Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 935: Dating App Cover-Up

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

Uber's Strategy for Fighting Sexual Assault Suits: 'What Were You Wearing?' - The New York Times Dating App Cover-Up: How Tinder, Hinge, and Their Corporate Owner Keep Rape Under Wraps – The Markup

This episode of Cognitive Dissidence is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Starting live from Glory Hole Studios in Chicago and beyond. This is Cognitive Dissence. Every episode to be blasts anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence.

To any topic that makes the news. makes it big or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome at. Today is Friday, August the 7th, and it is long-form day. Cecil, you're listening to this some other day, probably Thursday, the 13th, give or take. This is also content warning for this episode before we get started. We are going to talk about a lot about rape today. So if that's something that bothers you, if that's something you don't want to listen to, catch us on Monday. there'll be a different kind of assault that's going on, probably an assault from the government on to everybody else. But if it makes you uncomfortable, you know, you don't have to listen to it. But this is, I think, a really important piece because it's a tying between our reliance on technology and how that can sometimes put us into some real dangerous places.

Yeah. So this first story comes to New York Times. Uber's strategy for fighting sexual assault suits. What were you wearing? Now, I got to be very clear. that's not a euphemism. That is a direct question asked in deposition. And this is not, and so this article goes to great pains to use like an example where the facts are very clear.

When I say the facts are very clear, it's because the person who committed the sexual assault was tried in criminal court, found guilty and convicted. So it's not a he said she said situation, right? It is already a situation where the perpetrator of the crime has been arrested, tried, and convicted. And in the civil suit, Uber's like, yeah, that's a great place to start. But also, how might you have been a fault, victim? Yeah, yeah, it's a real terrible article to read because it's not just what were you wearing. It's how were you acting?

Were you intoxicated? Asking deep questions about that. Also, what about your family history? Have you ever cheated on your spouse? And they'll call the spouse in to talk about like these types of things. So what it is is it's making someone who's trying to sue Uber, who put them into a dangerous situation, re-examine that decision because it's going to hurt them.

them more while they try to sue Uber for creating a situation that is a real terrible situation. Now, as Tom said, this particular case, this person was charged and they wound up getting charged by the government, by the state for this rape. And that's a much larger and deeper burden of proof that's necessary for a criminal trial than it is for a civil trial. So often what happens when that someone is guilty of a civil offense or a criminal offense, the civil suits are normally not as difficult because you already know that the person has already done it and they've already been through a much more difficult procedure to prove that portion. So now this other stuff is not as difficult. But they are pushing back and it makes it

very uncomfortable for these people who are looking to try to get Uber to pay them damages for putting them in a situation. It's particularly egregious when it comes to them asking about, well, it's egregious on all accounts, right? It's egregious on all accounts. A lawyer has every right to try to protect their defendant, right? That's 100% true. But there are certain things that you shouldn't be asking based on that or lines of questioning

that are out of bounds. And one of them very specifically, one of the pieces that I think is really egregious, is them talking about whether or not somebody is drunk. because Uber sells itself as a company that is there when you don't want to be the designated driver. When you want to have people who want to go out and they want to have a good time and they don't want to worry about the logistics of transportation for the evening, they can instead use your company, which should be able to deliver them where they want to go by somebody who's sober and somebody who cares about their safety.

And what they've done is they've created a, system that neglects these background checks that sometimes puts you in the car with a dangerous person. And that really only affects you when you happen to be a woman, right? We've seen a lot of women who travel alone in Uber or who might be intoxicated, who get assaulted. And then they wind up, these people wind up getting arrested for it. I mean, like, they're the ones that are facilitating you even meeting this person. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. The, some of the stats on this are incredibly upsetting. Uber gets a sexual assault complaint about every eight minutes, according to this article. Some kind of a complaint comes in to Uber about every eight

minutes on average, if you were to average out the number of complaints against time for sexual assault claims. Now, they would say, okay, but compare that against the total number of rides and it's a diminutive percentage. That's still an enormous amount. And like Cecil said, there is not deep enough background checking and vetting for the contractors that work for Uber because some of these people, they have had prior convictions. They never should have been put in a place where vulnerable people would be put alone in their car with them because like a simple background check could have caught and eliminated them as a potentially viable contractor.

