While American workers face “forever layoffs” and struggle to find work in todays tumultuous job market, some are reframing this era of unemployment and finding a silver lining in their personal economic meltdowns.
Laid off in June and the job market is so bad I decided to have a funemployed summer, one TikTok creator posted earlier this year. Another wrote: a weekday as a funemployed millennial. In the video they wake up at 11 a.m. and scroll TikTok for an hour; after breakfast at 1 p.m., they journal, read, think about life, hit the gym, and then call it a day.
Some funemployed were laid off. Some quit, lured by voluntary buyout programs. Some simply crave a career break or are in-between jobs. I got laid off four months ago, yall wanna know what I learned, one TikTok creator posted. Life goes on.
Instead of spending their days poring over job listings or firing out résumés, theyre embracing the time off and using it to travel, pursue a passion project, or simply rest. (At least until the severance pay runs out.)
As workers are currently in the thick of end-of-year layoff season, more of them may well find themselves in a funemployment era of their own. Especially as layoff announcements now surpassed 1.1 million this year, the most since 2020 pandemic, consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported Thursday.
The concept of a gap year, or a sabbatical, has been around for years, and even the label funemployement is nothing new: Urban Dictionary defines funemployed as The condition of a person who takes advantage of being out of a job to have the time of their life. I spent all day Tuesday at the pool; funemployment rocks!
Also, when it comes to younger generations, work is less central to their lives and sense of self. Studies have shown that across the board employees are more disengaged than ever. Many are using the extra free time to help pursue passions they may not otherwise have time for, or create social media content to bring in some extra funds.
Besides, humor is Gen Zs go-to defense mechanism.
Question: how can I stay funemployed (from a financial standpoint) forever, one TikTok creator posted earlier this year. I swear I’m hardworking but even the thought of going back to a traditional in-office 9-5 starts to suck the soul out of me.
A period of unemployment, while it might hurt financially, is no longer seen as the moral failing it used to be. Résumé gaps no longer carry the same stigma and people can make extra cash through side hustles or gig work while they figure out their next move.
Its worth noting, those posting about funemployment are often young and single, unburdened by the costs of children or a mortgage. Of course, if youre buoyed by savings, severance pay, or have parents to help you out, you might have the luxury of not having to rush into another job for the sake of a paycheck. The entry-level job market is also the toughest its been in years, with only 30% of 2025 graduates finding jobs in their fields.
Considering more than 1 in 4 workers without jobs have been unemployed for at least half a year, might as well try to have some fun in the meantime. (Until the mental gymnastics kick in, anyway.)
Under President Trump, its becoming clear that doing business with China is fineunder the right, lucrative conditions. In a post on Truth Social, the president said this week that his administration will allow Nvidia to sell one of its most powerful AI chips, the H200, to China. The H200 is said to be up to six times more powerful than the H20, the most powerful chip Nvidia had won approval to sell to China.
Washington and Beijing are currently in a tight race to lead AI and robotics research, and are locked in direct competition to apply the technologies in defense and intelligence. The Biden administration and much of Silicon Valley agreed that limiting sales of the most powerful AI chips to China was one lever the U.S. could pull to give it an advantage, and protect its own security. But Nvidia and its ally, AI czar David Sacks, have been lobbying the Trump administration all year to remove restrictions on chip sales to China, whose economy is the second-largest in the worldand a huge chip market.
Now, Trump has been persuaded to sell H200s to Chinaprovided that the chips are routed through the U.S. for a security review and that the U.S. gets a 25% cut of the sales. I have informed President Xi of China that the United States will allow Nvidia to ship its H200 products to approved customers in China and other countries under conditions that allow for strong national security, the president posted to Truth Social. Notably, the agreement wont apply to Nvidias most powerful chips, Trump says: the new Blackwell GPUs and the forthcoming Rubin GPUs.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Trumps decision came following a meeting last week with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, where they reportedly discussed H200 chip sales. It’s representative of Trump policy, which seems to be based on whomever was in his ear last and not part of a coherent strategy, says Alex Jacquez, who was special assistant to President Biden for economic development and industrial strategy at the National Economic Council.
Huang reportedly speaks to Trump regularly. Earlier this year, he talked to the president about selling Blackwell GPUs to China. But when the president raised the issue with his cabinet, the idea was shut down over national security concerns.
In August, Huang agreed to give the U.S. a 15% percent cut in exchange for permission to sell a lower-performing chip, the H20, to China; Xi soon advised Chinese tech companies not to use the chips, citing security concerns.
