Go back

Bumble Allows Men to Message First & UMich Drops Letter Grades for Freshmen

31m 45s

Bumble Allows Men to Message First & UMich Drops Letter Grades for Freshmen

A total solar eclipse across Europe has sparked a surge in tourism, with remote areas like Iceland’s Westfjords and Spain’s Somosierra seeing unprecedented visitor numbers and logistical challenges. Hotels are charging record prices, and local governments are scrambling with emergency preparations, highlighting how astronomical events can drive economic booms in undervisited regions. Meanwhile, Bumble is overhauling its dating model by allowing men to initiate conversations and extending message response times to 72 hours, responding to user fatigue and declining engagement. The company is also phasing out swiping and exploring AI-powered matchmaking and real-world meetups to modernize its platform. This shift mirrors broader industry trends, including Spotify and Anthropic introducing AI content labels to restore user trust amid growing concerns about AI-generated content in music, books, and social media. In education, the University of Michigan is piloting a grade-free freshman program to reduce academic stress, though it sparks debate over student preparedness and the role of standardized assessments. Additionally, major developments include New York’s push to classify Amazon delivery drivers as employees, climate threats impacting Italy’s cheese-backed banking system, and a growing cultural movement toward plant-based life events and “do not finish” books as a sign of healthy reading habits.

