Published in the San Diego Union-Tribune, September 14, 2026
by Neil Senturia
I wonder if there is an intersection between entrepreneurship and loneliness. In other words, is the desire to find a community a “problem” that a startup can solve, since the first question that an investor always asks is, “What problem are you solving?”
I recently attended an event promoted by a startup called, The Social Study. It is a company that brings together speakers who want to talk (promote their book, service, agenda) for an hour, listeners who pay to attend and are interested in the topic, and bar owners, who lend their location in exchange for the listeners to buy food and drink.
The kicker is that the promoters do not tell you exactly where the event will take place until the morning of the event. They sell out every event, 30 to 50 folks who want some kind of community interaction, entertainment or just to get out of the house.
This whole mystery thing where you don’t know the location, the venue, the topic, the other attendees until the last minute is booming. The hunger for community is sufficiently great that many of us will give up autonomy and take our chances.
This is a bit orthogonal. Normally, you sign up for an event, and you know the venue in advance. Like the Rady Shell. You do not sign up to hear Tchaikovsky and wait until that morning to find out it is going to be held at Manny’s Bar and Grill.
It turns out that the mystery of where and with whom is the hook. The psychology seems to be that the uncertainty and the mystery is what attracts the audience. It is Hinge and Tinder transferred to brick and mortar.
There are any number of “dinner parties with strangers” startups. I recently got conned into one. I signed up for a newsletter and got invited to have dinner with six other people, again, not knowing who they are. Just the name of the restaurant and the time. It is the physical extension of the online dating apps, transferred to a concrete, distinct venue. Swipe left, surprise, Uncle Fester is your dinner date.
I would like to suggest that to some extent, the internet and AI, in particular, have increased our society’s loneliness factor. People are not just willing, but actually eager to go do something with people they don’t know.
Being held in suspense or mystery as to when, where and with whom suggests that the “problem” all of these companies are solving is pretty significant. he hunt for community is deep, and the hunger for it is relentless and real.
Dating apps met the demand for meeting people.
Now, the era of mystery and suspense, held hostage in the pursuit of community is really only the next iteration of “the blind date” that we all endured when we were younger.
“Exact location shared when you register.” Word for word, this is my most recent invitation.
Now, let’s take a look at the unspoken challenge behind all this searching for connection.
Can you carry on a conversation? Every strategy, innovation, decision or relationship begins as a conversation.
Can you talk and chew ravioli at the same time? Can you create a level of trust over a dinner in less than 90 minutes?
Alison Wood Brooks, Harvard professor, says “Conversation is the operating system of collaboration.” But conversation is a diminishing skill in the new AI world order.
In March, Meta acquired a social network, Moltbook, designed for bots to talk to each other. Maybe Ms. Bry and I could give a dinner party, send in the chatbots, and then just go to a movie. Nobody will miss us. But what we will really need is a bot to do the dishes.
The newest meme is “The Dead Internet Theory,” which posits that most digital traffic will eventually only be software, manipulated by algorithms talking to each other, leaving humans as merely a minority voice. This is called a bot loop, where artificial intelligence rules the roost.
I am writing this and laughing at the insanity of it at the same time.
But maybe Travis Bickle understood the key question better than all of us. “You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Well, who the hell else are you talkin’ to? I’m the only one here.”
Rule 839: “Nothing is real,” Strawberry Fields Forever