Coming at a cost
Even factoring the 25% U.S. cut on H200 sales, the agreement is likely a huge win for both Nvidia and China. And the win could come at a cost to the U.S.
Jacquez says that selling the H200 chips will give China a technological advantage that it wouldn’t have gained on their own for at least two to three years, meaning that Chinese chip makers such as Huawei would need that much time to develop chips as performant as Nvidias. On the U.S. side, every chip that we sell, every chip that we export, is a chip that’s not going to a U.S. company to continue to drive forward on our own AI capabilities, he says.
And the Chinese could use the powerful H200s to supercharge some of the forms of aggression in which its already engaged. For example, in November Anthropic discovered that a Chinese state-sponsored attacker manipulated its Claude AI coding tool to carry out a large-scale cyberattack. Those chips are going to go into AI systems that are going to look for weaknesses in U.S. cyber security, Jacquez says. They might be used by Chinese state-affiliated groups to scrape sensitive data from U.S. businesses or consumers, he addsor they could be built into weapons that the Chinese sell to Russia who are fighting Ukrainians.
The Administration’s licensing process will ensure that sales of H200 to authorized customers worldwide do not deprive U.S. customers of anything, says an Nvidia spokesperson, and will in fact benefit American national and economic security.
Offering H200 to approved and known commercial customers, vetted by the Department of Commerce, raises no cybersecurity risk and strikes a thoughtful balance that is great for America, the spokesperson added.
The H200 deal shows that Huangs charm offensive convinced the Trump administration that the U.S.s technological, economic, and national security goals are best served when the worlds AI models and apps are built to run on chips made by U.S.-based companieslike Nvidia.
Some days, starting feels effortless. A clear challenge or opportunity presents itself, an idea crystallizes, and then contracts into a single coherent thought. Today, frankly? Thats not happening. Im staring at a pristine white canvas while the cursor mocks me. That uncomfortable spacethe blinking cursor, the first messy draft, the false startsisnt a nuisance. Its where creativity lives.
Today, the temptation is to skip past all that. With AI, you dont even need to know where youre going. The bot can map it out, hand you something good enough. But what does good enough mean if you didnt wrestle with the idea yourself?
A recent MIT Media Lab study, Your Brain on ChatGPT, found that people who wrote without AI showed the strongest and most widespread brain activity, tied to creativity and memory. Essays produced with LLMs, by contrast, were described as flatter and more forgettable. The researchers warn that skipping the messy part of creation may create cognitive debtyou get an output, but you dont actually grow.
How to avoid this? Create, restrain, and edit the hell out of where youve been.
Create: Start Messy, Start Anyway
Starting anything new, even if youve done it a million times, is one of the great joys of the creative world. Sure, I could fill a blank canvas (or deck, or comp) with tried-and-true things we know work, but the beauty of creativity is that the first version is never, never, the last version. We have to start somewhere so we have something to improve.
I see creatives regularly jump right into making slides. Creating templates and parameters to work with that map out all the “must have” components of a complete idea. But when youre just starting out you dont need completely connected dots, just a gathering of interesting things that could become the idea. I personally like to read the brief and try to let it go, but keep a literal blank sheet of paper in front of me for the day or a new note on my phone. I jot down the sparks and weird things I come across during the day and keep adding to it while going about my life. In the collection stage its about volume and seeing where the energy of ideating takes you.
Restrain: Creativity Thrives Within Limits
Think of a tight budget like a limited palette. Only have $500? Youll approach the recycled cardboard canvas way differently than youll approach that 10-foot primed beauty with endless oils on hand. Only have two days? Youll make different choices than if you had two months. No designer available? Better figure out how to do it with words.
Great restraint is only going to get harder with so much immediate action at our fingertips. But those who can hold backwho know how to simplifywill reach simple, compelling, and worthwhile ideas faster.
Amazon is known for having their teams create fake press releases instead of pitches to help contextualize the details of an idea. A great exercise later in the process when you need to describe what youre looking to achieve. Lately, Ive had our teams test how much an idea can scale by writing it up in different voices. How would your favorite podcast host take and run with the idea? Does it still work and how does the tool of only audio change what you have to say?
Good marketers shouldnt fear constraints. Use them strategically. Whether its a tighter budget, a shorter timeline, or a smaller format, guardrails force creativity and result in sharper, more memorable work.
Edit: The Discipline That Makes Ideas Great
Good editing is another great skill of this new age: the ability to cut, to know whats worth amplifying, and to decide what actually makes the main feed. But editing is harder in an AI-powered world. Like the dopamine loop of social media, LLMs can make every idea feel validated: Heres your idea! Youre brilliant! The client just doesnt get it! False confidence is dangerous.