Transcription

5967 Words, 33553 Characters

English
Yeah, you might want to download that Exxon Mobile Rewards Plus app. Yeah. Are you the Exxon Tiger? I am. Yeah, you know, new users can earn $10 in points, five bucks after your first purchase and five after your second. That's a lot. That's a whole lot. It is. Well, hey, you get on that download, buddy. I will. Loading. Download the Exxon Mobile Rewards Plus app and join today. Exxon. Trust the Tiger. For details, visit ExxonOffer.com. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, White Bumble is letting guys make the first move. Then, the University of Michigan is ditching grades for stressed-out freshmen. It's Wednesday, August 12th. Let's ride. Santa's got competition. Christmas is going to be a feast for sports fans and a nightmare for anyone else related to one if you watch it. We want to stag their attention. The NBA just released its schedule of five juicy matchups slated for Christmas Day, joining a triple header of NFL games also slated for that day. That means there's going to be football and basketball games running from the Spurs versus Knicks at noon Eastern until whenever the Nuggets at Warriors ends with a 10.30 p.m. start. Toss in Packers, Bears, Heat, Celtics, Bills, Broncos, Sixers, Lakers, Thunder, Timberwolves, and Rams, Seahawks in between. And opening gifts might be the only reason to get off your couch that day. This is the real war on Christmas, for better or worse. Okay, here's my hot take. Too many sports on Christmas. It's trying too hard to be Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving, perfect holiday. You run a turkey trot, you eat a ton of food, then you crash on the couch for football and a nap. Christmas is just doing too much. Too many games, the nap doesn't hit the same. A ham-induced food coma doesn't hit as hard as a turkey-induced one. Christmas thought it could take the throne. Clearly, the NFL wanted to move onto the turf and say, hey, this is our day. But it's just trying too hard, Neil, and that's my take on that. And now a word from our sponsor, Rubrik. Neil, there's been a murder. Oh my god, is everyone okay? Oh yeah, not like a real murder, but cybersecurity as we know it is dead. The truth is, the old model was built on protection, safety nets, recovery plans, systems designed to withstand the last era and maintain the status quo. The AI era demands confidence that you can secure and accelerate your business operations so nothing stops your momentum. Rubrik can give you that confidence. Their platform helps you keep going by securing your data, controlling your AI, and protecting your identity built as one architecture, not stitched together after the fact. To learn more about how Rubrik rewrote the industry rulebook, head to rubrik.com slash mb. That's r-u-b-r-i-k dot com slash m-b. If you're already struggling to get in touch with your European colleagues this summer, just. Give up today. For the first time this century, a total solar eclipse will be visible from continental Europe. The path of totality, in which the moon blocks out the sun completely, will slice through areas of Spain, Iceland, Greenland, and a sliver of Portugal, delivering an awe-inspiring spectacle to some regions that haven't seen a total eclipse for over 120 years. And just like the eclipse in the U.S. two years ago, hordes of people are on the move to be a part of history, boosting a European tourism industry that's been battered by devastating, wildfires earlier this summer. In response to insane demand, hotels are charging like they're in Oxford when Ole Miss has a home game. According to the Financial Times, rooms in Reykjavik, Iceland, cost more than $1,000 on average the night of the eclipse on Wednesday, up 140% from last year. In the northern Spanish city of A Coruña, hotel prices have also more than doubled, and they're up 59% in Bilbao and 31% in Santiago de Compostela. One small Spanish village in the path of totality, named Somosierra, is. expecting up to 2,000 visitors today. It has a normal population of 93 people. Toby, love an eclipse. Love the logistics around an eclipse. Basically, you have these places that are not tourist hotspots at all. No one ever visits, but because of this random astronomical path, they have to prepare for a deluge of people. That is my favorite part, too, because obviously Spain gets a ton of visitors to tourist hotspots along the coast, but they are being pulled into rarely visited areas called, quote, empty, Spain, which are literally just the interior of Spain. And yeah, you look at these local anecdotes. You mentioned Somosierra. They're trying to figure out how to feed these people, because again, it is a remote village. Their population is going to explode. And so you have one hotel operator who has a plan right now. It's lamb stew, sandwiches, and enormous batches of paella that they're going to haul up to the mountain. And they basically asked her, the Financial Times asked her, what do you do if they run out of food? She goes, we can't leave people alone. We can't leave people stuck halfway up a mountain. We'll bring up another batch of paella. So you're seeing all of these funny logistical operations. And yeah, a lot of money coming into these areas as well. There's still some question marks about weather is like the main thing, especially when it comes to places like Iceland. But you're seeing these benefits concentrated in places that normally don't get them. It's like a World Cup for only five minutes in very remote places of the world. Yeah, this empty Spain actually has a name. It's called La España. And it's just a rural stretch of the country that no one ever visited. But it's expected to get two million visitors just today. A similar thing is playing out in Iceland, too. So whoever's been to Iceland, you know there's a main tourist. I have not been to Iceland, but I know that there's this loop that everyone goes on. There's certain places that you go to. Of course, the path of totality in Iceland is not going in those main tourist paths. It's going along the west coast, northwest coast, to a region called the Westfjords region. And Iceland officials are saying this is a nightmare because Iceland weather is very variable. You don't know exactly what it's going to be, cloudy or sunny, one hour to the next. So they're worried not by international visitors, but by the 400,000 people in Iceland because they haven't decided where they're going to go to watch the eclipse. So they have to wait to the last second to prepare all these things. You have port-a-potty rental companies saying we've been sold out for months. We have 250 port-a-potties that are just