Morning Brew Daily - SpaceX Reaches New Heights & Southwest’s Bag Fee Has a Price

Episode Date: May 28, 2025

Episode 592: Neal and Toby recap SpaceX’s ninth Starship flight that reached new heights as it reached space, but came crashing down to Earth. Then Southwest’s new bag fee becomes official with a price starting at $35. Plus, NPR fights back against Trump’s threat to cease federal funding to the national broadcaster. Meanwhile, Toby looks into the health trend of creatine, which has everybody wanting to lift stronger and live longer. Finally, the Trump Administration is ratcheting up the rules on student visas and consumer confidence got a little boost. 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. LinkedIn will even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign so you can try it yourself. Go to LinkedIn.com/MBD  Terms and conditions apply. Only on LinkedIn Ads. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note  Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow 00:00 - The Luckiest Casino 02:45 - Starship Launch 07:20 - Southwest Bag Fees 12:00 - NPR Lawsuit 18:10 - Toby's Trends: Creatine 22:00 - Headlines Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Terms and conditions apply. Good morning for your daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, let the Hunger Games for overhead bin space begin now that Southwest Airlines is charging for checked bags. Then Elon Musk's starship reached new heights and also new lows in a launch last night. It's Wednesday, May 28th.

Let's ride. Good morning, everyone. Here's a question. Have you ever been to a casino where the vibes just feel good and you think to yourself somehow I never seem to lose money here? For many people, that casino? is the Seminole Hard Rock in Tampa, Florida. That casino was just named the luckiest in the United States by casinos.com.

The analysis was more qualitative than quantitative. The site looked through TripAdvisor reviews to track how often they mentioned keywords like luck, lucky, winning, jackpot, and profit, and found those words most frequently in the Seminole Hard Rock Tampa reviews. The rest of the 25 luckiest casinos came from all over the country with New York, California, and the Midwest all represented. but Vegas just had two casinos on the top 25 list. Toby, you're from the Tampa area.

Have you been to the Seminole? And is it actually lucky? I've been one time. No, it is not lucky, and I don't want to talk about it. But I also think we just found a new side hustle, Neil, because casino operators can hire us to go create fake TripAdvisor accounts and drop every synonym we know for lucky jackpot, etc. in their review so then they can become the luckiest casino in America.

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Elon Musk recently posted on X that he was back to spending 24-7 at work and is super-focused on running his companies. That super-focused attention span was turned towards space yesterday as he put on his CEO of Space X-Hat to oversee the launch of his 400-foot Starship Rocket on its ninth test fight. And launch, it did. The super heavy rocket booster, which was being reused from a previous mission, successfully lit up all 33 of its engines and raced skywards. But half an hour after liftoff, the gigantic rocket suffered a leak,

started tumbling out of control in space, and disintegrated as it hurtled back to Earth. the third rapid unscheduled assembly in a row for a company with ambitions to reach Mars as early as next year. Starship did make it much further into its flight path than two prior test flights. Wu were destroyed just minutes after takeoff, but didn't quite achieve its goal of a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean. It also whiffed on a secondary mission of deploying eight dummy satellites in a test designed to mimic the process of distributing upgraded Starlink Internet satellites the rocket will carry when operational. So another Roershark test of a test flight, Neil, was it successful because it went further than others or a failure because Starship met a fiery demise?

Reading the T-leaves from Space X communications after this launch, I think they were disappointed with it. Yes, it was better than 7 and 8, but it wasn't as good as some of the earlier flights. It didn't achieve some of their key objectives of deploying the satellite and not doing this rapidly scheduled disassembly, which is, you know, space speak for an explosion. So I think from, you know, they're not going to be totally forthcoming with what they actually think, but just from reading and listening to their statements, I think this was a disappointment. It's the ninth one. They really want to get this ready for the moon for the Mars by next year,

and it's just not ready yet. Yeah, and you mentioned the moon, but Mars is becoming more and more of a priority for NASA. Obviously, it's always been a priority for Elon. That's the founding ethos of SpaceX to make humanity a multi-planetary species. But NASA is considering launching rockets to Mars by next year. That is a major shift because, yes, this moon landing program has been technically the priority that Starship has been building towards. But Elon doesn't really want to go back to the moon again.

