FAA Slashes 10% of US Flights & Data Centers in Space?

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0:32Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, why every college student is double majoring. Then Google has a plan for AI data centers that is out of this world. It's Thursday, November 6th. Let's ride.

0:51It's all happening. Mariah Carey has been fully thought out. Gift guides are taking over the internet. And today the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree will begin its journey from a farm near Albany to New York city. The holidays are on their way and there's no better way to celebrate them by coming to our live holiday show in Brooklyn on December 4th. We're going to send off 2025 in style with interviews, games, and an extremely embarrassing blooper reel. Most of the tickets have been gobbled up already, but there are still some available and we'd love to see you all there. If you've enjoyed the pod over the last few years, this is your chance to meet Neil, myself, and fellow listeners.

1:25If you haven't enjoyed the pod, all the more reason to come so you can voice your displeasure directly to our faces. By the way, this makes for a great early holiday present too. So if you want to cross some people off the list by you and your MBD obsessed friend or coworker, some tickets by heading to the link in our show description. You can also DM us on Instagram at MBDailyShow and we'll send you a sign up link there. And now a word from our sponsor, U.S. Bank. With the holiday shopping season just around the corner, we're all keeping a close watch on our budgets. The last thing you want is an unexpected bill or expense to catch you by surprise.

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2:34Bank Split Card. Learn more at usbank.com slash split card. That's usbank.com slash split card. With the government shutdown now entering a record 37th day, the aviation industry is starting to show signs of strain. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy decided to institute a bend-don't-break approach to air travel, preemptively ordering traffic to be reduced by 10 % at 40 major airports to, quote, alleviate the pressure on the air traffic controllers if the shutdown isn't resolved by Friday. Cuts will begin gradually, 4 % starting on Friday, 5 % on Saturday, and reaching 10 % by next week, but the plan could still change depending on staffing and safety data.

3:12Brian Bedford, the head of the FAA, stressed that getting ahead of any issues was the right thing to do. We're not going to wait for a safety problem to truly manifest itself when the early indicators tell us we can take action today, he said. On Tuesday, Bedford said that 20 % to 40 % of controllers at the 30 largest airports in the country were failing to show up for work as they've gone without pay for over a month. Neil, this is the shutdown effect we've most spoken about. Things start to get really real when the government shutdowns disrupt air traffic. We're entering that stage in full force now.

3:45And we're entering an unprecedented era, too, because Bedford said he's not aware in his 35-year history in aviation where we've had a situation where we're taking these kinds of measures. We're in new territory in terms of government shutdowns. If you're an air traffic controller, you can understand why you might be calling out. Because right now, according to Duffy, most are working mandatory overtime six days a week. He said some controllers are even struggling to pay for transportation to work. We've seen a lot of government employees who've been furloughed get side gigs working for Uber, DoorDash, things like that.

4:18But when you're working six days a week with overtime, you don't have time to get those part-time jobs. So they've missed not just one, but multiple paychecks at this point. They don't have enough money to get to work, Duffy said. So that's why they're taking these measures, because there's just not enough air traffic controllers. They're trying to preempt this, and it looks like air travel is going to get snarled beginning this weekend should the government stay closed. Yeah, and if you are flying, you're probably thinking, how does this affect me? It does look like this is going to affect the 40 highest volume domestic market.

4:49So if you're flying within the U.S., this is definitely something you should keep an eye on. International routes will not be affected, Duffy has said so far. If 10 % cut is fully implemented across these 40 major markets, it could cancel or delay around 1 ,800 flights. flights. So again, it's not a gigantic number right now, but the fact that this is preemptively happening shows that it is a serious lack of air traffic controllers that we are facing right now. So I don't know, maybe think about a road trip or something because it's going to get a little dicey over the weekend. The other big story from yesterday was Trump's tariff agenda getting its day in court.

5:26The vibe as the Supreme Court justices heard the administration's argument is best described as somewhere between skepticism and outright doubt. As a reminder, the justices are looking at whether an emergency-powered law gives the president unilateral authority to impose billions of dollars in tariffs without Congress's approval. And across ideological lines, it seemed like the justices were balking at the administration's arguments. Chief Justice Roberts invoked the major questions doctrine, the same principle used to strike down Biden's student loan forgiveness plan. This seems to be a misfit, Roberts said, suggesting the law's vague wording doesn't justify such sweeping economic authority.

