Morning Brew Daily - Job Seekers Are Paying to Get Hired & Elon Pivots From Mars to the Moon

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

Episode 776: Neal and Toby discuss the labor market being so bad that job seekers are paying recruiters to white-glove service their candidacy for potential employers. Then, Elon Musk seemed fixed on building life on Mars, but now, he’s pivoting to the Moon. Also, the US tariffs on Cuba has led to a shortage of jet fuel, forcing Air Canada to halt all their flights to the island nation. Meanwhile, celebrities once flocked to starting their own tequila brands. But now they’re flocking to underwear.  Learn more about FlavCity at shopflavcity.com  Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠ Watch Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many employees can't afford a hefty medical bill that pops up out of the blue, but it happens. And employees who are financially stressed are, understandably, more likely to be distracted at work, costing their employers greatly in lost productivity. Luckily, AFLAC plans help with out-of-pocket expenses not covered by health insurance and can be offered at no direct cost to businesses. Learn more at aflac.com slash morning brewdaily. That's aflac.com slash morning brew daily. Good morning brew daily show. I'm Neil Fryman.

And I'm Toby Howell. Today, the labor market is down so bad that people are paying recruiters to find jobs for them. Ben, Elon Musk is ditching Mars for something a little closer to home, the moon. It's Tuesday, February 10th. Let's ride. So I went to the gym yesterday, no big deal, and was obviously listening to Bad Bunny on my AirPods after a Super Bowl halftime show. I was looking around wondering how many people here are also listening to Bad Bunny?

and the answer is probably most of them. On Monday, the singers saw a 470% jump in Spotify streams in the United States and a 210% increase in global streams. As of this morning, he held the first six spots on Spotify's U.S. Daily Top Songs chart. He also holds the top six spots of Toby's personal Spotify's songs chart. We're also getting some more data into about how locked in people were for the halftime show. New York City Water on X posted that they saw a significant reduction of water usage during the halftime show.

But in the 15 minutes after the show ended, they saw a spike in usage equivalent to 761,719 toilets flushing across town. I was one of them. The homemade wings I attempted to chef up didn't go down so well. But now a word from our sponsor, Flav City. Neil, my smoothie budget is getting crazy.

I'm buying all kinds of berries, powders, tonics, and don't even get me started on the price of mushrooms. That is crazy, especially when FlavCities all-in-one smoothies have the benefits of those ingredients in one bag, no blunder needed. Okay, well, there's no way to taste better than my super secret smoothie recipe. No, they absolutely taste better than your gross weird smoothie, whether that's the pleasantly pepperminty shamrock, banana bread, brownie batter, or any of their wide range of flavors, you get a tasty protein-rich smoothie. All that, and with 25 grams of protein, 10 grams of collagen, wow.

head to shopflavcity.com to try any of their delicious flavors. That's shopflavcity.com. It's becoming so hard to find a job that people are paying recruiters to find one for them. According to the Wall Street Journal, applicants have gotten so fed up with the job hunting process that they're signing up for so-called reverse recruitment programs to help them stand out in a sea of 10,000 resumes. This isn't how it's supposed to work. Typically, recruiters are hired by employers to help them identify great candidates for open positions. But as hirings come to a halt, the tables have turned. Recruiters are increasingly looking to people, not companies, for their next batch of customers. Here's an example of how this works, per the journal, at least on the high end of things.

A firm called Reverse Recruiting Agency charges $1,500 a month for its services, which include LinkedIn profile writing and resume and career coaching. It'll submit as many as 100 job applications a week on your behalf, while contacting current employees that the companies you're interested in. Once you have the job, because of course you will, you'll fork over 10% of your first year salary minus the first month fee. Toby, desperate times call for desperate measures. The rise of reverse recruiting is a pretty perfect indicator of where this job market is right now. There's always been some ethical and even just practical concerns around this practice