completely gone. And this area of the Westfjords in Iceland just doesn't have roads that are paved. It's dirt roads. So it's going to be a bit of a logistical headache, not from the international tourists, but from all those Icelanders that are saying, yeah, we'll just wait till like 9 a.m. until we decide where we're going to go to watch the eclipse. And then we're going to bring a ton of cars and traffic toward those places. No, the Westfjords are literally preparing like it's a disaster zone. They've been repairing gravel roads. They have been adding more fidelity to their mobile network. They're staffing up hospitals and fire departments. They have emergency crews on standby. They literally set up a Reykjavik command center as well, similar to what they would do in another crisis like a volcano eruption, all for people just going to watch an eclipse. The stories are so funny. One person who operates Iceland's westernmost hotel received her first eclipse reservation 14 years ago. That's the thing about eclipses is that you know that they're coming many years in advance. And she thought it was a joke initially, but this is how much people take this seriously. They want to be in the path of totality. The solar eclipse economy is absolutely booming. We saw this in two years ago in the United States where people were traveling up to northern Vermont or the Midwest, places like Champaign, Illinois, that just saw tons of visitors because you do know that this is coming and you can book Airbnbs and hotels far in advance. And this is only going to increase the eclipse economy because we are in a golden age of, of solar eclipses. So we have one today in Europe next year on August 2nd, 2027. This one is called the eclipse of the century because we're going to get the longest land-based total solar eclipse anywhere between 1991 and 2114. So if you are near Luxor, Egypt, totality will last up to six minutes and 23 seconds. I Googled like Airbnbs and Luxor, Egypt, hotels and Luxor, Egypt. People were on Reddit threads. Years old saying we're already going to be near Egypt for this eclipse. And then we have the, uh, the capstone of this trilogy of eclipse, the golden age of eclipse, which concludes July 22nd, 2028. Totality is sweeping across Australia and New Zealand. So I know a bunch of people in Europe for this. I probably know a bunch of people heading to Egypt and then maybe I'll think about Australia and New Zealand because it's just a good opportunity to go. Let's move on. Bumble is completely changing what made it Bumble. The struggling dating app is ditching its definition. Feature women no longer have to initiate the conversation. As of yesterday, either person can kick things off. Meaning guys, you're once again, going to have to come up with something better than a Bumble burst onto the scene for giving more power to women started by Tinder co-founder Whitney Wolf heard the app was designed to improve the dating experience for women. After seeing men send aggressive opening lines and follow-ups. The problem with that approach is that women eventually came to resent it. Bumble said that two thirds of women had surveyed, especially Gen Z users actually prefer men to send the first message with many saying that they felt less pressured when they had a choice over how the conversation begins. Bumble also had to do something different because its business is hemorrhaging users, losing 21% in the first quarter. Wolf heard it came back to the company last year to go founder mode and try to turn things around. But even after cutting one third of its staff, the stock is still down 57% over the past year in 96% from its IPO price. Obviously, this is a pretty. a drastic departure Bumble's initial premise, but Wolfherd doesn't see it that way. What we are introducing is not a reversal of our principles or our DNA or our original mission. She describes it instead as a progressive evolution reflecting how online dating has changed over the past decade. Neil, good move, bad move. Are you ready to make the first move? However she wants to frame it, of course this is a drastic move. It's like Costco changing its $1.50 pizza and soda combos. The DNA of the company in the very beginning was the value prop, but clearly this model is not working. And I think they've identified the right problem, which is what they say the reality of modern dating is that everyone is super busy. It's not for lack of interest, it's for lack of timing. So they're not only allowing more people to make the first move or make the first message and toward increased engagement, it's also increasing the message response window to 72 hours. Previously it was 24 hours. If you're just not at your phone or you're busy, you have a meeting, you're traveling, which is just what modern young professionals do, then you're going to miss the match. So I do think dating companies, Bumble included, have identified that there is a problem and they're throwing a bunch of things at the wall to fix it to increase users on their platform. Bumble is also doing something that seems sacrilegious to the old era of dating companies, which is killing the swipe. This is something that's been on their product roadmap for a while now. Swiping, was the thing that created modern dating. Like that's what Tinder popularized. That's what Bumble came after it. And lots of apps adopted it as well. But Hinge never had swiping. It was mostly you go to a profile, you interact with prompts first, and then you like it. So it's ditching the swipe. It's ditching its fundamental premise of women making the first move. Where is it going then? What's the future of Bumble? And unfortunately it has a lot to do with two letters, AI. They're experimenting with tools for matching in a profile feedback. Whitney, kind of got a lot of pushback to this, but she floated a future where personal AI agents could interact with other people's AI agents on the user's behalf before the humans ever meet. So that created a lot of black mirror sort of conversation around the idea that my AI is dating your AI and they will tell us if it's actually good for us to meet in person. That's the future that Whitney Wolfe heard thinks that we're going towards. Not sure if it's the right one, but they had to do something different. The future of dating apps is not just about AI, but it's another three letters, which is IRL. Bumble and Tinder and Hinge and all these other dating apps are leaning into in real life experiences because that's what they think their users want to meet in low pressure, low stake situations in real life. Tinder has actually had a very successful rollout of its events tab. So they rolled this out in