The only way to become a strong editor is to put in the work: writing, failing, and listening. Taking feedback not from machines, but from mentors, peers, and audiences. I learned how to develop good ideas by generating a lot of bad onesand killing most of them.
Editing is leadership. Brands and agencies need to create a culture where teams arent just encouraged to generate but also to refine. Build space for young creatives to dream wildly, then guide them through the discipline of cutting back to the ideas that truly deserve to live.
I got better at editing by getting off the computer and having the conversation with someone else far away from the work and without the material in front of me. What remains? What must be said in a conversation to have it all make sense. If you have it, its easy to see what stays. If you find it confusing to even share over conversation the work needs more refinement, and maybe an edit overhaul.
I believe the creative work that stands out will be anything that resists skipping to good enough. Itll embrace the blank canvas, lean into the discomfort, and edit ruthlessly until whats left is not just efficient, but meaningful.
Lurking on sites like LinkedIn and Indeed, or among your incoming text messages and emails, lies yet another disappointment to dodge in the already lacking job market: fake recruiters.
Posing as representatives from top companies, theyll contact you out of the blue, offering a job so tempting, that 40% of targets ignore the warning signs and move forward with the interview.
More than half of them, 51%, end up being scammed to give up personal data or money.
Those findings came from a survey of more than 1,200 U.S. job seekers published in October by Password Manager. The prevalence of fake recruiters came to my attention several years ago, says Gunnar Kallstrom, the cybersecurity expert who conducted survey for the company, which reviews password manager apps. Since then, the number of fake recruiters has been on the rise . . . posing as recruiters for well-known companies.
Per the survey, those companies include Amazon, Google, FedEx, UPS, Walmart, Apple, and Facebook (identified that way instead of by Meta in the survey), in that order of frequency.
These scams pose real risks for the job seekers who fall for them. Fake recruiters steal Social Security numbers, bank information, and passwords in a variety of ways, some sneakier, or more sophisticated, than others. The Better Business Bureaus 2024 Scam Risk Tracker Report puts the median dollar loss at $1,500 for victimsno small sum, especially considering that these people are likely out of work.
Not only do they result in material losses; they also put a serious dent in morale for those on the employment hunt. More than half of Password Manager survey respondents said theyre now less trusting of job opportunities and find the process more stressful40% say theyve even let legitimate posts pass them by, too concerned that theyre being tricked again. The trend is a nuisance at best; an active threat at worst.
Still, false job recruiters have many tells that job seekers can use to spot them. Enterprises, too, have become increasingly aware of these scammers tactics.
Representatives from some of the companies that fake recruiters most frequently impersonate told Fast Company exactly what job seekers should watch for to avoid falling victim to these insidious hiring scams.
What is the MO of false recruiters?
Generally, fake recruiters operate exactly like a social engineering campaign, says Kallstrom, in which their MO is to create a sense of urgency, legitimacy, and promise of reward for their victims.
Those surprise text messages you receive saying your resume caught a recruiters eye, but the post theyre hiring for needs to be filled ASAP? Dont give it a second look.
We simply do not do anything to create an undue sense of urgency, says Brian Ong, vice president of recruiting at Google. Hes heard from Google job candidates and employees about people falsely posing as members of the companys recruiting team, sending direct messages and emails even to those who havent previously applied for jobs at Google. Theyll use emails or websites, Ong adds, that look like they belong to Google, often using the companys logo.
Weve also seen situations where these scams are using our name and brand to ask for money or an immediate in-person interview, says Ong, Both of which are misrepresentative of our hiring process.
Amazon, meanwhile, has noticed customers reporting an increase in scammers pretending to be Amazon recruiters in September and October 2025, says Scott Knapp, the companys vice president of worldwide buyer risk prevention. These recruiters will ask for information like SSNs, bank information, or Amazon account detailsall information real recruiters for the company wouldnt solicit.
At Target, No. 9 on Password Managers list of most-impersonated companies, the scams tend to focus on secret shopper opportunities, per the companys website. Via emails with subject lines like job offer or influencer opportunities, scammers will offer free products or cash in exchange for recipients buying items to review online, or for purchasing gift cards and sharing the cards information with the false Target reps.
Tactics vary based on the type of company scammers are impersonating, adapting to whatever feels normal for that brand, Kallstrom says.
FedExs fake delivery job offers will arrive via text: Urgent hiring needno interview required, Kallstrom says, a likely enough assertion since delivery companies tend to bring on seasonal employees for busy times, like holidays, without asking for extensive interviews or experience.