because charging job seekers, people at vulnerable moments in their life and career is not something usually looked favorably upon in the industry because maybe you're not even providing a good service either mass applying on behalf of candidates. But also, you and I have been out of the job market for a while now. So we wanted to get a second opinion on the rise of reverse recruiting. So we hit up our backup host and our friend Kyle Hagg, who also has a work life podcast of his own called Per My Last Email for his thoughts on the rise of reverse recruiting. Thanks, guys. And also thanks for having me as a Morning Brew Daily show. Field correspondent, it is an honor. I'm adding it to my resume. Now, let's talk about the reverse recruiting story. First, I'm a little

skeptical and there's definitely questions you want to ask them. What is their success rate of placing candidates and jobs? How many candidates do they work with at one time? Is this white glove or is this just a, you know, spray and prey type scenario? And then the lastly, what is their fee structure? Are you paying them up front or are the incentives actually aligned where you pay them after you get a job? I think that really matters. And I would make sure it's the latter and not the former. Back to you guys. One anecdote that the Wall Street Journal highlighted that I think speaks to what Kyle was saying was Sean Cole, he paid a reverse recruiter up front on Fiver, $400 total to ostensibly, resume, customization, you know, do everything a reverse recruiter is supposed to do.

He found no roles, didn't get many leads. And actually what happened afterwards, he said, I might start a reverse recruiting side hustle myself, try to make a little cash on the side by doing this thing that didn't work for me. So exactly what Kyle was saying, like make sure the incentives are in line because if you're not, you know, paying for the product, you end up, being the product and you make money that way versus actually getting a job. Let's talk about the big picture numbers about why there has been a rise in this cottage industry of reverse recruitment. It's because very few companies are hiring and the people who are unemployed are saying on the job market for a very long time. For the first time since the pandemic,

there are more unemployed people than open roles as of late last year. The average job search, according to federal data, is now approaching about six months. Meanwhile, workers aren't leaving the jobs they had. The quits rate as a share of employment was 2%, which was way below the 2.3% it averaged in 2019 before the pandemic. We also had the fewest jobs added of any year outside of recession in 2025. People not quitting is a problem. And it leads to this chicken or the egg situation where people aren't leaving the jobs they have because they don't think they're going to find an open position in the future. But one of the reasons there are no open positions is because people aren't leaving their jobs. So we are in a stuck moment in the, in the, in

the labor market and you also have to talk about the rise of AI and you can submit a job application anywhere using AI very easily. And so with all of this coming into the floor, you're seeing the rise of reverse recruiting. Yeah, the data is just so bizarre right now in the labor market because 4.4% unemployment rate is historically low and yet why does the job market feel just so stuck and why is there no jobs out there? It's because people are just holding onto their jobs. They're clinging to what they have, which is what you spoke to with that quits rate. So you have technically employment growing, but at a glacial rate, like you can't even observe it because you still are having like these unemployment rates sitting at a place where most people are

comfortable with it. So that's just a weird oxymoron on the center of all of this. I do just want to dive into some other things that people are doing to try to get jobs. I was reading this Business Insider article. Someone hired a resume consultant who basically told her to a appear younger on their employment history. They said remove everything for the last 10 years of experience, remove your college graduation date, erase more than half of your career. The explicit rationale was to appear younger. So in addition to reverse recruiting, you're seeing like these other tactics that only

really appear when you have a labor market as stuck as this one. Yeah, the Wall Street Journal wrote an article called, it costs up to $10,000 just to get a job right now. We're in this era where it takes a lot of money to make money. talked about paying a reverse recruiter, but you can also pay $200 for LinkedIn premium, which experts actually say is a pretty good ROI. You pay monthly fees for maybe Claude or ChatGPT to help massage your resume. You pay $500 for study materials. You got $50 for a career coach, and you are looking at thousands of dollars just to get yourself in a reasonable position to get a job

because there are thousands and thousands of people you are competing with for this one position. Let's move on. For years, one of Elon Musk's core promises was that SpaceX would take humanity to Mars. He wanted to, quote, extend the light of human consciousness by making humans multi-planetary. But in a sudden change of tune, Musk is ditching Mars for the moon. For those unaware, Elon wrote on X, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the moon. We can potentially achieve this in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20 plus, he explained. The abrupt recalibration of expectations took many by surprise. Elon called the moon a distraction as recently as a year ago, even if it does make logistical

sense. Must state a goal was to send an unmanned rocket to the red planet by 2027, but Mars is really hard to get to. The voyage can only be attempted every 26 months due to planetary alignment cycles, a needle in a celestial haystack. Also, don't sleep on the moon. It is still a very important place to reach for. It has a lot of sunshine.