what Uber is doing on the legal side with their depositions, their line of questioning and all of that kind of thing. Like to your point, Cecil, when they bring it up in the article, like the lawyers have an obligation, like a legal obligation when they take the case to protect their client, absolutely. But the way that they do that matters. And what they are not doing is looking into a fact pattern about whether or not this event occurred. What they're doing instead is saying,

how can I take this person and make them a less perfect victim? I want to create an imperfect victim. And the imperfections that they're trying to create with these lines of questioning have nothing to do with whether or not they're accurate factually about what occurred or didn't occur. What they're instead looking to do is not attack the reliability of the witness, but they're trying to get the jury or the judge or whoever to acknowledge implicitly that some people deserve it a little. Yep, yep. That is what they're trying to do. So these questions are not aimed at whether or not somebody's telling a true story. These questions are not aimed at whether

or not somebody is a reliable witness to these events. When they ask like, what dress did you wear? Were you wearing heels or were you wearing flats? That has nothing to do with the reliability of witness. That has, what that does is it taps into a misogyny bias. Yeah. And it reaches into the back of people's fucking heads. And it says, hey, you believe implicitly or otherwise, you believe that some women at least deserve it a little. So how can I create this, how can I take this victim and portray them in such a way that you're less sympathetic to them?

And maybe we'll still lose. But instead of getting $10 million, you'll award them $1 million. And I just saved the company $9 million, right? That is fucking gross. That is beyond gross. That should be illegal. I truly believe that, like, if it has nothing to do with the fact pattern of the crime, that should be illegal. You shouldn't be able to even ask after this.

Or if you ask after it, you should not be able to present it to the jury because it's not evidential. Like, whether or not somebody is drunk literally doesn't matter unless it matters for the prosecution, right? For the other side. Like, hey, this is a reason I couldn't consent. It's never a reason, like, why somebody, why it's okay to rape somebody. It's never like an ameliorating piece of evidence. It's really only the opposite. What somebody's wearing, shouldn't be able to ask that.

What somebody's like sex life is outside of this single event that occurred literally does not matter. It can't matter. This is this whole line of questioning. It's been doing this for years and years against women. And some states even have laws against doing this. But they treat victims of sexual assault as people who implicitly deserved it. and what they're trying to do is plant a message in the heads of the people who are deciding the case to say, okay, but she kind of had it coming, right? It's fucking horrible, man.

It's fucking horrible. And I think that there's two avenues that they work on. So they work on that avenue, right? Like the sort of inherent misogyny that's in people to catch that and say, come on, she kind of deserved it. But I also think there's also a line in there that they're also trying to work, which is men can't control themselves. Right? So there's the, there's the women kind of deserve it line, but then there's also this, well, hold on now, was she wearing underwear? Because you know that guys are just so disgusting and can't control themselves that they literally are just ids and they don't ever act in any way that's rational. They're constantly just acting emotionally and through and in ways that are unintellectual that they will act on something like that. So was she passed out? Well, you know, guys going to be opportunistic there. That's your fault.

You should have thought more about how these guys were going to act. Not that the guys should be in any kind of danger, right? The guys shouldn't be the ones who hold themselves to a high standard. We should just constantly hold the guys to a low standard because we know that's as high as they can reach, right? So it's like a double edge. And it's, in both ways, it's damaging. It's damaging to women and it's damaging to men.

Men are able to control themselves, right? There's guys. We know it's true. We know that's a true statement. Guys can control themselves. That's the thing that happens. But this idea that that guys can't and that they can't do it, that again, seeps into our sort of discourse and makes it seem like that's another, like not only do women have to roll this one heavy stone up, which is I'm not at fault, but they also have to roll up the guys because the guys won't load it up themselves. Dude, that's exactly right. You know, like, there's a sense that is built into this questioning to yes and that, that like you don't blame a lion for eating the goat, right? But that acknowledges that men are predators. Yeah. Right? Yeah. But they don't want to say that men are predators or acting as predators.

So they have to imply all of these things. They can't come out and say these things out loud. But what they do is they tap into the biases that people already hold because we live in a patriarchal rape culture that is must be. misogynist at heart that says, look, men are not responsible for their own actions. You're actually responsible for not protecting yourself from predators. The responsibility is on you for not doing enough to avoid being preyed upon by men who really can't blame themselves or control themselves. They are lions in the wilderness.

You are the prey. And, you know, you should run faster. You should not stand out in the open in the savannah. What do you expect a lion to do? not eat you? And it's like, yeah, that's actually the answer because we're not predators. We're not lions. We're human beings. And most men are not walking around looking for opportunities to commit fucking rape. Right. And the idea, though, that we excuse this behavior by shifting the burden to women and saying like, well, you should have done more to protect yourself because you know

you live in a world where you're less safe. And it's not the fault of the people who've made it less safe. That's, it's your fault for not doing more. Why do you carry pepper spray? Why don't you wear underwear? Why don't you wear ugly clothes? Why did you go out and drink? Why did you do these things? None of that should matter at all. Like, if I am creating an unsafe situation, I'm the problem and I'm the only problem. Yeah, yeah. Well, and what is so interesting is that the line that a lot of the Manosphere guys have and a lot of the things that they talk about these Manosphere people, they all seem to have the same idea. You look from a large group of them talk about personal responsibility as a man. It's my responsibility. Like, you got to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. I'll sell you

a course how to do that, right? I'm going to give you this course. This course is going to tell you how to not only, you know, pick up women, but make a lot of money and all this other stuff, right? That's how Andrew Tate got all his money by lying to people about his dumb course that he pretended was a thing that was real. It's literally just a, it's just like a fucking discord. He was selling people. But this is what they talk about. Look at Jordan Peterson's clean your room stuff, right?

