Host: Sarah Austin Jenness
[Uncanny Valley theme music by The Drift]
Sarah: [00:00:12] Welcome to The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Sarah Austin Jenness.
We like to say that The Moth is a movable feast. Moth nights are held in bars, clubs, and theaters all around the world and feature everyday people telling true stories without notes before live audience. In this hour, LA Confidential, four stories from Los Angeles and a spotlight on our StorySLAM producer in LA, Gary Buchler. He makes these open-mic nights tick.
Gary: [00:00:40] I had been doing the stay-at-home dad thing and taking care of my kids. While there were parts of it that were amazing, it was also lonely. There was just no adult interaction happening. My wife and I decided we're going to try to find something for me to do. After I'd been listening to some stories, it seemed like it might be fun to try to get involved and see if things were happening in LA. So, I reached out to The Moth.
Sarah: [00:01:05] We'll hear more from Gary later in the hour.
Our first storyteller is Carol Leifer. She's a stand-up comic and an award-winning TV writer, who some believe is the real-life inspiration for the character of Elaine from Seinfeld. Comics who tell stories at The Moth can't rely on laugh lines. They need to tell a story and tell on themselves a bit. Carol told this story at a Moth night in Los Angeles presented by public radio station KCRW.
[cheers and applause]
The theme was The Ties That Bind. Here's Carol, live at The Moth in Hollywood.
Carol: [00:01:37] It's 1996. Go back with me. I'm 40, I'm divorced, I'm single, I'm straight, [audience laughter] but I have this intense hankering to have an affair with a woman. I go to this charity event, and I meet this very interesting and gorgeous gal named Lori, who spells it with an I at the end. We spend a good deal of the night talking. She asked me out on a date the following week to another charity event. I don't know what it is with charity events and lesbian hookups, [audience laughter] but there's some energy out there.
So, a week later she takes me to the Beverly Wilshire for this other charity event. And I am nervous. I mean, this is my first date ever with a woman. There's a silent auction at this charity event, but that's good because it gives us an excuse to lean in close to each other as we lean down and look at these tables with the bid sheets on it. As we're gasping at a sheet, looking at how much people would plunk down for a Four Seasons trip to Hawaii and our mouths were wide open, Lori turns to me and she says, "Wow, you smell amazing. What is that?" Yes. Score. [audience chuckles]
This is important. You know when I'm talking about people, pheromones. Very important in the whole romantic dance. Apparently, it was working. I felt so good. I had just bought this perfume pretty recently. It's called Sung by this designer named Alfred Sung, who, honestly, I've never heard of. [audience chuckles] But I have to be honest.
Once Lori told me that she loved this perfume, that was it for me. I felt like, I'm going to be using this perfume for the rest of my life. Forever. It was done, sealed, deal. So, the only thing is, I get attached to things. There's a good aspect to this, but there's also a not so good aspect to this, because I hold on to things a little too tightly. You know what I mean? But look what happens. Lo and behold, my lesbian fling becomes a real thing. We fall in love. We actually move in together. She makes me a better person. She reconnects me to my faith. We get bat mitzvahed together in our 40s. [audience laughter] She turns me into animal lover. I'd never had a pet of any kind growing up. Here we are, these maniacs adopting all kinds of dogs and cats.
