Bumble Relaunching to Make Gen Z Fall in Love with Dating Apps

Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neal Freyman and I'm Toby Howell. Today is leap Day. Why does February go into overtime every four years? And is there a better way? Then we'll dive into Bumble's recent struggles and figure out why Gen Z kind of hates dating apps. It's Thursday, February 29th. Let's ride Wendy's attempt to turn the Baconator into a financial security lasted all of 18 hours. Facing a firestorm of criticism, the fast food chain said it had no plans to implement Uber, like surge p

ricing at its locations, starting in 2025, reversing previous comments by its CEO that it was going to test dynamic pricing for its burgers and shakes next year. Wendy's did say that its investment in digital menu boards could allow them to change menu offerings at different times of the day and offer discounts and value to customers more easily during slow times. Toby, What did we learn from this debacle? I think the PR narrative just escaped containment before they were really ready. I mean, p

eople took experiment and experiment tasting with digital menu boards to mean that they would dynamically increase prices. But now they're kind of saying that, no, no, no, we're going to use it to discount prices. We're going to use it to increase cost savings for you. So I do think that what they should have done is just slowly raise prices over time and then have this big announcement of, oh, we are lowering prices during off hours, we are saving you money. Instead, they got the entire reverse

thing where people assume that they are raising prices during peak hours. So if anything, it was just a PR debacle. It does go to show just how much people hate surge pricing. Absolutely. It's a trigger word for a lot of people, just especially from the Ubers and the lips of the world. Okay, before we jump into our show today, let's hear one last word from our sponsor, Veeam. Neil, what a journey we've been on with theme two months of presenting sponsorships. The VR mug has become pretty iconic

. I know from getting people to spell its name right to reminding our listeners that Veeam is the number one global leader in data protection and ransomware recovery. Thanks for the memories VM. I am adopting a Don't Cry because it's over. Smile because it happened. Approach to it all. I can see it on your face. You're positively beaming. Give it to them one last time, Toby. If you're looking to protect your data or recover it, if something's gone awry, check out Veeam dot com today. That's V am

p dot com. There's a new labor law about to be introduced in the state of California, raising the state minimum wage at fast food spots from $16 an hour to $20 an hour. But one restaurant chain is wriggling out of the pay increase. Panera Bread. The law has this weirdly specific exemption for chains that bake bread and sell it as a standalone item. Which is kind of interesting. Now, this has been throwing people for a loop. Governor Gavin Newsom told reporters last year that it came about as, qu

ote, part of the sausage making of politics, which led people to put two and two together and realized that billionaire restauranteur Greg Flynn, who owns 24 Panera Bread locations in California, went to high school with Gavin Newsom and has a long time donor to his political career. Now, Flynn insists he didn't play a role in getting the bread exemption built into the bill, but he has heavily lobbied against it in the past, arguing it would all but kill the franchising business model in the sta

te. Neal, what do we think about this political sausage and bread making, To borrow a phrase from my younger colleagues, this is pretty says it's it's just so bizarre and you can't wrap your head around why there would be a very specific carve out for bread making specifically. And then when you think, okay, so maybe McDonald's is going to roll out fresh, fresh bread and all of these fast food chains are like, okay, so to get to wriggle out of this as well, I'll just start making bread. You look

into the fine print and you realize there's a grandfather clause that realizes that you have to have made bread by last September to be exempt as well. So this does appear if you just look at it objectively, this does appear like a very specific carve out for Panera specifically. It also defined what counts as bread, and that excludes bagels and Casone. So it truly is just bread making. And yeah, it really just kind of illustrates the what happens behind closed doors to get these bills passed.

So it was the labor union that was kind of behind this service. Employees International decided to adopt this super narrow carve out as the talks progress. It's kind of one of those things where you compromise on some things in order to get everything else passed. And so clearly, Panera Bread and Flynn had a lot more lobbying power here than were who are kind of letting on. Just to zoom out on the bill in general, this is a massive increase for minimum wage. I mean, this is this is a 25% increas

e going from $16 to $20 an hour. As you mentioned, fast food chains and franchisees have been up in arms about it, saying it's going to add so many costs to their business. McDonald's franchisees in particular said it's going to add $250,000 per location per year in California. And California is the biggest state. It's also the biggest fast food market. Starbucks has 20% of its locations there. A bunch of other place, a bunch of other chains started there in and out. McDonald's. It is this fast