6:02Justice Gorsuch floated a hypothetical, could a future president impose a 50 % tariff on gas cars under the same logic? Trump's lawyer admitted, yes, they could. The tone of the justices was reflected by prediction markets, with positions tied to the court ruling in favor of Trump slipping to around 30 % from nearly 50 % before the hearing kicked off. Neil, still a long way to go in this case, but the justices' initial lines of questioning did not bode well for Trump. It was a rough day for your boy, Solicitor General John Sauer. He was in charge of defending Trump's tariffs. And it was kind of like defending your high school party rager to your parents the day after when the kitchen is a complete mess.

6:42He had a rough go of it. And that's because across ideological lines, these judges seem to make the conclusion that tariffs were taxes. And who has the power to levy taxes in this country dating back to the Constitution. It's Congress, the famous power of the purse. And they're saying that Trump cannot do this under, well, they are suggesting that Trump may not be able to do this under the 1977 Emergency Powers Act. And speaking of emergencies, there was a healthy discussion about what constitute an emergency because Trump in invoking this law to levy all these tariffs is saying, yeah, we have a huge emergency here in the United States because of persistent trade deficits.

7:21And And then Justice Sotomayor said the president threatened to oppose a 10 percent tax on Canada for an ad it ran on tariffs during the World Series. And he also imposed a 40 percent tax on Brazil because its Supreme Court permitted the prosecution of one of its former presidents for criminal activity. So this question of whether we're actually in an emergency that the Trump administration declared was also came under attack. By the end of this day, by the end of oral arguments, the question seemed to be not whether he had the power to do this. A lot of justices seem very skeptical of that. It's like, what do we do now?

7:55Because as the Trump administration weren't going into this, you're going to cause a huge mess if we have to refund all these companies,$90 billion that we took from them for tariffs. And that was the main question is how do we cause, you know, not economic chaos if we were to rule against the Trump administration's tariffs? Yeah, I think the conversation quickly shifted from court observers saying, I would be going back to the drawing board if I was Trump, because clearly this line of questioning did not necessarily support your tariffs. Also start looking at other alternative options like Section 122, like Section 301 that have a little bit more grounding within, you know, the laws of the land right now, because right now it doesn't seem like this one is going to hold up.

8:34All right, since Amazon bought Whole Foods eight years ago, it's mostly kept a barricade between church and state. No longer. To spur growth in a grocery division that's failed to take off as expected, Amazon and Whole Foods are about to start blurring the lines between them. Amazon has rolled out two experiments at Whole Foods stores in Chicago and suburban Philadelphia that aims to marry the quality Whole Foods is known for with the convenience of Amazon's online marketplace. Enter a Whole Foods with a warehouse full of junk food in the back. That's what's being tested in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, where a Whole Foods has been combined with a small warehouse tended to by employees and robots who will fulfill online orders.

9:13Here's the way it works. You head into the Whole Foods, say go birds to everyone you see, and buy your organic produce and wild-caught seafood in the store. That's not totally doing it for you. You also want to pick up goldfish or Kraft mac and cheese products Whole Foods doesn't carry because it doesn't align with the brand's healthy ethos. That's where the warehouse comes in. You scan a code with your phone that takes you to a portal where you can order stuff you'd see on Amazon, but not at Whole Foods. The robots will go fetch it for you from the warehouse, and you can pick it up within minutes.

9:41Okay, so that's test A in Pennsylvania. What are they trying in test B in Chicago? Well, first of all, test A sounds like, you know, my dream as a teenager. A warehouse full of junk food that robots go and fetch for me? Like, come on. That is my dream growing up. But in Chicago, they're actually going a little bit more direct. They're removing some seating area and replacing it with a 3 ,800-square-foot Amazon grocery kiosk, which is filled with your normal supermarket fare. You know, the bright and shiny Kraft Mac and Cheese, the Chips Ahoy's of the world. So the idea is they want you to buy your cabbage upstairs.

10:20They want you to buy your kale upstairs. But then descend downstairs into Doritos land so you can pick up that stuff as well. So that is a more direct test on if these two brands can coexist. Can we have our health-conscious shoppers be upstairs while maybe the less health-conscious food items are downstairs rather than staffing it in the back of a warehouse? This is trying to smush them together. Clearly, Amazon thinks they need to shake up their grocery division because eight years ago, 2017, they were thought of disrupting the entire grocery industry when they paid$13.7 billion for Whole Foods.

10:54every single stock, Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons, they all cratered that day. I remember it very well because, oh, here's Amazon getting into grocery. It's all over for us. But since then, Amazon's grocery division has not gained market share above 4%. Whole Foods has grown its sales 40 % since Amazon's takeover. That works out to about 5 % a year on average. That's far cry from what they were growing before this acquisition. Amazon's really not had a good time integrating Whole Foods into its broader ecosystem and sales at Whole Foods has declined as there's been or has grown more slowly as there's been increased competition from Walmart, Costco, Kroger, etc.