He wants to skip the moon and go to Mars. But none of that happens if you can't get this rocket kind of to work and not blow up. But yeah, let's move on to not just space. Let's go back to Earth a little bit because Elon did post this tweet earlier in the week saying like, hey, I am back to my companies. I'm no longer as Doge obsessed as I once was. And we did get a lot of Elon news, you know, focus on Earth yesterday. Tesla stock actually was feeling upbeat after that proclamation and rose about 7% yesterday. That helped dull the pain of some European sales figures coming in, though. where they showed a 50% drop in sales in the European continent in April, which is just

disgusting numbers all around. The stock went up, though, because Elon's back sleeping on factory floors again. And then for every bit of bad news, there is an equal and opposite bit of good news, it seems like his Neurrelink startup raised a fresh round of funding, $600 million, adding $9 billion valuation. That's up from $3.5 billion valuation two years ago. So a lot going on in Elon land. A lot going on in Elon Land. It looks like he's back to focused on his companies. He said in an interview last week, kind of shocked the world by saying, I am not going

to spend any more of my time or money on political causes. He said, I think I've done enough. He's ready to go back to business, which investors are so happy about. Like when you were talking about how Tesla stock had really cratered in the past year, the number one thing analysts pointed to that could stem this slide was Elon just focusing more on his companies unless on politics, they have gotten their wish. And Tesla has some really big benchmarks that they need to hit in just the next few weeks, next month, which is in the next few days, which starts in the next few days, they want to roll out a robotaxy service in Austin,

Texas. And Tesla's valuation, which is higher than any other auto company, is really riding on autonomy. So we'll see that launch, you know, Elon's busy launching things to space, but that launch in Austin, Texas will actually be super key for Tesla's really, really high valuation. If you book a flight on Southwest Airlines today, you'll notice something that hasn't been there for over 50 years, a charge for checking bags. Beginning today, Southwest is entering a new era, more fearless than lover, in which it's dropping its legendary two bags fly-free policy. The company announced that in most cases, passengers will be charged $35 for a first check bag, and 45 if you're a heavy packer and need a second.

It's a bold move cotton. For decades, Southwest earned passenger devotion and differentiated itself from the pack by foregoing a checked bag fee. Execs frequently cited bags fly free as one of the top reasons passengers chose Southwest over other airlines. So why drop an extremely popular passenger perk?

Southwest may not have had a choice. A few years ago, the hedge fund Elliott Management bought a big stake in the company and pushed for sweeping changes intended to boost revenue, which had stalled. The activists won six board seats last year and pressured CEO Bob Jordan to adopt strategies more aligned with the industry standard, charging for check bags, yes, but also things like scrapping free-for-all seating and offering basic economy. To put it another way, Southwest is becoming like Austin, Texas. It used to be weird

and quirky. Now it's just like everywhere else, but with better tacos. Toby, is this the beginning of the end for an iconic American airline? It's just such a bummer, and that sentiment was reflected on social media yesterday. I saw people saying that, hey, I just took a trip with my family to Florida. I would have paid $200 more just to get my bags on board under this new policy. But the sirens call of baggage fees was just too much for Southwest to ignore. The U.S. airlines made over $7 billion from baggage fees last year. That is a crazy amount of money. You look at maybe some of its peers, spirit frontier. I don't know if Southwest would actually consider itself peers with that, but kind of not.

the big three airlines. Spirit made $774 million in baggage fees. Frontier made $861 million. The big three each made over a billion dollars in an airline. And Southwest brought in $83 million. Those are just from the people who, you know, exceeded the two-bag fly-free policy. So that was just too much money that they thought they were leaving on the table. And now it is a new era in Southwest. And one challenge that comes with, uh, charging for check bags is that people will now put way more stuff in their carry-on, and they'll bring more carry-ons. Southwest needs to be prepared for this because their whole MO is we turn around planes at the gate faster than anyone else. A plane gets into that gate. The people are

coming off. The people are coming on right away. But when you have more carry-ons and more people paying for check bags at the kiosk out in the lobby, that takes a lot more time. Like right now, customers spend about 60 seconds on average checking in at airport lobbies, which, I don't think I've ever done in 60 seconds. That sounds pretty fast. But paying for a check bag or two will lengthen that to up to 100 seconds. They also think they're going to get a much bigger increase in people bringing carry-ons that won't fit in the overhead bins.

