If the idea of going on a date makes you anxious, and all you’d really rather do with your evening is stay home and play video games, well, have we got the app for you. Date Like Goblins, a new dating platform that debuted on Kickstarter this week and will launch later this year, invites you to go on dates that take place entirely inside your favorite video games. You play a few rounds of Fortnite or Final Fantasy with your date, while voice-chatting and getting to know each other. It’s cute!

Date Like Goblins is one of many niche, interest-specific dating platforms. There are apps for farmers, Christians, jam band fans, rope bunnies—whatever you’re into. These smaller, more tailored communities can be seen as an antidote to fatigue that’s caused by the over-monetized and alienating experience of the big dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge.

This week, we’re joined by WIRED staff writer Amanda Hoover to talk about Date Like Goblins and the other apps that have learned the cheat code for online romance.

Show Notes

Read Amanda’s story about Date Like Goblins. Read Lauren Goode on “Date Me” docs. Read Jason Parham on Boomers on the apps. Read all of our dating coverage.

Recommendations

Amanda recommends making butter coconut bars for your next summer potluck. Lauren recommends the recent episode of The Daily from The New York Times with Taffy Brodesser-Akner telling the story about her new book. Michael recommends Trickster: The Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda, a podcast about the wild, shadowy history of the famous author and counterculture figurehead.

Amanda Hoover can be found on social media @byamandahoover. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Michael Calore: Lauren.

Lauren Goode: Mike.

Michael Calore: What is your vision of an ideal date?

Lauren Goode: OK, I’m going to pull back the curtain here a little bit for our listeners, because we tend to do a loose script for these, and Mike, actually, I was traveling. Mike wrote a loose answer for me to say here, and the best part is that you know me really well, because my answer is, well, if it’s casual, meeting for tea and a walk, or otherwise something kind of fancy, like we get to dress up, like sushi or an Italian meal. OK, the dress-up part, no.

Michael Calore: No.

Lauren Goode: I mean, I live in the Bay Area now. But everything else, yeah, I say that’s about right. What about you? What’s your vision of an ideal date?

Michael Calore: Oh, just like nothing.

Lauren Goode: Exactly.

Michael Calore: Just lay in the park and enjoy the sun.

Lauren Goode: Fair enough.

Michael Calore: Well, I’m glad that I know you well enough to guess what your ideal date would be.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, I mean, we are such good friends that that’s essentially what we do. We’re like, “How about we put on stretch bands and go for a bike ride and coffee?”

Michael Calore: Yes.

Lauren Goode: Yeah.

Michael Calore: Yes. OK, so relevant to today’s episode, how would you feel about a date where you log into Fortnite and you play a couple rounds while you chat with your date inside the game?

Lauren Goode: I personally don’t think that sounds very romantic, but at least it is different, and I know people who would live and love in that universe.

Michael Calore: Yes. I think there are a lot of people who would just prefer to go on dates that are just video game dates, maybe. There’s probably people who feel the most comfortable there playing video games, most like themselves.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, there’s a wide range of dating experiences that people can have these days thanks to the internet.

Michael Calore: So let’s talk about some of them.

Lauren Goode: Let’s do it.

[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]

Michael Calore: Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Calore, WIRED’s director of consumer tech and culture.

Lauren Goode: And I am Lauren Goode. I’m a senior writer at WIRED.

Michael Calore: We’re also joined today once again by WIRED staff writer Amanda Hoover. Amanda, hello, welcome. Thank you for being here again.

Amanda Hoover: Hello. It’s fun to be back.

Lauren Goode: Great to have you on the show.

Michael Calore: So today we’re going to get to know each other a little bit more. We’re going to be talking about online dating, the apps, the feelings, the yearning for connection.

Lauren Goode: Should this come with an NSFW warning?

Michael Calore: No, I think we can keep it PG-13.

Lauren Goode: OK.