We see what a mitzvah it is adopting these animals. We make the next logical step, and actually adopt a child together, a son. And then, [chuckles] after 19 years together, we make the decision this year, this December, to finally get married. [audience aww] [audience applause and cheer]
And all the while, this relationship is going on, there is my Sung perfume. [audience chuckles] [sniffs] It is the foundation of me. The basis of the whole relationship rides on this Sung perfume. [audience chuckles] So, last February, as I'm getting the last few spritzes out of my bottle of perfume, looks like I need some more. So, that exacts a trip to the outlet malls, which, of course, I love. I mean, who doesn't love going to the outlet malls? You feel so noble, don't you? [chuckles] Like, I'm not shopping, I'm saving money, okay? [audience chuckles]
So, we head to the Camarillo Premium Outlets as opposed to all the other outlets. And we go. So, we split up. I, of course, head to my normal perfume outlet. I go into the perfume place, I ask the lady for my regular two bottles of Sung, and suddenly I'm greeted by, "Oh, we don't have any more Sung." "Oh really?" "Yeah, they discontinued it." "What?" I find myself in a bit of a panic. I find myself babbling dumb questions, "Oh, did they give any reason?" [audience laughter] Like, Alfred Sung was going to send a note along, "I'm through with the fragrance part of my life. I really want to concentrate on my tennis now." [audience laughter]
I'm in a panic. I go, "All right, well, I'll take whatever you have left." She goes, "No, no, I'm really sorry, but a woman came in about 10 minutes ago and asked for the same product, Sung, and she bought up my entire stock." So, now, my grief is also stoked by this competitive spirit. [audience laughter] Someone else out there. So, I was in a panic. I go to look for Lori. First, I went to Brooks Brothers, no sign of her. [chuckles] I go to the Adidas store, I finally find her. She's buying yet another pair of their patented three stripe sweatpants, which are very good for traveling, I might add.
"Lori," I say a little too loudly, "They're out of Sung. They're not making it anymore. And there's some bitch out there buying up the whole stock [audience laughter] in this outlet mall behind me." Well, Lori springs into action. This is one of the things I love about her the most. To my panic, she's the calm. She whips out that iPhone, she checks it out, she’s like, "All right, there are two more perfume outlet places at Camarillo here, and we're going for broke."
So, we hit the first place. It's fantastic. They have 13 bottles. I say, "Wrap them up. [audience laughter] 13 bottles, fantastic." Lori locates the other perfume store on the other side of Camarillo Premium Outlets. You got to cross the 101 to get there, so we go over there. [audience laughter] I walk in, I tell the woman I want the Sung. She has seven bottles. I have 20 bottles now. This is fantastic. "Oh my God, I scored."
We're in the car, driving back home to LA. And I start to do the calculation. You know what I mean? I started thinking, all right, well, I have 20 bottles, I turn 59 next month, [audience laughter] I think these bottles are going to take me till about 70. [audience laughter] Yeah, 70, that's pretty good." And I felt 70 was a good place to stop. Yes. Okay, good.
We go home. Lori goes inside the kitchen to start making dinner, and I head to the garage, because there's no room in the house for 20 clinking bottles of perfume. And that's when it started to get a little dark. When you go to your garage, it's the sad spot of the house, isn't it? You're faced with all your failure. There's the fondue pot. [audience laughter] The step aerobics set from 1980 that you never use. The dogs playing poker, that painting that never gets hung up in the house.
I just started to feel sad, because trying to find the bins where to put the perfume, it just all started to get very bad. I started to feel sad about the calculation, because I was thinking, why did I just calculate to 70? Like, screw 71. Who cares? Who cares what I look like, or who cares who I am at 71? It made me think, why is there such little love for our older selves?
I remember when I was a little girl, I was born in 1956, thinking as a little girl in 2000, what, I'll be 44. It was always such a bad image of me that I thought, oh, 44, I guess I'll be old and fat and nobody will care about me and I'll be ugly. It was all so negative. And it made me think, why did I stop at 70? Why is there no love for the 71-year-old self? I think back to 44 now, and I had a great time at 44. What I wouldn't give to be 44 again? It just started to make me sad, holding on so tight to all this perfume. [audience laughter]
So, from the garage, I walked into the kitchen, which adjoins the garage, and Lori was making dinner, and she was making pizza. She was making pizza the way she normally makes pizza, half cheese for herself and half garlic for me. And Lori hates garlic. She literally puts up with two days, because that's pretty much how long it takes to go through your system, two days of me smelling like a garlic mess just because she knows I love garlic. And it really made me think like, did I really think if I don't smell the same way every day to her, it's going to throw the whole juju of this 19-year relationship off? [audience chuckles]
And it made me think that she didn't join this perfume caper, because she wanted me to smell the same. She did it, because she likes to make me happy. She loves me. She's so game. That's what I love about her so much. She's really the Ethel to my Lucy, the Laverne to my Shirley in so many ways. And it made me think, change is good. I mean, I don't think I would have even met her if I didn't embrace change at 40 to say to myself, this thing with men is not working. [audience laughter] I need to find something else. And it really brought me to the love of my life.