food hub and this industry is saying it's going to be rocked by these changes and it's going to increase prices for consumers as a result. Yeah, right now across California, around 25% of fast food employees earn that base wage already. So, again, California was on the higher side when it comes to wages. Now we'll just push that number even higher. And the thrust of this law, obviously, is coming from a good place. It actually started all the way back during the pandemic when fast food workers w

ere showing up for their low paying jobs on the front lines. While lots of higher earning white collar workers got to work from home. And so the bill was kind of introduced as a means to offset some of those minimal benefits and low pay that fast food workers are getting. So you can see where it's coming from, but it does absolutely throw the calculus of being a fancy franchisee off in the state. And then when you realize the carve out for Panera specifically, it gets a little more absurd. If I'

m an economist, I'm probably thinking this is a great opportunity to do a little AB test of how minimum wage laws affect business and jobs and things like that, because you have kind of a natural experiment going on with Panera randomly not having to pay its workers more, but they might actually raise wages to compete in this labor market as well. So it'll be an interesting experiment. And if I'm a baker, I'm enjoying my my time in the sun. This is this is your moment here. BAKER So embrace it.

Moving on, Google is facing one of its biggest reputational crises in years, thanks to its faulty A.I. program. Gemini forcing CEO Sundar Pichai to take a walk of shame. Alas, Thirsty Lannister. Pichai addressed the controversy for the first time in a memo Tuesday night, acknowledging that some of Gemini's responses offended users were completely unacceptable and that Google got it wrong. Pichai said teams have been working around the clock to fix the problem. And the problem you might remember

from Monday's show is that Gemini's image generator gave historically inaccurate responses to prompts showing Asian Nazis in black Vikings. But the issues go further than that. As people started to poke around and ask more questions to its chat bot this week, when Elon Musk asked Gemini who has done more harm, libertarians or Stalin, the bot replied that it was hard to say definitively which ideology has done more harm. Gemini's Image Generator. Image Generator is currently in the shop for repai

rs, but Google's reputational hit might take even longer to fix. And to some analysts, Gemini's problems go beyond allegations of being woke and reveal much deeper rot at the tech giant. Yeah, I think the most embarrassing part for Google is that it's been at AEI for so long. Google's chat bot efforts actually date all the way back to 2013 when Larry Page was still CEO. They hired someone who was working on this idea of machines one day surpassing human intelligence. There's also a report that a

lmost three years ago, a pair of Google researchers started pushing Google to release this this chat bot into the wild. And apparently pushed back very heavily on this, said the technology didn't live up to their safety standards. And all of a sudden, Google got lapped in the AI race and has been struggling in the subsequent months to catch up. Right. So this is this might be an example of Google feeling rush to roll out something that they didn't know was ready for prime time. And then it appea

rs it wasn't ready for prime time. But when you're in the public markets and you are wanting to attract investment, you're seeing what's happening to Microsoft and all of these other tech giants that are getting so much money from companies, from shareholders and investors because of their AI prowess. Then Google might say like, oh, we got it, we got to get something going, especially because their search business is at risk from these chat bots and it wants to show investors that it has a compe

titor. But Gemini has just failed to live up to expectations. Even when it was launched a year ago, Bard, which was Gemini's first Incan incarnation, failed in its public demo, and Google lost $100 billion in market value because of that. Yeah, so I was speculating with some of my more financially literate friends in a group chat last night and it's basically like, how do you extricate yourself from your slump if you are Google? And a lot of the answers that people were giving out was that it fe

els kind of like meta 18 months ago, where the way out is what you could do a successful A.I. demo and show like, all right, we fix Gemini. Gemini is looking good, too. You could start paying a dividend like metadata and just hop on kind of the recent trend of tech companies like Salesforce, like Meta introducing dividends for their shareholders. Or three, you embark on a Zuck like year of efficiency and say, Hey, we understand there's some organizational issues at Google right now and just kind

of reshape the company. So those were kind of like the three pass out of this that you could plot forward if you are Google CEO right now. Please rise on the hot seat. Right. I think I think it's very clear Ben Thompson, who is a tech writer that everyone in the industry read, said that what happened with Gemini, it reveals rot within the executive management ranks and that everyone should be looking over their shoulder for their job, including Pichai. And when Ben Thompson says something like

that, you know, it's an actual threat. That seat is heating up. Let's move on. After a disappointing quarter to end the year that showed a net loss of $32 million. The buzz around the once hot dating app Bumble has been reduced to a low hum. As a result, changes are coming. Newly installed CEO Linda Jones announced the company is laying off 30% of its workforce and is planning to fully relaunch the app in order to loop in similar features. Enhanced safety measures, and make it generally more app

ealing to younger audiences. Now, this is not just a bumble issue, though. The shine of dating apps is definitely wearing off for younger generations. 79% of college students say they do not use any dating apps, according to an Axios in Generation Lab survey. And Match Group, who owns the OG Dating app Tinder, has struggled with declining revenue and user interest and a pretty out there and swiping right now. No it's not. I mean whatever resonated with millennials in the dating app heyday of the