And they're going to have to check those, you know, as you're getting onto the plane, which also adds more time. So they have to beef up technology. They have to beep up their staff presence at the gate in order to, you know, continue their, you know, pretty good track record of turning around flights because they're on time. rate is over 80% right now. That's basically on par with Delta and United as the industry standard. They have the lowest rate of cancellations among Maine U.S. rivals. So if they keep that up, I think they can position themselves as we can maintain this operational excellence, even as we make

these changes. The final angle we didn't talk about for this is the fact that business select or high loyalty status members still get those free bags. So this could play into their credit card business, which is another major moneymaker for a lot of airlines. I mean, Delta earned around $7.5 billion from its co-branded credit cards that they have in exchange with American Express. So maybe Southwest is saying, hey, let's beef up our credit card program. More people are going to want to join our rewards, our loyalty, use our credit card in order to get those bags fly free policy. So if you were looking for maybe a more positive spin on this, potentially it could lead to a greater increase of its credit card business.

And just to be clear, if you booked a Southwest flight before today, you can still have your free checked baggage. It's just tickets being bought starting today. You will have to pay at $35. Let's go fly somewhere, Neil. All right. MPR National Public Radio is known for its host hush tones, but it got plenty combative yesterday as it fights to keep federal funding flowing. NPR and three Colorado public radio stations sued President Trump over his executive order to defund public media, claiming that pulling the money violates the First Amendment and oversteps the authority of Congress. Here's the backstory.

Earlier this month, Trump issued an order that directs the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to cease federal funding for non-profit broadcasters, NPR on radio and PBS on TV. Drawing on decades of conservatives' concerns, the administration said that both PBS and NPR had a liberal bias, and that taxpayer money should be sent instead to, quote, fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage. In the order, it asked Congress to pull more than $1 billion that had been allocated to the corporation for public broadcasting over the next two years. NPR and PBS shop back saying that their editorial decisions were independent of outside influences and that they serve as critical information sources for Americans living in smaller markets or rural areas. They called the order, quote, textbook retaliation and viewpoint-based decisions.

discrimination in violation of the First Amendment. And yesterday, NPR formalized that accusation in a lawsuit. So Toby, all things considered, the gloves are off and yet another legal fight between the media industry and the Trump administration. But first, let's take a step back. I'm sure a lot of people are wondering, how do NPR and PBS keep the lights on? Would pulling federal money be a death bluff? Yeah, let's talk about this corporation for public broadcasting the CPB. It's this nonprofit organization created by Congress back in the 60s, distribute federal funding to things like public radio and TV stations across the U.S. It's not a broadcaster itself. It's just a financial steward that funnels money,

appropriates money to these stations. And where does that money go? 70% goes directly to local public TV and radio stations like NPR or PBS. And then stations in turn provide universal access to news. They say public news reaches 99% of the U.S. population, this wide array of programming. But so the CPB doesn't, CPB doesn't produce content or run any stations itself. It's just that funding middleman. Let's talk a little bit too about when that money goes to NPR. Is it going directly to funding this NPR as a whole? Not necessarily actually. A lot of that money actually makes its way to local member stations. So like WNYC, who then buy NPR programming. So eventually it does technically make its way back to NPR. But it really does support kind of.

that bedrock of member stations around the country. And those member station fees comprise 30% of NPR's funding. So it would not be good for the whole public radio news network or PBS to have that hit and have that funding pulled, obviously. Yeah, it looks like PBS might be more exposed because PBS and its stations get 15% of their revenue from the corporation for public broadcasting. The largest share of funding for NPR, 36% comes from corporate sponsorships, which if you listen to NPR, you know, they do have quite a lot of, you know, sponsor ad reads as you're listening to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. But we'll see where this goes.

This is not a new threat. And NPR has put out reports before back in 2011. It issued this top secret report saying that if federal funding were pulled, that a lot of stations would go dark, especially in rural areas back in 1969, as Congress was threatening to withdraw federal funding. from public radio and public media. The PBS actually trotted out Mr. Rogers to give testimony. So they've run this playbook before. NPR has sued PBS, even though it's more exposed, has not sued its settings, exploring

options. So we'll see what happens with the funding of public media. But yes, another sort of war going on between the Trump administration and the media industry. He's already sued CBS. He's already sued ABC News over claims of bias. There's no more Mr. Rogers anymore, so who are they going to try it out this time? I guess Big Bird or bring out Sesame Street from PBS, those are the big guns these days. Up next, we got Toby's Trends.

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Now through May 6th. Exclusion supplies to homedipo.com slash price match for details. Remember the dubious white powdery substance your meathead friends were ripping in between classes back in high school. Well, much like yourself, that powder has had a glow up since those days. And creatine has moved from Jim Bros. Shaker bottles into the mainstream. And as that rise, I want to talk about on today's edition of Toby's trends.

