Morning Brew Daily - SpaceX Starship Finally Reached Orbit & Why Dudes Are Becoming Cat Dads

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

#943: SpaceX finally gets its Starship rocket into orbit but has to cut the trip short. Trump announces a $15B steel plant in Iowa in an effort to boost domestic manufacturing. Bose is back with noise-canceling wired headphones thanks to the trend of retro-tech. The rise of ‘cat dads’ is today’s edition of Toby’s Trends. Finally, former Disney CEO Bob Chapek wants to have the last word in the Chapek vs. Iger battle.  Come to trivia night! https://events.morningbrewinc.com/mbdtrivianight-sept2026 Learn more at http://advertising.roku.com/mbd  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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, how wired headphones have become the ultimate status symbol. Then a mega steel plant is being built in America for the first time in over 60 years. It's Tuesday, September 29th. Let's ride. You know, you don't have to wait until the debt of winter to make New Year's resolutions. Over the past couple years, a trend has emerged of people working on themselves or setting new goals as the fall begins, right?

now known as a winter arc or a fall rebrand on social media. It's the idea that the end of summer is a more natural time in the calendar to hit restart or kick off a self-improvement challenge. Toby, I am all in favor of this, but I worry about the gym getting too crowded. I'm a big fan of having seasons in your life. It's too hard to be one thing all the time. Can't train for marathons all year. Can't go out every Friday night all year. You need season. So I endorse winter and fall arcs. We're kind of in the middle of one at MBD right now. Everyone's making overnight oats all of a sudden. It used to be so annoying finishing the show at, you know, 630,

trying to figure out what to have for breakfast. Now, oats for me, oats for you, oats for our producers. Everyone's making overnight oats. So it feels like that is our version of a fall arc kicking off. And now word from our sponsor, Roku Ads Manager. Imagine running a marathon and only being able to see the last two digits of your finishing time. Are you trying to give me Agitoneil? That would be a nightmare. Don't worry, your PR is safe.

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SpaceX's big starship launch was a little like going out in Boston, fun, historic, but forced to end way too early. In its 14th test launch, the biggest rocket in the world blasted off from South Texas and recorded a couple of first-time achievements. It successfully entered orbit never been done before, and it deployed 26-upgraded Starling satellites, which joined a constellation of 11,000 others and beaming internet back to people on Earth. The joyride did not last as long as expected, though. Plans called for Starship to circle the Earth six times before splashing down in the Pacific, roughly 10 hours after launch.

But after an engine mishap on the way up, engineers called it early and sent the rocket down after three hours. Overall, though, it was much needed progress at a crucial moment for SpaceX. Pretty much every goal Elon Musk has for his newly public space company relies on starship blasting into space at a frequency of once per day, deploying more Starlink satellites and building out the infrastructure for AI data centers in space. NASA is depending on Starship 2 as one of the lunar landers shuttling astronauts back to the moon as early as 2028. Toby, now that SpaceX is a public company, we can look to its stock to see how this launch measured up to expectations. Pretty much flat for the day. Looks like those expectations were met,

no more, no less. It was a bit of a different experience watching a SpaceX, launch, knowing that there are real consequences on the line in the public markets versus just a private company. And Elon Musk was fully conscious of this. He was talking about the danger of bringing Starship over land before SpaceX is fully confident in it. And he said, our popularity would diminish very rapidly if it blew up over land and rained down on people. So that was kind of the background anxiety around this launch. Things went pretty well overall. And one thing that SpaceX investors probably perked up on where the CFO, Brett Johnson, called this a revenue generating flight. That is music to the ears of SpaceX because Starlink is very, very important

to this company, especially this V3 satellite, which Elon Musk says has 10 times the capacity of V2. He said that SpaceX expects a very rapid increase in revenue from V3 once they start deploying en masse. So there was the anxiety around potentially this blowing up and ruining the stock for a little bit. But then there's also a lot of optimism around this becoming a much bigger revenue driver going forward. Yeah. And I was wondering, where are the chopsticks? Right. So one of the coolest things about a starship launch, at least in the past, is that sometimes they bring down the booster into this, back to the launch pad and catch it with chopsticks. It's one of the coolest things I've ever seen. And that is a mechanism for creating a fully reusable rocket.

That's the big thing here. They want Starship to be fully reusable. They want to send it to space, bring it all back, and then use it again potentially the next day. That is supposed to lower launch costs. That's the real big push for Elon. That's the real big business case here, is that we can lower launch costs by up to 10 times compared to their workhorse rocket, currently Falcon 9.

