries, having a strawberry jam for breakfast probably won't affect you throughout the day, but selecting a romantic partner who is not a good choice for you, will have a very long impact not only on your life, but the life of your children, your financial well being, your overall physical and emotional wellbeing for years. I like to take people through this exercise because my data actually also indicate that when people who are dating online, are finding somebody who they really like, that they're far more likely to commit to them than somebody who's dating offline.

They say that once they meet somebody, they're more likely to commit than someone who dates offline. And I think this is why, there are a lot of choices that are available on these apps, but they're not all equal choices. So let's say an individual swipes on a hundred people in a given day, let's say that they swipe right on 10 of the 100 people, which is a very realistic number. Then of the 10 people that they swipe right on, they match with five of those people and then of the five that they have swiped right on, who also swiped right on them, they go out with two of those people and then they only end up liking one person, and only one person likes them back.

So while in theory you have had a hundred people that theoretically could be choices, only one choice actually worked out because you were only interested in one choice that was also interested in you. So I think that this idea of endless choice is completely and totally empty because it's not how the market actually operates. So when find data to me that I've done through conducting nationally representative surveys that says to me, people who date online are more likely once they find somebody to commit, than people who date offline, I believe it because they're visualizing the market.

They know that while there are a hundred people, only one of them actually worked versus the one person dating offline, who can just speculate about the woman walking down the street and walking into whole foods and say, “Well maybe she'll like me.” That's not realistic.

Yeah, but there's nothing rational about love, right? I mean, people are going to make non empirical judgements based on their experiences.

I think that there is a degree of rationale for love, which is what my market logic suggests that we do maximize, and we make choices and we make compromises. And I think that you yourself are in a longterm relationship, I am sure that you make compromises, I make compromises all the time. My fiance definitely would tell you he makes compromises all the time. And I think that actually people who are good at relationships are highly rational because if the things that my fiance did at times and the things I do to my fiance at times, anybody will look at that and say, "Well that's stupid." But I understand the underpinnings of why he behaves the way he behaves, because I am a rational actor.

Some of the things I do are irrational, but I'm able to process things rationally.

Good relationships are all about compromise obviously. And that's a thing that I am glad to hear you say because I have this impression as an outsider looking at dating apps, that it's sort of a process that has quantified our relations to one another to such an extent that people expect every single one of their notes to be hit. They want to have the best possible, most efficient, most like well tailored to them partnering. Like there's a sense of entitlement or something that has emerged from the process, but you're saying that's not the case. So it's somewhat reassuring to me.

I tell people that they're allowed to pick three things that really matter to them, and to look for those three things and then go out with people who match those three things that you think are really, really important to you.

It's really nice to think that when we let go of this obsession with finding the perfect mate, we also give ourselves the freedom to not be perfect. Right? I mean it works in both directions.

Oh a 100%, a good romantic partnership really helps you to understand what's wrong with you, and what is not good about you and what you should work on to improve. I really think that that's one of the most beautiful things about a real romantic relationship, is that it helps you to evaluate who you are when you're trying to evaluate somebody else.

Well, I met both of my longest term boyfriends online, one on Tinder and one on Bumble, and I definitely had people try to make me feel weird about it or embarrassed about it, but the way I see it, meeting someone online is really no different from meeting them in a bar. It's no more or less shallow, it's no more or less random. Both things are just kind of meeting up, seeing how it goes and you can either drop it or you can keep and meet the love of your life. Who knows?

Most people I know under the age of 40 who have a significant other, they found them through some sort of app, but I found that it doesn't really work. I don't really make a connection with people whenever I do that, like I go on dates and eventually I just don't want them to exist anymore. So I find that the best way to do it is the old fashioned way in person meeting people, like with meet cutes or however you want to describe it, but a to each his own.