For Meta, on the other hand, since they are a tech company, there may be a fake HR portal, software skills assessments, and fake interviews, adds Kallstrom, who describes tech company hiring scams as more sophisticated. They may entail full-on skills tests for software engineers that include coding challenges, through which scammers end up downloading malware onto the coders computer. The high salaries these fake recruiters offer may also cause applicants to let their guard down, Kallstrom says, because they are enticed by the money.
Across the board, these companies are chosen by scammers because of their name recognition, says Kallstrom: They make great bait for a potential unsuspecting victim.
How do you spot a recruiter impersonator?
Any request for personal information is likely a sign of a scam, Googles Ong says, adding that candidates whove applied to Google jobs have already shared information like email addresses and phone numbers. Real recruiters shouldnt be asking for thoseespecially not alongside an invitation to a Google Meet or link to a login page where users need to input that information to sign in.
Scammer tells will also appear in their own email addresses. Ong says he and his colleagues have seen fake recruiters with incomplete websites or misspelled emails along with outreach from people who do not have Google in their title or email. Misspellings, poor grammar, and inconsistencies in general could indicate an impersonator. Emails or websites replete with stock photos, too, should warrant a side-eye.
As obvious as it may sound, any job opportunity that comes with an ask for payment should be avoidedeven if its indirect payment, like requesting you purchase a gift card. Amazon will never ask you to provide payment information, including gift cards (or verification cards, as some scammers call them) for products or services, says Knapp.
Ultimately, if youre unsure whether a job opportunity is a scam, check the companys website. Companies tend to list their job openings online. Both Google and Amazon representatives point to their companies online job boards, where those whove received offers to apply for jobs can cross-check that those posts indeed appear on their websites.
Job seekers can also do due diligence on the alleged recruiters doing outreach. Verify the contact by checking the email addresses, Ong says, looking up the person online, such as on LinkedIn. And if something does seem suspicious, flag it to the outlet where it was received.
What to do if youve been targeted?
The first step is to report it. The more consumers report scams to us, the better our tools get at identifying bad actors so that we can take action against them and protect consumers, says Knapp, pointing out Amazons scams help page where those targeted can report. The company works with consumer groups like the National Cybersecurity Alliance and the Better Business Bureau to create awareness campaigns about the latest, most common scams.
Amazon also partners with law enforcement across the globe, Knapp adds, to hold scammers accountable, having initiated takedowns of more than 55,000 phishing websites and 12,000 phone numbers being used as part of impersonation schemes in 2024.
A representative from Target says that cybersecurity experts from the companys Cyber Fusion Center use advanced tools and training to prevent and address potential threats. That includes tools developed by the company as part of an open source initiative on GitHub, like one that scans files, such as emails, to detect possible malicious activity.
Anyone can get baited on social media or get a text about a job opportunity thats too good to be true, says Knapp.
If something seems too good to be true, it likely is an impersonation scam.
We talk about time at work as if its a fixed resource: something outside of us and something we either manage well or never have enough of. People genuinely believe the clock is the problem. But the more you look at how the brain processes experience, the less true this becomes.
People dont feel pressured because they have too many tasks. They feel pressured because their brain is constructing time in a way that makes everything feel urgent or impossible to catch up with.
Modern neuroscience has been pointing to this for a while. Our experience of timewhat feels fast, slow, overwhelming, or not enoughis not a reading from an internal stopwatch. Its a story the brain builds using prediction, memory, emotional state, and identity.
In other words: your brain doesnt observe time. Your brain generates it. Or we can say it another way. The brain predicts time, not measures it.
Instead of tracking time objectively, the brain uses patterns and context to estimate how long things take. It relies on memory and sensory information to create a timeline that makes sense. But the problem is that those internal estimates shift dramatically depending on whats happening inside us.
When your system is stable and regulated, your internal sense of time widens. You can think clearly, make decisions from the part of your brain built for problem-solving, and move through your day without constantly feeling behind. In contrast, when youre stressed or mentally overloaded, the brain speeds everything up. Time contracts” and you lose the feeling of agency. Minutes disappear and even simple tasks feel rushed.
The external calendar hasnt changed, yet your internal clock has.
Stress and emotion distort the experience of time
Under stress, the brain becomes hyper-focused on prediction: What might go wrong? What am I missing? What did I forget? Whats next?
This pulls attention away from continuous processing and toward threat monitoring, making time feel fragmented and chaotic.