Los Angeles and said, okay, we're going to host meetups for you to just hang out with people in a low pressure situation. So they're going to host meetups for you to just hang out with people in a low pressure situation. And now they are expanding that pilot program in Los Angeles to a bunch of other cities. And I've seen subway ads for Tinder events all over New York city. So they're certainly here. And again, these are, these are defensive actions. They are not aggressive actions. They don't come from a place of offense or success because Tinder has not reported positive user growth in more than three years in its recent quarter, monthly active users were down 7%. And then that was actually a an improvement from the previous quarter before that, that had an 8% decline. So these dating apps, the business models kind of falling their part. They're looking to a bunch of letters like AI and I R L to turn things around a I R L there's something there moving on these days. It's not easy to tell whether a post you're reading or a song you're listening to was made by AI, but yesterday Anthropic and Spotify made moves to clear up the confusion, part of an ongoing movement by companies to distinguish AI from human creations. Anthropic said it would soon begin to slap a watermark on Claude generated text and images in order to comply with a new AI transparency law in the EU. That doesn't mean you will visibly see a tag like written by Claude on every LinkedIn post, but it'll be embedded in the metadata for back end detection. Anthropic stressed that this watermark will stick with the content wherever it travels on the internet and will be present no matter which Claude product you're using, whether it's Claude code, Claude cowork, whatever. Meanwhile, Spotify also made moves to prevent AI music slop from taking over its platform. The audio streaming service said it would start labeling AI generated artists with an AI persona badge and block their songs from editorial and algorithmic recommendations. AI artists can self report as robots to Spotify, which would make things easier, but Spotify said it'll also be proactive in slapping badges after reviewing profiles itself. Toby, we're seeing tons of momentum toward labeling AI content. What do you think it says about the moment we're in? I think this is just the tip of the ice berg of a much deeper debate when it comes to AI generated content. Namely, a lot of us are navigating through the world right now without knowing if the content that they are encountering is made by a person or a machine. And I was reading this Twitter thread. It is very corrosive for a society to have that happening. You need trust to function and lots of AI is built on, you know, light plagiarism and the like. So we've talked a lot about the toll when it comes to the workplace and when you get fed work slop by one of your coworkers and it just like creates more work for you. It reduces trust within the organization. You extrapolate that across society as a whole. And a lot of us have been feeling duped or you just feel on edge because you don't know if the LinkedIn post you're reading is by a human or not. If the song you're listening to is by a human or not. So yes, this was a direction that we were heading towards. Anthropics is clearly trying to get ahead of it right now by saying, yeah, we're going to install that metadata. Spotify doing the similar thing. They need to figure this question out because the fundamental thing that AI is built on seems like it's bad for society, seems very anti-human. So they need to figure out a way to get around that. We're already seeing chaos in industries like publishing. There've been a number of scandals, controversies, whatever you want to call it about books, highly touted books, very popular books being accused of with the authors being accused of using AI. There was this hot crime novel called Call Me, I'll Hide. The Body, a book agent recently pulled support for that book after the author was accused of using AI or leveraging AI to help the book. And then we've also seen this in the music industry as well. We saw Spotify make this move toward labeling AI artists because a number of artists have come to the fore recently where people are like, they sound AI, looks like AI. We aren't sure there was that lack of trust. Thinking about Velvet Sundown, which was this rock band that had a lot of popular songs. 117,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. People questioned whether Velvet Sundown was AI or a real band. Turns out they were AI. And then there was Sienna Rose, another artist. They went into Spotify's viral top 50 in January, did not appear to be real. So this doubt, this lack of trust is creeping into publishing books, music, and work as well. And looks like platforms, again, as we talked about from the dating app story, just from a defensive posture trying to get ahead of this because they can't have their users not knowing what to trust or what to believe in. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with a story about grades right after this. Toby, has budget ever stopped you from doing something? Yes, I'm not even allowed to look at gold toilets. Okay, well, Rising Stars is a docuseries that follows small business owners as they create their businesses, face real challenges, and scale their brands with help from Amazon ads. Like HydroJug, sponsored products, videos on Amazon ads helps them showcase their brand innovations right when customers are browsing, and it's helping drive real results. Watch now at advertising.amazon.com slash rising dash stars. That's advertising.amazon.com slash rising dash stars. The following is a paid advertisement. Toby, do you have a personal philosophy? Yes, everyone should have more money. New York Life's protection-powered growth philosophy might align with yours then. It explores how protection can serve as a strategic foundation for long-term financial success that enables future opportunities. Their approach brings protection and growth together, helping clients build confidence through every stage of life. To learn more, head to newyorklife.com slash protection dash powered dash growth. That's newyorklife.com slash protection dash powered dash growth. Neil, if you were a shape, what would you be? I think I'd be a big red octagon because then maybe you'd stop. Ooh, geometric burn. Anyway, we're talking about Square, the fair and easy way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, manage staff, and keep everything running in one place. If you've been to Shake Shack, and I know you have, Toby, then you already know how easy it is to tap, pay, and enjoy. Right now, listeners