I really think I landed dates simply by writing with proper grammar and full sentences. A female friend actually once showed me their OkCupid inbox and it was really overwhelming, it seemed like it would be difficult to stand out, but somehow I was getting about a date every other week, which didn't seem too bad to me. Later my wife, whom I met on OkCupid told me that my good grammar stood out and was important for getting that first date.

I'm curious to know about some of your research findings when you describe working with focus groups and looking at data. I mean, what are some of the most surprising things that have come to you through these processes?

People are really bad at presenting themselves. It's shocking actually how bad people are at determining what makes them interesting and what makes them appealing to other people. So because there are so many people dating online, I think that people often have a difficult time presenting themselves and standing out, and they often go towards what I like to call this safety and interest for approach. Whereby they're not saying anything unique about themselves, but rather being completely and totally vanilla in their profile so as to not necessarily alienate people. But I think that they're doing themselves more harm than good because everybody is seemingly the same. I do so many focus groups where women and men are constantly telling me that men talk about the same thing in their online dating profiles.

And the data to me indicate that as well, they're very consistent beings, and while most of us are pretty mundane and uninteresting people in terms of what we like to do in our free time, most people are not that aberrant in their behavior. Most people watch Netflix, most people go to the movies, most people like to have dinner with their friends, most people like to listen to podcasts. Most people like live music, that doesn't make somebody super interesting. It just makes them relatively general. And I obviously understand that not everybody is a Nobel Laureate and can advertise that about themselves.

I'm not a Nobel Laureate but-

Yet.

Oh I don't think ... They don't have a sociology field so it's a problem. But the thing is everybody has a special story about themselves that makes them unique. I think in online dating you have to stand out because there ... As you've mentioned so much competition out there, we may not necessarily be internalizing it, but it exists.

In the past couple of years we've witnessed, obviously we've talked about this, a big shift in the way that the societal norms around dating work and then sort of normalization of online platforms. But I would be interested to know what your speculations for the future are. I mean say five years from now, what does Bumble look like? What does online dating look like?

I think about this a lot because that obviously is how you stay alive and how you stay relevant as a company. And as a scholar, I think about it all the time. And I think a lot of people are moving towards video. I don't know how that would work, I think that if people have a hard time presenting themselves in a blank space, how are they going to do in a video? I read a really interesting script a few years ago from somebody who talked about the idea of people going to sleep, and being able to date in their dreams and that was absolutely fascinating, the idea that you were able to go on a dream date. It was a program that you put on headset, and you were able to visualize your date through your dreams.

And go on a date through your dreams and the idea of going to sleep and the anxiety associated with going to sleep, and wondering if they would want to go on a date with you. I mean I already have enough problems going to sleep. I wouldn't want to think about that. But it's really interesting to think about how artificial intelligence will really influence that idea. The idea that you could be at home and going on a date rather than meeting in person, that would really be sad to me because there's so much that you learn about somebody in person that I don't believe artificial intelligence would be to give you.

Obviously it will be able to feel like you're in the room, but there's smell, there's pheromones, there's touch. And obviously you could theoretically touch somebody in AI, but it wouldn't feel the same. And I think that that would be sad and problematic. That's said I probably will end up working for our company and like 10 years that's doing that. And so for that point, they should disregard this interview obviously. But I think that there are so many technologies that I think that will try to integrate and just move forward. And that's really what we've seen through all technology in terms of how dating has evolved with technology.

Obviously in the 19th century there were personal ads that continued through the 80s, and then there was video and then there was chat rooms, and then there were sites, and now there are apps. So I think the next tech ... I think that dating will follow the next technological wave. I see it as this evolution, I think that AI probably will be the next step.

That was Doctor Jess Carbino, a dating and relationship expert and former sociologists for Tinder and Bumble. This is You, a podcast brought to you by Okta and I'm Claire Evans. Thanks so much to our guests. Doctor Jess Carbino, Kelly Rakowski, the Aku Ammah-Tagoe and Justin Long for joining us. In episode two we'll be talking about family and how the Internet is changing what that means. Don't forget to subscribe, share, and please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.