Emotion does something similar. When youre anxious, your internal timeline becomes jumpy and inconsistent. On the other hand, when youre burdened by unresolved emotional patterns or past loops, the present feels compressed and the future feels far away. This is exactly why whole months can feel like they passed in a blurand yet individual days felt strangely heavy or stretched.
We experience time not as it is, but as our internal state shapes it.
Identity plays a bigger role than people think
Your identitywho you believe you are right now, and who you believe you should already behas a direct impact on your sense of time. When theres a big gap between your current self and the self you think you should have become by now, the brain interprets this as lateness.
People living with a strained identity often feel theyre constantly running behind, even on days where their workload is reasonable. It creates a quiet pressure underneath everything they do.
It is important to acknowledge that this is not laziness or lack of discipline, but a distorted time experience shaped by identity tension.
Why two people with the same schedule feel time differently
Every leader has seen this but cant always explain it: two employees with the same deadlines, same workload and even the same tools, yet one remains steady and the other is overwhelmed.
From the outside, they look identical, yet from the inside, theyre living in completely different time worlds.
One persons nervous system is regulated enough to let their brain track time coherently. The other is in chronic predictive overdrive, experiencing time as something slippery and unforgiving.
Attention shapes the texture of time
Theres a reason deep work feels slow and spacious, while days full of interruptions vanish in an instant.
That’s because attention gives the brain enough information to build a rich, continuous timeline. Fragmentation does the opposite. When your attention is scattered, time becomes thin. It loses its structure and feels shorter.
This isnt just unpleasant. But it also changes how people remember their workday, how they evaluate their progress, and how capable they feel.
When companies unintentionally design days full of micro-interruptions, they are not only lowering productivitythey are altering employees subjective experience of time.
And people make very different decisions when they feel like time is disappearing.
What this means for modern work
If time pressure and overwhelm come from internal time distortion rather than external time scarcity, then our conversations about productivity need to shift dramatically.
And this doesn’t refer to better time management. It is about reducing the internal states that warp how people experience time.
Leaders can influence this more than they think by using the following strategies:
1) Reduce unnecessary chronic stressors to keep time perception from becoming distorted beyond usefulness.
2) Protect uninterrupted focus windows as the foundation for coherent time experience.
3) Be intentional with urgency: Constant urgency rewires the brain to live in a compressed and reactive timeline.
4) Offer clear, grounded futures: a stable sense of where I’m going helps people feel anchored, instead of feeling constantly behind.
The real work is not to fit more tasks into a fixed number of hours, but to help people live in an internal timeline that isnt distorted by stress and identity pressure.
Clock time will always move at the same pace. But the time that determines burnout, clarity, performance, and decision-making is the time your brain is constructing from the inside.
Understanding that difference changes everything.
On Wednesday morning, local time, over one million Australian children discovered their social media accounts had vanished. And it may not be long before kids in other countries find themselves in a similar predicament.
Under the new law, which was approved late last year, no one under the age of 16 in Australia will be allowed to set up accounts on platforms including Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, X, Snapchat, Twitch, and Reddit. Any accounts for people in that age category will be deactivated or removed. The law is meant to protect the mental health of children from the addictive nature of social media.
Australia’s law goes three years beyond the de facto minimum age for social media limits in the U.S., where privacy legislation dictates that children under 13 are not supposed to be able to create accounts (though they easily end-run those restrictions). Anika Wells, the country’s communications minister, said those extra years will help children mature more before they take part in social media.
We want children to have childhoods. We want parents to have peace of mind and we want young peopleyoung Australiansto have three more years to learn who they are before platforms assume who they are, she said earlier this year.
The legislation is being watched carefully by other governments, which have struggled with the impact of social media on young minds. If Australian children show improvements in their mental (and physical) health, with reduced reports of depression, anxiety, attention deficit disorder, and more, the country’s policies could become a blueprint for other nations.
Several have already put plans into motion. Denmark, Norway, Malaysia, and the European Parliament have all either announced plans to ban social media access for children, similar to the Australian law, or are in the process of creating new rules.
Denmark has gone the furthest, announcing last month that it would ban access to social media for anyone under 15, noting 94% of the children in that country had profiles on at least one social media platform. Under the age of 10, half of all Danish children do. The country has not yet set a date for the ban to begin.
Children and young people have their sleep disrupted, lose their peace and concentration, and experience increasing pressure from digital relationships where adults are not always present, the Danish ministry for digital affairs said. This is a development that no parent, teacher or educator can stop alone.
As for the U.S., don’t expect similar legislation anytime soon. The Big Tech lobby is firmly against the policy. And tech leaders, including Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, have a close relationship with Donald Trump. Even those whose relationship with Trump is contentious are seemingly protected. Last week, when the European Commission hit Elon Musk’s X with nearly $140 million in fines for violating its moderation law, the Trump Administration came out swinging.
