I'm a correspondent at NBC News, but I'm so excited about our panel today and this conversation. It's going to be such an interesting one. I am joined here on stage by Arthur C. Brooks, William Henry Bloomberg Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School and the author of many books including the latest, The Meaning of Your Life. And I'm also joined by Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder and CEO at Bumble Inc. Thank you both for being here.
This is just so interesting because what we're really going to talk about today, as the title of this panel suggests, is the science of love, which you have just partnered on. A lot of new science that just got published yesterday in this fantastic white paper. But what's so interesting about it, really to go back to the beginning, Whitney, is to really invest in people finding love, connecting with each other, and importantly, as we're going to discuss, connecting in person means ultimately they're getting off your app, which is a little counterintuitive given what your business is. Take us back to what you identified as an issue that made you want to seek a partnership like this one.
Well, he's brilliant obviously, and for those of you that don't know him personally, also extremely funny apparently. Tears from laughter were flowing moments ago. Laughing, crying all morning. So listen, I think we're at this moment that everyone thinks that they've been on things like social media, which are much more antisocial than we realize. And we're at the intersection of every morning waking up to these videos of people introducing their AI boyfriends and girlfriends to their parents, and this is a big problem. We cannot allow society to go down that rabbit hole. And I think when you look at all of the research and all of the work that you have done, happiness really does come down to who we share our life with. So we really embarked on this partnership in an effort to help better enable people getting offline into the real world. There's definitely this mindset from more of the investor community that says, 'Well, if they're successful, they lose their members, and how is this a good business?' But what's so powerful, and we were just talking about this, is this KPI of real love. That's the most powerful flywheel for growth, because when you go to a Bumble wedding, where you meet this happy couple, and they have found this amazing life through the person they met on Bumble, what is a more powerful flywheel or proof of success or reason to join than that? So that's kind of the background. We want to help people find real love. So, take it away, Arthur.
How bad were you, quickly, were you seeing the problem of like dating app burnout?
No, it's a real problem. And actually just yesterday we teased — because we haven't released the new product yet — but we teased that we are actually ending the swipe for our product. So this is a RIP to swiping for us. It's been a good run, but our time is done. And we are going to release a new product, which Arthur — we can't talk about it too much — but gave us the stamp of approval, which means more than most people realize. And really the goal of this new product is to get people from that first interaction to meeting in real life more seamlessly and in a more compatible, healthy, safe way. And we think it's going to be transformational. We're excited.
Okay, so let's talk about the partnership. First, who called who? How'd this come to be?
Oh, I made the first move. Because on Bumble, the woman makes the first move.
And what did she say when she said she wanted to work together?
Well, when our teams actually started talking to each other, there was a natural affinity for it for exactly the reasons that Whitney was just talking about. So, in life, there's two big kinds of problems that we face. And it sounds like we're splitting hairs here, but we're not. There's complicated problems, which are based on facts and information and analysis and algorithms, and there's complex problems, which you'll never solve, you can only live with, and those are the things you care about the most. How to get the work with your GPS is a complicated problem. How to build a toaster is a complicated problem. How to stay married is a complex problem. Trust me, I've been married for 35 years, very, very complex. And so, the truth is, what we care about is the complex stuff that you can't solve ever. You can't solve it with an algorithm, and that's what tech has been getting wrong when we talk about the things that we care about the most. So, if we go back to social media in 2008, 2009, the promise was this is going to solve loneliness. But that's wrong because loneliness is a complex human problem, and social media is a complicated set of algorithms. When you're trying to solve a complex problem with complicated solutions, you make it worse. And that's the biggest problem with dating apps. When your metric is time in app, that's a complicated solution to a business problem. When it's falling in love and staying in love, that's the deep value of the complexity behind humanity, and that's how it's different. And when that became clear, then that's when we knew that this was the match that we needed to have. Now, how do you monetize it? How do you instantiate it? How do you build it into a product? That's the most exciting thing, and that's what we're working on today. That's what her team is working on.
So, you set out though to do — and you've revealed real new research when it comes to falling in love. Just tell me first about even setting out to do that, given what we all know, the books we've read of yours, to focus on what's happening in your brain when you're falling in love.
Yeah. So, my students are intensely interested in the science of falling in love for pretty obvious reasons. You know, you'd think everybody would, but the truth is I wasn't thinking about that in my 20s, which was a long time ago. In the 1980s, when I was in my 20s, I wasn't thinking about the science of falling in love because it just was what we did. That's all we cared about. It was just ordinary life. It's not ordinary life anymore, which means we need to make it more explicit and help people understand how to do it. And so when I talk about the neurochemical cascade of what's happening when you're falling in love, my students find it extremely useful. And I explain it in relatively non-technical ways because my students are not neuroscientists, they're business majors. I talk about it in the kind of way you would think about your brain as a business problem, as a matter of fact. Falling in love starts with attraction, obviously. And modern sort of politically correct society has said something stupid about attraction — that there's something wrong with attraction, something predatory about attraction. Wrong. That's one of the great things in life is attraction toward each other. And it involves estradiol and testosterone and all sorts of wonderful mysterious things in the psyche. That quickly turns into, when you're starting to be really attracted to somebody and you're falling in love, this sense of euphoria and anticipation. This is when neuromodulators get involved, mostly norepinephrine and dopamine. Where you know, a text — who cares? It's like, 'I think it's from her.' And then special value. It has special importance. A dumb text to read about that because I think we've all been there. When you see their name pop up and you're like — Yeah, well, I've never been there because there were no texts when I was falling in love. You know, 35 years ago. And that's when the dark part actually comes in because after a few weeks in this process, that's when serotonin levels tank. And low serotonin levels are usually implicated in clinical depression, which is why you take selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac if you're depressed to increase serotonin in the synapse. But when it's low, that's when you ruminate in sadness or you ruminate on another person, which is the process of bonding. Part of falling in love is being depressed. It looks like clinical depression because there's activity in the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex that comes from low serotonin levels, which is by the way why when people are taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors — more serotonin in the synapse — people will report that it's harder to fall in love. It's harder to bond to another person. Not impossible. Still work. Take your meds, folks. But it's harder. And then last but not least, what you want to get to is the oxytocin zone. That's when you bond to each other as kin. The magic of marriage is that you adopt a stranger and make her your kin. It's the apex of both family and friendship is romantic love and that's when you bond to each other with this vasopressin and oxytocin and these neuropeptides. And so that's the process.