11:34So this is one way that Amazon thinks it's going to use its convenience, its fulfillment capabilities to bring more sales to Whole Foods because it's struggling right now. It just feels like it's a culture mismatch. This is something that has been said ever since Amazon bought Whole Foods a long time ago where it was, you know, this local place where you had in-store healthy foods, like artisans coming by, and it just felt like a very, you know, forward-looking, human-touch company. And now Amazon is probably not known for a lot of those things. So it's just been a little bit of an awkward marriage.

12:05And now, potentially, this is an even more awkward marriage. Like, what do you mean we're going to scan something on my phone? Are robots going to get it from the warehouse? Like, isn't groceries shopping already easy enough? Like, just go pick something off shelves. So they're definitely trying stuff here. We'll see how it succeeds. I'm more bullish on the Chicago experiment than the Plymouth meeting one. Moving on, Google thinks it has an idea to solve the growing demand for AI data centers that are devouring both land and energy at an alarming rate. Toss those puppies up into space. Data centers are power hungry and heat intensive and already use one to two percent of the world's electricity.

12:41A number Goldman Sachs thinks could double by 2030. That's why some engineers are asking, what if we just moved data centers off Earth? Yesterday, Google unveiled its latest moonshot proposal called Project Suncatcher. The vision is to put a network of orbiting processors in space powered entirely by solar energy. You can see the logic. Putting chips on satellites allows you to harvest continuous sunlight with greater efficiency than anything on Earth. There's also no zoning battles or NIMBYs who don't want ugly, noisy, and energy-hungry build-outs in their backyards. Now, of course, there are some complications with this idea, namely, space is a really unforgiving place for anything, let alone sensitive high-performance AI accelerators.

13:25This is why Google calls these things moonshots. There's a long road ahead and lots of engineering challenges to solve, but the payoff is clear. It sounds crazy, but at the same time, there was this little company within Google 15 years ago that was one of their moonshots. It's called Waymo. And then now we have Waymo self-driving cars driving around a bunch of cities. It's growing like a weed. And we're all going to be in self-driving cars one day. This seems almost as far-fetched as that did. And you're right. There are pros and cons to this. The pros are that we're running into a lot of problems here on Earth with data centers.

13:59There's not enough energy to go around. They take in so much water. You're fighting with local planning boards. So space seems pretty attractive. At the same time, there are a lot of complications in space as well. The biggest challenge they've identified is having the AI chips communicate in data centers, terrestrial data centers. It's a lot easier. You can just hook them up with a cable and they need these, you know, they need to be able to communicate very fast. But in space, you basically need to build the most powerful Wi-Fi ever created and at the same time put these satellites more closely together than they've ever been before, which could lead to all sorts of complications.

14:35So this is going to take a lot of work and decades of work, but there are a lot of folks betting on this happening because they think that the best way to scale data centers and AI is in space because there are just fewer limitations. Yeah, imagine these satellites. They have to stay within a kilometer of each other to provide that optimal arrangement, to provide that optimal power. But also you have to think about radiation from the sun because, you know, super good for Superman, but it's not so good for anything out in space. So what Google has been doing to test this out is just bombarding these chips with radiation and seeing how they react.

15:06And they're like, they actually do pretty okay. They have about a five-year lifespan under intense radiation, which is not bad. And then the other thing that they need to figure out essentially is what do you do with the repair aspect of this? Like do these things depreciate so fast? What is the launch cost associated with it as well? You got to get these things up there. So, again, once you start really thinking about it, maybe it becomes less and less feasible. But that's why you toss a name out there like Project Suncatcher to get people excited because the logic seems like it makes a lot of sense because it's really easy to get power up there.

15:40And it's a lot. It provides a relief from some of these power grids that are being strained on Earth. You're not going to see a data center in space anytime soon, though. And that's because of the prohibitive launch costs. As you mentioned today, it costs about fifteen hundred dollars per kilogram on a SpaceX Falcon heavy rocket to take something up to space. They need that to drop to around$200 by 2035, which could happen because NASA's space shuttle cost more than$54 ,000 per kilogram to take something up to space. It's down to$1 ,500 now. So in the next decade, it goes down to$200. That is possible.

16:15So Google's going to launch two satellite pilot tests in 2027 to see whether this is even feasible. And then maybe in the 2030s and 2040s, when we're sitting here, we'll talk about this thing going online for real. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Neil's numbers. As a podcast producer, I spend a lot of time listening to people spit straight bars. But now I found a truly incredible bar, David Protein Bars. They have 28 grams of protein, 150 calories, and zero grams of sugar. So they're ideal for when you need a quick, high-protein snack without the excess calories.