can get up to $200 off Square hardware when you sign up at square.com slash go slash morning brew daily. That's S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash go slash morning brew daily. The University of Michigan is getting rid of grades for first semester freshmen. Sounds like a fever dream you might cook up after your alarm goes off for your first 8 a.m. class after a night out, but it's a real pilot program rolling out in fall of 2027 that will apply to about half of Michigan's 8,000 incoming freshmen. The school says it's meant to curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college age individuals and let intrinsic motivations guide personally meaningful academic journeys. In other words, the prospect of gunning after A's can get in the way. way of learning. But it is not a true free-for-all. Professors will still assign grades internally for things like scholarship and award purposes, but students won't see them on transcripts or on mom's refrigerator. While MIT and Caltech have tested similar grade covering programs, Michigan is jumping on this bandwagon when most of higher ed is heading in the other direction. Grade inflation seems to be the bigger issue. 74% of Michigan undergrad grades in 2022 were A's, up from 58% a decade earlier, and Harvard just capped A's at 20% per course. One thing it did get right, freshmen are coming into college pretty unprepared. UC San Diego saw remedial math placements jump 17-fold in five years, so the freshmen coming in probably are stressed out if they see the bad grades piling up. Neil, I can't tell if Michigan is solving a problem here or creating an even situation. Well, students were big fans. The student body President Sumit Luth said, yeah, like, we love this. They cite data that said there actually is a mental health crisis among freshmen that is closely, college students broadly, that is closely tied to academic stress. And 18% of college students reported severe depression symptoms, according to a 2024-25 healthy mind study. Look, when you mentioned that 75% of all students were in college, all undergrad grades were A's at the University of Michigan or some derivative of an A. And so it doesn't really matter to a person's transcript broadly about whether they want to go to grad school or anything else, but it is just a way to reduce stress. So you probably see a big generational divide here. We have the older folks saying, wow, these are coddled youth, the coddled students, they need everything, handed them on a silver platter. And you have college students saying, no, wait, we actually need this. The burdens, the stresses, on us are more than ever. It was more than when you guys were college students. We need just to take the pressure off a little bit. We're 18 years old coming into college. So they are very happy with this. Yeah. History professor at Michigan, Derek Peterson said the idea that our kids are somehow more coddled is simply not true. And his view on the thing is that you should create room for students to experiment without damaging their GPAs because GPAs funnel into things like career prospects. And you shouldn't let one bad semester go by without damaging their GPAs. And so I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. You know, influence the rest of a kid's life. So it does make sense there. But on the other side of the coin, you have these professors who are one advocating to bring the SAT and ACT back more than 1,100 Cal math and science professors are urging the UC regents to reinstate college entrance exams because they say that too many students are arriving unprepared for college level STEM work. So they are saying that it is not good that these kids are coming in necessarily, unprepared. That is leading to more stress. It's leading to worse outcomes for teachers as well because they're spending all this time supposedly teaching them college STEM, but actually just going back and building years of missing foundational math. So is it better to paper over those things or is it better to just prepare kids better before they reach college so then they can make A's without having to cover up the A's? So you're seeing kind of two camps forming in higher ed right now with both sides just wanting the best outcome for the students. Let's sprint us with some final headlines. Amazon's army of New York City delivery drivers may soon discover who their real boss is. A New York City bill backed by Mayor Zoran Mamdani would force Amazon to directly employ the roughly 5,000 contract workers who deliver its packages across the city. Right now, those drivers technically work for more than 40 small delivery contractors, even though they wear Amazon vests, drive Amazon branded vehicles and deliver Amazon packages. Supporters say that that setup lets Amazon outsource the deliveries. But also the responsibility for injuries, benefits and working conditions. Amazon says forcing those workers onto its payroll would blow up its delivery model and potentially make your purchases both slower and more expensive. Neil, this showdown is happening in New York, but the stakes could easily go nationwide. The Teamsters Union, who represents delivery workers, say that if it passes, they'll push similar legislation in cities across the country. Yeah, not a surprise that Amazon has spent a lot of money fighting against this particular bill. They have a lot of money fighting against it. They have forked over over $5 million on a big opposition campaign with a couple of TV ads. It also comes at a time when Mamdani's fight against big business and the wealthy, which is a core pillar of his platform, has hit some stumbles. Recently, a judge paused that new tax on luxury second homes, pita tear, saying it was a semi botched rollout. And then the city has appealed that. So there's an ongoing legal fight there. There's an ongoing legal fight when it comes to Amazon. And we should add that FedEx and other big companies are also included. Reminds me of the fight back in 2019. I was an early writer at Morning Brew. California lawmakers passed this bill that had all these gig working companies classify their drivers as employees rather than independent contractors. We're seeing that play out, at least in New York City here in 2026. It is a symptom of just this growing gig economy. We see these people every day in New York City, delivery workers. We'll decide who exactly they work for, a subcontractor or Amazon itself. Moving on, a key pillar of Italy's financial system is curdling under extreme heat. And I mean that literally. Cheese banks could become the latest victim of climate change. It sounds a little on the nose, but in