“The European Commission’s $140 million fine isn’t just an attack on X, it’s an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on social media. “The days of censoring Americans online are over.”
Some U.S. states, including Texas and Florida, have tried to enact bans, but those measures have either failed to pass the state legislatures or have been struck down by courts.
Australia’s social media ban, meanwhile, passed with overwhelming support, though some critics warned it would be too blunt an instrument to address risks effectively.
Social media companies were given a year to beef up their technology to confirm user ages and teens were encouraged to begin weening themselves off of the apps, so the formal ban wouldn’t come as a shock. Teens were even given a checklist to prepare for the shift.
Justin McLeod, founder and CEO of dating app Hinge, is consciously uncoupling from his app. Hinges president and chief marketing officer Jackie Jantosrecently named one of Fast Companys CMOs of the yearwill succeed him in the role of CEO, effective immediately. McLeod will stay on as an adviser through March to support the transition.
McLeod, who founded Hinge in 2011, is leaving to launch Overtone, an AI-driven venture focused on facilitating connections between people; it will be backed by Match Group. In a blog post, he calls his departure a wildly bittersweet moment.
This past year, I got higher conviction on two different things. One is that Jackie is the next right leader for Hinge. She’s an incredible strategist, he tells Fast Company. The other thing [is] I realized how much I miss and how much I love the early-stage part of building a company. That was where my heart was and where I wanted to focus.
Jantos joined Hinge four years ago as CMO and took on the role of president in March. Shes behind the companys breakout No Ordinary Love campaign and has steered its outreach to Gen Z users, who now account for more than half of Hinge users. She also helped bring the app to new markets, most recently Mexico and Brazil.
Ive been operating the business for the past year, since I stepped into this president role, so there won’t be much change, Jantos says.
Hinge has been so successful because Jackie and the team understand their consumer, says Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Hinge parent company Match Group. They have [their] finger on the pulse of where the world is at with respect to human connection.
DESIGNED TO BE DELETED
Hinge has been one of the few bright spots amid a broader downturn in dating apps. Earlier this year, Bumbles struggles led to the return of founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, who has since laid off 30% of staff. Tinder, another Match Group property, has lost more than 1.5 million paying users since its 2022 peak.
After Rascoff took over as CEO of Match Group in February, he trimmed headcount by 13%.
In contrast, Hinge, which has 15 million monthly active users, saw its paying users grow by 17% year over year to 1.87 million in the third quarter of 2025. The app took in $550 million in revenue last year, and more than $500 million in the first nine months of 2025.
McLeod laid the foundation for this success with a foresighted app relaunch in 2015. While other dating apps were prioritizing user engagement and addictive swiping, Hinge focused on creating positive outcomes: app interactions that convert into real-life dates.
The company has even inserted deliberate speedbumps into the user experience to combat user behavior like ghosting. McLeods iconoclastic approach is embodied in the apps tagline, designed to be deleted.
Jantos says Hinges mission will remain unchanged. We are very much working to help intentional daters find the relationships they’re looking for and get off the app into dates.
THE MATCH GROUP ECOSYSTEM
McLeods departure comes as Rascoff pushes to create more links between Match Groups different apps, allowing them to share insights around user behavior and how to incorporate AI in their user experiences.
For example, a member of Chispa, Matchs Latino-focused dating app, might receive an invitation to join Hinge, which will autofill their profile. Rascoff even envisions that the matching algorithm behind these apps could be standardized
I’m moving the company towards more cross-brand collaboration and knowledge sharing,” Rascoff says.
He notes that Hinge has long embraced a “consumer-focused, product-led” mindset. “I’m trying to bring that attribute that has made Hinge so successful into all of our other brands, many of which have been more financially oriented, more short-term oriented, and less consumer-driven, Rascoff says.
With more integrations on the back end, the distinctive user experience and marketing of each app could prove more important than ever.
As CMO, Jantos has attracted younger users to Hinge by showcasing real-life relationships rather than the polished versions of love usually portrayed in media. This year, the company launched the second iteration of its No Ordinary Love campaign, which tells the complicated love stories of real Hinge couples, as well as the second chapter of the Its Funny We Met On Hinge video series.
FOUNDER MODE
McLeod remains coy about his new venture, Overtone, which a Hinge spokesperson describes as focused on using AI and voice tools to help people connect thoughtfully and in a personal way.