It's got some natural resources. It makes sense to work on establishing a lunar manufacturing hub that can be used as a launch pad for other missions, maybe even to Mars. Neil, shoot for the Mars, and if you fail, you'll land amongst the moon, which maybe isn't such a bad thing after all. This is a bigger head fake than the Super Bowl Coinbase karaoke ad, because it's worth drilling down on just how core to the DNA of SpaceX Mars is. This is in the founding charter back in 2002.

He founded SpaceX with basically one goal, which was Occupy Mars, colonize Mars. If you go to his executive suite down in Texas, the carpet is rust red to resemble Mars. He had this vision that other executives at SpaceX talk about of creating something called Oasis Mars or Mars Oasis, where the main goal of this company was to get humans in a permanent colony on Mars. So the fact that there's been this huge pivot just in recent days, and I know he's, I know he's, I know he's, said in his tweet, you know, if you haven't been paying attention, we've been doing this for a while. It's a really significant shift and speaks to a lot of different factors going on right now. Yeah, and the idea is that the moon is a very helpful stepping sound. It's so funny that we were saying like overlooking the moon, but for a long time, Elon did just ignore the moon. He laughed at it.

He like looked down upon it. But now, depending on how sci-fi you want to get, it could be very helpful to have a lunar base there. One thing that Ars Technica kind of brought to the forefront was building a catapult-like thing on a world with far less air that could be a much more efficient way of transporting materials to space and beyond to build stuff. So maybe if you're talking about orbital factories, maybe we're talking about data centers, solar farms, and then eventually bringing those things to Mars, you would need a lunar base set up. Also, don't sleep on the moon's resources. It's obviously not Earth, but it does have reliable stores of oxygen. It's got storage of Silicon as well. So Elon, I was going through his Twitter account this morning, which don't do

that. He tweets way too much. Elon responded to someone saying there's enough of everything on the moon. So clearly he's kind of recalibrated what it represents and the opportunity it does present. All right. Sounds like you want to go to the moon. But there are three things here that have changed, I think, outside of Elon's control that has reshifted this focus from Mars to the moon. The number one one is that there is now competition for years, for decades. There was no competition with SpaceX to go to the moon or land people on the moon. Jeff Bezos's blue origin is coming on strong, and there's a possibility that they will land on the moon, land people on the moon faster than SpaceX with blue origin. So that is certainly one competitive factor

that has Elon Musk a little scared. The other is remember, SpaceX just bought XAI. There's a newfound confluence of Elon Musk's business vision, which is centered around AI. And his main goal with merging SpaceX and XAI is to get all these data centers in space. You can do that from the moon. You can't do that from Mars. That's reason number two. Number three is SpaceX is IPOing in a few months. I don't know. We've never seen a Mars IPO before. You have to go to public shareholders, public investors, and say, you need to buy shares in my company. And I don't know how strong a pitch it is, is we're going to go to Mars in 10 to 20 years and we can only get there once every 26 months when the planets align.

Like, that is, I don't know if you would put your money in that particular company. So I think those three factors are really driving this pivot. Moving on, next time you fly into Cuba, don't ask for a top-up. The government warned international airlines that they won't be able to refuel their planes at Cuba's airports over the next month as an energy crisis grips the Caribbean nation. It's a worrying development since international flights bring much-needed tourists and basic necessities to the island. Fueling the fuel shortage is the United States, which has been putting intense

economic and diplomatic pressure on Cuba's communist regime since the start of the year. After capturing Venezuela's Nicholas Maduro in early January, a close ally of the Cuban government, the Trump administration effectively cut off fuel shipments to Cuba, then later threatened tariffs on any country that sells or provides oil to the island. Russia, another Cuban ally, called the energy shortage truly critical, and it does seem that way. On Friday, Cuba announced an emergency plan to ration fuel for certain sectors, which include shortening school days going to a four-day work week and limiting public transportation services.