Creatine is now one of the most popular and widely studied supplements in the world. It's a naturally occurring substance in our bodies, synthesized in small amounts by our liver and brain. you can also pick up a gram or two via your diet, specifically from meat or seafood. The main benefits you might see from upping your dosage of creatine is increased muscle mass, not because creatine itself is building muscle, but because it gives you the energy and strength to train harder and recover faster. It's also been linked to improved cognition and memory benefits, and has been shown to fight off the effects of sleep deprivation, which is of special interest to the whole MBD crew.

Combine all those benefits with a real. recent meta-analysis of hundreds of studies that found little to no negative side effects, and you have all the ingredients of a powerhouse supplement. The global creatine supplement market was valued at $1.1 billion in 2024, and is projected to grow to $4.2 billion by 2030, with sales at vitamin shop alone surging 320% from 2019 to 2024. Neil, I got a little tub on my desk at home and at work. Creatine truly is riding a wave right now and has been for the last.

few years. I think this is a great trendy pick, Toby, because I can't go a single day without someone mentioning creatine, and I've always wanted to dive into what is going on here. And what's interesting about this particular supplement, as opposed to others that maybe we've covered on the show, is that this has been around a very long time, and it has been studied to death. We're pretty certain we know what creatine does. The benefits were first discovered in the 1970s, and the benefits have been well established in sports in particular. There was a study of athletes between 14 and 17 years old, specifically soccer players and swimmers.

They were found to have a roughly 5% to 15% improvement in performance when taking creatine. So we know, I think what's going on here is we know it's very good for, or helpful at least, for athletic performance. Now studies are trying to show whether it does improve cognition and whether it can be apply to other areas of your life like old age and, you know, sleep deprivation, just providing an energy boost and a behavioral boost overall in addition to those physical benefits. Yeah, brains certainly love creatine, according to a lot of studies, brain health, depressed, and treatment,

increase energy, but also the longevity movement have completely embraced creatine over the last few years because, you know, building muscle before old age is key to healthy aging, but in creatine helps with that, but also it has all those brain benefits that we've seen studied so far. And I think that's maybe been the major shift we've seen as longevity as a field itself has become more popular, more lucrative. Huberman, Adia, Brian Johnson, creatine has similarly seen its star rise. So I think so many of the key tenets of that movement are reflected in the benefits you see in creatine. That's part of the reason why it's been powered to such heights. And another frontier of research is creatine's impact on women, because,

because most of the research has been done on men. And women actually produce 20% to 30% less creatine than men. They're trying to find whether creatine in combination with resistance training can help post-menopausal women maintain bone density. So it looks like over the course of decades of research, most of that has been focused on what's going on with men who create more naturally occurring. Creatine. Now they're trying to figure out what potentially creatine could have an impact on women. Okay, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. The Trump administration is expanding its crackdown on foreign students at American colleges.

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered U.S. embassies worldwide to stop scheduling interviews for student visas so the administration can prepare to ramp up vetting of their social media activity. This move comes after Trump blocked Harvard from enrolling international students, accusing the school of fostering anti-American and anti-Semitic behavior on campus. But Rubio's ban on new student visas widens those curbs, at least temporarily, to all higher ed, showing no colleges safe from the potentially damaging financial turmoil that awaits. Yeah, let's dive into how many international students this might affect. It's around 6% of the total U.S. higher education population. That comes out to about 1.1 million students, if you look at last U.S. school year. About 25% of those international students did study math or computer silence in 1 in 5. opted for engineering. So these are, you know, highly skilled people taking very difficult classes

who, if they say in America become citizens, could bring those skills into the workforce. There's also the tuition angle. Obviously, two foreign students typically pay more in tuition, full tuition, which helps universities provide more financial aid to U.S. citizens. So the pushback here is that the vetting for these student visas is already a very tough process. I mean, you have to go through their academic credentials, their financials. to see what their ties to their own country are, if they're going to stay in America or go back to their country. So adding social media vetting on top of that, people think that's just an unnecessary and additional step. Up next, the U.S. shopper felt the first traces of

warm spring weather on their faces in immediately channeled Prime Michael Jordan fully regaining their confidence back. U.S. consumer confidence jumped in May by the most in four years, driven by improved economic and labor market outlooks and easing tariff tensions, with expectations for the next six months, surging by the most since 2011. Part of that jump might be due to timing. The cutoff for the survey was May 19th, right after the U.S. and China agreed to temporary reduce tariffs on each other's goods and negotiate a trade deal so people were feeling upbeat.

