Transcriber: FNU Swati Reviewer: Doreen Litke
So, my name is Amy Webb
and my story starts six years ago.
I was in not the best relationship
although it started really well
and I thought that the person I was with
was the person I would wind up marrying
and our relationship came to a somewhat abrupt end.
And I was devastated.
But I looked around at my friends
and my family members
and the people that I knew
and the people that I admired
and realized that there were
a lot of people who were divorced
there were a lot of people in pretty bad relationships
and a whole bunch of people
who were generally not happy.
And I thought, "What's wrong with all of us?"
Right? We're all smart people.
There's got to be something wrong.
Maybe there's something wrong with me?
And so I consulted my friends and my family
and my grandmother
who -- in between mahjong games -- said,
"Play the Field!"
"Stop being so picky!"
"You got to go out with everybody!"
And most importantly,
"True love will find you
when you're least expecting it."
Now, we've all heard this before
and you may not come from the same
background that I do but I'm a numbers person.
I'm a data and math person.
And "least expecting" my way in the true love
made no mathematical or scientific sense.
But online dating did.
I had a whole bunch of people suggesting me that I try online dating websites
and to me that seems a lot easier -- going trough that sort of data --
than trying to find somebody in real life.
So i decided to create a couple of profiles
I went to Jdate, which is a site for Jewish people
and I went to match.com.
Now the problem was that I had a very full schedule
and the last thing I wanted to do was to sit down
and start answering a whole bunch of questions
as if I was taking some kind of Cosmo quiz --
this is gonna shock all of you
but I am not a Cosmo quiz kind of woman.
(Laughter)
So I did what any woman in my position would do
I copied and pasted from my resume
(Laughter)
including bullet points!
So I had worked tirelessly to make sure
that my resume was spectacular
and I was quite proud of all of my professional accomplishments
so I listed all of those
along with some other highlights
like the fact that I spoke fluent Japanese
and I was also fluent in CSS and Javascript.
(Laugher)
Now, obviously we all know now
that this was not a good idea
but I want to take you back to 6 years ago.
You see, work was really important to me
and I feel very much that
my professional life defines who I am
also, and perhaps most importantly
this bullet point resume that I copied and pasted
onto my online dating profile
didn't prevent me from finding dates
in fact, these algorithms, at Jdate, Match
had stuck me with plenty of people.
And we went on truly awful dates
For example
there was Steve, the IT guy.
Now, online he seemed spectacular
He said he was 6 feet tall, muscular.
He was a foodie who liked to cook
and an IT manager, who loved gadgets.
The problem, as I soon realized
was that Steve in real life
was a very short 6' tall
and quite stocky
he did like gadgets
and he was an IT manager
but one of the things that I realized when we went out
was that he liked to order lots and lots of food
that was very very expensive.
So he ordered all kinds of dishes
the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu
and when the bill came
he actually pushed it towards me on the table.
Now, I am a modern woman
and I am totally ok with paying the bill sometimes
and splitting the bill sometimes.
But I didn't order all of that
and the bill came up to what at the time,
was an entire month's rent for me
so reluctantly I pulled up my credit card
and I thought, "That's it, you know, we're done. I'm leaving."
Outside the restaurant, he tried to shake my hand
and I said, "This is interesting, thank you."
And I started to walk towards my car
and Steve ambled laboriously behind me
and as he's walking, said, "Do you smoke?"
and I said, "No, I don't".
"So do you mind if I do?"
And I thought, "At this point, am I going to be able to stop him?"
So he pulls out of his pocket this thing
this giant thing that didn't quite look like a cigarette
and didn't quite look like a cigar
it was in fact a giant joint
a roadside flare of weed.
(Laughter)
And out in the middle of everybody
he lit this thing up
and asked me if I wanted to take a puff.
Okay.
So obviously this was a terrible date
but it's one of just many many terrible dates
and after each I would go home
I would call my mom, I would call my sister,
and tell them what an awful time
that I had had, and they said
every single time, "Stop complaining!
You're just being too picky."
And I thought,"That's ridiculous".
Right, I'm gonna start showing them
empirically that these are really terrible dates.
So I'm going to do three things.
I agreed to continue with my grandmother's advice
to date everybody until 'least expect' my way into true love,
but I did that with some parameters.
I would only meet men at bars
that I knew had wi-fi.
I carried a giant bag with me
and my laptop inside
where, once we were at the date
they would invariably go terribly terribly wrong,
I would pull out an email template
that I had created in advance
where I had different data points
that I would track
so that, when the date went bad
I could show with empirical evidence
and quantitatively why
this entire thing was a ridiculous exercise.
So I would send out these email templates
(Laughter)
and I was tracking things like
the number of times the guy tried to high-five me.
If you want to touch me, by all means, touch me,
but don't force me to stick my hand in the air.
And the number of times he abused
the English language and overtime
I had amassed quite a bit of data.
(Applause)
And that allowed me to make some correlations.
For example --
(Laughter)
For example, the number of times I got high fived
the more times that guy was to abuse the English language.