Emilia-Romagna, Italy, banks store hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Parmesan cheese wheels in climate controlled facilities as collateral for loans they advance to farmers. It's an arrangement that dates back to the 50s and works out to the point where the most of the money goes out for both sides. Since Parmesan cheese takes at least a year to age, farmers can get cash right away by giving it to local banks. The banks only have to hand over 60% to 80% of the wheel's value up front and can deploy their capital into vaults that ripen the cheese to its world-renowned quality. However, that economic model is being upended due to rising temperatures, with this summer set to be one of the hottest in Italy's history. Daily power consumption by the vaults has climbed 30% when this year's heat hit its peak, raising costs for the banks to keep that cheese at the right temperature. And at the same time, milk production is down 10% because cows, like all of us, get lazy and need to lie down when it's sizzling out. Toby, give me one sniff of a cheese bank and I will die a happy man. I mean, this goes viral every once in a while. The fact that Italy has cheese as collateral for some loans is just so funny. The jokes really do write themselves. The U.S. actually has a little cheese storage history of its own as well, we used to have a similar cheese stockpile, but it was for a totally different reason. During the Great Depression, milk prices kind of collapsed and dairy farmers were just dumping it in the streets in protest. So the New Deal came in, subsidized farmers who reduce production, and they actually created something called the Commodity Credit Corporation, which bought all that surplus dairy. Now that they have it though, they're like, where do we put it? Obviously, underground caves in Missouri, Wisconsin, and Kansas, where the naturally cool conditions, the heat is affecting Italian cheese banks. Why don't you just put them underground in the Midwest? That allowed it to last four years. By the 1980s, the federal cheese stockpile exceeded 500 million pounds. I think we got to bring it back because that would either create a new era of prosperity in America with collateral backed by cheese, or it would cause everything to curdle because maybe using cheese as the backing up for your loans is not the smartest financial decision. I look forward to your forthcoming book on a recent economic history of the world, as told through the viewpoint of cheese. All right, we close out every Wednesday show with Suggestion Box, where Toby and I share some recommendations to get you over the hump of the week. Toby, please enlighten us. All right, so I don't know if it's all that original, but my recommendation is to buy plants for major life events. So everyone knows my wedding is this weekend. I went to the flower district and got a jade plant, which lasts from 50 to 100 years if you treat it right. So now me and my fiance, we have this plant that, much like a marriage, if you tend to it and care for it, will last a very long time. If it dies, then it's not indicative at all about the marriage. But I was extrapolating this. This could happen for lots of major life events. Maybe you buy a plant on your first day in college, you tend to it over the four years, and it just represents a portion of your life. Same thing goes for other life events, a kid or other like that. There's great plants that lost a very long time. I was deep in Google. I was like, oh, I'm going to buy a plant. I'm going to buy a plant. Which one lasts a lifetime? And jade was the answer. I wish you talked to me first because I have three jade plants that are growing like crazy and I need to give away clippings because they're literally tipping over on my windowsill. They're extremely healthy. They're very robust and they're honestly too big. So I'm looking to give away clippings. I wish you went to just ask me before you went to the flower. I'm not going to lie in the back of my mind. I'm like, I think I know Neil has been complaining about these plants. I did not know they were jade. I got a much smaller one because again, I wanted to grow and multiply. That makes sense. Okay. My rec is DNF or do not finish as in do not finish a book. If you aren't enjoying it, the debate over whether to put down a book midway through or grind it out to the bitter end has reached a fever pitch after good reads added a new did not finish shelf where users can place books. They want to hit pause on good read said this was one of the sites most requested features, but others say they can't imagine not following through on a book that they started. My take life is too short and there are too many good books to read a book you aren't enjoying. Yes, it feels like quitting at the time and you feel a bit like a failure, but once you sink your teeth into a better book you'll forget all about it so i'm on team dnf and i've done it many many times this feels targeted neil i have like four dnf sitting on my bedside table right now and it's not because i don't like the books it's because i see a new one and i go oh that looks kind of fun to start so i'm literally halfway or three quarters through wuthering heights brother karamazov and the new dan brown book all just sitting there staring at me every night so yes i like the idea and concept but i think i'm putting into practice too aggressively and and hence the unfinished books are piling up all right that is all the time we have thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful wednesday toby you're off to your wedding venue i'll see you up there tomorrow and morning brew daily listeners will catch you back behind the desk later next week to share your thoughts on the episode or anything else send an email to morning brew daily at morning brew.com or dm us on instagram at mb daily show let's roll the credits milliron is our supervising producer raymond liu is our senior producer our producer is olivia graham and our associate producer is olivia lake technical direction by nina miller hair and makeup is in the west fjords to see the eclipse devin emery is our president and our show is a production of morning brew great show today neil let's run it back tomorrow hank joined bj's wholesale club the day he became a father of 30. i coach football now coach hank saves up to 25 off grocery store prices 30 pounds of pasta three cases of protein bars 75 sports drinks and that's just pre-game he knows teamwork and bj's knows savings this is your home coach home of the save join for just 20 at bj's.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months open soon limited time offer new members only bj's home of the save