We have this funny thing when that song comes on by Lionel Richie and Diana Ross, Endless Love. I always sing the lyrics to her, because I feel it's our story. She really is my first love, with a woman, and really my endless love. Cue the song. [laughs] So, yes, I did it. I decided to donate all the bottles of perfume to the Gay and Lesbian Elder Housing Facility in Hollywood. [audience laughter] [audience applause]
Yes, where senior love will, I hope, no doubt bloom for the 70-year-olds, for the 75-year-olds, for the 80 and beyond. The fat lady has finally Sung. I'm sure you'll find me trolling the aisles of every Sephora now, sampling anything and everything. And who knows, maybe at our wedding in December, the rabbi will just have pronounced us wife and wife. We'll turn to each other. Lori will lean into me for a kiss and say, "Wow, you smell amazing. [audience chuckles] What is that?"
[cheers and applause]
Sarah: [00:13:37] That was Carol Leifer. Carol and Lori tied the knot six months after she told this story. They, their son Bruno, and their three rescue dogs live in Santa Monica.
[Endless Love by Diana Ross and Lionel Richie]
Carol won a Writers Guild Award for her work on Modern Family. She's also the author of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Crying. I asked Carol what she smells like these days. And she said, "I'm riding on soap and water until I can find that one and only perfume that's got my name on it."
It's a misperception that the only people who tell stories with us in Los Angeles are in show business. After our break, a couple of stories to prove that. One from an Air Force veteran, and one from a woman who turned to swing dancing at the age of 56.
Jay: [00:14:45] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX.
Sarah: [00:15:37] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Sarah Austin Jenness. Our open-mic storytelling competitions are held three times a month in Los Angeles. I asked Gary Buchler, our StorySLAM producer in LA, what these nights are like.
Gary: [00:15:51] The first time you come to a StorySLAM in Los Angeles, you can expect a lot of people. People stand in the back, they stand on the sides, they sit on the floor just wherever they can get in and make themselves comfortable for the duration of the show. And it just makes the show feel really homely, and warm, and really adds to the intimacy of the show, which I think is one of the benefits of a live Moth event.
Sarah: [00:16:15] People might think that LA StorySLAMmers are all actors and writers and comedians. Who else comes to the shows?
Gary: [00:16:23] We regularly have or have had chauffeurs and computer programmers. We've had cops, nannies. We recently had a weatherman, teachers. There have been people involved in the diplomatic world and war correspondents. It's anybody who has a story to share finds their way to The Moth, regardless of what their career is.
Sarah: [00:16:47] The story you're about to hear is from an Air Force veteran. He told it at our SLAM series in Los Angeles. The theme of the night was Rewards.
[cheers and applause]
Here's Adrian Estrada, live at The Moth.
Adrian: [00:17:00] So, I was 19, standing in the acceptance parade at the United States Air Force Academy, surrounded by valedictorians, Eagle Scouts, team captains. I still didn't quite feel like I belonged there. Some general gave a speech about how proud we should be for graduating basic training, and that's how I really hoped I'd feel. But I didn't. I felt disappointed that I hadn't been transformed, that it hadn't been hard enough. But the year was just starting.
At the Air Force Academy, a freshman is called a cadet fourth class, a four degree, although most upperclassmen just called us smacks. This is what life was like for a smack. You're always in uniform, you're always at attention. Indoors, you marched. Outdoors, you ran. 4,000 cadets would eat lunch in 15 minutes, and you were authorized seven chews per bite.
You were yelled at for an eighth chew, or for improper table decorum, or for moving your eyeballs, anything. And this lasted until spring, culminating in an insane series of challenges called recognition. After that, you were recognized as a human again, unless you were on the cadet honor guard. They were recognized by their upperclassmen much later.
Now, people said you had to be crazy to join honor guard. But they were sharp as hell. They carried the American flag, they performed funeral honors, fired 21-gun salutes. But they were most widely known for their rifle drill team, one of the best in the nation. I had never seen anything so perfect, so precise, it was almost inhuman. Sign me up. Day one's lesson, "If it ain't hard, it ain't guard." [audience chuckles] I was in the right place.