We’re not going to talk a lot about that quite yet, McLeod says, except to say that there’s an opportunity to completely reimagine the dating experience and how technology can help facilitate people finding their partnerthat breaks the mold of the way current dating apps are designed.
McLeod has been bullish on audio technology in dating apps: Hinge now allows users to record a 30-second audio introduction.
McLeod began developing Overtone at Hinge, with Match Group providing early funding. Overtone will operate independently, but Match Group plans to lead the company’s initial funding round early next year and will have a substantial ownership position. Rascoff will join its board of directors. McLeod will serve as chairman and founder.
I think for that zero-to-one stage of a company, where you have to move really fast, it made sense [for Overtone] to be its own independent public company, McLeod says. And I’m a founder and CEO at heart. There’s a piece of me that wants to be out there on my own, ultimately steering the ship again.
If your home insurance rate has spiked lately, youre not alone. And President Trumps policies could make it even more expensive.
Since 2021, at least 6 million policyholders across the country have seen rate hikes to their property insurance policies, according to a new report from the environmental advocacy group Climate Power. Insurers have also canceled at least 1.4 million policies in that time.
One big reason is the worsening climate crisis, which is driving more and more instances of extreme weather. Inflation, labor shortages, and supply chain issues are also factors, as they drive up the costs to rebuild a home.
The Trump administrations policies may be exacerbating this crisis. Trumps tariffs could make home insurance prices rise 38% faster, one insurance agency estimated.
And since beginning his second term in office, Trump has also gutted the countrys ability to forecast extreme weather, as well as the governments ability to respond to disasters. Less information means insurance companies may raise premiums even more, or pull out of high-risk areas altogether.
Climate change and the home insurance crisis
When it comes to rate hikes, cancellations, and the cessation of new business, insurers attribute more than one in four of those actions to extreme weather or climate disasters, according to Climate Power.
In Louisiana in 2023, Citizens Property Insurance customers saw a 63% rate increase on their home insurance. That move affected more than 100,000 homeowners who were forced to take out policies with Citizens after Hurricane Laura and other recent storms, The Times-Picayune reported, because other insurance companies went insolvent or left the state because of its disaster risks.
And more companies are leaving especially risky states, or halting their coverage. State Farm and Allstate stopped insuring homes in California because of climate risk. And Farmers and Progressive have scaled back their coverage in Florida.
Its not just coastal states at risk, however. While Florida and California are the two top states impacted by insurance cancellations, per Climate Powers report, the top 10 list also includes Iowa, Oklahoma, and Oregon.
Cost-of-living and affordability issues don’t hurt profits
At the same time that Americans are facing higher premiums or being left without any coverage, insurance companies are still profitable and paying their CEOs millions.
In 2024, 22 publicly traded insurance companies reported profits that exceeded $36 billion combined, per Climate Power. Together, they gave their CEOs more than $220 million.
One example is Allstate, which reported $4.7 billion in profits and compensated CEO Thomas Wilson with $26.7 million in 2024. Thats the same year the company raised rates for 350,000 California policyholders by 34%.
Insurance companies are raking in profits, paying CEOs millions, but still canceling policies and hiking rates, which is leaving Americansespecially those facing extreme weatherhung up to dry, said Lizzy Ganssle, Climate Power’s national press secretary.
No help from Trump
The property insurance industry has also supported Trump to the tune of more than $1.3 million for his presidential campaigns, through donations from individuals and political action committees (PACs). But as Climate Power points out in its report, Trump isnt addressing the insurance crisis issueand may actually be making it worse.
Trumps tariffs, cuts to disaster relief, and elimination of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) programs all mean that homeowners will have to bear more of the burden when it comes to extreme weather events and the cost of rebuilding their homes.
Many Americans are already dealing with a cost-of-living crisis and struggling to pay for groceries, housing, and skyrocketing energy bills. As they become more pessimistic about the economy, though, Trump has called affordability issues a con job and a fake narrative.
Climate Power hopes its report helps Americans to understand the scope of the insurance problem, as well as why their prices may continue to rise.
Its very important for us that Americans understand the impacts that extreme weather is having on their real lives, Ganssle said. Its also important for us that folks understand that Donald Trump is doing nothing to address this issue.
U.S. job openings barely budged in October, coming in at 7.7 million with ongoing uncertainty over the direction of the American economy.
The Labor Department reported Tuesday that employers posted 7.67 million vacancies in October, close to Septembers 7.66 million.