Take responsibility for who you are. But it's so interesting whenever anything like this comes up, they immediately fall back on well, you can't trust guys around girls, right? You can't. But like, where did all that responsibility go? Like, where did it all go?

Right. You're responsible enough to clean your room, but you're not responsible enough to drive somebody home if they're not wearing panties. Like, you know what I mean? I know. Those things are, it's so at odds. it's unbelievable, but the thing is

is like it doesn't have to make sense. It just has to make people feel good, right? Then nobody's trying to make sense of any of this stuff. And I think that that's the real detriment that we have to deal with. I want to yes and though what you had to say because I think that this is such a detriment to guys and to girls. And the fact that, like, just like you said,

whether or not somebody had a relationship before, what does that have to do at all? with whether or not someone was assaulted, right? That has nothing to do if they had an extra marital affair, or they were, you know, they were unfaithful in their, you know, boyfriend-girlfriend relationship or whatever. What is that? It has nothing to do whatsoever with the fact that they were assaulted.

What they're wearing, nothing to do whatsoever on how they were assaulted. This is literally just trying to get somebody to pay less money. And I, genuinely, this is a company. that is putting you in a place that is ultra vulnerable. I mean, you're locked in a room with this person. Yeah. This is you locked in a moving room that they are controlling the entire time.

The amount of, of, you know, personal responsibility on the company to make sure that the person they put you in that room is safe should be through the fucking roof. The idea that there lacks on that is appalling. They shouldn't. They should be sued out of existence if they're lax on that. That's the thing you're selling to me.

Like you're selling me, I am going to put you in a rolling locked room with a stranger and you are going to be impaired and you're going to be safe. That's the lie you're selling me. That's the line. That's the whole thing. If you can't sell me that, what the fuck are you selling me then?

Yeah, man. This is a direct result, I think, of two things that, like the contractor slash gig worker model that Uber has created and relies on, it is there. Because remember, if you work for Uber, you're not an employee. So Uber's been very, very clear about this. They've been sued and they fought very hard to make sure that if you work for Uber, you are not an employee, which you are as a contractor, your subcontractor, you're a gig worker. And what that does in effect is it shields them from responsibility for the most part

for the actions of their people because those people are not employees. They're not acting on behalf of the company. So there's a lot of advantages that Uber reaps by not having these people who are doing the driving be direct employees. There's financial and tax advantages. There's a lot of structural advantages. but one of the other advantages is this false distance. It is a false distance.

What you're doing as a consumer is you're engaging with the company Uber. That's all you're doing. The person who shows up, as far as you're concerned, is an Uber driver. But as far as Uber is concerned legally, they are a subcontract. Yeah. Right. And so if you had a regular one-to-one employee, you would have a direct one-to-one responsibility for that employee's

They create a false distance or a false legal gap by using this contracting gig worker model. It's great for them because it lets them exploit workers and exploit their customers. So there's like no losing if you're Uber on this. And this also contrasts like the way that they behave when they're sued contrasts directly with their own policies and mission statements and value statements and all the rest of it. they have what sounds like really like unimpeachably good training for their people where they talk about, you know, hey, it's never. If you're taking an intake call on a complaint, remember it is never their fault.

They've got all this really kind of good stuff over here written in the black and white. But then when the rubber hits the road and the legal end of it, it's what are you wearing? Yeah. And you're like, holy shit. Like the things you're doing with your mouth are not matching the things you're doing. with your fucking money. And I'll tell you what I believe. I believe your wallet.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can show me your mission statement all day. I just want to see how much you spend. Right. And where you spend it. Right.