When we went to practice, we wore Vietnam era helmets, black pots instead of the red baseball caps all the other four degrees wore. We did these loud little kicky flips every time we turned a corner. This [foot stomps] Naturally, everyone made fun of honor guard. [audience chuckles] And the first year consisted of running up and down hills, and crawling up and down hills, all while breathing only through your nose and keeping your chin in. We might drill once, after coming back from a run after the sun was gone, drenched in sweat, snow, and snot, unable to feel our rifles with our frozen hands. And I loved it. [audience laughter] It turns out I could hack it. I could even be one of the best.
And the honor guard had a peculiar way of rewarding their best. The ridiculous helmets that we would wear to practice were all black, but there was rumor of a white one, one that would be rewarded only if someone were deemed worthy. One day, our training session was going a lot longer and harder than usual, and I found myself getting singled out. Now, I had a great gift for keeping my back straight in the push up position. And this seemed to pull a lot of weight with these guys. I was told to run circles around the group already running up and down mountains to carry their weapons, to carry them even, to see if I cared enough about the team.
Now, we had all just endured what was, at that point, our most epic beating, when all of a sudden, on top of the hill, the upperclassmen stopped shouting. They got a little silly even. They made a game out of us, holding our rifles straight out, and they all started to surround me while all the other rifles dropped until it was just me and them. They were grinning, which was disturbing. [audience laughter] I felt someone behind me take the black pot off my head and slam a new one back down. It didn't really fit. Smelled kind of wet dog, but I could see bright white paint out of the corner of my eyes.
They celebrated by saying things like [onomatopoeia] [audience laughter] It's very touching. [audience laughter] That night, I walked into the dining hall, all eyes were on me. I had a frigging white pot on my head. You can't help, but look at it. My team got to eat at rest, which means we got to chew more than seven times and we got to talk to each other and laugh. I marched back to my room. And once I was safely inside, I took off the white pot and held it in front of me, flipped it over, and I studied all the initials that had been carved in there over the years. I immediately put A-K-E, Adrian Kim Estrada. This I could be proud of for now. Thanks.
[cheers and applause]
Sarah: [00:23:02] That was Adrian Estrada at a StorySLAM we have in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. After the Air Force Academy, Adrian led convoys during a tour in Iraq. He left active duty two years after returning when he was diagnosed with PTSD. He's lived in Los Angeles for the last few years and says that unearthing and sharing his stories helps him, quote "make sense of things and figure myself out."
And a fun fact. The night Adrian told his story on stage at The Moth, he met two Air Force Academy grads, who were in the audience. To see a photo of Adrian and his graduating honor guard class, go to themoth.org.
Gary Buchler, the producer of our Los Angeles StorySLAM series, has been to over 200 of these open-mic nights.
Gary: [00:23:48] You know, one that stands out, for sure, is the guy who got up, and you could tell he was not a storyteller or a performer by trade and started to tell us about how his two friends who were brothers, their parents, had been killed and how he was trying to spend as much time with them as possible. And then, one afternoon, they just said, "Do you really want to know what happened to our parents?" And when he said, "Yeah." They just proceeded to confess to killing them because he was talking to the Menendez brothers. And the audience was just floored. Everyone's jaw was just on the floor.
Sarah: [00:24:28] Have you ever told a story at the SLAM?
Gary: [00:24:30] I did. I told at least two.
Sarah: [00:24:34] What was that like?
Gary: [00:24:35] [chuckles] It's so funny you asked this, because it just came up in my Facebook history that yesterday was the four-year anniversary of me telling my first story. It was fun. I really enjoyed it. It was at a father SLAM. I think I prepared making sure I knew what I wanted to say before going up. I was, I think, respectably nervous and then got up there and got the lights in my eyes and just tried to share my tale.
Sarah: [00:25:05] So, Vicki Juditz is another one of our storytellers in this hour.
Do you know Vicki?
Gary: [00:25:12] Sure. Vicki's a powerhouse. I think she's been in five of the last six GrandSLAMs. She has a very modest demeanor, and a very innocent tone to her voice, and has made some spectacular choices in her life which have led her to having some great stories.