So previously they have caught the booster. There's two parts of this rocket. There's the booster, and then there's the Starship itself. They have caught the booster on the launch pad. before with the chop sticks. They've never done that with starship. And one of the reasons why is that they don't want to bring it over land before it's ready, because if it blows up and rains debris on people, yes, that would diminish SpaceX's popularity. But hopefully next time, test launch number 15, they will try to catch the actual ship itself as well as the booster

on chopsticks, and we will be able to see SpaceX's reusability in action. Where are the chopsticks that are in my junk tour? I have like 40 pairs right now, Neil. Just zooming out here, what's the eventual vision for what Starship will help SpaceX achieve? It's basically just a lot of satellites up there. SpaceX has submitted plans for as many as 100,000 Starlink satellites. They roughly have 11,000 up there currently. So again, a 10x increase in satellites. Plus, they want to launch as many as a million satellites that would function as orbital data centers as well.

And again, Starship is central to those plans. We're not even talking about Mars anymore, which was Elon Musk's original vision for what Starship would be able to do. First step is actually just get to the moon, and that still has a lot of question marks around it. They still need to show that they can do things like a refill Starship in orbit. So every time you see this rocket go up, it comes bearing the weight of all those future plans, and they seem far-fetched. But, hey, it kind of has gotten better every single launch. not every launch, but the general line is trending upwards, and this launch was the latest in a pretty successful period for SpaceX right now. Moving on, along the banks of the Mississippi River,

where barges drift past Iowa cornfields, the next chapter of U.S. steelmaking is taking shape. President Trump announced plans for a $15 billion steel plant in eastern Iowa yesterday. A location picked in part because that same Mississippi River can transport iron ore from a newly opened mine in Minnesota's Masabi Mountains. Acute artisanal steel mill, this is not. Masabi Metallics owned by Indian conglomerate SR Group says the plant could eventually produce 10 million tons of steel a year, roughly equivalent to one-tenth of the U.S.'s current output, while supporting around 1,700 permanent jobs and 5,000 to 6,000 more during construction. It's the first new mega-steel plant to open in the U.S. since the 1960s, and the White House is using it to show that Trump's

tariff-fueled push to bring back heavy manufacturing home to the U.S. is working. Everyone's building their plant here because they don't want to pay tariffs, Trump said, during the announcement. Still, hold on to your hard hats. The first steel isn't expected until 2030, and the company behind the project has spent nearly two decades trying to get its operation fully up in running. A long way to go, Neil, but we don't get a lot of new steel factories around these parts these days. These parts, meaning all of America. Yeah, I mean, I've been to the Lehigh Valley to Beth to the old steelworks there. It's actually insanely cool to walk around. But yeah, it's all rusted and it hasn't been active for many, many decades. For a new one to come online, this is a big deal for Middle America. Tariffs are a huge part of this story when he first came into his second term. Trump raised tariffs on steel and aluminum to 25 percent, later doubled them to 50 percent. Those tariffs have stayed. The Supreme Court knocked out a bunch of other tariffs, but the tariffs on steel have stayed. And the steel industry has absolutely loved it.

credit the tariffs with spurring more than $40 billion in investments. And while there's a lot of critics of tariffs, steel industry is not one of them. They wrote a letter to Trump last Friday, saying weakening the tariffs now would put that progress at risk. Tariffs have proven to be sound effective trade policy. The converse of that is that because of the tariffs, these American steel companies have been allowed to raise prices because they don't feel like they're going to be undercut by foreign competitors coming into the market. because those foreign competitors have to pay tariffs. So we've seen major price hikes for steel,

and that is hurting any company that imports steel or uses steel to create their products. We've seen prices rise 10.4% between April 2025 and April 26. Steel Mill Products Index was up 13.3% even as domestic steel production increased. So we're seeing steel companies reap the benefits of these tariffs. They're raising prices because they know they can. They're making money, and they're finally able to make it. a new steel plant for the first time in a long time. But steel is so central to Trump's industrial policy in his second term.

Remember, the White House approved the sale of U.S. steel to Japan's Nippon Steel. Last year, that requires Nippon to invest roughly $14 billion in U.S. plant expansion. So clearly this is a focal point for the administration. Plus, you can't look at this announcement and not think about what is coming in a month. midterms are coming and they definitely want to hold this up to middle america as an example showing that hey we are bringing jobs to you we are bringing economic activity to you so that is kind of in the back of everyone's mind as you know the biggest u.s steel plant 60 years is announced yeah iowa has a ton of very close races finally shout out to our super sub kyle haggie and minnesota because

i do not know the game that the iron range had in minnesota there's this big range in iowa that's that it counts for so much iron ore production or mining in the United States. That's where they're getting their iron ore from to make this, to make the steel at this particular plant. In the 20th century, the iron range, which is about 100 miles long, contributed about 60% of total iron ore production in the U.S. in the 20th century.