And how you spend that money. And how you're responsible for yourself. And that's the real issue. You know, these, I think that there was certainly a feeling that these companies like Uber. And I'm thinking of the other one that. Lift? No. I'm thinking of the.

one where you stay in a hotel, what's that called Airbnb? Airbnb and things like that, that sort of made a situation where people were like, hey, I could get involved in this, do this work as a gig worker. You know, I can rent out my place for a night. I can run out a room for a night. I can get my own car and drive somebody for a night and make a little extra money. And there's sort of like, I think in some ways, if those people are compensated correctly, that's great, right? But there's also like this. this thing that this company will do is sometimes they will pair you with a creep, right? Sometimes because they're not doing their due diligence. When I think about Airbnb, I think about, you know,

like the times that they've found like cameras and shit in people's houses and they found like, you know, people have been like spying on someone. They go into the house and they find a camera. And it's because there's, you know, the company, they don't care whether or not, they're not going to send anybody out. They're not going to spend any of them. this money. This person's putting themselves up there. And so then you wind up in a house where somebody could maybe take a look at you. Now, can that happen in a hotel? Sure, it can. Absolutely. Different hotels can have that happen. But what you have in a hotel is you have some sort of safeguards because there's going to be a different person who comes in and cleans the room. There's going to be a manager

maybe once in a while that walks around and checks that room. You're going to, you're working there, so they're paying attention to where you're at and what you're doing while you're there. So there's other people there that can do it. If you own a house, who's there to check on you? Right. Nobody's there. It's not like there's another person who's going to be like, hey, what are you doing in that room? Nobody knows what I'm doing in my bathroom fan or whatever, right? Nobody knows what's happening up there. So there's like a totally different, less amount of checks in the place. And the same thing goes for when it comes to Uber. They don't have any. Just like you described, you could just be a gig worker and they don't know much about you. That's a real dangerous situation to put

you in. You shouldn't be just so flippant about putting people in these dangerous situations and then not having responsibility. The way you're making your money is off of the convenience that your app gives to both the person who's hired by you and the person who's hiring you. That's the benefit is the convenience of it all. But if it's not safe, then it's no longer convenient. Then it's not a good thing to have anymore. So you've got to fulfill one promise and it's to make it. You've got to fulfill one promise. And it's to make it safe. And you can't make it 100% safe. There's always going to be something that slips through the cracks. And I think people would be forgiving of that. What we're worried about is when it's constantly happening and there's all these suits that happen. And you're like you say,

there's all these complaints that are happening. That's a real problem. You need to do a better job. Yeah. I mean, I think it's also worth saying that like the lack of oversight that you were describing, it's a kind of legal shield for companies like this. What I mean by that is that if I'm a company and I do a certain thing, and it becomes the policy and procedure of my company that every time I inspect a car, let's say I'm enterprise, right, the rental car company, and I have a policy that every car that goes out gets inspected every 10 times, and then I neglect to do that. And on the 15th time that that car goes out, something on that car mechanically fails. Somebody that's a lawyer is going to say, all right, well, what are your policies and procedures

around maintenance? Oh, well, we would inspect the car every 10 times. Did you do that in this case? No, I did not. Boom, you're screwed, right? So if you're a company like Uber, you would intentionally structure your company so that that lack of oversight created a structural gap that nobody could ask you about, right? So you don't want to do more. They don't want to do more. I think this is worth saying out loud. They want the employees to not be real employees, but to be gig workers and subcontractors because that creates legal distance and illegal shield. They want to have the least amount of oversight, background checking, et cetera, as they possibly can,

because the more they do, the more that they are held to and responsible for doing. So it only makes sense for them to do the bare minimum. As long as they do the bare minimum, they are only obligated against their own policies and procedures when it goes to court to say, I've followed my policies and procedures, here's what they are, we do them. Maybe they should be more robust, but they're not. and I can't then get held. I can't say like, nobody's going to go to court and say, well, you didn't do this thing and it's your own procedure that you do it.

And as a result of not doing it, somebody got hurt. That's pretty easy open and shut shit. So to a large degree, it's advantageous for companies to do the least that they can do. And it's important to note that companies like Uber literally structure their entire organizations to create as much distance as possible. And who pays the price, the consumer, women, specifically. are being raped in these cars and by these drivers. It's egregious. I also want to just mention, too, like, I'm not against like Uber workers or Uber itself. Oh, no, I don't want to come across that way. And I don't think that Uber itself necessarily is a bad company in that sense, right? I'm not,

I don't know a lot about their books or how they pay people or what they take off the top or any of that stuff. I don't know a lot about their business practices themselves. And I, and I know for sure that there's plenty of good people who drive for Uber all the time. And like, they have probably helped people who have been in their car, who have been intoxicated, and they've helped them get out of the car and they've, you know, maybe wiped up a little bit of something. I know Tom, you threw up in a car one time. Throw up a cab once. It was a cab wasn't Uber. But still, you know what I mean? Like, like, I know I've been intoxicated in cars before and people have never really tried to take advantage of me. So I know there's good people. I'm not saying that automatically somebody is bad.

I don't want people to get the wrong impression. What I am saying is that sometimes Uber doesn't give a shit. They have proven that they don't give a shit about who they put you in the car with. And that should be the one thing that they should be paying attention to the most. Let's talk about this other article. This other article is from the markup. I believe the markup is a subset of the Guardian, if I'm not mistaken. It's published by The Guardian.