It's also closing some hotels and consolidating tourists into certain resorts to make sure there are no disruptions from gasoline shortages. And Toby, all this when Cuba's already suffering the worst economic crisis in its modern history. Yeah, it is bad on the ground in Cuba right now. One of the issues is in addition to this fuel shortage is that tourism has taken a nose dive. In 2025, only 1.8 million visitors came to the island. That has downed. 17% from the year prior. Their goal was 2.6 million tourists. So when you factor in the fact that they can't produce a lot of their energy themselves, you know, 40% of the oil comes from Cuba. The rest they have to import in order to fuel this island. And then you factor in the fact that

no tourists are coming as well. You have this economic crisis that isn't new, but it's been exacerbated extremely by these sanctioned from the U.S. There are tourists there, which is pretty wild right now, what they're experiencing. There are 4,500 Russian tourists and what Cuba is doing, basically Cuba right now is doing the equivalent of when you're in your house, it's getting really cold and you just energy-efficientize the crap out of the place. Like, turn all the lights off, make sure all the doors are closed. That's essentially what they're doing to their economy right now so they can just provide basic services. So there are all these resorts on the North Coast. They're consolidating tourists. They're closing two down and moving them all into one. Meanwhile,

Russia is sending an emergency plane to get them out of there. You can, as an international airline, refuel elsewhere in the region. This has happened in the past this last happened a decade ago where there was just not enough jet fuel to refuel planes. And you basically just go to Cancun or the Dominican Republic, refill your plane, go to Havana and then come back. But Air Canada said we are not flying, at least for the foreseeable future, down to Havana. So, yeah, all this tourism money is about to dry up.

And it's a big deal because they provide hard currency, which the government really needs just to keep the lights on. Yeah, and conditions in Cuba have actually gotten so bad of late that the U.S. itself is sending humanitarian aid into the country. Washington obviously wants to replace Cuba's regime. But in the meantime, they are saying that there is a humanitarian crisis developing, you know, right near our borders or sending some money there, even though it is a crisis, particularly of the United States making as well. So what are they saying at the top level? Like, will this resolve and how will this resolve? Cuban President Miguel Diaz Cannell said, we're open to talking with the Trump administration. Our sovereignty is not on the table, but we will have discussions.

And then last week also, President Trump said negotiations were taking place with top Cuban officials. And he said, I think we're pretty close to an agreement. All right. We're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's trends right after this. Study and play. Come together on a window. 11 PC. And for a limited time,

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It's all right, real quick, check if you have a wedgy, fix it. if so. Now check if you're wearing underwear created by a celebrity, perhaps skims, maybe something from Skylark. If you are, then you're part of the growing contingent feeling the latest Toby's trend, which is A-lister's slinging skivies. When Justin Bieber took the stage at the Grammys last month wearing just his undies, it wasn't some weird humiliation thing. He was drawing attention to his brand Skylark, spelled without any vowels, which recently debuted a line

of boxers. His performance, Sons Clothes, came soon after Sidney Sweeney debuted a lingerie line of her own called Siren, again spelled without vowels. And of course, both Sweeney and Jay Bebes are playing catch-up to the Underwear Queen Kim Kardashian Skims, that does have a value, which was recently valued at $5 billion. The Hollywood reporters James Hibbard noted all of these releases and posed an interesting question, is underwear the new tequila? Think back over the last decade or so. If you're a movie star, you launch or endorse a tequila brand. George Clooney has Casamigos, the Rock has Teramana. Heck, even Mark

Walberg has Fletcha Azul, which won CNN's blind taste test, by the way. But when you've got Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch creeping into a space, it probably means it's oversaturated, which is why celebs have been broadening out from agave and into tidy widies. Neil, I'm just going to turn the question right back around on you. Is underwear the new tequila? Well, I did have a bad experience with both in college. But, no, I think these These are very different products. Obviously, to launch on V's brand, you have to have a certain amount of sex appeal. But also at the same time, underwear is a much higher level of difficulty than tequila.