Michael Calore: Yes. At least we can try. So a new dating platform has emerged, and it’s called Date Like Goblins. It debuted on Kickstarter this week and will launch to the public later this year. The idea is that you go on dates that take place inside your favorite video game, which sounds fun if you’re a hardcore gamer, or if you’re down here on my skill level, then maybe it sounds terrifying to you. So later in the show we’re going to zoom out and talk about current state of online dating and all the ways the dating platforms are changing. But first, Amanda, we asked you to come onto the show this week because you wrote about Date Like Goblins. So if you could, please tell us how it works.

Amanda Hoover: Yeah, so it works in some ways similar to other dating apps, with some new twists. People still create profiles. They can actually choose to have these with or without photos, though, they can make longer profiles, and instead of swiping, people can more so search for things that they’re interested in, find people. There’s then a Calendly-like feature where you can see when they might be available to play a game, and you can book time on their calendar, then go play a game, chat on Discord as you play, get to know one another. So the idea is that this is a first date that might not be getting a drink, getting coffee, getting dinner, things that can be a little high-stress and high-pressure for people that are maybe more shy, have a hard time meeting in public for the first time, or this is just a way to really show up as yourself, is what the founder of the app is telling me, because if you like to play games, this is a thing that you might want somebody to spend their time doing with you if they’re going to be your romantic partner.

Lauren Goode: I had this idea when you were first pitching this story that it was about actual gamers who sit there with their headsets on and they’re streaming massive multiplayer games and then within that environment, instead of just chatting about the game, they’re sort of going around and chatting up each other. But this is actually they meet like they would on a traditional dating app, but then they end up in a game. Is that right?

Amanda Hoover: Yes, more so like that.

Lauren Goode: OK. So the app still has prompts, right?

Amanda Hoover: Mm-hmm.

Lauren Goode: So how do the game makers decide to approach that? Because that’s a pretty common tool in dating apps just to get people to open up. How is it different in Goblins? We’re just going to call it Goblins for short. I love that.

Amanda Hoover: Yeah, the founder was telling me that they’re meant to encourage longer profiles. Some of the prompts are quirky, not just the classic ones that you see on Hinge that I feel like don’t really change very often and you kind of start to see the same thing over and over. With these, they encourage a longer profile. The sample profiles that I saw were much longer than what you’d see on something like Hinge, or Bumble, or Tinder.

Lauren Goode: OK.

Michael Calore: So why Goblins? What does that word mean?

Amanda Hoover: Yeah, it’s a reference to being in goblin mode, being your most true authentic self, which really feels the opposite of what we see on dating apps with a lot of people that are much more Instagram-ready and even like link out to people’s Instagrams, or people really want to put their best public foot forward on a dating app. This is meant for people to approach like a bit more authentically.

Lauren Goode: I thought it was just a dating app for certain Silicon Valley venture capitalists when I said it was Goblins.

And then when you end up in a game, playing with a person you match with, is this any game you want to play?

Amanda Hoover: Yep, any game that the two people can both play together.

Michael Calore: So you chat in the game or you can chat on like Discord, I assume?

Amanda Hoover: Yeah, yeah, it seems that the idea’s for it to be done over Discord then because it’s a very new app. Maybe that would change down the line, more features built in, but this is something that has been beta tested among a small group of users and is still rolling out to the larger public, and it probably will stay more niche than something like Hinge or Tinder or Bumble, just given that it’s catering more toward the gaming community, but we’re seeing a lot of different niche apps gain popularity that are a little bit more like community- or identity-focused.

Lauren Goode: Mm-hmm.

Michael Calore: Right.

Lauren Goode: I imagine a lot of people playing this also just end up being friends, right?

Amanda Hoover: Yeah, and that’s an option it seems, you know? You can say that you’re looking for friends, people can just be looking for friends. Sometimes you see that on any dating app, and there’s things like Bumble that have those different sections and different features, but this is marketing itself as a dating app, but it seems that friendship could be a possibility or a new gaming partner or friend.

Michael Calore: Yeah. Now, this isn’t the first dating app focused on video games and gamers, right?

Amanda Hoover: It’s not. I did find one other, Kippo, is I believe how it would be pronounced, but a lot of these, you know, it’s one of these interest-focused dating apps that we are, like I said, seeing more of as people maybe get a little tired or overwhelmed in the big pools of the major dating apps.