Dating app coverup, how Tinder, Hinge, and their corporate owners, keep rape under wraps. The company behind more than a dozen dating apps Match Group has known for years about the abusive users on its platform but chooses to leave millions of people in the dark. This is a long and

very fucking disturbing article. This is an article if you are a $2 Patreon or above, you can head over to Patreon and you'll be able to listen to the audio version of this article read by myself. I had no idea. Maybe this is stupid of me. I didn't

know that one company owned most of those big data apps? I didn't even. I had no idea. I didn't know that they owned all that stuff. Yeah, they own like, they own Tinder and Bumble and Hinge and plenty of fish. And they own a bunch of that stuff. Like the match group owns a bunch of that stuff. Really, corner in the market on that stuff.

They are. They are. Yeah. I always thought they were competitors. I guess in my head, I was always like, oh, Bumble's a competitor to these things. I did too. They're just like slightly different structurally or like user experience-wise. It didn't occur to me. Yeah, it didn't occur to me. Yeah. No idea.

I never really spent any time on the dating apps. So like it's not a world I'm familiar with as a user. So, but these dating apps, what they should have is a reporting mechanism. And they have these, right? There's a reporting mechanism. So if somebody behaves badly, then users can say, hey, I'm going to report that person for behaving badly. And then the app should, or the owners of the app, the company, they should make that person not be on the app anymore.

Yeah. Right. So if somebody behaves badly, whether or not, I mean, they're not necessarily, it doesn't sound like they're necessarily responsible for engaging the authorities, but they say, okay, like, look, we don't want people who are unsafe to meet up with people in sensitive and vulnerable places and insensitive and vulnerable ways. So if somebody gets a user report that somebody has, like, sexually assaulted them or behave, like, badly in that way, then we're going to kick them off the app.

They can't be here anymore. We want to say of a safe community. But the person can just go back in and make another fucking profile. And if you get kicked off of this one app, the other apps don't talk to each other. And it doesn't kick you off of the other associated apps, even though it's all owned by the same company. So predators just use this as hunting ground. And it's not just that there's, there are multiple like reddits, threads and whatnot to tell you how to skirt the rules to keep. yourself back into these places

because other people have figured it out. They've gotten kicked off these apps and then they've been like, oh, well, you can actually get back in and then they can use one of the things that happens to Tom is they might go to the other competitor, but they might also just stay on the same one and just change their username, but then have the

exact same name, exact same birthday be the exact same person that they said that they were before, but they've just changed a tiny bit about themselves in order to get back on the app. And this is, again, We talked about it with Uber where they're putting you in a locked room with somebody, the driving locked room, they need to be more responsible with who they're putting you in the

room with. The same goes here. I understand things are going to slip through the cracks. There's going to be a moment where somebody is like, hey, a creep on your site. Of course, that's going to happen. You're dealing with the general public. There's going to be somebody who's bad. I don't think anybody would expect you to have 100% rate of safety on all these things.

women already know that when they go out on dates, that there's a chance that they can be sexually assaulted. They already know all that stuff. The women already realize that stuff. They're going to try to be safe on their own anyway. But what happens is when you know somebody did something, and then you allow them to just go right back in, right? You allow them to dip right back into the stream.

That's on you now. You've made the decision to not make this place safe. You have something that says this person has been a creep. So if that person's been a creep and that can be in many different ways, you have to then review it. That costs money. But you know what? You're making money off these apps.

So you should in that time be like, well, we've got to figure out a way to both make money, but then also spend money to make sure that that person did or didn't do the right thing. And if they didn't, we need to make sure they can't be on our app or any of our other chain of apps that we have because that's our responsibility as a person. You wouldn't want to do this if this was like a meetup for us, right, for our group, for CogDIS, let's say. We were having a meetup.

And somebody was a creep. And then they came back and they changed their name. And you and I saw him come in and we're like, oh, I recognize that guy from last time, but he changed his name to Joe. Yeah. Be like, get out. You can't be here.