And this is just in northern Minnesota. I was looking into this. I knew there had to be some hockey lore in the iron range. And it's true because we had an iron ore, we had an iron range line in the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. There were three guys from the Iron Range in Minnesota, and they held it down against the Soviets in 1980, contributing to the miracle on ice.

All right, moving on, Bose is trying to strike a chord with consumers by releasing its first wired earbuds in 11 years. Get it? I said chord because it can mean chord like music, but also cord spelled like a different way, means wire. Anyway, the $99 pyre of headphones come with a special feature that the vast majority of wired headphones do not. Noise cancelling. The audio giant hopes that the ability to tune out the world around you

will win over customers of cheaper wired earbuds like Apple's earpods, 20 bucks, or undercut fancier wireless headphones on price. The momentum for wired headphones is undeniable. Whether it's a fashion symbol, a rejection of digital technology, or the joy of untangling, Gen Z is embracing the throwback wire, sending sales of wired headphones to their first sales gain in five years, up 20% at the start of 2026. There's plenty of reason for it. While they won't make any of Taylor's

songs about Travis any better, they do generally have higher audio quality. There's none of the lag issues when you want to watch a video on your phone or computer, and you can't knock one down to sewer while on your run. Bose's president of Consumer Audio said when he dropped off his kid at college last fall, he was shocked to see how many students were rocking wired headphones around campus, partially inspiring the product launch about a year later. Toby, are we boomers with our AirPods? Well, I don't even have AirPods anymore because the situation you described happened to both of us recently where we came back from runs and we go, I don't know what happened, but lost an ear pod off the bridge, down the sewer, wherever they go. Shout out Bose, though, for recognizing that this is

a trend and moving pretty quickly to capitalize on it. They developed the earbuds in around eight to nine months, which is a pretty fast timeline for a major consumer audio project. And then the thing that I think they did well was apply what they are good at to a format that has already existed. Bo's is known for its noise canceling abilities and the fact that they brought noise canceling to this particular set of wired ear pods makes it differentiated from something like an Apple. So one, they recognize the trend, but then two, they made it their own, which I think is just a savvy business decision. Yeah, and this is not your wired headphones of old. There's not that jack that goes into a phone because they took away. Like, give me the off.

talks like that is not a thing anymore. It's a USBC. So you put the USBC into your phone, which I was thinking maybe doesn't work on an airplane. You may have to pay Delta 6 bucks to buy the airplane if you have these wire to buy airplane earbuds if you have this particular one. But it does go into your Nintendo Switch, which a lot of people say is great and it doesn't have that latency. Let's talk about just the overall rise of wired headphones because it seems like everyone

has it these days. I think one of the main contributors was that as people are, watching TikToks and social media, all of the creators are using wired headphones because it has a better microphone than wireless ones. And I think that may have, and we all want to be influencers, right? So maybe that was one reason that spurred the introduction of wired headphones as a stylistic statement because they're very visible too, right? Like I'm thinking about the Apple commercial. I mean, you can see the wires hanging down. There's a bunch of celebrities that have swore by them to do a leap Ariana Grande, things like that. So it's certainly become a trend.

increase for the first time in five years. One thing that is ironic is Wired did a review of these new Bose headphones and they found that the tension on your earbuds when they're in your ears was not necessarily the nicest thing. So the very thing that made AirPods, you know, more appealing, the fact that you don't have to deal with these wires, the fact that you don't have to deal with tangled wires do, that still very much exists. Like this form factor still has its shortcomings, but they're being outweighed by the nostalgia, by the fact that creators and celebrities are using them. They're still wired headphones, though, at the end of the day.

But you don't have to charge them. Yeah, that I forgot that that was a world that existed where you don't have to charge the things that you use to listen to music. The fact that we've all just been normalized to that is a little bit crazy. All right, let's take a quick break and come back with Toby's trends right after this.

Your brain might not be the best filing cabinet. speak for yourself. The best idea of your week might have died in a meeting where you weren't taking notes. Professionals now spend about 21 and a half hours a week in meetings, probably more spoken input than any one person can reliably retain. 21 and a half hours? At that point, your calendar needs its own stenographer. That's why Plaud's wearable devices are hands free. No app to open, no interrupting the conversation. Just tap once and it acts as a second brain for anything spoken. Go to plod.a.ai slash brew and use code brew for 20% off all plot devices. Neil, you ever stay in one of those hotels where you sleep in a human-sized bird cage?

