YouSaid · the spoken record

Christian Rudder

lines on the record
74
first
2016-10-11
most recent
2016-10-11
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1
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podcast

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  1. “I wouldn't say everywhere, but certainly with that example for sure, as I was saying, you ask guys what they want and they say they are looking for women roughly their same age a few years on either side and then they go out and do what you just described for race you know people You almost universally say race is not a factor in who they think is attractive or interracial dating is great if you ask people, but they go out and act. It's like not in my backyard type of attitude with interracial dating, for example, where people will profess to say that it's fine, but they themselves do not want to do it generally. Yeah, you do see that quite a bit. I mean, it's not, people don't know themselves, I think. There's also social desirability bias where they don't want to look bad to even a computer questionnaire.”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And I think that's what's going on. That's not the best explanation of it. It's hard to talk about this stuff without speaking in kind of broad and generally like macho terms. Just for your listeners, I talk like this because online dating is driven by guys approaching women. 90% of the activity on the site is driven by men. First contacts, ratings, all that stuff. Men are the initiators offline as well, but I think especially online, where for whatever reason women just approach online dating a lot more passively than guys do. And so, you know, when I'm talking about guys hitting on girls and all this stuff, the straight male drives like 80 to 90% of the traffic on a dating site.”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “We did find that. I mean, it's definitely lower than just the power of having a lot of people really like you, but we did find that just everything else being equal, having more people dislike you strongly slightly helps the amount of attention you get. I have no idea why my operating theory would be that like, you know, everybody has a sense of what everybody else is, what the general perception of a person is going to be. I can see somebody and I might not find her really attractive, but I have a good sense at like, oh, I bet a bunch of guys think she's hot or whatever, you know, and I think what happens is if you see somebody that you're into and you think that there are a lot of people that are not for a certain type of person, it's like, well, it's a turn on. It's kind of like a white knight effect, I guess, where you're like a lot of people aren't going to be into this girl. My message is going to be the one I'm going to find that diamond in the rough. I'm going to come in there and say, yeah, I really think you're beautiful. You probably don't implied you don't hear this that often.”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Meet you in person, presumably, and date you or whatever. So the more variants you have in your look, the better you do. And so an example of a thing that people, and our users have kind of realized this. And I think this is something that people intuitively know in general. You know, you can do, you have tattoos is a kind of very easy example. There's lots of people who think tattoos are super hot. There are lots of people who think tattoos are just not for them. They don't want to date somebody with a ton of tattoos. That works super well. Nose rings, piercings, that kind of thing. crazy looking hair, blue hair, you know, whatever, a buzz cut on a woman, for example, or really long hair on a guy, maybe. You know, it's almost like you want the people who are predisposed to like you to really like you. And everybody else, you don't even care. They might as well hate you, essentially, to use kind of extreme terms in terms of your dating outcomes. And so we found that, say, a five out of ten that has a high degree of variance gets the same amount of attention as, say, a conventionally attractive seven or eight.”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Sure, sure. I mean, generally speaking, the better looking you are, the better you do on a dating site for sure. I assume with a high degree of confidence that's also true in real life, right? The better you do romantically. But within a group of people who all are the same amount of good-lookingness, so kind of like ISO attractiveness band, the people who exhibit the highest variance in their appeal do by far better. And by variance, I mean you have, say, Europe 5 out of 10. It is better to have half the people think you're a nine and half the people think you're a one than it is to have everyone think you're a five. And that's obviously the most extreme amount of variance. I have half the people think you're extremely good looking and half the people think you're repulsive. Because what we found is that it's almost like an activation energy required in terms of someone approaching you or wanting to actually”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Warts on the especially the male, but in general the human psyche that you have to grapple with and kind of try your best to rectify or smooth out so that the site will function. Because obviously these 20-year-old women don't want to hear from any 45-year-old guys. Right. And we've got to make everybody happy running OKCupid.”