You're a creep. And then you just love. about your name, you need to leave. We would immediately do something about it. But if you don't, if like you don't care about things like that, you wouldn't, it doesn't matter. You're just like, whatever. That guy could just literally walk out and change

his middle initial and come back in the room and then can do the same things again. You have a responsibility for putting people in these situations. The story that this person tells in this very specific article is a horror. They go to hang out with somebody and then they drug their drink at

the house. They are able to get away, but not before they're sexually assaulted, right? So they're sexually assaulted at this house, and they're able to, but they are able to get away in some way, but still get assaulted. That's a horror. And this person didn't just do it once. And then they wound up getting fucking prosecuted for it. And they're spending the rest of their life and somebody else's life in prison because of it. Yeah. And this person was expressly using the app ecosystem, the dating app ecosystem to lure people back, to drug them, and to sexually assault them. And it wasn't, it's not like this person was complained about once

and the companies didn't act. There were multiple credible complaints against this user. And the company was just basically like, yeah, we've made it intentionally. And I think this is true. I think these companies understand that they exist and they have value because they have so many fucking people on them. And what the real incentive for them

is, is not to have less people on here, but more. So they're going to make all the fucking noise, and I'll make all the right mouth movements towards saying, we have to value everybody's safety and safeguard and protection. But they're really just going to leave every fucking door open possible to have as many people on the app because you want as many people

to swipe through and connect with and talk to and interact with as possible. And the more people on that, the more people are going to get on that. And it's just going to be this money fucking cycle for these guys. If they are really diligent, it's going to be a little bit annoying. It may be cumbersome for the user. They may have less people on it.

None of that works in the company's financial favor, and that's the only thing they care about. So they only care about. These are not companies that really want you to, like, find love and make a connection, right? As soon as you find love and make a connection, you're probably off the apps. It's actually in their best interest for you just to be on the apps going out and meeting people and paying that monthly subscription fee. That's how their business model. Their business model is disincentivized for you to be off of it.

And they even say in the article that they're gamifying data. Yes. They're doing, they have like loot boxes and all kinds of crazy shit that they're introducing because they hired the guy who did like Farmville to be the head of the app company. So they're an app that's getting people together and they're like, hey, why do we get that guy who made that addictive game on fucking Facebook to come over? And so that's what they started doing. They started gamifying it according to them.

I've never even opened one of these. I don't know what they're like. I got married analog. So it was like a long time ago. It sounded way better on vinyl when I got married. Like this long time ago. So I never had to do any of this stuff. And I think about this in some ways.

Obviously, dating when I was young was unsafe too. Right? Like it was those were unsafe. That was an unsafe way to date. And it was also, interestingly, I was thinking about this too. It was also like all the ways in which you meet, you would try to talk to somebody. now is one of those ways that would be gauche if you were to talk to them now.

Like walking up to somebody when you're working out or walking up to them in the outside in the world when they're walking around, you would go up and be like, hey, you look cute. Can I get your number or whatever? There would be like an interaction between people in those places. And it's so funny that like now, the way in which you meet people is really sort of distilled down into these apps. And I think that there is a benefit in some way. I don't know if there are probably some, almost certainly negatives as well.

but there's certainly some benefit to being able to meet more people and like you say, the more people are on it, the better off they do because there's just more people in the area. So it's all good.

I think that's all positive in some ways, but you've got to be more stringent in the people that you let back on your app after you kick them off. They're clearly... And the thing is, they clearly don't want those people

there initially, right? They clearly don't want them there initially or they're at least going through the motions to show people that they're not willing to tolerate it in some ways. but they are willing to tolerate it if they let that person come back. I just think like we have played out the hyper-capitalist tech companies

and how they treat people who use their products. And we've seen that it's never good. It's never a good way. It's never like there's a major benefit that these tech companies allow us to have without a unbelievable difficult price. whether it's your privacy or it's your data or it's the, you know, the putting you in a room with somebody who might be dangerous. It's all these things that are like really,

really strong negatives. And these companies don't give a shit as long as they're making money. And I think like this, if anything called for regulation, it's regulation on these companies that don't staff their companies well enough. And their bottom line might take a hit. But there's ways in which they can make their companies demonstrably safer and they choose not to do it. Yeah, man, these companies, a couple of,

a couple of quick points on that. Like, these companies are intentionally built to be not responsible for the product people actually use the company for. They are responsible for these sort of like tangential items when you read through their terms and conditions. They, but like, so like the dating app is a good example. What, what I'm used, if I was a user, the thing that I am getting out of the dating app is a date with. somebody. And the app's like, well, I clearly can't be responsible for your date. And I get that. Of course, you can't be responsible for your date. But you're taking their money and you're responsible for something and you should be responsible for some minimal amount of due diligence to make sure

that the people that you're putting at your, that you're hosting a great big digital party singles event. And you're saying, hey, everybody that pays me $2,99 can show up. But like, I'm going to do a little bit of checking at the door to make sure people. aren't armed, aren't dangerous, aren't creepy, etc. Not doing anything is not a solution. But these tech companies have fooled us into thinking that they can exist without responsibility to the product that we as consumers are ultimately using them for. And that's fucked up.

