Marketers, tell us if this sounds familiar. You invest in something that seems incredible like millions of views, but then don't see any revenue. Instead, invest in what looks good to your CFO. LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a $250 credit. Just go to linkedin.com slash mbd. That's linkedin.com slash mbd. Terms and conditions apply. Good morning, Brudeli Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, the Southern College more exclusive than the Ivy League. Then the DOJ has opened an investigation into the NFL. It's Friday, April 10th. Let's ride. Good morning and happy Friday. El Nino is coming, but not just any El Nino. This week, forecasters updated their models for an increased chance of a super El Nino and unusually intense version of the climate altering pattern. El Nino is when a warming patch of water in the Pacific Ocean influences climates all over the globe, causing more stormy activity in some places while drying out others and sparking storms, floods, droughts and typhoons. Later this year, those effects could be multiplied with a super El Nino we haven't seen in a long time. One professor of atmospheric science, Paul Roundy, wrote there's real potential for the strongest El Nino event in 140 years. Super El Nino pumps me up. I don't know why. Maybe because they're pretty rare. There've only been four since 1950. The last one was a decade ago in 2015. A super El Nino doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to get like end of world storm level intensity. It just means that the normal impacts of El Nino, which are that warm, dry winter in the northern part of the country and then the wet or colder winter in the southern states is just a higher chance that that happens. Also super charged summer temperatures. So we just had our winter from hell in the north. Now everyone in SoCal and Texas and Florida and the Sunbelt, they are going to get their bad winter, their wet winter. It's coming for you next. One positive, a super El Nino could also mean an especially quiet Atlantic hurricane season. So there's always two sides of the El Nino coin. And now a word from our sponsor, Tax Act. Neil, what are taxes? Another classic Toby bit. Yes, this is certainly one of my famous bits. I totally know what taxes are. Then it's time you check with Tax Act. They help small business owners get their taxes done by providing the only online DIY filing software for small businesses. With Tax Act, you can file your business taxes any way you'd like. You can do them by yourself with step by step guidance. You can file with help from a credentialed tax expert when you have questions or you can upload your documents and an expert will prepare and file for you. Just head to taxact.com slash business dash returns to get started. That's tax act.com slash business dash returns. NFL is America's sport, but watching football also feels like a sport in and of itself with all the streaming services you gotta pay for. An unexpected single high safety though is looking to lay the boom on the rising costs of viewership, the department of justice. The DOJ has opened an antitrust investigation into whether the NFL is squeezing fans and harming consumers with all these subscription fees. Back in the day to see the jets suck, you flipped on your TV and watched the game. Then in 1961, Congress passed the Sports Broadcasting Act, which gave sports leagues a hall pass on some antitrust rules so they could negotiate media deals as a package. Fast forward to today and the league has used that leverage to chop up its schedule in sprinkle games across a dozen platforms each with a monthly bill attached. That bill has gotten very big. Watching every NFL game last season as Senator Mike Lee, the chair of the antitrust subcommittee points out would run you nearly $1,000 and requires access to CBS, NBC, ESPN, Fox, Amazon Prime and YouTube's Sunday ticket which alone runs $240 a season. The NFL points out that over 87% of its games air on free broadcast TV and that 100% of games are free in the local markets of the teams playing. Which is great, but also not really the point if you're a Bill's fan living in Miami. Bill, paying a grand to watch all of my fantasy players underperform should be illegal. Talk about an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. This is the US government versus the national football league. As someone say, it's just America versus America, a true heavyweight battle. There is growing scrutiny of the high cost of consumers of watching sports, especially the NFL on both sides of the aisle in DC. They're very much on the hot seat right now and there's a very important dynamic lurking in the background of all this, which is that the NFL back in 2021 signed all these rights deals with CBS, NBC, Fox, all its broadcasting partners. And there's an opt out ahead of the 2029 2030 season where Roger Goddell, the commissioner can go can basically renege on all these agreements say we want to renegotiate them and they want to get a lot more money because they're looking at the Super Bowl and they're saying 134 million people watch this in the second quarter. We think we can go back and get even more money from these broadcasting partners. So they want to rip up these agreements and get more money. And that's what's kind of lurking in the background. This is what the, this is what has DC really looking at this antitrust exemption. Yeah. In 2025, the NFL had 83 of the top 100 Nielsen rated shows. So they certainly have the leverage to rip up those agreements. So what would happen if this exemption that we was, you know, handed down to them back in 1961, what would happen if it disappeared? The NFL would have to market their TV rights on a team by team basis. They can't say like, Hey, we are a league as a whole. You have to pay, you have to negotiate with us if you want to broadcast our games. Instead it's the Jaguars now offending for themselves and saying, Hey, anyone want to pay us money to broadcast our TV games? Likely the demand wouldn't be there. It wouldn't be the same at least that the Cowboys would get for instance. So it makes teams have to start to fend it for themselves. Which makes, you know, maybe the pie that the revenue, the league is bringing in a little bit smaller. It would make salary cap a little harder for the smaller teams to deal with, which could lead to, you know, two leagues fracturing from each other. One with the Cowboys in it, one with the