Lauren Goode: Amanda, some of these dating apps also have some real content moderation issues, and that ranges from someone purporting to be someone they’re not, trying to scam you out of money, to actual real harm and violence that can be done in person if or when you eventually meet up with someone. How is Goblins approaching content moderation?

Amanda Hoover: Yeah, I think they’re still new and building a lot of that out, and that will be further done as they do their Kickstarter and move forward. I think it’s been a very small group so far, and so like a lot of more manual kind of content moderation. But when I spoke to the founder, she’s very familiar with being on these other dating apps and being dissatisfied with sometimes the way people behave or just like not getting what she’s looking for out of them, so this is meant to address a number of those issues, but I think that will be more clear when it launches more widely.

Michael Calore: All right, that’s a good place to take a break, and we’ll come right back and talk more about the wider world of dating apps.

[Break]

Michael Calore: So Amanda, in your story this week about Date Like Goblins, you mentioned that there are a lot of niche dating apps out there. This is a big part of the story because some of them are familiar, and some of them I had never heard of. There are apps for people in rural areas, there are apps for Christians, there are apps for people with specific kinks, and they all seem to be responding to the same dissatisfaction in the dating app scene. Can you tell us what your reporting taught you about this?

Amanda Hoover: Yeah, it seems that people are really seeking out some of these, and this might be in replacement of a major dating app or in addition to. There are lots of people who are maybe on one of the big major dating apps and then on one of these smaller community-focused ones as well. Experts really told me that these niche dating apps are starting to take off a little bit more, especially ones that are focused on the queer community, or non-monogamy, or certain kinks. You know, people might feel more comfortable if they can move into these other apps and then there’s less or you’re more likely that you’re going to find somebody who’s interested in the same things as you, there’s less of a hurdle to start talking about some of those things. So some of these are doing really well. Meanwhile, Bumble, some of the match group apps, including Tinder, are kind of growing slower, or combined, some of these big companies have lost a lot of market value in recent years, whereas the smaller apps are picking up more users still.

Lauren Goode: And dating apps had a lot of growth during the pandemic, right? Like a lot of online services, people were really using them to connect online through screens because that’s all we could do for a period of time.

Amanda Hoover: Yeah, I mean, it was the only way to meet, so people would match on a dating app and maybe go sit 6 feet apart in a park in hopes of not spending the pandemic alone.

Lauren Goode: It was so awkward. It was like, “What have you done for the past two weeks?” “Well, I don’t know. I went to the grocery store. Might mean death if we meet up in person.” But I’m wondering if this contraction or this change in the way people are thinking about dating apps has happened because we’re post-pandemic and people can meet up in person again, or because something going on specifically with the apps and the way they’re designed—the gamification, the pricing structures, and all that has just turned people off.

Amanda Hoover: Yeah, it seems Gen Z in particular is kind of getting turned off, so that would be in theory the biggest growth market for these apps. Millennials who got really used to them, some of those people have gotten married, and some of that’s happened because of the apps and then they ultimately lose their user. Boomers are kind of a growing demographic on these apps, but obviously there are going to be more single Gen Z people probably looking to date than boomers.

So a lot of Gen Z people are kind of more interested in meeting in person. It’s maybe a thing that they haven’t gotten to do if they were using the apps, or maybe they’re still in school, which makes it easier to meet people, you’re around so many of your own peers, you don’t need the apps. But there’s also definitely frustration that people are voicing about the algorithms and having to pay and the way that these apps really seem to learn what you like and then put those people behind a paywall pretty quickly, and there’s some frustration, pushback, and just burnout overall for people that have been using these. For millennials, like some people have really been doing this for more than a decade and not found their partner.

Michael Calore: Right.

Amanda Hoover: So there’s a lot of dissatisfaction.

Michael Calore: So is that what’s happening, like you go in, you say what you’re looking for, you start to match with people, and then the app learns exactly what you’re looking for and they hide it from you? It sounds nefarious. I mean, it doesn’t surprise me knowing that these are corporations that are trying to extract subscription dollars from you, but if you’re going on this app because you’re looking for love or you’re looking for companionship, it just seems kind of cruel.