And they know it, right? They know it. They build out their products and they build out their terms and conditions very specifically to avoid responsibility for what you actually get as the consumer from the product. That's structural. That's intentional. Because the other thing is these are solvable problems. Yes. And they choose not to solve them. It's not that they don't know this stuff happens. Of course they know they're getting sued. They know this stuff is happening. These are solvable problems that are not in their financial interests to solve. And they do not solve them on purpose,

on purpose. And the difference like you brought up like people, it's always been unsafe for women to date. It is. Of course it is. But apps and these sorts of technologies, they inject the problem of scale into that danger. And we've never had that before. And we often, I think, like to draw analog to digital analogies and say, oh, well, there's always been something like this. And it's true, right? There's nothing new under the sun in some ways.

But the problem of scale is the real problem or danger of technology in general. It's the difference between a musket and a machine gun, right? They're both guns you can hold in your hand and one person can carry it around. And I could list 20 things that are the same about them, but the difference is scale. And technology oftentimes introduces an element of scalability that we have not regulated ourselves into yet, where we've not recognized the danger of that scalability. So the predator that serves as the example in this article to anchor it, like this person was able to commit crimes, sexual assault crimes. at a level of scale because meeting people, these apps make it very easy, very accessible.

They remove a lot of the friction barriers that would exist if I had to go out to a bar and pick somebody up every time. They remove all of that stuff. They smooth it out. And they create a possibility of problems at scale that otherwise might not exist in the same way. And these apps are built to like make no responsibility

for themselves while they do this. Well, and to add to that, you know, back in the analog days, you might meet somebody at work, or you met them through a friend, or you met them through a different way. It wasn't just like you'd go to a public place and meet people. You met people through other people. Well, you can't do what he's doing if you happen to have like another point of contact with that person, right? Like if you introduced me to your friend, and then I sexually assault your friend, your friend knows you, right? And then suddenly that friend group knows that you did something bad, and that's real bad for you in that friend group.

But when everybody is anonymous the entire time, and I'm not saying that in the past, you couldn't just meet somebody in a random place, but there was a lot more of, oh, I know a gal who would like really like you, Tom, let me introduce you. And there was a lot more of that type of thing, right? Like, the reason, how I met my wife was I was at a party where I happened to be at a party and she was friends with other people that I was friends with, but we weren't friends. Sarah and I weren't friends. We didn't meet until that party.

But we had mutual friends that put us in the same room together. So it's the same, like, that's a common way that people met. That's totally different when it comes to these apps. So that means that you need to be more diligent when it comes to, I'm introducing two strangers to each other. Those two strangers need to, they need to be able to interact in a safe way, or at least I need to do my due diligence, And so I didn't know they wouldn't act in an unsafe way with each other.

And if we don't do the work of holding these companies accountable and responsible, and the argument, you can hear it, it's like, well, how are they supposed to? Like the standard can't be perfection. We're not talking about a standard of perfection. Nobody can achieve a standard of perfection. But what they're doing is the least amount possible. They are intentionally choosing not to solve solvable problems. And we have decided that we are going to do.

do nothing structurally to force these companies to do that work. And it's true of Uber and it's true of these app companies. And it's true of these and these and these. We've talked about it so many times. We don't have our fucking act together on this stuff. And so we are being run by these companies who run roughshod over the top of us, making money off of our fucking misery. And there's nothing we can do about it because we haven't decided that we care about our own well-being more than we care about their bottom lines. Because that's what it is. At the end of the day, the counter is like, well, then they couldn't operate.

Then maybe they shouldn't operate. Like, maybe we shouldn't have things if they can't be made to be safe. I think that's worth saying out loud. Maybe we should not have things at all if they can't be made to be safe. You wouldn't accept that with so many other products. We should not accept that because a product is digital. But we weirdly do. What would, I'm sure that there's this sort of thing exists, but there's probably got to be an app for

like child care out there. Absolutely. It's called care.com. There you go. So there's a care.com. What if care.com did the same thing, right? What if they put your kid in a situation? I'm not accusing this company, but I'm saying like, what if they did that?

Would you feel comfortable allowing it? Wouldn't you want to know as a parent? Wouldn't you want to know that that's happening? Wouldn't you want to know that that's? And then if they're trying to feel. trying to back out or they're trying to like blame the kid in some ways and they're trying to get out of paying for these these legal costs that are where they're clearly in the wrong shouldn't shouldn't you wouldn't you want to know those things like it's not just that these companies are putting

these people in these situations where it may be unsafe it's that once they're caught they're not changing their ways and then they're trying to weasel out of any responsibility that they have for it like they're doing every step of this wrong it's not like they're just doing one step of it They're making it unsafe and then they're trying to get out of responsibility for it. Those are they, that's like the only two things that are part of this equation and they're failing in both of them. Yeah. And we are failing to do anything about it because.

