Tim Ferriss, the bestselling author of 4-Hour Work Week, has dived into the world of online and offline dating in a new episode of his TV show.
The Tim Ferriss Experiment sees the author push himself to breaking point, attempting to learn notoriously tough skills – whether surfing, professional poker, Brazilian jiu-jitsu or parkour – in one week.
To do this, he enlists the help of experts in the field, to guide and tutor him for each week’s set task.
And in one episode, available on iTunes, Ferriss tackles dating – seeing whether he can find love in a week.
Ferriss recruits an A-list team to help: computer hackers, matchmakers, and even the author of The Game, Neil Strauss.
The author wants to find a date, and makes it measurable by test-driving three different approaches to meeting a match – online dating, the cold approach and matchmaking.
For the online dating aspect of the episode, he meets up with Samy Kamkar, a famous hacker and security researcher, who is best known for creating the fastest spreading virus of all time.
Kamkar tells Ferriss how he created a number of programs to game online dating, after thinking “what would I do if I was trying to hack the system”.
He talks about how he automated the repetitive tasks which online daters go through, because many singles are simply looking for the same things in different profiles over and over again.
So Kamkar created a scraper program that downloaded every profile from a dating site to his computer, creating a database of all the single profiles in LA.
After this, he automatically ran the profile text through a program that assessed the writing ability of each single, and graded it.
He also trained his computer to automatically filter out profiles that wouldn’t appeal to him, and was able to generate data on which of his profile pictures would work best.
The hacker then applies these various techniques to help Ferriss along the way to finding a date.
Check out episode on iTunes here, and on Youtube below, to see how Kamkar gamed online dating, and see Ferriss try the other two methods – doing cold approaches with Neil Strauss, and testing matchmaking with the founder of CEO of matchmaking site Linx Dating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1dXJqy46E8