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slash brew AI. For today's edition of Toby's trends, I want to talk about the cat daddy. Not the dance I tried and failed to bust out at numerous weddings this year,

but the rising share of young men who are increasingly embracing cats. The New York Times reports that U.S. cat ownership jumped 23% in 2024, a record year, according to the American Pet Products

Association. A separate report found that men now account for 43% of U.S. cat owners with a marked increase coming amongst Gen Z men. The rise in cat dads comes in the face of long-held stereotypes around cat ownership, namely that it could make you a less desirable dating prospect. Colorado State researcher Lori Kogan studied how women responded to photos of dudes holding cats versus without cats. Men holding the cats were perceived as less masculine, more neurotic, and ultimately less datable than their catless counterparts. But those same men also scored

high on openness and agreeableness, desirable traits in a partner, especially as guys become less concerned with performing traditional masculinity. I think there are probably a lot more men that are willing to be cat liberated, a long-haul truck driver who owns two cats, told the New York Times. Neal, are you cat curious? I mean, the evidence is undeniable. The implication now is that having a cat is a huge dating green flag. We're far from the days of Dr. Evil and Mr. Bigglesworth and that concept of being a cat dad as a supervillain. Now it's just seen as sexy. And there have been a number of ad campaigns that celebrate cat dads.

People magazine worked with Temptations, which is a treat company, and Dave Franco, to name him the first ever sexiest cat dad last fall. You have the influencer known as Tinks. Also did this collab with a pet food company saying that being a cat person is now something that is desirable in a male partner. And then finally for Father's Day, 2025, the cat food band Smalls ran a campaign that basically depicted cat dads as something

that is also desirable as a role model. The slogan was cat dads is greater than other men. So we're seeing brands catch onto the trend and promote cat dads, obviously, to sell their own pet food or whatever they're selling, but also just to reframe the conversation around dudes with cats. Also, though, you can't talk about cat dads without talking about the stereotypes that are applied to cat women, especially like this childish cat lady stigma that's really gone back to, you know, the middle ages when cats were associated with witches during that time. And then I was listening to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, and they were talking about this story.

And the comedians there were like, cat dad is such a generous label to a. apply to male cat owners versus childless cat lady to women who own cats. And so they were advocating for not cat dad. You don't get that paternal label. You actually just need to call them cat men, which sounds like a really weird superhero. But it does show that, you know, the stigma around male cat ownership, you can't separate it from the stigma around female cat ownership as well. But in general, cats are being a lot more accepted in what was a very, you know, dog-focused country in America for the last couple of years. But the trend is is undeniable. It's not just dudes adopting cats. Cats are, cats are trending up and dogs are

trending down. And you just have to listen to these big companies that are seeing this. And their last quarterly earnings reports, General Mills, Chewy and Pecco all said that they're seeing huge strength, double-digit growth in their cat business while they're seeing slumping dog business. So cats do have a long way to go to overtake dogs. There's 53 million households with cats currently in the United States. There's 71 million households. with dogs, but I think just the fact that maybe having a cat is cool again, but also the fact that they don't have so much work associated with them, I think is raising the profile of cats. But you hear Chewy CEO saying, dog seems to be worsening. Cat seems to be strengthening.

Are you cat curious? Would you ever get a cat? We had two cats growing up, so I already satiated that curiosity. Currently, I'm a plant dad. Okay. That's enough taking care of something for now. I am certainly cat curious. Right now, my plants are, they're taking up too much of my time, trying to nurse those babies back to health.

One out of time. One out of time. All right, let's run to the finish with some final headlines. Invidia is making so much money. It's doing what a lot of us do with some cash left over and buying Nvidia stock. Yesterday, the company announced it would purchase an additional $150 billion of its shares as part of a stock buyback program, bringing its total repurchases to Twitter. $135 billion, far in a way the largest buyback ever. For a perspective, the previous record was Apple buying $110 billion of its own stock two years ago. Why the spending spree? Buybacks reduce shares outstanding, making each investor's proportional ownership stake worth more. They're also a vote of confidence. Even with NVIDIA valued at roughly $5.5 trillion, management still considers the stock attractive enough to be one of its biggest buyers. One of the reasons it's making so much money is that it's

it's gone full Warren Buffett slash VC. It's become this huge investor in companies and it's making an insane return on them. Envidia on Monday said that its investment portfolio now has 13 public companies, 229 private companies, and that the average return on its investment when these companies have exited was more than three times the amount that they put in. So they're just making so much money as an investor because they have so much money left over when they want to turn that money into more money. So they just have a huge pile of cash growing from all these startup investments and public company investments that they're now returning to shareholders.