The more shots he ordered,
the more likely he was to lie about his job.
And speaking of alcohol,
for some reason, and I still can't figure out why,
Scotch drinkers were more likely
to immediately talk about kinky sex
right when we sat down, than anybody else.
And this may not be surprising,
but lawyers were 62% more likely
to pull up their mobile phone and stare into it
than me, and compared to some of the other people
that I went out with.
Now listen, these weren't necessarily bad guys
they were just bad for me
but the problem, actually
were the dating algorithms
that we've all come to rely on
those of us who are online.
Now to be sure, algorithms in dating
are actually not a new thing
in history we've had matchmakers
in every culture
and my culture is Jewish
and we had matchmakers, too
and the matchmakers for us would be looking at things like
whether or not the girl and the boy would get along,
what the rabbi would say,
whether the community would agree,
whether or not they'd have kids
and even I, in the process of setting up
my friends and coworkers when asked
had sort of my own formula that I was using.
Would they have the same interests?
Would they get along?
And what was the probability that this entire thing
was gonna become a pain in my ass
for which I'd be paying later on.
So I want to fast forward
to the worst date ever
and I'm gonna spare you the details
but let's summarize by saying I smoked an entire pack of cigarettes
and went through a whole bottle of wine
in a short amount of time.
And then in my drunken state called my sister
and I said, "That's it. I'm done.
"I'm finished with online dating sites."
And she said to me,
"Don't do that. Don't you remember Mary Poppins?"
I said, "What are you talking about? Mary Poppins?"
And she said, "Remember in the movie
how the kids had gone through all of those nannies
and none of them worked and what did they do?"
Does anybody remember?
They made a list.
Right? Those two kids started writing down
every single possible thing
they could want in a nanny
and once they had that list
it wound up going up a chimney and poof!
Mary Poppins appeared.
And I thought, "That's it, Hillary
You've nailed it.
I'm going to stop "least expecting" all of this.
I'm going to create my own Mary Poppins list to find a husband."
And so in my drunken state that's exactly what I did.
I started writing.
(Laughter)
And I wrote down every single possible thing
that I could think of,
from height to the amount of body hair
that I found acceptable
to the kind of musicals
that I would agree to listen to
and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote.
And by the end of this exercise
I had come up with 72 attributes --
things that I was going to demand
in any person that I would date from here on out.
Now, 72 seems like a lot
and I had a whole bunch of scrawled notes
and it was really hard to, sort of figure out
you know, who would meet all of those qualifications.
I had to parse that list.
So I thought about all of the people that I'd ever dated
and what things on that list
the good things that they had in common.
I thought about the attributes that were important to my family
because my family and I are very close
and there are lots and lots of them
and the last thing I need is any more complaining.
And attributes that were important to me.
And once I had all of that figured out
I came up with a list of weighted scores
so I had my top tier list
and my secondary list.
And in my top tier list
were points that were pretty high,
I had lots of different things.
So I wanted someone who was Jew-ish, like me.
Not religious but very culturally tied, everything.
I also wanted somebody who
would want to have kids with me
so these are pretty normal things.
But I also thought that the stuff on my second tier list
was just as important.
So I weighted those slightly differently
and I was very specific about what I wanted
so I was looking for somebody, for example,
who liked to travel but not cruise-ship travel
that's not what I would call traveling.
I wanted somebody who was ready
to strap on a backpack
and get out and hike around.
I was also looking for somebody who was not fat and not skinny,
but would always weight 20 pounds more than I did --
(Laughter)
-- regardless of what I weighed at that moment.
So, anyhow --
I had my top tier and my second tier
and now that I had all of this figured out
still in the same night in my drunken state,
I developed a scoring system
so for 700 points, I would agree to email the guy
for 900 points I would go on a date
and for 1500 points I would consider him
for a long-term relationship.
So I had set some minimum thresholds
and I thought, "This is really, really smart."
Right? I am no longer gonna go out with everybody .
I'm gonna have to only go out
with men who meet these different criteria.
And so when I went back in
I found Eric1971.
He looked pretty good.
I liked the way that his profile sounded,
I liked the things that he wrote
and as I started scoring him
on a scrolled matrix
I found that too many of the things from my list
fell below the middle line
and so as a result of that
I saved myself a terrible date.
Right, and having to send out a bunch of emails.
Then I found Jewishdoc57
which, I have to tell you,
he was really good looking,
but he also specifically in his profile
said that he liked to travel and not cruise-ship travel,
and I thought, "I've hit the jackpot".
My system is definitely working.
I put him on a matrix
and everything was above that middle line.
I had created my own sort of algorithm
and my own way to personalize
these online dating websites
so that I could use them
as databases for my own individual tastes and needs.
There's one problem with that,
I realized that if I thought
Jewishdoc57 was so amazing
there were probably some people out there who did too.
So, still in my drunken state
I decided to take a look.
And that's when I found Smileygirl1978.
SmileyGirl was very short and very thin
and said that she was silly, nice and friendly
and has a "genuine" sense of humor.
