Travelers Face Hours-Long TSA Delays & BTS Makes a Comeback

0:00Toby Maloney:Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right, so I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin. Way better than points. Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue. Instant room upgrade. Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with Kayak and get your trip right. Kayak. Got that right.

0:29Toby Maloney:Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, to help out with long airport lines, Trump is sending in ice. Then, the war in Iran is making electric vehicles a lot more attractive.

0:42Neal Freyman:It's Monday, March 23rd. Let's ride.

0:50Toby Maloney:And then, there were none. Last night, the final perfect bracket for Men's March Madness took the inevitable L after going 43-0 to start the competition. It was a great run, even a historic one. ESPN said it was the longest ever undefeated streak to start the event. On the women's side, we're still on perfect bracket watch. 166 have no blemishes as the second round wraps up today. Toby, you didn't go 43-0, did you?

1:16Neal Freyman:Well, Virginia screwed me. I would have been 44-0. No, it wasn't me, unfortunately. I do want to give a shout out to the leader of our men's bracket pool right now. His name in our pool, the Morning Brew Daily ESPN bracket pool, is the real Neil Freiman, which is not actually Neil. I'm sitting in a solid 106th place. Neil, you forgot to hit enter on your bracket. So well done there. No, I'm first. Yeah, there you go. The real Neil Freiman. But in the women's, I'm in sixth place. Our women's bracket is being led by Sean Frommock. So well done to both of you. A lot of basketball left to play, but I want to leave everyone with one advanced stat nugget to help you pick the remaining games.

1:54Neal Freyman:Head coaches wearing suits are 11 and 8 so far in the tournament. So pick someone dressed for success. And now a word from our sponsor, LinkedIn Ads. Quick, what does ROAS mean? Return on armchair spend. What would be the return on that? A lifetime of comfort, maybe. It's return on ad spend in LinkedIn ads generates the highest B2B, that's business to business, ROAS of all online ad networks.

2:20Toby Maloney:They also have a network of over one billion professionals and 130 million decision makers.

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2:33Toby Maloney:Spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com slash MBD. That's LinkedIn.com slash MBD. Terms and conditions may apply. Let's begin at New York's LaGuardia Airport, where tragedy struck overnight. An Air Canada plane that had just landed from Montreal collided with a fire truck on a runway at LGA, killing the pilot and co-pilot and injuring two people who were in the truck. No major injuries were reported among the 72 passengers, according to CNN, and the airport will remain closed until 2 p.m. Monday. This is a developing story, so we don't know many details yet, but the collision comes at a time when air travelers all over the country are dealing with security line chaos due to the partial government shutdown.

3:19Toby Maloney:TSA agents who aren't being paid have been increasingly not showing up to work because they have to take on other jobs to pay the bills, leading to hours-long security lines that sometimes extend outside of airport terminal buildings. In a controversial effort to help move the lines along, yesterday the Trump administration said it would be deploying ICE officers to 14 U.S. airports starting today. The idea is to have the ICE agents conduct tasks that free up TSA workers to focus on getting passengers through security checkpoints.

3:46Neal Freyman:Yeah, right. As of right now, it looks like Atlanta is going to be the first place where ICE agents are going to be deployed to help with things like crowd management. But America's largest federal employee union says ICE agents are unqualified to replace TSA agents. They said in a statement, TSA officers spend months learning to detect explosives, weapons and threats specifically designed to evade detection at checkpoints. Sales that require specialized instruction. That's been the general, you know, pushback here to deploying ICE agents. They are not trained for the situation into which they are entering, which, you know, could make it worse in some scenarios.

4:20Toby Maloney:Yeah, a lot of TSA agents that were interviewed by major outlets said this is a distraction. What we really need to happen is a funding deal to get TSA workers paid. The big date to know is March 27th. That is Friday. That is the date that TSA agents will miss their second full paycheck. They missed the first one on March 13th. And people in the industry say that if TSA workers don't get paid for it for the second time, they'll be going without a month without pay. And at this point, they will just leave to take other jobs. And the long security lines that you're seeing all over social media will only get worse.

4:54Neal Freyman:Well, the other thing to note about March 27th is that's when Congress has a scheduled two-week recess. So if Congress leaves and there's no deal in place, that is when you start stretching on more than a month without a paycheck. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he would cancel the coming Senate recess if the two sides cannot reach a deal. So I guess that is something that is looking positive. But right now, the two sides still seem pretty far apart.

5:21Toby Maloney:Meanwhile, Elon Musk jumped into the fray on Saturday. He posted on X that he would pay to TSA workers salaries, which would be, you know, a rounding error for his overall net worth. It's very unclear how this would happen or what mechanism by which Elon Musk would pay for these salaries. But he did sort of point out, and it shows how this is very top of mind for people, that Elon Musk is looking at, you know, he never has to fly through an airport terminal, but he's looking at what's going on and saying, I want to help.