Jaguars down. I'm beating up on the Jaguars right now, but small market teams, let's just insert small market teams there. It's more difficult for them to negotiate their own rights. It's just amazing how the balance of power has shifted since 1961. That antitrust exemption was put in place to help out the NFL, which was a fledging league and it wasn't doing so well compared to the very strong broadcasters. And now we're living in a world in 2026 where the NFL is more powerful than ever and broadcasters are back on their heels. So but right now the law is sort of tilted toward the NFL. So it's unclear what's going to happen toward this antitrust exemption, whether it's going to go away or not. It would change the NFL as we know it, but I think they'll probably come to some sort of agreement. It could be some sort of power play by the broadcasters here, putting pressure on politicians to put pressure on the NFL to work out some sort of agreement that lowers costs for all of us who just want to watch games. Moving on, this morning we'll get our first look at the inflationary impact of the war in Iran from the Consumer Price Index report. Data released yesterday showed inflation was already a problem leading up to the conflict. The Personal Consumption Expenditures Index, what you would call the opening act to today's CPI headliner, showed prices remained elevated in February, even before the biggest oil shock in history. Core inflation, which removes food and energy, jumped 0.4% from the month prior and rose 3% from a year earlier. Reminder that the Fed's target inflation rate is 2%, so we've been well above those comfortable levels for five consecutive years. Inflation has that gnarly effect of draining Americans' purchasing power. The PCE showed that consumer spending rose 0.5% in February, which sounds healthy until you factor in inflation, which shows spending stagnating at 0.1%. That continues a six-month trend of a more cautious consumer as they contend with higher inflation and a creaky job market. Toby, all eyes are on the inflation report coming out in just a few hours. If that's the entree, this appetizer was a soggy plate of fries. Not so appetizing. I think that what we're seeing is some residual effects of tariffs still filtering through the economy right now because a lot of the price firmness came from goods in this PCE index drop. Prices of recreational goods, clothing all picked up from the start of the year. Services inflation actually cooled a little bit. That is excluding energy and housing, of course. You are seeing just more physical things costing more money, which a lot of people did expect when the Liberation Day tariffs were announced. There are some potential tailwinds though. This wasn't all bad because a lot of economists are looking at higher tax refunds as a potential boon to help support spending in the coming months. Again, that risks being offset by the higher inflation ticking in. That is one thing that people looked at and said, there is some hope here that spending will remain robust because of the increased amount of tax refunds people are getting. Yeah, we've got two clashing forces coming to household finances. Their tax refunds, which were running about 14% higher than last year, but not for me apparently. That translates to about $290 per household. Then at the same time, we have elevated oil prices and we don't know exactly where they are going to go. At current levels, that would amount to a loss of $350 per household. It looks like all of those gains are going to be wiped out by higher energy prices. You set the table well saying that the CPI report is dropping today. The reason why a lot of people are very excited for that is because we are going to see some of the impact of rising gas prices from the Iran war. Again, the PCE, even though the Fed loves looking at it to make their rate decisions, that does not reflect these volatile food and energy costs. CPI report does. Well, that was February. This is March. Yeah. And in addition, that is pre-war that we're getting. So we are getting a more up to date report and we're getting one that does bring in oil and gas prices. So it's not going to be pretty. I mean, there are some pretty dire expectations going into this. Economists are expecting almost a 1% increase in the CPI. That is the biggest advance since 2022. So a little bit nervous ahead of this drop later today. Let's head to stock of the week, dog of the week, the segment where Toby and I pick one stock that wrapped up their taxes already and another that's scrambling to the deadline. I win the pre-show drag race. So I get to go first. And my stock of the week is Vanderbilt University, which has become more selective than some IVs. I literally did a double take when I saw this for the upcoming fall. Vanderbilt admitted just 2.8% of regular decision applicants, 1,382 students out of 48,720 applications itself a record high. Combined with early decision, that comes out to a total Vanderbilt admissions rate of 4%. To put that in perspective, Vanderbilt's acceptance rate about 20 years ago was 32.8%. And the 4% currently makes it more exclusive than Yale and Columbia, which accepted about 4.2% of applications. So what the heck is going on in Nashville? Why has Vandy become the southern bell of the ball? There are a bunch of factors driving Vandy's rise to near IV status. One is that it's got an enviable mix of elite academics and great D1 sports culture that work hard, play hard mentality attractive to high achieving high school seniors. Another reason is that in general, Southern universities are seeing heightened interest due to better weather, typically lower prices, and there are less political campuses after the upheaval of the past few years. Toby, the Commodores are rising. Commodores are ripping. They kind of screwed me in March madness though. So I still have a bone to pick with them. One other factor that is leading to the influx of applications is it's just easier to apply these days. The common app is a lot easier for a lot of people to fill out. So standardized testing is a massive factor when you have to consider applications. Vanderbilt doesn't require students to submit those standardized test scores, so that could have juiced up their application numbers a little bit. That is kind of the overthinking approach to this story. The other approach is what you said is just Vanderbilt's an awesome school. It's located in the awesome part of