20 tens is clearly not resonating with Gen Z. You can look at that 79% of college students not using dating apps and say, okay, this is the one time in their life where they're going to be surrounded by a bunch of people. Maybe when they graduate college and move in to the real world where it's extremely lonely and you're an adult living in cities and don't have any friends, that might be an opportunity to hop back on the dating app. But compared to older users, younger users are just not payin

g for them. So you see massive revenue declines. This appears to be a very big moment of reckoning for dating apps because they are just not capturing the younger audience. Yeah, dating apps are for people who feel like their networks have stagnated a little bit. Who they can't meet anyone new, a.k.a. older people. And yeah, you're right. College age kids, you're surrounded by a lot of people. Your own age, your social network is constantly fluctuating. You can go to parties, you can meet new pe

ople. So it does feel like almost a strategic error that these companies are making, trying to gear their gear, their apps for a younger audience just embrace kind of like the middle aged person searching for love that I don't know if that's a good business strategy because you got money people when they're young. I think the problems go deeper than that. Than that, I think people express exhaustion with swiping. They express fears over the creeps on the apps. They fear that they're just spendin

g endless hours doing nothing, that it doesn't lead to anything. I think the ultimate problem is that the apps do not fulfill their promise of providing matchmaking services. So I think that's something that they need to resolve. So let's say we were the CEO of a dating app tomorrow. What would we do to turn the ship around? I mean, I, I don't wish to be in this position, but I would say I would buy the crap out of everything. Just make it easier. Just make it easier to create profiles like one

click of a button, take all of my best pictures from my camera roll, generate everything about me, that is. And that is what some of these companies are doing. And then just get your algorithm better to provide better matches. I think one of the main problems here is that you spend endless hours swiping and you don't find anyone that you actually want to go on a date with. If you can improve that and fulfill your value prop, which is you're going to find someone that you can date and do that bet

ter than I think people might spend more times on the time on these apps. So I would just yes, infuse everything and see, I think that's a total misconstruing of what dating apps actually do. Dating apps should not see themselves as a matchmaker. They should see themselves as an entertainment app. Their core product is the dopamine hit that you get when someone matches with you. It's not they don't actually need to set up relationships. So I think that you should double down on the things that m

ake people want to use the app, which is increasing the velocity of connections and just forget about all the features that lead to longer lasting love. It's very cynical, but dating apps are entertainment apps. They are not actually matchmaking apps. So as soon as CIOs embrace that idea and just make the velocity of matches and optimize for that, I think that you'll see more possible dating app companies. Well, we couldn't be on different pages. Mine, I feel like mine is a little more cynical,

but I do think that it's an entertainment product. And so that's if I was CEO, let's, let's start our own Neil's dating app. Tobi has very specific matchmaking services. Yours is more of a candy crush. Yeah. Candy Crush for four singles. Okay, let's hear a quick word from our sponsors. But don't go anywhere because we've got your favorite Thursday segment. Neil's numbers coming up right after this. What is the greenest car in America? That and more will all be revealed in Neil's numbers. The seg

ment where I share three stats from the week's news that will make you feel something again. First up, the greenest car in America has been crowned. And shocker, it is not a fully electric vehicle. Instead, it's the Toyota Prius Prime as e a plug in hybrid that can go 44 miles on electricity before the gas kicks in. The report conducted by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy. Not an efficient name for sure. Evaluated cars based on their emissions while on the road and during the

production of the car and battery. And the fact that a hybrid was named the greenest vehicle when there are 50 fully EV models available shows that above all a light weight and a small battery size win out in terms of environmental benefits. Take the Hummer electric vehicle, for instance. It was ranked near the bottom of the green scale right next to gas guzzling trucks because it weighs £9,000 and its battery is more than ten times the size of the Prius. Toby. Hybrids are on a roll right now.