Sarah: [00:25:37] So, here's Vicki, live at The Moth StorySLAM in Los Angeles.
[cheers and applause]
Vicki: [00:25:45] I'm in a shop on Barham Boulevard, floor to ceiling shelves lined with black satin T-straps with two-inch heels. "Perfect for swing," the salesgirl tells me as I slip on a pair. I stand up, I do a triple step. I think I'm already a better dancer in these shoes. I go to the mall, a store called Sidecca, where teenage girls with purple hair and tattoos shop for retro and rockabilly. [audience chuckles] I put on a halter swing dress, lime green, decorated with drawings of little black dogs, polka dot straps tie around the neck. "You want a petticoat?" asks the sales girl. She has a nose ring and safety pins in her ears. And I say, "Yes, I want one."
But I'm 56 and even this dress takes courage. [audience laughter] And I say to myself, "Tonight, I'm going to put on those new shoes and I'm going to put on the new dress and I'm going to drive over to Joe's Café in Burbank, where there's a dance floor and a live band. I'm going to meet up with everybody in my swing dance class that I take in the room with the mirrored walls on the basement level of the Burbank Mall on Thursday nights." I have been to Joe's once before, six months after I lost my husband. I used to think it was strange to say that you had lost someone. But in my husband's case, he was truly lost in the darkness of severe depression, and he saw only one way out.
After his death, I accepted every invitation. Breakfast, lunch, coffee, dinner, mani-pedi, hike in the canyon, 10k walk to raise money for homeless beagles. [audience laughter] I would repeat the details of what had occurred over and over to friends, and acquaintances, and friends of friends until the event became a story that almost seemed to have happened to someone else. On Wednesday mornings, I would go to Zumba Fitness at a martial arts studio in Sherman Oaks. And for an hour, I would lunge and shimmy and yell, "Hey, hey, hey" to the throbbing beat of samba and hip hop and salsa, free to think of nothing.
And one morning this gal named Sal told us that she was a lead singer in a band called the Crown City Bombers. And didn't we want to all come and see her perform at Joe's. A few of us went, and that was the first time I went to Joe's. And at Joe's, Sal got up on that stage and she belted out I Ain't Shook Up, and everybody rushed to the dance floor. The guys were in their 60s and 70s, and the women were of all ages. And the men were wearing pinstripe suits and caps, and the women had on flared full skirts and pin curls and pillbox hats like it was 1952. I noticed partners constantly changing couples lasting only the length of one song, and I thought, I have to learn to dance.
I went online and I found that class at the Burbank Mall. And our teacher, Bruce, he told us that he had answered an ad for a Fred Astaire dance instructor when he was 19, growing up in Nebraska, it was either that or the Navy. [audience laughter] I met Mark and Jim, recently divorced, and Herbie, who had just lost his job, and Jeanette, who had just lost her husband to cancer, and Marie, who had just moved here from Ohio. After a few sessions, Bruce said, "Hey, it's time to strut our stuff at Joe's." I said, "I have been to Joe's." I put on my new shoes, and I put on my new dress, I drive to Joe's.
I feel really self-conscious, I don't dress like that. I get out of the car, I open the door to the bar, and there's everybody from my class. They've already pushed tables together, and they've ordered drinks, and they tell me I look terrific in my shoes and my dress. [audience cheers and applause]
One of the regulars, a guy in his 70s with hair dyed orangish blonde, [audience laughter] and he's got on plaid pants and a stiff white shirt and suspenders, he comes over to our table, he puts his hand out to me. I say, "Oh my God, I'm really nervous. I'm just starting. I'm so bad." He says, "I'm Tony. Step, step, rock, step, turn, wrap, out, step." Tony is surprisingly strong. [audience laughter] in his grip, I never falter. I could be mistaken for one of those regulars, I think, dancing at this moment, spinning. It was Nietzsche, of all people, who said,- [audience cheers and applause] -"We should consider every day lost, on which we have not danced at least once."
[cheers and applause]
[swing and rockabilly music]
Sarah: [00:31:13] That was Vicki Juditz. She's still dancing to swing and rockabilly music at Joe's in Burbank. She says, "Dancing requires you to stay in the moment, concentrating on the steps, which is a great relief after a tragedy. And dancing requires other people, which is the best part." To see a photo of her outside of Joe's wearing her swing dance dress with the little black dogs printed on it, go to themoth.org.