For tequila, I mean, I think there is not so much a discerning consumer. I don't, I know there was a taste test, but I'm not sure if you could tell the difference between Taramana and Plutja Azul. Fletcha Azul. I don't, Toby, I know you're a discerning person, but I don't think you can. Once you just go get some agave, you make tequila, you get the formula. then you set it and forget it. It's marketing.

It's marketing. For underwear lingerie, this is a much, this is a much more difficult market to crack. You have to constantly update styles for the different seasons, and it's just a much more nuanced thing. So I think you're seeing a lot fewer people get into this space, but there could be a higher upside than tequila. We are absolutely seeing too kind of the next wave of celebrity entrepreneurs, figure out that maybe endorsement isn't the only way I can make money off my career.

obviously you get paid to star in movies. Movies make you famous. And then usually you use that fame to endorse another brand. But we have seen this flock to ownership of late. I mean, Kim Kardashian is maybe the poster child of this. Her skim's brand is, you know, almost it's a $5 billion a company at this point. We've also seen Ryan Reynolds dive much into ownership. He owns everything from Mitt Mobile to a soccer team.

Now Sidney Sweeney is kind of doing the same thing. She has put her face everywhere. I mean, she has endorsed a lot of brands. She's not afraid of that. It's not shying away from that revenue stream, but also saying, it's time I start investing in my own products, in my own brand, which is Siren. Yeah, Hollywood does not pay like it did in the 90s in the early 2000s. Back then in the 90s, Julia Roberts, Will Smith, Tom Hanks, Jim Carrey, they were commanding

over $20 million per movie. Do you know how much Michael B. Jordan got paid for Creed 2? Just 3 to 4 million, which is, it's a good paycheck. but it's not the FU money that some of these celebrities want, so they're starting their own companies and moving from being endorsers to owners. Let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Google thinks it's going to be here for a good time and a long time. As part of its borrowing binge to fund AI investments,

Parent Alphabet is reportedly planning to sell a 100-year bond, a move so rare that it's the first time any tech company will have done so since Motorola in 1997. I know what you're thinking. Who is going to buy it? what is the 100-year bond addressable market look like? Typically, ultra-long-dated bonds are scooped up by institutions like governments and universities, as well as insurance companies and pension funds. The fact that Google is getting into the century biz is a sign it's casting as wide a net as possible to raise funds. After all, it's expecting to spend $185 billion on capital

expenditures next year in pursuit of AI domination. So you mentioned Motorola, which is an app, It's the only thing we can compare it to because it's the only company that has gone down this path of a hundred-year bonds. How did it work out for Motorola? At the time that they issued it, they were top 25 market cap in the country. They were top 25 revenue corporation in America. They never reached those heights again. Yes, the company is still around, so I guess that's a win. But it is not near the heights of when it issued these bonds at its very peak.

So that is one thing to look at. But another data point that I saw people putting out is that there is demand for this. bond. It is already seven, this round that Google is trying to raise of debt is already 7x over subscribed. So clearly the credit world is pretty comfortable with giving them the terms that they want. Unlike most people, or in my brain, it doesn't even seem possible to, you know, issue a 100-year bond. But clearly people are saying that this is a build-out that they feel comfortable with and want to give Google money. What do you think the yield on this is going to be? I know. It's crazy. Well, that's, I actually looked out of this because Google recently issued a

50-year bond. And the only thing you can compare it to is treasurer. which usually pay back money over 30 years, the interest rate Google is paying is not that much more than what the U.S. Treasury pays, even though they're getting an extra 20 years to pay it back. So it's not, it was like less than a percentage point different. So people are digging Google, maybe even more so than the U.S. government. Moving on, Mr. Beast, the YouTuber who wants to build an empire, just took another step towards making that a reality. He bought a bank.