Lauren Goode: Well, they’re all designed to be deleted, Mike. Their business model supports you really deleting all of their apps.

Michael Calore: I mean, I’m trying to take off the cynical hat and just approach this from a human perspective, but is that really—

Lauren Goode: Yeah, I mean, they’re designed with dark patterns, no doubt. But Amanda, I have the same question. Based on your reporting or even your experience, do you find that once the app figures you out, it then starts figuring out ways to get you to pay up?

Amanda Hoover: I think that’s definitely what they’re pushing for, and these are, again, like so many of the apps that we all use, these started as largely free or sucked people in as paying users being very, very cheap. They aren’t so cheap anymore. Some of them are like $15 a week.

Michael Calore: Wow.

Amanda Hoover: Your rate kind of goes down if you buy for a longer time, like I’ve noticed some have promotions that your price per week goes down a lot if you buy for three months, but do you want to plan to be single for three months? I think people see that and get a little frustrated, and Hinge takes a lot of heat for this for putting people in what’s kind of called rose jail, where you go over to see the standouts, you have to send these people a rose, you only get like one a week if you’re nonpaying, you can buy more roses, but as you start to look, you might see these are some of the most attractive people or the profiles that are the funniest, you know, people that you would like to meet, but you can only even start to talk to them if you send them one of your very few roses.

Lauren Goode: Mm-hmm. And it’s like 10 bucks for three, I think.

Michael Calore: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I think a lot of dating apps have the same model where there’s just the little add-ons that allow you to foster one-on-one communications more quickly with people than just sort of like getting in line with everybody else.

Lauren Goode: Mm-hmm. It’s almost like a game with in-app purchases.

Michael Calore: Oh, no.

Lauren Goode: Yeah.

Michael Calore: I’m curious about the free ways to meet people online, such as date-me docs. Are those still a thing?

Lauren Goode: You know, I wrote about them a couple of years ago, and I believe they are still a thing.

Michael Calore: Why don’t we quickly bring everybody up to speed on the date-me doc?

Lauren Goode: The date-me docs, you can go to WIRED.com after you read Amanda’s article. We’ve done a bunch of reporting on Hinge, Hinge spambots and scammers. Date-me docs are part of a dating subculture in a sense, and the people I reported on were in Silicon Valley, they call themselves rationalists. They’re very into optimization and efficiency, and these people were youngish, and they were creating these Google Docs where they just put everything out there and then share the link to the Google Doc and the Google Doc is public, and some of them are chapterized and have tabs and photos and all this, and it’s just a way of saying, “Hey, this is who I am. I’m really putting my whole self out there. I’m making it clear what I’m about and what it is that I want, and take it or leave it.” And it was sort of like eschewing the typical container dating app that is run by someone else that then you’re upsold on eventually.

I don’t know how successful they are. I’m sure there’s a world in which one dating doc person finds another dating doc person and they’re like, “Look, we both did date-me docs, and here’s my Calendly link,” because that’s really efficient too. But I think to Amanda’s earlier point, people are seeking alternative options to the big bloated dating apps that are all run by two companies because they’re looking for something hyper-specific. They’re looking for people who are like-minded or into their interests and part of their community, and this is one way, date-me docs, one way to do it.

Michael Calore: Mm-hmm.

Lauren Goode: Mm-hmm. I never made one. No.

Amanda Hoover: I keep them.

Lauren Goode: I’m already too online. I’m like, “There’s so much out there.” What were you going to say, Amanda?

Amanda Hoover: I keep seeing when I go on Facebook Marketplace to try to buy cheap things for my apartment, I keep seeing a guy who’s advertising himself there, like he has paid for a slot, and it’s his date-me doc, and I’ve seen him for a while, so I don’t know that it is working for him.

Lauren Goode: That it’s working? What does his date-me doc say?

Amanda Hoover: It seemed very normal. I read it because I was like, “What is this? Is this what I think it is?” Because it’s all the kind of ads they put into Facebook Marketplace, and it’s a guy, it’s like meet Michael, and I was like, “Who is this?” and it was his date-me doc.