While you're there, you can check out the dates and themes of our StorySLAMs. Now, three times a month in Los Angeles, and in many other cities in the US and around the world. We welcome people with all sorts of experiences and backgrounds. The firefighters, the dentists, the bus drivers. Everyone's invited to come and tell stories.
After our break, our last story. A bored student working on his PhD in Applied Mathematics decides to data mine for dates.
Jay: [00:32:25] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX.
Sarah: [00:33:10] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Sarah Austin Jenness. It's time for our last story from Los Angeles.
Chris McKinlay came to us from a friend of a friend of a friend, like some storytellers do. He's a self-professed geek, and a graduate of UCLA with a PhD in applied mathematics. Here's Chris McKinlay, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Chris: [00:33:36] So, it's the summer of 2012, and I'm living in my thesis cubicle. [audience chuckles] I'm in the sixth year of a PhD program in math at UCLA. At that period in my life, I was going through this monastic phase, and I had a little foam pad that I would roll out under my desk to sleep, and I would go to the UCLA gym to take a shower. Every night, I would log on to this supercomputer called Yellowstone, which is at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. At the time, it was in the top 20 powerful supercomputers in the world. And so, I could only use it at night.
And so, every night I would log on and I would run these distributed data mining algorithms that I was working on for my dissertation. It was pretty quiet in the cubicles at night. And so, when my code was compiling or running on the cluster, I'd have a lot of downtime and I'd kill it on Reddit or OkCupid. [audience laughter] And one night, I'm reading OkCupid's blog and I come across this post, this line in a post, and it says, "OkCupid is no more responsible for your match percentages than Microsoft Excel is responsible for your net worth." [audience laughter] I took that as an invitation to program my way into a relationship. [audience laughter] I'd been questioning my lifestyle at the time [audience laughter] and wondering if maybe it was time to try and find someone and start a relationship. So, I decided that I was going to reverse engineer OkCupid's match algorithm. [audience laughter]
In case you don't know what OkCupid is, it's the largest free dating website in the world. It's got about 14 million active monthly users. And between any two of those users, it generates a number between 0 and 100 called a match percentage. And everything in the site, all the activity, all of the visibility is based on these match percentages. Your match percentage with any other person is determined on the basis of your answers to these multiple-choice questions called match questions. There's about a half million of them. They're all user submitted, cover all walks of life, dating, drugs, sex, religion, lifestyle.
And so, I'm looking at these questions and I ask myself a question. "Well, okay, what happens when everyone goes online and answers these? Do their answers uniformly percolate throughout the space the way that they might if we all flipped coins to determine our answers, or do they tend to clump up somehow around commonly held belief systems or something like that? And if so, how much?” So, the more I thought about that, the more compelling the idea seemed. I started using all of my supercomputing time to download and analyze OkCupid match data. [audience laughter]
I discovered that when people in Los Angeles go online and answer match questions, they don't do it uniformly at random. Instead, they cluster rather tightly into seven different groups. And so, I started checking out these different groups and I found one that looked datable. [audience laughter] So, I wrote some combinatorial optimization software to figure out which of these half million questions could I answer truthfully, but still maintain the highest possible match percentage with every single person in the cluster. [audience laughter]
So, I wrote that and I ran that code on this supercomputer for a while, [audience laughter] and it spit back the right questions to use. I entered those into my profile, and that's when things blew up. [audience laughter] All of a sudden, I became the top match for over 30,000 women in Los Angeles. [audience laughter] [audience cheers and applause]
So, that meant that anytime any one of these women went on OkCupid, I'd be there at the top. [audience laughter] Any search they ran, anytime they looked at their what's new feed, there I was. [audience laughter] But I'm still this ratty grad student with a bad profile, and I'm getting hundreds of profile views a day. I got excited and decided to write a whole bunch more software to optimize [audience laughter] down to the very last word and last pixel, like the ideal profile for myself to convert these page views into messages.
