for a conversation on the future of human connection in the age of AI. Please welcome founder and CEO of Bumble, Whitney Wolf Herd, with Atlantic contributing writer Derek Thompson.
Hi everybody. Um so Whitney, hello. Good to see you.
Uh 10 years ago, you and I sat on a stage at the Atlantic Festival. And the conversation was dating and dating apps and Bumble. And I made an initial disclosure that I had just met someone on Bumble and was dating someone on Bumble. And now here we are 10 years later and I can now say that I met my wife and mother of two children on Bumble. So every 10 years we're just going to meet each other. This is what we're going to do and just talk about the family that I have that exists because of Bumble. So um that's me buttering you up for uh what is otherwise going to be an extremely difficult uh interview. Um, look, word of the street is that young people aren't dating anymore. You're the CEO of a dating app. It sounds pretty hard.
Yeah, it's an interesting time, but you know, people want to connect today more than they did when I started this company. I think they're craving it more now than literally in 10 years ago when we were on stage. I think what's so interesting is last time you and I spoke I was still trying to convince people that they should use technology today essentially right like we were still early and then it exploded and everyone wanted to get out there and meet each other and then COVID hit and they had no way to meet each other and then COVID ended and people were just craving to be together in real life and I think that is the biggest thing is like people have become so hungry for real-world connection. And so our goal at Bumble and this next decade and hopefully you'll all join us 10 years from now because we're going to do this every 10 years. We've agreed the Bumble babies will be teenagers by then. So they'll be ready to be on Bumble a few years later. It's going to be great.
So can I challenge that? The premise that people are hungry for more social connection than ever. I mean, there's a revealed preference at work. Young people are spending more time in their homes than they used to. They're spending less time socializing. They're spending more time alone. I wrote a cover story for The Atlantic last year called the Antisocial Century. And according to the American Time Use survey, Americans overall have reduced their in-person socializing by 25% in the last 25 years. And among young people under 25, that decline is 40%. According to the same government survey, if you ask young people, how much time have you spent in the last month going to or hosting a party, that number has declined by 70% since 2003. So, it does kind of seem like young people, even if they say they want connection, they do seem to be rejecting in-person connection. And I wonder as the CEO of an app that is trying to bring people together, I'd like you to answer this question first as a kind of sociologist and then maybe as a CEO. What's going on? What's changed, do you think, in the last 10 to 20 years that has created this disconnection, this fear of rejection of meeting someone you don't know because you're afraid of something that might happen.
Well, I will be a pretend sociologist. I am not one. But I do feel like I have an unbelievably unique lens and view into what's going on with culture and the dynamics of relationships because of this business that I have started and run since I was 24 years old. Um, and so it has been absolutely fascinating to watch how things have shifted and moved. I'm going to challenge you back, okay? And I'm going to disagree with you. I agree with the statistics but I disagree with the underlying fundamental ideology that people want to be antisocial or they want to be disconnected. We are social creatures. We belong together. If you go back to the earliest earliest times humans we have to exist together. That is what we were made for. That is who we are. And this isolation is kind of what this generation has been ushered into. Look what we have done to them. How can we blame them for being where they are today? When I was in college, I don't know what it was like for you. We went to parties and we like stayed at a frat house all night long. And now, you know, this generation that's going into college, they have been on Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok for the last however many years. And of course, with this revolutionary technology, iPads and distractions, you know, you can't blame this generation of parents that let their kids try it all because the other kids in the class were doing it, right? They don't want to be bullied. They want to be left out. But what we've done by letting them be social online is we have inadvertently made them antisocial offline.
And this is not what the future should be for anyone. For any of us, for our my kind of bumble babies, I guess they're sort of bumblebees for your actual bumble babies. We want better. We want better. And so what we are actually seeing is this craving of being together in real life. And I will tell you this is very much evidenced in our BFF growth. So we have a product called BFF and it is a product to find community and friendship and it is absolutely astonishing to see the types of groups forming and the way people are setting up these events to go crafting together to go bar hopping together to do obscure you know hobbies pickleball in the morning and a swim in the night I mean all sorts of stuff you can see people want to come together to do things together in the real world. And this is why the dating app market, including ours, has to evolve. This is why all of our roadmap coming starting literally in October is all around one goal, which is get people out in the real world together as quickly as possible. We don't want to be one of these products that keeps you trapped on your phone all day. Go and be together. And frankly, as we are all I mean, you're all here to hear about AI this and the future of that and how AI is going to disrupt this and change this. And frankly, there's so much that AI can do great and will optimize and will improve all of our lives. The last thing standing is the connection we have with each other and the relationships we have. That will be the last thing. And it cannot be disrupted by technology. It has to help us come together. And that's why I'm still doing this. Like why am I still running a dating app? Like I have three kids. Like I have other stuff going on. And like I didn't really like dream of being a dating app founder when I was a little girl, but here we are because connection matters. And this is the most valuable thing I can give my time and energy to. Helping people find love, friendship, and community. We are, you know, we're so isolated.
