Paul Eastwick

Leaving room for individual taste, that's kind of step one in this realization that the market metaphor only gets us so far.

Look, it's for me, but this is not for everybody.

And that's the beauty of the thing.

Yeah, so I want to take us back as best we can estimate what it was like when you were looking for a partner, I don't know, 50,000, 150,000, half a million years ago.

Keep going.

OK, so you probably lived in a group of about 50 people.

There might be a couple other groups nearby that you'd interface with.

But so we're talking like 150 people.

That's your social universe.

And now how many of those folks are roughly your age?

How many are unpartnered already?

That's a pretty small market, especially relative to what we experience currently in the modern day.

But you had one thing going for you, which is that you were likely to be able to get to know these folks over a pretty extended period of time, in some cases months or even years.

And what we see in our research is that some of that consensus, that agreement about who's desirable and who's not,

As people get to know each other over time, what starts to happen is that that agreement actually declines.

So that thought experiment we did earlier where we see a photograph of a guy and we agree 65% of the time.

If it's now somebody who's in our social milieu, like a friend or an acquaintance, now you and I are agreeing like 53% of the time.

I mean, that's better than 50-50, but not by much.

And what has happened is that as we have gotten to know folks over time, you see a spread in how we think about that person.

So, okay, we agree they're a six at first, but with time, some of us think he's a nine and some of us think he's a three.