Who is this horrible woman?
And why can't she spell?
Well, SmileyGirl picked my interest,
so I went deeper in
and found that I had some problems
because while all of these women
looked pretty much and sounded pretty much the same,
when comparing them to the photos that I had posted,
I saw that perhaps I had a problem.
And that my perfect 1500 point man
may not think that I was so perfect back.
I also looked at the way
that they were describing themselves
so whereas I had my entire resumé posted
they just used aspirational language
and sounded like they were really fun to hang out with
At that moment I knew that I needed to be fearless.
It was time to join JDate as a man!
(Laughter)
True story!
So I ran a little experiment.
I created 10 male profiles
that each fit the archetype
of the perfect point man that I had developed
And when I say, "Created 10 user profiles",
I didn't just go in and type in some stuff
the way that I did the first time around.
I created 10 separate characters
with huge amounts of data associated with each.
I knew what their favorite foods were,
I knew that one was in a battle with his sister
and they didn't get along because of something that happened
in a car at a family vacation.
I knew these men inside and out
and they all scored the minimum threshold of points
for me to date them.
And my goal here with these 10 men was to learn.
I wanted to find out why the women
who were popular on these dating websites
-- because the algorithm certainly [wasn't] helping me, right?
I wanted to know why they were popular.
So I looked at their vocabulary and language
I looked at the length of the profiles they had
their senses of humor,
how they describe their career,
I looked at their height and their weight, what they were listing.
I looked at photos,
and I was also categorizing
the amount of time that it took
for them to make the first interactions.
My family always said
I couldn't possibly email or talk to a guy first,
that I would seem too aggressive.
That I had to wait for them to come to me
and I wanted to find out if that was true.
So started collecting data over that month
and I was looking at both qualitative and quantitative data.
Qualitative data show that aspirational language
like "love" and "like" and "fun"
would never describe something like a building as "fun."
But I learn that the popular women do.
I was also looking at quantitative data.
Now we all think that everybody lies about their weight.
Would you believe that more women online
are actually lying about their height?
rounding significantly down,
than are lying about their weight?
It's one of the interesting things that I found out.
After this month I had enough data now
to create what I called a super profile.
It was an amalgam
of what I had found from the popular women
that was very much personalized to me.
And that's when I gamed the system.
So I created a new profile
with different photos
I was honest about my height and my weight.
I can't help the fact that I'm 5'6" and not a size 2.
But I did shorten what I had originally written
in my profile significantly.
I now used aspirational language,
I mentioned my career but it wasn't the focus.
And suddenly I was the most popular woman
on all of these websites.
I had a full inbox
for the first time in my entire life.
I had men coming at me from every direction,
every single guy out there wanted to date me.
And what that allowed me to do,
was to go back in and from this enormous pool of men
apply my own framework, my own algorithm if you will,
and the problem in doing this
was that even the best of the men that were out there
only scored 650 points.
My friends and family said, "Are you nuts?
Everybody out there wants to go out with you.
You're still being too damn picky!"
And that's when I found this guy.
So, immediately I like the way that he looked
I'm into baldies.
I really loved what he wrote as his job --
he said that he was an arctic baby seal hunter (Laughter) --
and I thought he was pretty awesome.
And, since he immediately scored 800 points
I thought - you know - maybe my system is working.
So we started chatting,
I emailed him first.
My data showed me that I was able to do that,
unlike what my grandmother had said my entire life,
it was ok to be a little aggressive.
I waited 20 to 22 hours until our next interaction
although it pained me greatly every single time.
I didn't get specific about my job,
the specific things that I like to watch,
or the specific places that I like to go to,
until our third interaction.
In the meantime I kept scoring him.
Three weeks later we went out
on our first date.
It lasted 14 hours
and it was one of the most amazing dates
of my entire life.
At the end of that date, I went back home,
and I scored him again.
He went over the 1000 point threshold
and I thought, "You know what?
This entire time that I've been listening to everybody's advice.
I haven't been picky enough!
I was too afraid to go out there
and ask for and demand what I really wanted."
Well, a year after that first date
we were traveling in Petra, Jordan.
Real traveling, when he got down on his knee,
and asked me to marry him.
We called my parents, they were thrilled,
and a year after that we were married.
A year after that our daughter, Petra, was born.
(Applause)
So obviously I'm very happy and having a fabulous live
but what does this mean for all of you?
(Laughter)
Well, what this means, whether or not you're single,
is that you have to be fearless,
and if everybody around you
is telling you that you shouldn't be asking
for the things that you really want,
tell them to take a hike.
It's ok to be fearless and to ask
for what you really want and to demand it.
And whether or not you're dating or doing something else,
develop your own set of data points
and your own framework.
Construct one for qualitative and quantitative analysis
and start gaming your own system.
So I wrote a book about all of this,
and it's called "Data, a love story" it's on pre-order now.
It will be in bookstores all over the place Jan, 31st.
I hope you want to read it and to tell everybody else to read it.
And that's it, thank you very much.
(Applause)