So, after doing that, I started getting about 88 unsolicited messages per week, which, to put in perspective for a straight male and OkCupid, the median number of unsolicited messages per week is zero. [audience laughter] So, that's how for three months during the summer of 2012, I became the most popular of the seven million male profiles on OkCupid. When it was happening, I was like, "Oh my God, this is amazing. This is going to be like Amazon Prime for my dating life." [audience laughter] I remember being worried like, "Is OkCupid going to notice? [audience laughter] Are they going to shut me down? How long do I have?" [audience laughter]
So, I decided I needed an equally hardcore second phase to this project, and so I promised myself I would go on an average of one date per day until they either shut it down or I met someone worth shutting it down for. I still remember the first date that I went on after deciding to do that. So, I unfold myself from my cubicle, and I go to the gym, and shower. I had to leave early, because I knew I was going to have to jump start my car. [audience laughter] So, I get a jump and I drive to West Hollywood and I meet this entertainment lawyer. She's driving a Mercedes convertible, [audience laughter] and she wants to go to this expensive restaurant. I'm like, "All right, this is not even worth doing. Is it dead? This is a total waste of time and money." But whatever, I'll go. [audience laughter]
And over dinner, I'm thinking, why is she even doing this? She looks at me quite seriously and asks me, "You know, I've been on OkCupid since 2006, and I've never seen a 100% match before. Do you think we're soulmates?" [audience laughter] I got really freaked out [audience laughter] and I thought, wow, I'm playing with fire. I have to be very careful. [audience laughter] And so, that whole month, I just kept going on these dates. Dinners, concerts, hikes, one funeral. [audience laughter] I was trying to have these romantic, storybook first dates, and it was just killing me.
I put over a thousand miles on my car, I was burning through time and money, and it was clearly not scalable the way I wanted it to be. [audience laughter] And so, I asked myself a second question like, "Well, all right, what is the smallest socially acceptable interaction I can have around about three minutes of FaceTime?” Because that's all I really need to know if I want to continue, and I haven't been able to write software to really tell me that information. So, I decided on a small cup of decaf coffee, preferably drunk, standing up. [audience laughter] I found these four coffee shops in Westwood, close to UCLA. They were all kitty corner to one another. And so, I would just do one coffee date each hour on the hour [audience laughter] and work my way around.
At that point, I'd started to notice some interesting similarities between these dates. These were people who'd answered several hundred of these multiple-choice questions with a high degree of statistical similarity. But the common frame of the coffee date really brought it out. So, similar conversations, similar affectations. At one point, eight out of nine people in a row ordered the same coffee drink. [audience chuckles] And so, I think partly as a result of the practice and also my, I think, natural inclination to try and optimize things, I got very good at these dates. [audience laughter]
And in the course of six weeks or so of doing that, I took the conversion rate from first date to email asking for second date from 50% to 60 to 70 to 82%. [audience chuckles] But the problem was I wasn't going on many second dates, because at any given time I had six or seven first dates already lined up. [audience laughter] And so, I was saying no to people that just a few months ago I would have been completely ecstatic to go on dates with. I was completely desensitized. And yet, these women were people who matched very highly with me, and so they were bringing their A game to these dates, they had expectations. I was, I think, disappointing those expectations, and it became very hard for me to do that. I felt guilty. These didn't feel romantic in any way.
So, in order to avoid writing these hard emails, I began to intentionally tank dates. So, at first, I would just tell them the truth, "Hey, I've got three other dates lined up today." [audience laughter] And that didn't work. [audience laughter] That cut the second date email percentage by about 12%, but not more than that. So, I started to go to more and more extreme measures. So, one thing I would do is in the middle of the date, if I decided, "Okay, no good," I would go to the bathroom and I would put on eyeliner, [audience laughter] and then I would come back, and she'd be there and she'd say, "Did you just put on eyeliner?" [audience laughter] And I would completely deny it. [audience laughter] Completely, awkwardly deny putting on eyeliner.