5:49Neal Freyman:Yeah, it would be$40 million a week to cover the entire officer salaries of the TSA, which, you know, sounds like a lot. But again, Elon's net worth, I checked as of this morning,$850 billion.

5:59Toby Maloney:So, yes, he could afford it. Moving on, the war in Iran is spiraling into a global economic crisis that experts say markets and politicians are vastly underestimating. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the most important shipping choke point in the world, combined with heavy damage to energy infrastructure in the Middle East, has upended daily life for hundreds of millions halfway across Earth and threatens to become much worse before it gets better. Yes, oil is being disrupted, causing gas prices to skyrocket, but also impacted are key raw materials like sulfur, helium and petrochemicals. And so a swath of industries are at risk of becoming collateral damage from farming to chip making to pharmaceuticals to aviation.

6:36Toby Maloney:On Friday, United Airlines delivered the oh snap moment that brought to mind March 2020. In a memo to employees, CEO Scott Kirby said that the airline is cutting five percentage points off this year's capacity in response to a surge in jet fuel prices, which have more than doubled since the war began. Kirby said United is preparing for a scenario in which oil rises up to$175 a barrel and stays above$100 through the end of 2027. Should that happen, United's annual fuel bill would come to$11 billion, which is more than double United's profits in its best year ever. But these are the kinds of business decisions that need to be made when you're facing what the head of the International Energy Agency called the greatest threat to global energy in history.

7:18Toby Maloney:At least 39 oil refineries, natural gas fields and other energy sites across nine countries have been hit during the war so far. Damage that could take years to repair. Even if the war were to end today, experts say it's going to leave a lasting imprint on the world economy and it's not going to end today. Maybe it'll only escalate. On Saturday, Trump gave Iran a 48 hour ultimatum to reopen the strait or else the U.S. would destroy Iran's power plants. Iran replied it would retaliate with more strikes on key infrastructure sites in the region. Toby, the thing I keep seeing over and over from insiders is no one is internalizing how bad this could get.

7:54Neal Freyman:Yeah. In the midst of all of that, the U.S. is easing its own sanctions on Iran because right now they're doing the math and they say they actually want to cool oil prices more so than they want a regime change at this point. Treasury Secretary Scott Pesant said on Friday that the easing of sanctions would only be temporary and narrowly tailored. But these are sanctions, you know, dating back to the 80s at this point. But what they want to do is bring more oil onto the market. The aim is to bring approximately 140 million barrels of oil to global markets. The issue is, is that that translates to around 14 billion dollars in revenue for Tehran.

8:29Neal Freyman:So a lot of people have criticized this move, saying the U.S. is essentially funding a war against itself right now because, you know, the energy crisis has gotten so bad.

8:38Toby Maloney:Yeah. Richard Haass, who's the longtime president of the Council of Foreign Relations, talked about the easing of sanctions. He said the oil the U.S. is allowing Iran to sell is too small to stabilize energy markets, but it is large enough to help Iran fight the war and raise its price for ending it. He called it misguided. You know, all the ripple effects of this war are echoing across the world, specifically in Southeast Asia and East Asia. Eighty percent of the crude passing through the strait ends up in the Pacific. And what you're seeing there is EV dealerships are being absolutely overrun.

9:08Toby Maloney:overrun BYD, which is a Chinese electric vehicle company, the biggest in the world. Vinfast is a Vietnamese EV company. Dealers in Hanoi and Manila and in China are saying, we have never seen demand like this for a while because high gas prices are translating to people wanting to switch over to EVs and hybrids.

9:28Neal Freyman:Yeah. In Laos, government agencies are actually slashing EV registration services by 30 % and raising them by the same amount for gas cars. So they're actively trying to disincentivize purchase of gas-powered vehicles amidst this massive energy crunch. Also, we've talked a lot about oil, but there's other natural resources that are under pressure right now. Helium is a big one. Qatar supplies a third of the world's helium. We talked about this last week. Helium is produced at Ras Lafon, the biggest liquefied natural gas processing plant. A byproduct of processing natural gas is finding helium.

10:04Neal Freyman:So helium is very important for not just, you know, your birthday party balloons. It is essential in the chip making and chip fabrication process. You need it to produce, you know, the cutting edge AI chips that are powering much of the world economy right now. It's used to cool wafers. So that is a big choke point. In addition to oil, if helium is very difficult to, you know, produce, you can't produce it. It's a naturally found element. So that's something to just keep in the back of your mind that no viable replacement for this essential part of kind of like lubricating the global economy. Right.

10:37Toby Maloney:I mean, so much of the global economy is occurring right now, or a lot of the growth is occurring in South Korea, which makes the memory chips that make AI possible, as well as Taiwan, where TSMC is the biggest chip making company on earth. And all of those things go into data centers. Data centers are powered by natural gas. Close to 75 % of on-site power for data centers is powered by natural gas. Well, Right now, Qatar, which exports 20 percent of all the world's natural gas, can't do that because their infrastructure is hit and the Strait of Hormuz is closed. So from helium to sulfur, which is used for chip cleaning, it's also integral in the process.