Yeah. There's so much that you said there and I'm thinking of it for my own purpose of designing the next 20 22 minutes as we want to talk about dating. I want to talk about AI and I want to talk about friendship. I think those are three different categories. One more piece on dating. I feel like there's a kind of tech utopian story that could have been told in 2014 when Bumble was founded, when Tinder was taking off that said, you know, meeting people is very hard and bars are an inefficient way to meet someone who shares your interests and offline friendship groups are an inefficient way of meeting someone who shares your interests. You know what's an efficient way of meeting someone who shares your interests? are dating apps where you can refine exactly what you want and talk to exactly who you want in your downtime. And so there's a story that could have been told in 2014 that dating and romance was about to enter a kind of golden age in the 2020s because of online dating. That world didn't happen. And I think that it would be simplistic to say that dating apps ruined romance. But I don't think it's simplistic to say that dating apps failed to save romance from what is objectively the fact, which is that there are fewer couples and less dating and less sex. So why do you think that at the very least dating apps failed to create this golden age of romance?
Well, first of all, that was the PR pitch and they were, you know, they were the people hired were supposed to do that. I'm just joking. No, but truly this is what it was always about was to help people come together and we also to be really self-aware and completely candid with not just this group and wherever this is going to end up on the internet because this is my life. I say one thing and it goes all over the internet in some weird way. So, you know, sound bite this however you want. But we, you know, trying to do a good thing, good intentions sometimes have some weird consequences. There's some side effects. And I do believe this never-ending stream of availability of someone that might be better, someone that might be around that next swipe or that next, you know, like has created a bit of this disconnection from the way we were meant to connect. And you know, if you go back to my grandmother's time of meeting my grandfather, they met through probably, you know, a local community gathering. And she wasn't going to say, 'Oh, you know, I'm going to say no to Elliot cuz there's probably 7,000 better guys on this thing.' Like that was her only option. Like Elliot was fine. Like he was great. So, but you get what I mean. And so I'm not saying that that was the most efficient. we're going to evolve. Like we always have to innovate and evolve. And so while it was both great to be able to hear the stories, not even using your story, I heard a story the other day. Two people lived in the same building for years. One and I've I think I've heard the story like 12 times cuz I keep hearing the same version of it. Same building would have never crossed paths in the real world. One person left at this time and the next person left at that time. They're now married because of Bumble and they literally were. It was like sliding doors. So there's beauty to that. But this notion of you know a lot of men have kind of gamed it frankly. And then women have also kind of like I call it like this like obsession with the ick. Everything gives people the ick now. Like they will literally break up with someone over their socks. And I'm like there are bigger problems. So I do think this I do think the dating apps have created this never-ending stream of options and it has burnt people out and so I think moving from this passivity where also people are real human beings like we can't just be like oh no that person's not for me like over here this is a human we're dealing with and so there's like a lack of empathy involved in some of the way that people connect online. And so I think that's really where we've been self-aware. When I came back in as CEO about a year and a half ago, I got about a year hiatus, which was awesome. Um and when I came back, I was like, 'Okay, we need to bring the humanity and the soul back to this.' Like, we got to bring the love back into the room because that's what this was always meant to be. Um and so yeah, like are we perfect? No. has it created millions and millions of marriages, babies, you know, some of them are yours. Like, that's incredible. But for all of the great stories, there are also a lot of people that are like, 'I'm out of here. I'm deleting these. These are not making me feel good. It's degrading my confidence.' And so, that's why I get up every morning and go to work. Because the fact that there is a generation of women, not just here in America, but around the world, that still walk around saying dating sucks and the apps haven't fixed it. I'm like, 'Okay, let's go. Let's innovate. We got to make this better. We got to fix it.' And so that's kind of the way I'm approaching this.
I'm hearing two distinct problems and I'm interested in how you're thinking about solving each of them. One problem that I'm hearing is something like the paradox of choice. People feeling like they have so many choices online that they develop this kind of perfectionism that is sometimes manifested through what you called the ick. One doesn't develop the ick when there's only two choices, right? You're in a village, there's Greg, there's Bob, you got to choose one. But like if you're in the global village and there's 10,000 Gregs and 10,000 Bobs and 10,000 mics, then it is more plausible for someone to develop something as specific as a red sock ick. So that's a paradox of choice and I want to hear how you want to solve that. But there's another problem that I just want to tell you that I'm hearing which is a problem of something like rejection overdose. That of course being a single person in a place like New York where I was single when I was using your app means asking... I hope you were single. So yes right. Exactly. Good fact check. Um is one of you know you go out with some people and then you break up and you ask someone out and they say no. Like dating involves a little bit of rejection, but dating apps inject steroids into that amount of no. Because if you're reaching out to 50 people to talk to 10 people, to go out with one person, then the act of being on a dating app involves hearing a lot of no. And it makes the experience of dating more inundated with this feeling of rejection which might ultimately get people to get off the app entirely. And I guess I'm interested in how you think about each of these specific psychological challenges. The paradox of choice ick challenge and the sort of rejection overdose challenge.