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Exxon is promoting its Mobile Rewards Plus app, offering new users $10 in points—$5 after the first purchase and $5 after the second—to incentivize app downloads.
  2. A total solar eclipse visible across parts of Europe—including Spain, Iceland, and Portugal—has triggered a surge in tourism and economic activity, with hotels in Reykjavik and A Coruña charging significantly more and remote villages like Somosierra preparing for massive crowds.
  3. Bumble is abandoning its original "women initiate" rule, allowing both genders to make the first move and expanding the message response window to 72 hours, while also eliminating the swipe feature and experimenting with AI-driven matchmaking and real-life meetups to boost engagement amid declining user growth.

Summary:

A total solar eclipse across Europe has sparked a surge in tourism, with remote areas like Iceland’s Westfjords and Spain’s Somosierra seeing unprecedented visitor numbers and logistical challenges. Hotels are charging record prices, and local governments are scrambling with emergency preparations, highlighting how astronomical events can drive economic booms in undervisited regions. Meanwhile, Bumble is overhauling its dating model by allowing men to initiate conversations and extending message response times to 72 hours, responding to user fatigue and declining engagement.

The company is also phasing out swiping and exploring AI-powered matchmaking and real-world meetups to modernize its platform. This shift mirrors broader industry trends, including Spotify and Anthropic introducing AI content labels to restore user trust amid growing concerns about AI-generated content in music, books, and social media. In education, the University of Michigan is piloting a grade-free freshman program to reduce academic stress, though it sparks debate over student preparedness and the role of standardized assessments.

Additionally, major developments include New York’s push to classify Amazon delivery drivers as employees, climate threats impacting Italy’s cheese-backed banking system, and a growing cultural movement toward plant-based life events and “do not finish” books as a sign of healthy reading habits.

FAQs

The Exxon Mobile Rewards Plus app allows new users to earn $10 in points—$5 after the first purchase and $5 after the second. This rewards program encourages app usage and loyalty.

Yes, anyone can join by downloading the Exxon Mobile Rewards Plus app. For details, visit ExxonOffer.com.

A total solar eclipse will be visible across parts of Europe, including Spain, Iceland, and Portugal, creating a rare astronomical event that draws large numbers of visitors to remote areas.

In Iceland, authorities are repairing roads, boosting mobile networks, and staffing hospitals and emergency services. In Spain, remote villages like Somosierra are preparing food and services for expected crowds.

Bumble is updating its model to reflect modern dating realities, where time constraints and scheduling issues make it difficult to initiate conversations. This change aims to increase engagement and reduce pressure on users.

Bumble is removing the swipe feature and expanding the message response window to 72 hours. It is also experimenting with AI tools for profile matching and future interactions between users' AI agents.

Chat with AI

Loading...

Pro features

Go deeper with this episode

Unlock creator-grade tools that turn any transcript into show notes and subtitle files.