Exactly right. So many people, I think, are worried that if we build an internet environment that requires companies to be responsible, that we will stifle innovation and make it impossible for these companies to operate and we will lose the conveniences that we've come to. to rely upon. I think that's ultimately at the at the helm of a lot of what drives this. But I guess I would argue like, I don't believe that that's true. I think that's bullshit propaganda that companies want to sell you and want to get you to believe. They want you to believe that if they had to make these changes, they would not be able to operate. I would say, look at Australia.

Australia said, hey, you guys are not able to have, you guys are going to have to age verify by everybody who's on social media, anybody under 16 can't be on social media. And the first thing these companies said was, that's impossible, it can't be done. And Australia said, neat, then you can't be here. And they said, you know what? Turns out we figured out how to do it.

I talked to my guy, and he had an idea. Right. So they're fucking lying, man. Dude, tell me to my face that this company, if you say, I am going to put these regulations on you, they'll say it's not worth doing business anymore. Tell me they're going to say that. Tell me that they're going to say

it's not worth doing business anymore. They're going to scream. They're going to cry. Oh my God, you're cutting into profits. You're going to make us lose a bunch of money or whatever. They're going to say all that stuff. But none of that stuff's true. They're still going to make a ton of money

off of these things based on. And I say that, although I don't even know if Uber is even profitable. I say that out loud as I realize maybe they're not even profitable at this point. I think they're still trying to collect as much market share as possible so they could eventually, I don't know what, but that's how businesses work. I think that they did turn a profit. I think they only started turning a profit.

I could be wrong about this, but I thought I read that they started turning a profit in 2024. But they've been subsisting on venture capital for a long time. I know I'm not wrong about that. I know that they were for a long time. So I don't want to make it seem like. But at the same time, I think the same should go for everybody. if you can't do these things, then like you suggest,

maybe you shouldn't exist. And if you're pushing back because you don't want to spend the money to do these things, that's not a reason. That's not a reason. That's not a reason anybody takes for anything anywhere else

but for business. That's the only people we ever take that from is like, well, they can't do it or they lose money. I don't fucking care if they lose money. They're going to lose some money. They're going to have to pay more money to hire more people,

to deal with more tickets, to deal with them in a business, better way. The thing is, like, in this fucking article, in this article that you're talking about with this, with the, they had systems in place supposedly for them to try to catch these people.

But these people were just, they weren't doing their job well. That's the thing is, when you read this article, there's a whole group of people that they hired on to try to sort of be the stopgap to stop people from coming in and

victimizing other users on their platform and they just weren't good at their job. They just didn't do a good job with it. They already had the money to hire somebody. They just didn't do a good job and didn't follow it through. And then they wound up with a person who sucked at it. And they sucked at it for a while. So the thing is, we didn't hold them accountable.

If you hold them accountable, then it's like, oh, well, I got to fucking fire that person because they suck. They're terrible at their job. If Ian doesn't post the show every week, you got to fire him. You can't be like, well, he's just a nice guy and we just got to keep him around. No, if Ian doesn't post the show, you got to let him go. It's the same thing here. You said you do a job.

You didn't do the job. You suck at it. You got to get fired. And there was no pressure to do that because we just don't hold these people accountable. Yeah, you know, I'll tell you a quick story from the industry that I make my living in. So I work in the real estate industry. And after 2008, there was the Dodd-Frank bill was passed sometime after 2008. And one of the things in Dodd-Frank required banks to do a bunch of regulatory stuff,

stuff that they didn't want to do before. And it also required that they maintain a certain amount of capitalization, that they did not previously have to maintain, which is why a bunch of them went out of business and went bankrupt and all that stuff, and the global economy folded. And if you would have asked people right before that bill was passed, if you would have asked bankers whether or not they could operate in that stricter regulatory environment and maintaining that level of capitalization,

they would have said no. Absolutely not. They would have said, we cannot. And I know that because I remember them saying it. They said it. They testified to Congress saying that if the Dodd-Frank law passes, it will make banking impossible, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Dodd-Frank law passes.

They maintain the capitalization. They operate in a more strict regulatory environment. And they've made more money than they've ever made before. They were always lying. They were always lying. They just didn't want to have the responsibility. They just didn't want to do it because it cost them some money, but they figured out ways around it. They moved things around.

They hired the bright people. They were always lying. These companies are always lying. If you believe it, what you've bought into is their corporate propaganda. Yes, exactly that. All right. That's going to wrap it up for our long form. We're going to be back on Monday with a full show.

We're going to leave you like we always do with the Skeptics Creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-Babillon bullshit. Couched in Scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo-quazi alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized, stereogram, pyramidal, free energy healing, water, downward spiral, brain dead pan, sales pitch, late night infoducatainment. Leo Pisces, cancer cures, detox, reflex, foot massage, death and towers,

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