I mean, they just have more money than God. Their quarterly profit last quarter was $60 billion. Three years ago, it was $6 billion. So they're just killing it. And now they're returning money to shareholders. Moving on, Bob and Bob really despise each other. That's a takeaway from a memoir from Bob Chappick, the former CEO of Disney, who went scorched earth on another former CEO of Disney. Bob Iger. In interviews and in the book, which gets released today, Chapic says that Iger

undermined his leadership at every turn and the wounds are so deep, he'd never visit Disney World ever again. Quick backstory, after a legendary CEO run, Iger handpicked Chapic to succeed him at Disney early in 2020. But after a tumultuous stint that was marked by the pandemic, Chapic was canned and Iger came out of retirement to retake his old position. Then the feud started to boil over. Iger called appointing Chappick the biggest failing of his career, while Chappix accused Iger of only hiring him because he knew COVID was coming and needed a fall guy to conduct mass layoffs. Toby, imagine being so bitter you can never visit Disney again. I feel like you kind of glossed over what is a really incendiary point here, which is that

Chappick says that he suggested that there was a small group of people that knew COVID was coming before the rest of the world. Like he just slid that into an interview. and then kind of broaden the scope to talk about other things. So kind of dabbling the line of conspiracy theory here just to show his displeasure with Bob Eiger. And then the one thing that Chapic has in his corner that he says, I was a much better CEO than people gave me credit for. It was the fact that the division containing Disney Plus became profitable. And the exact quarter that he had forecasted when he was CEO. That was part of the reason he got canned is that one, there was this big debt because they bought 20,

Century Fox. And then the other thing, too, was streaming losses were racking up. He said that, like, hey, we are going to go through this period of loss making, but eventually it will become profitable. Unfortunately, he did not get to reap the rewards

of showing that that division was profitable. But pretty crazy to see how bitter this feud is and how much he hates Disney after being such a Disney life. Or he said he'll never go on. It's a small world again. And now he's, it seems like he's transitioning to a private equity role where there's a lot less politics.

And he's vying for what I've heard is one of the best board seats in all of corporate America, which is Vail, because you can just go to any Vail resort and just get a cool room there. So apparently that's what he's angling for. So he's doing okay in his post-Disney career.

Finally, as anti-Data Center backlash spreads across the country, a group of people held a party in favor of them. On Saturday night in Washington, D.C., hundreds of data center supporters gathered at a crypto-themed bar to celebrate data centers and the technological advancements these massive buildings underpin. They sipped data center themed cocktails like the Loudoun County Ice Tea, a reference to the mecca

of data centers in northern Virginia. They took pictures in front of a banner that read, Virginia is for servers, and they raged against critics of data centers, calling them misinformed and anti-progress. Speaking of those critics, protesters showed up to, and when one would jump on the stage to sound the alarm, the crowd broke into a chant of USA, USA. Toby, with polls showing three quarters of Americans opposing local data centers, they might be fighting an uphill battle, but they're fighting. This was a little bit of a joke event, but there is some reality underneath the fact that there's very much two parties in America right now beyond politics, which is pro-data-centers,

pro-AI versus anti-data-centers, anti-AI. And you saw those talking points clearly on display within this room, because if you are pro-data-centers, you want more AI infrastructure, you want American industrial capacity to increase, you want to compete with China and you want technological progress. But then those same protesters are saying what they see when they see a data center is higher power bills for everyday people, noise, environmental risk, and then job displacement from AI risk as well. So even though this event itself was probably a little tongue in cheek given you, you know, the fact that USA Chance broke out and all these cocktail names, it does speak to a very real,

vibe that is only going to become more apparent as we enter midterm season. That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Tuesday. There are still a few spots left for MBD trivia in New York tonight. So if you're looking at your calendar and see a blank space this evening, round up some friends or coworkers and come on by. You can sign up for free at the link in the show description. I do have to say one thing. I gave a teaser trivia question on Friday to invite people to trivia and got flooded with responses that my question was incorrect. The question was only one other person has betrayed Wolverine on screen other than Hugh Jackman,

and my answer was Troy Savon. But a lot of people are quick to point out that Henry Cavill, aka Superman, has portrayed him briefly in a cameo in Deadpool versus Wolverine. So I apologize and we'll be better tonight as we host trivia. All right. To share your thoughts on the episode or anything else, send an email to Morningbrewdaily at morning brew.com or DM us on Instagram at Mbidele Show. Let's

roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our supervising producer. Raymond Lute is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham and our associate producer is Olivia Leak. Technical direction by Nina Miller. Hara makeup is Cat Curious. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's

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