Lauren Goode: This is so funny. So it’s like you’re looking for a couch, let’s say, if you’re a certain vice presidential candidate and you stumble upon a date-me … I can’t, I can’t. And you stumble upon a date-me doc. You’re like, “Oh, I need this butcher block for my kitchen. Also, here’s Michael. Should I buy him, too? Does he come at a discount? Is there like one of those price markings, it’s like he originally cost this but it didn’t sell after a few weeks?”

Michael Calore: Yeah, maybe.

Lauren Goode: And strike through.

Michael Calore: It’s a great story, though. “Where’d you guys meet?” “Oh, on Facebook Marketplace.”

Lauren Goode: Facebook Marketplace.

Michael Calore: There’s a guy in Philadelphia who’s taking out billboard ads with his Instagram handle and a photograph of him, like, “Date me. Find me on IG and send me a DM.” Have you seen this?

Amanda Hoover: I have. That is my home city, so this has been all over my Twitter, and today in my friend group chat, where someone started saying, “Should we do this for one of our single friends? We can crowdsource the billboard.”

Lauren Goode: So in some of the experiences I’ve had in the past with dating apps, they’re incredibly spammy, too, and I’m not on the hyper-specific ones, the niche ones for, you know, farmers or Christian singles. Those are all very valid, and Mike is like doing pointy fingers right now as though what, I’m supposed to … Should I get on the farming app?

Michael Calore: No, the jam band one.

Lauren Goode: Oh, the Phishheads? I’m sure there’s an app for your pals, the Phishheads, right?

Michael Calore: Yes, yes.

Lauren Goode: I’m not on those, but sort of the basic ones in the hetero dynamic, what I find is that men will just swipe en masse on women. They’re not being super thoughtful about it. And some have created and showed off the bots they make to do this for them. So if you’re a woman on the app, you open the app, and you have hundreds of likes, and you know that they’re not very well thought out, and it’s impossible to wade through. So I have found when I have been on them in the past, as soon as I have started dating someone where it feels remotely like we have a connection, we’re going to continue dating each other, this is great, I just paused the app or delete it almost immediately. I quite literally don’t have the capacity to respond, to like add another messaging function in my day-to-day life.

Michael Calore: Right.

Lauren Goode: It’s a lot. And they take up so much mind share, like it does feel harder to meet people in person these days. And the last person I dated, I met in person, and it was like after it ended, I completely forgot that that had happened. Maybe that’s just me, like it went down a wormhole. But I was traveling recently and someone said, “How hard is it to date in the apps? Do people still meet people in person?” This person was married, and she was saying, “Do people still meet people in person the old-fashioned way?” and I said, “You know, I can’t remember the last time I met someone in person.” And my other friend looked at me and she just gave me this look with her eyes wide open, and I was like, “Oh, yeah. Oh, right, that guy. Yeah, no, I did meet him in person, but I completely forgot. Memory-holed.”

Michael Calore: Yep.

Lauren Goode: Because like our lives, the line between real life and screens has just blurred so much. It’s been happening for a while, but it feels that way in particular with dating sometimes. Amanda, I don’t know if you’ve had that experience on the apps—

Amanda Hoover: I think it’s—

Lauren Goode: But I would imagine you get a lot of real likes and spam likes.

Amanda Hoover: I think because it’s just become, it feels like, the only way to meet people, that the interactions you have on the app probably aren’t very memorable at all and you probably do remember more when you sat down to have a drink or went for a walk because you’re actually meeting the person then. I think it’s hard to even have a line that’s that interesting to say to somebody on the dating app to be that memorable.

Lauren Goode: Right, right. Yeah, in my experience, it was like the initial contact was in person, not on an app, but it’s still, yes, it’s harder to make imprints, I think. Impressions is probably the right word to use, but yeah.

Michael Calore: And the advice that you get from dating experts and from every time there’s like a mainstream media story about this, they ask a dating expert like, “Well, what is the right way to meet somebody?” and they always say, “Join a group that is within your interests, like take a pottery class, take a dance class, start going to yoga classes.”

