SpaceX Starship Finally Reached Orbit & Why Dudes Are Becoming Cat Dads

0:01Mitch S.:Good morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman.

0:04Nina S.:And I'm Toby Howell.

0:05Mitch S.:Today, how wired headphones have become the ultimate status symbol.

0:09Nina S.:Ben, 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.

0:23Mitch S.:You know, you don't have to wait until the dead 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 about 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.

0:51Nina S.: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 6.30, 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.

1:26Mitch S.:And now a 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.

1:34Nina S.:Are you trying to give me agitoneal? That would be a nightmare.

1:38Mitch S.:Don't worry, your PR is safe. But that kind of predicament is what marketers face when there's not clear, transparent reporting on their CTV ads.

1:46Nina S.:Thankfully, advertisers on Roku don't have to worry about that. Roku connects to outside measurement partners so you can see how your streaming ads stack up against your whole marketing mix, not just in isolation.

1:57Mitch S.:Roku is for advertisers who want the full picture. And right now, first-time advertisers who spend$5 ,000 will receive a$5 ,000 match. Just go to advertising.roku.com slash MBD and use code BREW5K. SpaceX's big Starship launch was a little like going out in Boston. in. 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 Starlink satellites, which joined a constellation of 11 ,000 others in beaming internet back to people on Earth.

2:39Mitch S.: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.

3:13Mitch S.: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.

3:30Nina S.: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.

4:12Nina S.: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 just 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.

4:42Mitch S.: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 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.

5:22Mitch S.:So previously, they have caught the booster. There's two parts to 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 chopsticks. 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.

5:55Nina S.:Where are the chopsticks?

5:56Mitch S.:They're in my junk drawer. I have like 40 pairs right now, Neil.

5:59Nina S.: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.

6:36Nina S.: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. It's 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.

7:11Nina S.: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 Mesabi Mountains. A cute artisanal steel mill this is not. Mesabi 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 megasteel plant to open in the U.S.

7:47Nina S.:since the 1960s, 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 deal isn't expected until 2030, and the company behind the project has spent nearly two decades trying to get its operation fully up and running. 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.

8:18Mitch S.:Yeah. I mean, I've been to the Lehigh Valley, to Bethlehem, 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%, later doubled them to 50%. 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.

8:51Mitch S.:They credit the tariffs with more 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 gonna be undercut by foreign competitors coming into the market because those foreign competitors have to pay tariffs.

9:23Mitch S.: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 2026. 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 a new steel plant for the first time in a long time.

9:53Nina S.: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.

10:35Nina S.:Steel plant in 60 years is announced.

10:37Mitch S.:Yeah, Iowa has a ton of very close races. Finally, shout out to our super sub Kyle Hagee and Minnesota, because I did not know the game that the Iron Range had in Minnesota. There's this big range in Iowa that's that accounts 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 percent 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.

11:12Mitch S.:I knew there had to be some hockey lore in the Iron Range. And it's true because 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 cord because it can mean cord like music, but also cord spelled like a different way means wire. Anyway, the$99 Pyrrhoff headphones come with a special feature that the vast majority of wired headphones do not.

11:50Mitch S.:Noise canceling. 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.

12:26Mitch S.: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 a 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?

12:46Nina S.: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. So 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 product. And then the thing that I think they did well was apply what they are good at to a format that has already existed. Bose 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.

13:33Nina S.:So one, they recognize the trend, but then two, they made it their own, which I think is just a savvy business decision.

13:38Mitch S.: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 aux. Like, that is not a thing anymore. It's a USB-C. So you put the USB-C into your phone, which I was thinking maybe doesn't work on an airplane. You may have to pay Delta six 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.

14:11Mitch S.: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.

14:42Mitch S.:So it's certainly become a trend. Sales have increased for the first time in five years.

14:45Nina S.: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 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 too, 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.

15:22Mitch S.:But you don't have to charge them. Yeah, that's true. 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.

15:34Nina S.:All right, let's take a quick break and come back with Toby's Trends right after this.