And what's so important though about that last point, and I know that you were super interested in this, Whitney, is that last piece that is what leads to that lifelong love happens in person. It has to be in person. It has to. Which means Bumble is still an incredibly interesting and major opportunity because if we stop meeting in person, Arthur, tell us what's going to happen. I mean, it's not going to be good.
It's not good. What you get is the first couple of steps and it gets truncated. And this is one of the reasons that apps where you're too long virtually, the relationships burn out or you wind up with the wrong person. You actually don't understand the nature of attraction or there's predation. There's predators at that particular point that are trying to make you feel deep attraction because what they want is lots of anonymous sexual activity, which does not lead to love.
Well, I mean that's — this is one of the reasons that hookup apps, they're bait for —
Which is not Bumble for the record.
Exactly. Quite exactly the opposite. The sociopathic males, they thrive on hookup apps for that particular reason because they truncate that whole process that I just talked about.
Even though like for women who have experienced that on these apps, reading the science behind like that is essentially like a personality type that's out there that exists is helpful. Like it's not you, it's them.
Yeah. The dark triad? Oh yeah. I don't want to talk about dark triads. Because it's a problem when there's too many of them. No, but it's a real issue. We were actually just talking about this. Do you know the power of AI actually, in fact, with the way we can now get to know our members better? Arthur and I were saying there's so much you can learn about someone. There's these questions you can ask and you can start to derive different bits and pieces of someone's personality so that we actually prevent you from being exposed to someone that we know is not good for you. And so that's why where this precise matching opportunity becomes so interesting to really waste less of your time. And frankly that's going to be the new product that launches in Q4 — it's about shortening that horizon of getting on the app to getting off the app. But what we don't want to do is just send you out on a date with 20 different dark triads. That's not the goal here. We really want to make sure that compatibility is layered into this connecting process so that you can actually find more suitable folks that we know will work for you. But then this really interesting thing happens which is how do you simulate chemistry online? And I asked you — can I share what I asked you about?
So, and share with the group. She said, 'How did you know you were in love with your now wife? What was it? What was that thing?' Because that thing cannot be simulated. It has to happen in real life. Can't be simulated on the app. Yeah, so Whitney and I talked about this because for a little bit of background, I'm married to a woman from Barcelona and we met in a neutral country, France. Actually, it's not neutral. It's anti-American. But my point being that when we met, she didn't speak a single word of English and I didn't speak a single word of Catalan or Spanish. So I did the only thing that one should do when somebody has no words in common — I asked her out. And she's so attractive to me. Whitney's like, 'How did you know?' And because relatively shortly thereafter, I actually quit my job in New York City and moved to Barcelona. I took a job as a musician in those days to work as a musician there. But the real reason is I was chasing this woman. I was going to learn the language. I was going to close the deal. 'How did you know?' And I said, 'I don't know. I don't know.' She smelled like cantaloupe on an August afternoon. I mean, what can I tell you? And okay, there's science behind the melon. All right, behind the cantaloupe. It's not the cantaloupe per se. The olfactory cortex in the brain senses your mate. That's why in person matters. When you're looking at a picture, it's just using the occipital lobe, the visual cortex of your brain. It's woefully insufficient. We smell the immunological profile of potential mates. There's a great study from the mid-1990s. You've all heard of it. It's the dirty t-shirt study where men on a college campus — because they are in all the experiments, undergraduates will do anything for 20 bucks. Trust me. Men wore t-shirts for 48 hours. Didn't take them off. Did sports, going to class, sleeping in them. And then they put the t-shirts in shoeboxes. And women who didn't know who they were sniffed the t-shirts and said, 'How hot are these guys?' And it turns out that the more immunologically different they were from each other, the hotter the women perceived the men to be. Why? Because your potential offspring have a better immunological profile from somebody who has different — what's called a major histocompatibility complex — and you get that from your olfactory cortex. It's not just about the August afternoon. It's that it's like, 'I don't know what it is, but we're going to have healthy kids.' And you can't get that on an app.
It's literally how I launched this company. On $20?
That would be a great Bumble bio.
Yeah, no kidding. I know. And look, technology, no joke. Bumble is actually working with ideas about voice. Because that's really, really important. Who knows within two or three years whether or not we can smell each other.
Well, that's the next feature. Coming soon.