Hybrids are on a roll. This is not the first time that a hybrid has won this award and run it back in 2020 to 2022. But the surprising thing is, as there's been more electric electric vehicles, models rolled out, hybrids are still topping these efficiency and environmental friendly metrics. So that's very surprising to me. And it just shows you that the components and the things that go into electric vehicles may not be as environmentally friendly as the eventual final product. So it's the batte

ry making and just the sheer amount of stuff. Yeah. I mean, and the heaviness of the vehicle, their efficiency when they're driving and the battery. I mean, we've talked about car bloat getting so big now, especially with electric vehicles and the batteries that power them have been getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And sometimes you just got to you got to go a little lightweight if you want to be environmentally efficient. There have been some critics of this ranking, though, because they s

ay that many people, when they drive plug in hybrids, don't actually plug them in. So they're driving on gas more than they think they are. So that that is some sort of pushback to saying like it is surprising that a hybrid vehicle is greener than an electric vehicle. And it's surprising because it's probably not true. I forget to charge my phone. So I totally get that people are forgetting to charge their cars as well. Meanwhile, hybrids are just kind of going crazy right now as consumers want

to find that happy medium from gas powered to fully electric with their range excited and finding charging infrastructure being a problem. Hybrid sales increased 76% in 2023, so they are on a roll. And Toyota, which has been leaning into them, is reaping the benefits. For my second number, I'm going to give you a pop quiz and feel free to pause the podcast so you can have some time to guess. What do you think is the most common U.S. paper currency in circulation? By number of notes. The answer i

s the hundred dollar bill by a long shot and its lead is only growing. The Wall Street Journal found that the number of Benjamins in circulation more than doubled between 2012 and 2022 faster than the growth of any other denomination. There are now 18.5 billion $100 notes floating around, compared to 14.3 billion for the second place $1 bill. This may be surprising since many of you probably don't use $100 bills to buy things or even carry them around in your wallet regularly. But that may be th

e key to explaining why there are so dang many. They enter circulation far more quickly than they leave because people hold rather than spend $100 bills. They can last over a decade longer than ones in five. I think the issue here with some of you is that you're bringing $100 bills to a $1 bill fight. The reporters at the Wall Street Journal went around and started trying to pay with $100 bill at various establishments. They tried to buy a $4.95 bottle of beach at a vegan restaurant and was deni

ed. First of all, where do you find a $4 bottle of vodka? Anywhere in New York. But I do think it's a matter of hassle for the business owner. They usually have to verify it with one of those markers or hold it up to a light. And again, if you're buying something under $5 with $100 bill, that's a lot of change that they have to produce. So I'm not totally on the thing that $100 bills are completely going extinct and being used. I tend to use them. I have to say, you seem like a guy that is be dy

ing around some bills and throw $100 down for a $5 purchase, not for a $5 purchase. If you're getting like, I don't know, brunch fertility, it gets you up to $85. Then it feels right. And sometimes you can just. There's nothing better than just leaving a crisp $100 bill as the tip for a meal as well. So do you get them? ATMs don't dispense $100 bills. I, I played I played poker. And so the payouts are often come in hundred dollar bills. I haven't played in a while, by the way. Mom or grandma, if

you're listening to this, I've been off the poker game, but that is where I'm. I'm procuring my $100 bills. And one of the interesting things that people are so part so reluctant to part with $100 bills is something called the denomination effect. And research shows that people are less willing to buy something when they're given a $100 bill compared with five twenties, because something about breaking up $100 makes you feel like you're losing a little more. Yeah, it needs to be a special occas

ion and it needs to be a nice meal or something. All right. My final number is the perfect encapsulation of why you shouldn't blame presidents for high gas prices or applaud them when gas is cheap. Energy markets just have a total mind of their own. Consider that the top ten U.S. oil and gas producers have almost tripled their profits under President Biden, who has criticized the industry and championed green energy policies. Fossil fuel giants are set to bring in net income of $313 billion in t

he first three years of the Biden administration, three times as much as they did during the same period under Donald Trump, who is much more sympathetic to their cause. Much of this has to do with external forces driving the price of oil higher during Trump's administration. The pandemic causes price to plunge, severely denting energy profits. But after Russia invaded Ukraine and travel demand surged. Coming out of the pandemic, prices have shot back up, and it's led energy companies, in Biden'

s word, to make more money than it got. I mean, if you just look at the market caps of the top ten energy company two, they're up. It's up more to over a $1.1 trillion or up 132% over the period as well. So it really is just a reflection of what is happening in the broader world. And it just totally goes against the narratives that Biden is kind of squashing energy projects in domestic energy production. Sorry. And yeah, so it kind of flies in the face of some of those criticisms that Republican