11:16Toby Maloney:Half of global seaborne sulfur comes from the strait. So down the line from all these industries are being impacted by these secondary consequences of closing the Strait of Hormuz, of not getting liquefied natural gas to the places it needs it. and think about what is powering the global economy right now, it's data centers and AI. So if this industry has to halt production or slows down, I mean, a lot of dominoes can fall after that.

11:39Neal Freyman:And it feels like the market finally woke up to this fact. The S &P 500 has fallen for four straight weeks now. Gold has lost about 25 % of its value since hitting a record high. It is the worst four-week trading period for the S &P 500 since April 2025. So it does look like people's eyes have finally been opened that this conflict is stretching on longer than maybe anticipated. Moving on, we talk a lot about AI disrupting white collar work, but it's coming for cowboys jobs too. A startup in New Zealand called Halter is strapping AI-enabled collars onto cattle, which let ranchers create a virtual fence around their herd.

12:16Neal Freyman:It's basically find my iPhone for cows. Farmers can monitor their cows, check health indicators, and even herd them remotely using vibrations and audio cues from their callers. The business pulled in$100 million in revenue last year and attracted the attention of Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, which is leading a round that values halter at over$2 billion. The pasture isn't the only place AI has weaseled its way into the beef supply chain. Cargill, one of the biggest beef processors in the world, is using an AI system called Carvy that uses computer vision to spot tiny flecks of meat left clean to the bone as carcasses move down the line.

12:53Neal Freyman:Early trials show plants are getting up to a half a percent more meat per animal. And at the scale Cargill operates, every fleck matters. It processes around 11 billion pounds of beef a year. That half a percent translates to roughly 55 million extra pounds of meat worth about$200 million annually. Neil, we got cow rhythms making re-enswers far more efficient. Sounds like a horribly boring Yellowstone plot line, but good for business.

13:19Toby Maloney:I don't think it's boring. I thought you were going to say it's coming for black and white collared work. So basically what they're doing is putting a souped up Oura ring on cattle. And it's very cool how this works. So they have this system of smart collars, connectivity towers, a mobile app that lets ranchers make virtual fences. You essentially just draw a line on an iPad and the cow, through the smart collar, it learns that they can't go past that. And they say that this is actually a huge fix for what number one huge cost efficiencies because they don't have to build actual fencing anymore because they have substituted this with virtual fencing.

13:54Toby Maloney:Halter says that physical fencing fencing costs about$20 ,000 per mile to install and maintain. They've already created 11 ,000 miles of virtual fencing so far in the United States, saving an estimated$220 million in fencing costs. Meanwhile, farming, yes, there is a fear maybe that it'll take over some jobs, but that's not the problem in the ranching industry right now. Over half of U.S. ranchers are older than the age of 55, and there's been a huge labor crunch, especially with tighter immigration enforcement. So people are looking at Halter and saying, hey, that's a pretty clever use of AI.

14:26Toby Maloney:Let's put it in cattle.

14:27Neal Freyman:And I love this Cargill story too as well because supervisors can replay clips on a screen to coach colleagues as well to show them where they left literal meat on the bone. Imagine, you know, getting showed an instant replay, a VAR of you, you know, carving a cattle carcass and saying, hey, you're leaving some flecks on the bone here. But especially as the U.S. market is kind of seeing a supply crunch when it comes to beef, every little fleck matters. We've said this a couple of times. U.S. cattle herd has shrunk to its smallest level in 75 years. So there absolutely is a need and a demand for more meat.

15:04Neal Freyman:If you can, you know, scrape a literal flex of meat off the bone, it does lead to massive, you know, savings.

15:10Toby Maloney:Not necessarily a visual I want to have. Halter, back to New Zealand. This guy is a very interesting story. The founder, Craig Pidgett. He is the New Zealand's 2026 Innovator of the Year. New Zealand doesn't have that many unicorns. So whenever some guy creates a unicorn, he is celebrated as a national hero. Very interesting founding story. He grew up on dairy farms with looking at his parents working 100 hours a week as they they moved from far to farm. They were working really hard. They were moving a lot of very labor intensive. So he came up with this idea, raised 100 raised at a one billion dollar valuation last year from Mary Meekers Bond Capital, who actually flew their people from San Francisco to Auckland overnight to say, we need to invest because there was so much demand to invest.

15:55Toby Maloney:And now he's getting some money from Peter Thiel at a$2 billion valuation. So pretty interesting use of AI to put it as big aura rings on cattle.

16:04Neal Freyman:All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with our winners of the weekend.

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16:43Toby Maloney:This episode is brought to you by Apple. There is nothing like your first Mac. When I got mine, I was heading into freshman year at the University of Maryland. A lot was uncertain that fall, but I knew I had a dependable sidekick for homework, connecting with other students, and devouring blogs about our basketball recruiting class. What about you, Toby?