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “What women tell us thereafter, which coincidentally is the same thing men tell us that they're after. They want someone near their same age. So women, 25 year old woman will say she's looking for a 25-year-old guy, or she'll say she's looking for a 25-year-old guy. And then lo and behold, that's the age of guy she thinks is most attractive. 30-year-old woman thinks 30-year-old guys are most attractive. And that's also who she told us she would think was most attractive. And so on, kind of up that diagonal, 45-year-old women, maybe a little bit younger, but still right around their same age. Whereas, again, guys, a 35-year-old guy will tell us, oh, yeah, you know, I would love a woman who's 30, 32, 33, 34. That's what he says on the site, goes through, it's all 20 year olds. So this is something that you kind of have to wrestle with. One of the many sort of challenges of running a dating site, there's all these kind of...”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Always pursue the kind of the youngest woman in the group of women that they're presented with. And so, you know, if a 20-year-old guys think 20-year-old women are the hottest, that makes sense. 25-year-old guys think 20-year-old women are the hottest, 40, 45-year-old guys think 20-year-old women are the hottest. And, you know, like, it's not exactly an earth-shattering conclusion. You can open a magazine and see all the models are very young. movie stars, certainly female movie stars, there's a huge youth skew there, you know, but it is interesting to see it play out in the real world in terms of the decisions like actual online daters are making in their ratings of people, in how they contact guys basically go after the youngest women period.”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “He says at some point, and doesn't confuse that, that's what I love about high school girls, man. I keep getting older, but they stay the same age. And that viewpoint is basically, at least in the data, the viewpoint of collected maleness in general. Like guys, no matter the age, always.”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Some of the trends, sure. Maybe a fun Oh man, Waterson's lie. Yeah, okay. Well, that Wooderson in question here is Wooderson from Dazed and Confused, which is actually the reason I moved to Austin for those few months anyway because that movie.”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Oh, in the book? Well, I had one color to work with. That's what they told me. And given that, you know, like it's almost chooses itself, like blue is too close to black, green is just kind of weird. And again, it's still dark among the kind of warmer colors. Yellow is too light. Orange, like, I mean, the red is a little bit orangey, but, you know, it's surprisingly easy to settle on red. And it just kind of like, I mean, also Tufty is an inspiration here. He uses the one color for endpoints on a spark lines and stuff like this in some of his books. So I was like, I'll just use this red, basically.”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “No, I just did it. You just made it work. Yeah. You just get in there, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, some of those things I used using the actual grid rather than a chart. You know, I would use the grid and they're kind of like heat mapping ability for the different cells. Yeah, I spent a lot of time in general with that stuff. And all the graphs on the blog were done in Excel, sometimes with JavaScript overlays that I would write so they would animate and stuff. You know, this is like 2009, 10. There were basically no charting tools kind of off the shelf charting tools or out of the box charting tools. So I just made everything up. So yeah. And we're doing the blog and certainly the book and this can credit Tufty for like I really wanted to get away from like the infographic feel where everything is like super designed and there's just tons of like illustrations and everything looks very nice and that kind of.”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I just kind of crunched everything just using basically the raw materials. I don't ever use things like chart bead or mixed panel or any of that stuff. I don't know.”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “That's Sure. I mean, well, like I said earlier, I was a math major. I didn't actually take a statistics class. I was mostly into algebra and kind of more abstract stuff. You know, a lot of the statistics and data analysis is not like rocket science. In fact, the more rocket sciencey it gets, the kind of like that usually implies the worse your data actually is. So at OKCube, we never had to bring those tools to bear. But I use SQL, OKCubid uses SQL to store the data. I would use a little bit of Python or I would have first more sophisticated things I would have programmers write a little script for me or I would just take a raw dump and put it into Excel, you know, Excel can hold. Well, it can hold about a million rows, but you have 500,000 with some room to breathe. So I did a lot of that in Excel just because I've been using Excel, that very first software program report engine was originally built as this like really arcane set of Excel macros. So I love that program. So I did a lot of it in Excel. Everything else is pretty much homespun. I mean, we...”