Well, more correctly, it's a teen-focused all-in-one banking app called step. The motivation, according to Mr. Bees, is to help his fans improve their financial futures while also helping him diversify his own financial future. The idea is for him to use his considerable YouTube following over 460 million subscribers to direct customers to Step. He's also talked openly about his plans to launch a new YouTube vertical focused on finance and investing, specifically to promote Step. Financial content just feels like a nice fit for us because we do so much with money, Mr. Bees recently said in an interview. Mr. Beast is clearly on a path to broaden away from his normal content of stranding people in circles or on islands for millions of dollars.

This is a step in another direction. Let's just hope he doesn't launch an underwear brand. I mean... Why should you have to bring that visual into people's words? I'm sorry. No, Beast Industries is huge. It's valued at $5.2 billion in 2024. I think there might be some similarities between the celebrities that we just talked about in Hollywood and what Mr. Bees is doing. He's leveraging his 460 million subscribers to his main YouTube channel to spread.

his, to spread his business and he has chocolate and most importantly, Toby, has anyone won the $1 million from the Super Bowl commercial yet? And no one even tried to help me with that. I put out a call on our seemingly very popular podcast. No one hit me up. So I don't think our audience, I think it's two separate circles of the Venn diagram, people who are trying to solve Mr. Bees challenge and people who listen to Morning Brew Daily. And you know what? I'm okay with that. The $1 million is still up for grabs. Finally, it was 90s night at the Winter Olympics yesterday. For the rhythm dance portion of ice dancing, every pair skated to millennial anthems like I'm Too Sexy, Back Streets Back, getting jiggy with it, and blue daboo-dibu-di-dabu-di.

This wasn't an accident. As the Wall Street Journal notes, Ice Dance is the only event at the Olympics that dictates what genre of music its competitors will skate to, and this year it's selected the 90s. The goal is to use these millennial throwbacks to recruit a younger audience, which is key for a sport that's sponsored by the makers of memory supplements and AARP. But perhaps the funniest part about all this is none of the 90s songs deliver a nostalgia hit for the figure skaters because they're too young. Nearly half of the ice dancers at the Olympics weren't born until the 2000s, making 90s music equivalent to oldies.

Toby, everyone loves a 90s theme. What song would you pick for your ice dancing routine? I mean, my first thought was Outcast, like so fresh and so clean. Sorry, Ms. Jackson. Something from Outcast, but I'm not sure if there's just like too many words. I don't know what the ideal song is. Like, do you want to optimize for beat? Do you want to optimize for the judges kind of singing along?

It depends on your routine. I know, like what you're doing out there. Well, considering I can't skate backwards, it would be a lot of forward motion. So I don't think it really matters what song on picture. I'm going full instrumental, Seinfeld theme. See, instrumental. Seinfeld theme, the base would hit.

But the Americans, Madison, Chalk, and Evan Bates are not in first place. They were the favorites going in, but they are actually second to a Canadian team. They're going back out there tomorrow for round two of too. It was very funny that Canadian skater said, it's really our coach who chose the music for us because again, these people are too young to know the 90s that

all right. It's going to be a great day at the Olympics. We got on our second monitor here at the morning brew office and hope you do you do too. At noon, we have the Corrie's going for gold in mixed doubles curling. This is electric. You got to watch that. And then there's US women versus Canada in ice hockey.

Great rivalry. And then the quad god Ilya Malin is back on ice for the short program in men's figure skating. did that backflip, which was way cooler than what Benson Boone does. That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Tuesday. If you want to get in touch, send an email to Morning Brew Daily at MorningBrew.com or DM us on Instagram at MB Daily Show.

Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Lou is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Hair and makeup, yep, is launching an undies brand. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show, Danielle. Let's run it back tomorrow.

Thank you.