But that optimism was also reflected in the market yesterday, which roared back to life after Trump walked back some of its EU tariff threats as well. Neil, haven't seen a turnaround in confidence like this since I got my braces off. Congrats, Toby. No, it feels like the market in consumer sentiment overall is just riding the wave of tariff news. I mean, any time you see a huge jump in stocks or consumer sentiment, it's because a tariff has been rolled back. And anytime you see a massive drop, it's because a massive tariff has been applied. The S&P 500 was up 2% yesterday. It's biggest daily gain in weeks.

So whatever corporate earnings are out there, whatever else is happening, the market just seems to be completely. ignoring that and is zeroed in 100% on what Trump tweets about his various tariff threats, because that is the sole driver of market volatility right now. Next, there's a new Harry Potter in town, and his name is Dominic McLaughlin. HBO's upcoming Harry Potter TV series announced their casting of the iconic Hogwarts trio yesterday, with Arabella Stanton taking on the role of Hermione and Alistair Stout as the flaming ginger raw. The three landed their parts after an open casting call that drew over 30,000 auditions and will now join a star-studded group that includes John Lithgow as Dumbledore and Janet Mateer as Professor McGonagall, with J.K. Rowling serving as executive producer.

Neil, filming is set to begin this summer with a show promising to be a faithful adaptation of the seven books. Judging from the looks of the youth, does it seem faithful so far? If this reaches any of the level of popularity as the Harry Potter movies, these are you. kids have just booked their ticket to international superstardom. Rupert Grant, Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson are all, you know, household names because of a movie that they started when they were first 10. I did see Daniel Radcliffe on Broadway last year when he was in Merrily, we roll along. He won a Tony for that. He's had a pretty illustrious career. So I'm sure these kids are thinking, wow, I just, you know, I just beat out 30,000 kids to be Harry Ron and Hermione. Like, I'm going to be set for life here.

Yeah. And speaking of Broadway, that's where Eric. Arabella came from the child who's playing Hermione. She's been crushing it as Matilda on Broadway. But the big West End in London. And yeah, sorry, not in Broadway, in London. But then also, Harry finally has green eyes, which has been the one bone to pick with Daniel Radcliffe is like, obviously he was an incredible Harry Potter,

but he's had blue eyes. And green eyes is kind of a big plot point to the whole Harry Potter arc. So finally they found a Harry with green eyes. And then Ron Red Hair, check, got that. That's pretty much the main thing you have to visibly nail. And this kid has a flaming ginger lock. So I think they did well on all three of them. Finally, Japan's government is cracking down on all the parents naming their kids

Pikachu, Nike, and Naruto. Starting Monday, a law went into effect that aims to curb the rise of outlandish pop culture inspired baby names that parents have increasingly used to make their kids stand out. The rules limit but don't ban outright the ways in which kanji or Chinese characters used in written Japanese can be read. The government says its goal is to simplify the digitization of administrative procedures and make pronouncing these names easier in settings such as schools, hospitals, and other public places.

But critics say this is a ruse, and the government is simply fed up with kids being named after Winnie the Pooh or Pokemon. You know what's crazy is we also did a story about how everyone in Japan will be called Sato by 25th or 2,531 unless married couples are permitted to change their surnames. So there is this naming kind of controversy in Japanese culture where they don't really necessarily want you to take any risk. They don't necessarily want to stray too far from tradition. And you see the downstream effects of that is the fact that

the entire population is going to converge on one surname if you don't allow a little bit more leeway here. And now they're cracking down on your first names as well. So tough time to have a little bit of creative spark if you're a parent naming a child in Japan right now. It sounds, it just seems like they're unpronounceable. They're completely, like, you just don't know. If you're reading a class roster and the teachers, like, I literally have no idea to pronounce your name.

Like, my name, people would say like Freeman or Freeman, that's annoying as it is. I can't imagine if it's wholly unpronounceable like some of these names. But Neil, we got Neil. That was pretty easy. Neil's pretty easy. Okay, that is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Wednesday. Yep, it's already Wednesday.

Short Weeks are to the best. If you have any thoughts on today's episode, send an email with, questions, comments, or feedback to Morning Brew Daily at Morningbrew.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Lute is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Hair and makeup was cast as Davy in the new Harry Potter. Congratulations. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.