This Week on Thinking Is Cool <3

By luck or fate or something, you’ve found yourself reading an email from Thinking Is Cool, *the* podcast to listen to if you want to have better conversations. If this email was forwarded to you, sign up for regular correspondence from yours truly right here:

I’m not sure what this feeling is. Something in the air has changed, right? It’s as if, suddenly, breathing comes a little easier. The fog, both literally and figuratively, has lifted. Colors are brighter and sounds are sharper. The calendar tells us it’s a little too soon to feel the crispness of the coming season, so it can’t be that. It must be…

Love is in the air, and it’s taking the form of a new season of Thinking Is Cool. After a brief hiatus, I’m back with new episodes every Monday. First up this season: dating apps, modern love, and the technification of our most important relationships. More on that in ~73 seconds depending on how fast you read. 

But first, a brief interlude to say this: welcome back to Thinking Is Cool. For the uninitiated, my name is Kinsey Grant and I started this show in an effort to arm curious minds with the fodder they need to think harder, ask more questions, and enjoy difficult conversations.

I believe wholeheartedly and unabashedly in just a few things:

1. We shouldn’t feel ashamed to change our mind when we expand our worldview, and the best way to expand our worldview is by asking questions and talking to people.

2. Talking to people, even those with whom you disagree passionately, should be viewed as a chance for intellectual provocation and curiosity, not as a dogfight.

3. Hustle culture and performative intellectualism are a scourge upon our society.

4. OnlyFans f*cked up.

This is my belief system. This is what informs every single episode of Thinking Is Cool. I hope you enjoy Season 2—and remember to take it anywhere.

This Week on Thinking Is Cool

Modern love is messy, complicated, heart-wrenching, beautiful, and above all else? Online.

In recent years, evidence has suggested that some 40% of heterosexual couples in the U.S. met online...up from a meager 2% in the late 1990s. The numbers don’t lie—we know technology solves problems, and we’ve applied that logic (logic ingrained especially deeply in the generations that never used Encyclopedia Britannica) to one of the biggest problems we face in this lifetime: finding someone to spend it with.

Most of you have likely had experience with dating apps, whether by using them for yourself or swiping for a single friend or listening to your adult daughter laugh-cry about things like this:

That ubiquity means this: We’re quick to make snap judgments on dating apps—about the apps as much as the profiles we see on them. You love them (doubtful), you hate them (likely), you use them regardless. Because if you want to meet new people, online is the place to do it.

I mean, why waste the time sitting at a bar hoping the love of your life walks in when you can breeze through 100 people in the span of one episode of Manifest from the comfort of your couch? We’re a species bred to appreciate efficiency, and dating apps are nothing if not efficient. 

Why, then, is there such stigma around using dating apps? Why did most people I spoke to for this episode tell me they hoped to meet a significant other by chance instead of on an app? Why do we think they suck so much...regardless of our actual experience using them?

To me, it’s a reflection of our relationship with technology. We’re happy to use LinkedIn to find people to work with and Twitter to find people to fight with, but we draw the line at using Tinder to find people to spend our lives with.

And yet...those stats at the top suggest we do it all the time.

So in this episode of Thinking Is Cool, I’m exploring the ways our modern interpretations of meeting people might force us to hold a mirror up to all of our relationships—with each other, and more importantly, with technology. What do we value and how do we set expectations for technology that reflect those values?

It’s about giving ourselves the time and space to consider what it means to yearn for and sometimes find human connection on something that can make us feel at times so inhuman...our iPhones.

Quick break for a word from our sponsor:

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Even on the worst first dates, you learn what qualities you want (or definitely don’t want) in a partner, whether that is risk-seeking adventure or security and consistency. That kind of personal development (over drinks, dinners, and coffees) doesn’t just come from dating. How about the qualities you are looking for in your investments? 

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This week offers a comprehensive look at modern relationships and the ways their technification has changed both them and us. That comprehension is c/o a very smart, very forthcoming guest list that helped me to more fully understand the implications of dating apps:

• Lindsey Metselaar, host of the podcast We Met at Acme 

• Josh Kaplan, cofounder of Thinking Is Cool and reluctant Hinge user

• Michael Fundora, close friend and honest confidant

• Coleman Baker, my boyfriend (who earned that title with a very compelling Hinge profile and a very endearing opening line)

I hope you’ll listen to the episode (available on Spotify, Apple, and everywhere else you get podcasts) and ask yourself, single or not, how technology has inched its way into your heart. Maybe think about these questions?

• If you're single, is your relationship with the dating apps healthy? If you’re not single, what do you think of your friends on the apps?

• What’s the appropriate role of capitalism when it comes to dating apps—apps designed to help us connect with people in what’s hopefully a very non-transactional way?

• Do you think our collective reliance on dating apps has changed the way we hit on people (or even just try to strike up a conversation) IRL?

Let me know what the group chat thinks. And slide into my DMs if you want your Hinge audited.

I’ve wanted to make an episode about dating apps for as long as I’ve been in your ears, but I’ve been terrified to do so. It’s humbling to consider a phenomenon so vast and so meaningful...I think I’m perfectly ready, though. In love, in life, and in podcasting, there’s no time like the present.

Xo,

Kinsey