s have been lobbying at them. But you're totally right that we should divorce what's happening in energy markets from whoever is in the office, because this is showing that it's kind of divorce between the two. Yeah, US energy US oil production is now at a record high. It is the largest oil exporter in the world, and it also passed Qatar last year as the world's largest liquefied natural gas exporter. That's a fun fact for you. It's leap day, Neal. So let's all take a moment to remember how kind

of dumb our current Gregorian calendar is. So we all know it takes the earth around 365 and a quarter days to orbit the sun. But our calendar doesn't account for that day, which creates this awkward idiosyncrasy known as a Leap day. But it doesn't have to be this way. Neal. There are better options out there. Allow me to introduce you to the Hanke Henry Permanent Calendar. Under the HPC system, the years divide up into four three month quarters. The first two months of each quarter are made up

of 30 days. The third has 31, which all adds up to 52, seven day weeks and a 364 year day. But the true magic of this calendar is that all the years would perfectly repeat themselves. Christmas would come on the same day every year, New Year's same day, every date would fall on the same day. The amount of accounting woes companies could avoid, the amount of regularity that the people could enjoy. This is the future we could be living in. Bill, do you like that? Do you do you want that sort of re

gularity and dispense with the spontaneity of saying, Hey, when is the July 4th this year? Oh, Thursday, SEC. I get off work because this calendar would intentionally put holidays on weekends because there's a lot of cost savings that that occur from that. The US would is estimated to would be the US would be able to save $150 billion from putting federal holidays on the weekend which is what this calendar would do. So it kind of be a buzzkill for the week, but it would save money and it would s

ave a lot of time and stress trying to figure out, hey, it is Christmas on Wednesday. Like what does that how does that work out? How should I make travel plans? It does definitely help companies more because remember, there has been a lot of kind of reporting and accounting fiascos over the years. Well, the most famous ones was fall in. In Q4 2012, Apple suffered one of its worst one day losses ever due to a simple calendar generated year, basically that a lot of analysts forgot to account for.

The fact that Apple's Q4 2012 was one week shorter than the same quarter a year before, because, again, due to our weird calendar, fiscal quarters often don't end up lining up with the year, and every five or six years or so, companies have to add in an additional year to kind of make up for the difference. So this kind of stuff really does impact business in leap years. We've gotten a little bit better as time has gone on, but it has caused disruptions, to say the least. It does. It also had t

his really interesting quirk of saving Australia from a recession. So Australia was about to dive into a recession of two negative quarters of GDP growth in 2020. But because there was an extra day, they added $5.2 billion to their GDP and that allowed it to just take over the positive line. So because of the extra day people were working, people are contributing to the economy. People are buying things that had spared Australia from a technical recession back in 2020. That also reminds you that

if you're a salaried worker and you're working an extra day for free here, don't remind people of that. But I also think it's very funny that Leap Day bugs are so common that Meeker, Microsoft Excel still miscalculating 1900 as a leap year. It's technically not, but in order to stay compatible with other programs that have miscalculated leap year over time, Microsoft Excel intentionally has like this, this weird quirk into it. So if you go down the rabbit hole of one alternative calendars and t

hen to all the ways leap year, it impacts our economy, it's a fun rabbit hole. Let's end this show with a deep thought. I mean, leap year to me it just show how futile it is for humans to be able to wrap our minds and make sense of time over generations, over millennia. We can't put it in a neat package. It is. It's on its own. We're trying to organize it. We're trying to make sense of it, and yet it constantly escapes us. 365 days .25. We just can't organize it. Humans, we got to let nature jus

t run its own course. All of our best attempts will ultimately fail except for that one calendar. I kind of like that. It hours ago. But I like this. Be on the line with you on that. Okay. That is our show for this Thursday. Have a wonderful leave day everyone. Use this extra day as an opportunity to try something you wouldn't normally do in a standard 265 day year. I'm going to be off tomorrow. So you will be in the steady hands of Toby and not Toby, but I'll still read your emails, which you c

an send to Morning Brew daily at morning Broadcom. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milian is our editor and producer. Raven Lu is our associate producer. Eugenia Ogawa is our technical director. Billy Menino is on audio hair and makeup, knows where Kate Middleton is. Spill the Tea. Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neal. Let's run it back tomorrow.