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18:06See Mint Mobile for details. Welcome to Neil's Numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that will make you want to tap the stranger you're next to right now and tell them what you just learned. For my first number, double majoring is booming at U.S. colleges because while getting two degrees used to indicate you're an overachiever, now it just means you want a job. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, nearly one in three Badgers have taken on a second major, a 25 % increase over the last decade, according to the Washington Post. And this is happening across the country at large public and small private universities alike.

18:41In the 2023-2024 academic year, nearly 4.8 million college and university graduates earned almost 5.4 million credentials, which means 12 % earn more than one credential upon graduating, double the 6 % share from 10 years ago. Higher ed analysts say students are tacking on a second major to hedge their bets in a rapidly evolving job market that seems to value different skills by the day. Oh, you majored in computer science, but Claude just took your coding job? All good, you have that sports management degree to fall back on. You also can't overlook just how grim the labor market is for young grads, forcing applicants to stand out any way they can.

19:16The unemployment rate for new bachelor degree recipients is higher than the nationwide average and at its highest point since 2014 outside of the pandemic. When applying to a job, the double major on your resume could give you a slight edge against the slacker who only completed one degree in four years. Yeah, I think the big thing that you have to think about here is control, because when you look at the labor market right now, it just seems like it's spiraling out of control for a lot of young grads because jobs are getting replaced left and right if there are even jobs available. So what do you have control of in college is you can start to hedge your best.

19:48You can provide a little optionality for yourself by double majoring. And also, it doesn't cost more to double major. It almost makes me think back to my time in college. I'm like, what was I doing here? I probably should have double majored. That's two for the price of one right here. So I do think that that is a big reason is it's more bang for your buck. It's more optionality. And it gives you some outs in an increasingly evolving labor market. Yeah, and research shows that people with double majors actually fare better on the job market, especially during economic downturns. Researchers at Ohio State and four other universities found that graduates who had two majors are 56 percent less likely to be laid off, have their pay cut or suffer other negative effects when things go in the tank in the economy.

20:31What would you pair? What would be your double major? Probably some – this is a boring answer, but probably some humanities one with some more technical one. I just did history. I actually did minor in GIS, geographic information sciences, but I didn't bump that up to a major because, you know, who wants to work that hard in college? I did not know those you would think. My college roommate, Seth, did CS and philosophy, which I think was, that's like the best combo possible. Although he was thinking way too deeply about computer systems. And then also there's just too much thinking involved in that.

20:57I think those two are actually not as disparate as I think. All right. For my next number, the sun is setting much earlier now, which means more driving at night and getting blasted by an oncoming cars bright headlights. And virtually all of you think that's distracting or even downright dangerous. A new study from Britain's Department of Transport found that 97 % of drivers said they were regularly or sometimes distracted by oncoming cars. And 96 % said that most or some headlights were too bright. Even more strikingly, 33 % said they had stopped driving at night or driving less in the darkness because of the headlight issue.

21:32It's not just you. Headlights have gotten brighter recently as LEDs have replaced traditional bulbs. That's a big win for the environment because LEDs save a ton of energy over older lights, but there are downsides too. LEDs are bluer and generate eight times more light for each unit of power compared to halogen, according to the College of Optometrists, which may be helpful for drivers of the car, but as this survey showed, creates dangerous conditions for other drivers. Change could be coming. The UK government is commissioning more studies to learn more about the headlight problem and is planning to propose regulations that take care of the glare.

22:05Yeah, it's not only that they're getting brighter, it's the colors as well. As you mentioned, the shift from halogen bulbs to LEDs, that means you're seeing a lot of bluer and whiter light, which is actually, your brain perceives it differently. Even if it's the same intensity light, blue and white light makes it harder to see in our peripheral vision. Everyone has experienced this before. You see a car coming down and you're just, holy Toledo, you just can't see anything at all. and that part of it is the fact that the color of the light affects your seeing as well. But a lot of this is tied back to safety ratings as car makers and automobile manufacturers have tried to pursue these safety ratings.

22:41One of the easiest ways to get that checkbox off is to say, hey, it's better when driving at night. And it is usually safer for the person inside the vehicle, much like cars have gotten a lot bigger. Of course, that makes it safer for people inside the vehicle, but everyone outside of it is more at risk. I think the cars getting bigger and the lights getting brighter are two sides of the same coin here that, yes, it makes the occupant safer, but it makes it more dangerous for people outside of it. It's a negative externality, which I learned about when I briefly majored in economics. For my final number, maybe killing your houseplants isn't such a character flaw after all.