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, I really tried to get away from that model of here's an academic finding and here's this kind of quirky example of it in practice that we found in that one factory in Idaho. So because I knew that I had my own data to mine and I understood it probably better than anybody in the world. Especially writing about online data in general, but specifically data from a dating site. It's just so inherently interesting. I feel like I had to take advantage of that myself.”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Exactly. My role actually at OK Cubit was at least those first from, say, my first half of my OK Cuba time was very similar where I was just writing stuff. That would make people realize that okay, Cubit existed in the same way I was writing stuff at SparkNote that made people realize Spark Notes existed. So I would work on the product and do a little bit of programming here and there, but nothing serious. It's a good training.”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Those years from 2004 to say 2008 or 9 was maybe three months out of the year I was on tour. Yeah, it was my, you know, we weren't paying ourselves for a qubit at that point. So it was like my full-time, my only real job at that point.”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Was big enough on its own at that point. Anyway, so I left SparkNotes in 2002. We started OK, Cupid in 2003. Really right around the same time that I started the band Bishop Allen. Kind of did both of those things at once. The first few years were more Bishop Allen than OK Cupid. And then once I started writing the blog for OKCupid, where we kind of took all our data and analyzed it, had some kind of... Cool graphs about race and sex and attraction and all that stuff. That was about 2009, then I just kind of was full time okay Cupid until I left OKCupid in 2015.”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I mean, you're 31, right? So this is way before you ever would have used it. It used to be the Spark and Spark Notes as two separate URLs. The Spark was like the stuff that brought people to SparkNotes. It was kind of a genius plan, which I didn't think of, so I can say that. It was like the Spark had tons of time wasting stuff, like things to read, dumb tests to take, all of this kind of thing, toys, web toys. that would appeal to high school and college students. So they would pass all these things around, waste their time not study while they're playing around on the spark lo and behold, hey student who hasn't studied check out our new product SparkNotes, which when I joined, I think only had Hamlet and maybe Macbeth. So only had two guides. We offered Spark Notes to kind of like solve the problem that we had created. And Spark Notes took off. And later they shut down the Spark after I left because it was kind of one of these things me and my friend and OKCuba co-founder Chris Coyne. We wrote everything and as soon as we were gone there was kind of no point to continue with Spark.”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And make basically viral content. The Spark was one of the few places. That was making viral stuff back then. We had like the first online purity test. I mean, this is like, you know, this is like Paleolithic internet times, basically, you know.”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Didn't even pull away. Like, we weren't even that ahead of the game. This was like 98. So you entered in from statements what was going on in an account and it made all these really nice reports and charts and stuff actually a lot like how dataclim ended up to kind of tie the room together so to speak so we did that we really didn't know what we were doing we sold a few copies of it but you know unquestionably a failure didn't really go anywhere and then i moved to austin where i was there for like three months and my main job was baking bread at this place texas french bread but while i was there this was like 90 spring of 99 so this was like the heyday of like internet boomtown i applied for a bunch of random.com jobs and one of them was uh for the spark.com aka spark notes um i got that job i sent in some writing samples they hired me it turns out i knew they were also harvard guys and i knew them one of them from math class i was a math major and but i was hired to be a comedy writer essentially”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Well, when I came out of school, I was actually working. I had started this, I won't even call it a software company, but I wrote this program with my friend called Report Engine, which was like for stock brokers. It was like a random idea, like a girlfriend's dad at the time was a stockbroker and he needed something and I made it. It was”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I mean, it'll be hard to kind of connect it into a whole theory or a whole story. I mean, I guess I was a founder of OKCupid, which is a dating site. That's probably the kind of tentpole of my life, I guess. I was also the main songwriter in a band called Bishop Allen also played in the band. I was one of the people who helped make spark notes. I wasn't a founder, but joined very early on, which is spark notes are like study guides, kind of modern-day cliffs notes, I guess. And I wrote cataclysm, as you know. And I guess I did that not chronologically.”

    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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    2016-10-11 · Invest Like the Best · Christian Rudder – The Quantified Self - [Invest Like the Best, EP.05] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source