Lauren Goode: Run clubs.

Michael Calore: Run clubs, go to art openings. And it’s like that’s great advice if you are the type of person who is not easily overwhelmed socially, if you have the confidence that it takes to strike up a conversation with a stranger in one of those groups, if going to those groups is within your lifestyle availability, like if you have Wednesday nights free, which not everybody does, especially—

Lauren Goode: Right, might be working.

Michael Calore: … people who are single parents, right, might be working. So dating apps have a purpose for those people, for the people who just can’t fit those old-school social interactions into their life because of all the other life stuff they have to deal with.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. It’s almost like what you’re describing is this environment where it’s really ideal for the young, but now the young, as Amanda, you’ve been saying, they’re turning their backs on these old apps.

Mike, when you got married, dating apps weren’t a thing, right? Or maybe there were websites.

Michael Calore: Right. Phones were attached to walls.

Lauren Goode: One number per household. If you were dating someone, your mom knew it. You just have to take the twisty cord around the corner into another room to have a private conversation.

Michael Calore: There were computers and web browsers.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. I was going to say like Match.com must have been around.

Michael Calore: Yes, there was online dating, but I met my wife in a bar, playing pool.

Lauren Goode: Was Phish playing overhead?

Michael Calore: No. I believe it was the Jerry Garcia Band. Thank you very much.

Lauren Goode: Perfect.

Michael Calore: OK. I feel like that’s a good place to end it.

Lauren Goode: You don’t want more questions about your personal life, Mike?

Michael Calore: Not really.

Lauren Goode: Does Hilary listen to our podcast?

Michael Calore: Not really.

Lauren Goode: OK.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: Hi, Hills.

Michael Calore: We can say whatever we want.

All right, stick around, Amanda. We’re going to take a break, but we’re going to come back with recommendations.

[Break]

Michael Calore: OK, this is the last part of our show, where we go around the room and we ask everybody to recommend a thing that our listeners might enjoy. Amanda, as our guest, you get to go first. What is your recommendation?

Amanda Hoover: OK, my recommendation is this new recipe that I discovered. I went to a picnic and someone had made me these, but they’re like butter coconut bars, and they are incredible. It’s kind of like a cake.

Lauren Goode: Say more.

Amanda Hoover: It’s kind of like a cake cut into little bars, very gooey on the bottom and coconut flaky on the top.

Lauren Goode: Ooh.

Michael Calore: Perfect picnic food.

Lauren Goode: Nice. What’s the goo on the bottom?

Amanda Hoover: I think it’s the butter and like the cake all together.

Lauren Goode: So it’s like traditional cake batter?

Amanda Hoover: Kind of. I didn’t make it yet, but I tried it and the person was like, “I’ll follow up with this recipe,” because they were gone at the picnic.

Michael Calore: So did you procure the recipe?

Amanda Hoover: Yes.

Michael Calore: OK, so is this something where like if somebody just types butter coconut bars into their search engine of choice, it’ll give them—

Amanda Hoover: Yes.

Michael Calore: … an AI overview and tell them how to make it?

Amanda Hoover: Probably. There seem to be a few different versions of it that you can find online.

Michael Calore: OK. That is solid. Thank you. I’m going to try to make the nondairy version of it.

Lauren Goode: Right, minus the butter.

Michael Calore: Minus the butter.

Lauren Goode: Yeah.

Michael Calore: Lauren, what is your recommendation?

Lauren Goode: My recommendation, I was going to recommend a book, but I’m not finished with it just yet. I’m currently reading Old God’s Time, by Sebastian Barry. It was recommended to me by one of our former colleagues when I said that I was on an Irish writers kick, because I had just recommended The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray. Have recommended Seamus Heaney a bunch in the past year. Anyway …

Michael Calore: And now you just recommended this book?