That was much more effective. [audience laughter] But clearly, something had gotten twisted. [audience laughter] I began to question my motives. "Are you really trying to find someone, or are you just trying to optimize some game, or are you more into the sociological side, or is it the performance art side?" [audience chuckles] I thought about gathering more data, refactoring the code. I thought very seriously about shutting it down. But I didn't, because at that point, I was going viral, I guess, on OkCupid. I was getting placed in front of enough eyeballs that I was getting messages from Argentina, from Australia, from all over LA, from people who didn't belong to this sort of cluster that I'd optimized for. And so, every once in a while, on these dates, there'd just be a total surprise. I loved that.
So, I remember on date number 88, I met this woman named Christine. She was like, "Hey, you know, your profile says 'replies very selectively.' So, I decided to amp up my profile for you, and put these pictures on, and tweak the language a little bit." I could tell that she was really different, and I just melted and said, "Oh my God. Well, I have a question for you. I basically did the same thing. Actually, I did much worse. I used some topic mining algorithms to plot all these things, and then I reverse engineered the match algorithm, and I've been going on an average of 1.1 dates per day for the last 80 days, and I'm getting really tired and I'm confused, but you seem really cool. Is that like twisted?" [audience laughter]
She took a beat, and she said, "No. You know, that's actually what it's like being a woman dating online. [audience chuckles] You have all these people writing you, you don't really know. If it's about you, it's confusing." We had a really good 20-minute conversation about the politics of gender and data. It was a really good date. It felt like a good date. Anyway, that was a couple years ago. Since graduated and moved out of my cubicle and moved on with my life, but I occasionally tell this story. When I tell it, people often express this like buyer's remorse about their relationships, "Oh my God, I met my significant other in a bar or through friends. Do you think I stopped dating too soon?" [audience laughter] They want to know, "Well, did it work out for you? I mean, did you meet someone or did it all fizzle [chuckles] despite all that work you put into it?" Fortunately for me, it did work. Christine and I are engaged. [audience applause]
But it's not because I hacked OkCupid. [audience chuckles] I would say we're engaged because we work pretty hard at our relationship. And relationships, at least good ones, aren't the kinds of things that you can get from Amazon Prime. [audience chuckles] But I usually also add when I respond to these people that I'm fairly certain I conducted a thorough search. [audience laughter]
[cheers and applause]
Sarah: [00:49:05] That was Chris McKinlay.
I asked Chris if he had a photo from the night that he and Christine got engaged. Go to our website to check out what he sent. It made me laugh. He said he asked her to marry him over Skype, because she was living in Qatar for the year. The photo is a pair of screenshots.
Chris and Christine married on a farm in Ojai, just outside of Los Angeles. I asked if they paid attention to any every data point in detail, and he said, "Nah, we're both pretty low key." Chris was the hacking consultant for Michael Mann's film Blackhat. And if you're wondering, no, Chris won't help you hack a dating site, I know because I already asked. And one final note from our Los Angeles StorySLAM producer Gary Buchler.
Gary: [00:49:51] As far as The Moth being a place where people can come together, we've never had a proposal on stage, but people like Carlos Kotkin, who's an accomplished storyteller, he's won 14 SLAMs and three GrandSLAMs, and he's a regular host for us in LA now. He met his wife at a SLAM and now they have a two-year-old daughter. So, life has been brought into the world because of The Moth.
Sarah: [00:50:16] Now, I'm not saying you should head to a Moth StorySLAM to meet a new partner. All I'm saying is it has happened.
That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour. Thanks for listening with us today. We hope you'll join us next time. And that's the story from The Moth.
[Uncanny Valley theme music by The Drift]
Jay: [00:50:44] Your host this hour was Sarah Austin Jenness. Sarah directed the stories in the show along with Maggie Cino.
The rest of The Moth's directorial staff includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Jenifer Hixson, and Meg Bowles. Production support from Mooj Zadie.
Thanks to public radio station KCRW, who partners with us on our Los Angeles StorySLAMs and Mainstages.
Moth stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Recording services by Argot Studios in New York City, supervised by Paul Ruest. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Lionel Richie and Diana Ross, The United States Air Force Academy Band, Suzi Quatro, and Eagle Eye Williamson. You can find links to all the music we use at our website.
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by me, Jay Allison, with Viki Merrick, at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.
The Moth Radio Hour is presented by the Public Radio Exchange, prx.org. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching your own story to The Moth, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.