The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), which was delayed by the extended government shutdown, also showed that layoffs rose to almost 1.9 million, the most since January 2023. And the number of people quitting their jobsa sign of confidence in the labor marketfell in October, suggesting that businesses seeking to control labor costs will have to pivot to active layoffs, lifting unemployment, rather than rely on natural attrition, Samuel Tombs, chief U.S. economist at Pantheon, wrote in a commentary.
Job openings have come down steadily since peaking at a record 12.1 million in March 2022, when the economy was roaring back from COVID-19 lockdowns. The job market has cooled partly because of the lingering effect of the high interest rates the Federal Reserve engineered in 2022 and 2023 to combat an outburst of inflation.
Overall, its a puzzling time for the American economy, buffeted by President Donald Trumps decision to reverse decades of U.S. policy in favor of free trade and instead impose double-digit tariffs on imports from most of the worlds countries.
Policymakers at the Federal Reserve are meeting this week to decide whether to cut their benchmark interest rate, and the gathering is expected to be unusually contentious. Inflation remains stuck above the Feds 2% target, partly because importers have tried to pass along the cost of Trumps tariffs by raising prices. Normally, stubborn inflation would discourage Fed policymakers from cutting rates. But the job market has looked shaky in recent months, and the Fed is expected to reduce its benchmark rate for the third time this year, though some policymakers might dissent.
Meanwhile, the 43-day federal shutdown has made a mess of the governments economic statistics.
The October report on job openings came out a week late, and the September version was not published separately because federal data collectors were on furlough. Instead, Septembers JOLTS numbers were folded into Tuesdays report along with Octobers. They showed a hefty increase in openings from 7.23 million in August.
The Labor Department will issue numbers for hiring and unemployment for November next Tuesday, 11 days later than originally scheduled. The department is not releasing an unemployment rate for October because it could not calculate the number during the shutdown. It will release some of the October jobs dataincluding the number of positions that employers created that monthalong with the full November jobs report.
Forecasters surveyed by the data firm FactSet predict that employers added fewer than 38,000 jobs in November and that the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.5% from Septembers 4.4%. That would be low by historical standards, but the highest in nearly four years.
By Paul Wiseman, AP economics writer
Google faces fresh antitrust scrutiny from European Union regulators, who opened an investigation Tuesday into the company’s use of online content for its artificial intelligence models and services.
The latest regulatory flexing by the European Commission in Brussels risks antagonizing President Donald Trump’s administration, though EU officials denied they were singling out American Big Tech companies.
The European Commission, which is the 27-nation bloc’s top antitrust enforcer, said it’s examining whether Google has breached competition rules through its use of content from web publishers and material uploaded to YouTube for AI purposes.
Regulators are concerned that Google has given itself an unfair advantage by using content for two search services, AI Overviews and AI Mode, without paying publishers and content creators or letting them opt out. AI Overviews are automatically generated summaries that appear at the top of its traditional search results, while AI Mode provides chatbot-style answers to search queries.
They’re also examining whether Google uses videos uploaded to YouTube under similar conditions to train its generative AI models, while shutting out rival AI model developers.
Officials said they’re seeking to determine whether Google gained an edge over AI rivals by imposing unfair terms and conditions, or giving itself privileged access to content.
This complaint risks stifling innovation in a market that is more competitive than ever,” Google said in a statement. Europeans deserve to benefit from the latest technologies, and we will continue to work closely with the news and creative industries as they transition to the AI era.
The Commission, which is the bloc’s executive arm, is carrying out the investigation under the EU’s longstanding competition regulations, rather than its newer Digital Markets Act that was drawn up to prevent Big Tech companies from monopolizing online markets.
“AI is bringing remarkable innovation and many benefits for people and businesses across Europe, but this progress cannot come at the expense of the principles at the heart of our societies,” Teresa Ribera, the Commissions vice president overseeing competition affairs, said in a statement.
Last week the Commission opened an antitrust investigation into WhatsApp’s AI policy. It also fined Elon Musk’s social media platform X 120 million euros ($140 million) for breaching digital regulations, which drew complaints from Trump officials that American companies were being targeted.
The Commission is agnostic about the nationality of companies it is investigating, spokeswoman Arianna Podesta said.
Of course, the sole focus of our antitrust investigations is possible illegal behavior and the harm that this could bring to competition and consumers within the European Union, Podesta told reporters at a regular briefing in Brussels.
Google will have the chance to reply to the concerns, and the Commission has also informed U.S. authorities about the investigation, she said.
Brussels has no deadline to wrap up the case, which could result in sanctions including a fine worth up to 10% of the companys annual global revenue.
By Kelvin Chan, AP business writer
Associated Press writer Sam McNeil contributed to this report.