Lauren Goode: Yes, except I’m so close to being done. I tried to finish it on a plane this week. I didn’t get through it, so I’m not going to recommend it just yet. I also listened to a podcast episode on the plane that I’m going to recommend. It’s an episode of The Daily and it features the New York Times writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Taffy is a writer for The New York Times, but she’s also a book writer and now a television writer. Her last book was Fleishman Is in Trouble, which was turned into a series on Hulu starring Claire Danes. I really enjoyed the book. She has a new book out, another fiction novel called The Long Island Compromise. But this Daily episode is interesting because … And this is a little bit of a media ouroboros now, right? Because I’m recommending a podcast that’s about an article that’s about a book.

But the book is fiction, but as Taffy explains it, as she was writing the book, the plot that kept working its way into the narrative that was in her brain and she was pouring onto the page was about a kidnapping of an adult that happened in a Long Island neighborhood, and it was based on something that really happened to a family she knew growing up on Long Island, and she ended up talking to the man who’s now in his eighties, who was the victim of the kidnapping, and sort of asking his permission like, “Hey, this is going to become a part of my fiction novel, and it relates very closely to what you went through.” But then through her conversations with him, started to write about not just surviving a traumatic event, but the surviving of the surviving as she puts it, and it’s just a lot about trauma and some of the trauma that she’s gone through too.

Trigger warning, it’s not a super happy episode. It goes pretty deep and unpacking a lot of her own trauma. There’s probably some stuff in there that would be triggering in particular to women, but it’s very good. There’s some element of hope in there. Yeah, it’s about an hour long.

Michael Calore: OK.

Lauren Goode: So I recommend it, the latest episode of The Daily.

Michael Calore:The Daily, from The New York Times.

Lauren Goode: with Taffy Brodesser-Akner, yes.

Michael Calore: Great.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. It’s kind of a heavy recommendation, I’m not going to lie.

Michael Calore: OK.

Lauren Goode: But very compelling.

Michael Calore: OK.

Lauren Goode: All right, what’s yours?

Michael Calore: I am also going to recommend a podcast that is about an author. It’s called Trickster: The Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda. It’s from about three years ago I think is when it came out, but it’s a 13-part true-crime podcast about the author Carlos Castaneda. Are you familiar with Carlos?

Lauren Goode: It sounds so familiar.

Michael Calore: OK. So he is like a counterculture guru kind of guy. He wrote a series of books in the late ’60s and early ’70s about his adventures with a Native American shaman named Don Juan, and it’s about their experiences using psychedelic drugs, so mushrooms and peyote mostly, and Don Juan sort of taught him about the ceremonial use, and there’s a lot of explorations that Carlos Castaneda writes about inside of his own mind when he was on these substances. It’s an anthropological study at its core, so there’s a lot of anthropology in the book. Big sensation, turned on all the hippies. Turns out he probably made most of it up.

Lauren Goode: Oh.

Michael Calore: Also, he’s—

Lauren Goode: Plot twist.

Michael Calore: … a manipulative person who was not nice to the young women that he surrounded himself with and often had a very manipulative relationship with the women in his life. The books made him quite wealthy. He amassed tens of millions of dollars in personal fortune, and when he died, he left most of this money to the women that were in his life, and all of them disappeared, and one of them turned up dead.

Lauren Goode: Sus.

Michael Calore: Yes, extremely.

Lauren Goode: Disturbing.

Michael Calore: So having read Separate Reality and a couple of the Don Juan books when I was like in college, I’ve always just held him up as like, hey, he’s like this cool kind of counterculture author, anthropologist guy who had these fun experiences that I like to read about, but then forgot about him for years and years, and then this podcast comes along and I immediately just downloaded it and started listening and was thrown completely for a loop. It’s amazing. So highly recommended if you have ever encountered Carlos Castaneda in your life and you’re wondering more about him.

Lauren Goode: Great. I’ll listen to it as soon as I’m done reading Taffy’s latest book and have deleted Hinge.

Michael Calore: Amanda, thank you for joining us this week. It was really great to have you on the show again.

Amanda Hoover: It was great to be back.

Lauren Goode: Thanks, Amanda. Always great to have you on.

Amanda Hoover: Thank you.

Michael Calore: And thanks to all of you for listening. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on Hinge. Just check the show notes. Our producer is Boone Ashworth. And we will be back with a new show next week, and until then, goodbye.

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