town. It's warm there. You know, again, a lot of people are attracted to Southern schools because of the air of apoliticalness that are in some of those campuses. So sometimes you don't have to overthink a story. Vanderbilt's a sick place to go to school. But we're also seeing this happen across similar kind of Southern schools that want to vault into the exclusive Ivy League status. And one other one is Duke University this year. It has an overall acceptance rate of 4.7%. And that acceptance rate, Duke's acceptance rate has been cut by about half over the past decade. So Duke, Vanderbilt, other sort of private Southern schools are really wanting to become this, they're all vying to become the Ivy's of the South and they're lowering their acceptance rate to the point where I wouldn't even think of applying now if I was a high school senior. As I was reading about all these stories, I go, I would have literally no chance. What do you mean the regular decision rate is sub 3% like it does seem very difficult to get in because there's just a lot of demand right now. Vanderbilt is looking at that demand though and going, what if we just expanded our entire campus? They have plans for new campuses in New York, San Francisco and West Palm Beach, Florida. They actually are breaking ground on the San Francisco one by 2027. And this is going to be a full blown four year undergraduate college. It's not going to be just a satellite outpost. So that is maybe something we could see become more common as the demand is there. But if we just opened more schools and had like this chain mentality when it comes to higher education. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with our dog of the week. Neil, let's make a deal. Last time you said that I ended up painting your fence and you did such a good job on that. But data site can deliver deal intelligence across every stage of the investment lifecycle powered by the best available AI models and protected by security standards, deal makers trust. This is intelligence uniquely designed for M&A. The AI and data site can meet the demands of complex high stakes transactions where outcomes matter most. You can move faster on deals and win with data sites AI when you visit data site dot com slash brew. That's data site dot com slash brew. Marketing your brand these days probably feels harder than finding a good avocado at the grocery store at five PM. Lucky for you, Instacart built a one stop shop for grocery retail media across more than 20 to 100 retail banners to help you reach all sorts of high intent consumers. Instacart's ad platform covers the entire shopping journey and it's all backed by real time optimization and closed loop reporting. Keep your brand top of mind and top of the grocery list with Instacart. Hit the check out with Instacart at ads dot instacart dot com. That's ads dot instacart dot com. And now a word from our sponsor company retreat. Attention fans of jury duty from the creators of jury duty comes the next installment of this documentary style comedy series that captivated audiences. This season takes place on an annual company retreat where all the employees at rock and gramma's hot sauce are actors except one. At the center of it all is a new hero Anthony, a hardworking kind and very patient temp employee who has no idea that the company is fake and that the entire retreat is staged around him. And here is the fun part. You'll be able to try all four flavors of rock and gramma's hot sauce sold on Amazon. Jury duty presents company retreat is streaming now on prime video. Catch the feel good comedy that'll knock your sauce off. My dog the week is the zippers on your carry on because they're going to be bursting due to all the extra clothes you're trying to fit in there. American Airlines announced yesterday that is jacking up bag fees with the biggest squeeze coming for the people who can least afford it. Basic economy flyers for regular tickets booked starting yesterday. Your first checked bag at the airport will run you $50 up 10 bucks. But if you're flying a basic economy starting May 18th, your first bag is $55 and your second is 65. American is far from the only airline doing this. United, JetBlue, Delta and Southwest have all hiked their bag fees in the past two weeks. The culprit is jet fuel which has gone completely vertical since the straight of Hormuz choked off global supply. But American is uniquely punishing the cheap seats. The whole industry has figured out that premium cabins are where the growth is while regular economy sales are softening. So American is broadcasting that if you're paying up will treat you like royalty. If you're not will nickel and dime and quarter in a penny. Neil put another way kind of stinks the fly right now. Overhead bin space is going to be an absolute disaster. I mean people are going to get hurt. It was already bad and now they're charging even more to check a bag. You're obviously bringing more suitcases on the plane. Jet fuel prices have about doubled since late February climbing to about $4.80 a gallon. This is this is airlines second biggest cost coming after labor. New projections say that at current jet fuel prices, airlines would be on the hook for about $40 billion more in fuel spending alone this year from the rise in jet fuel. So obviously they're going to turn on this switch and it's a very lucrative switch because they make billions of dollars in bag fees and people are willing to pay them. So last year airlines made $7.2 billion on a bag fees alone. So you can easily split the switch and just say, okay, do we want to make another couple hundred millions of dollars to offset jet fuel prices? Okay, let's just charge $5 more for bag fees. Yeah, it's easier to charge for back fees than for fares alone because fares are also going up in price. United said that they're going to raise prices 15 to 20 percent. Delta said that higher fares would stick around. A lot of the CEOs have also said people are willing to pay them. I guess people are just willing to pay any prices at this point to go the places where they want to go. But this is definitely, American is unique in this sense that they are specifically penalizing regular economy flyers because they think that they've gotten the reputation of not being the premium airlines that Delta and United are trying to push into at this point. So I really do think that they're trying to discourage or even overtly punish this lower economy flyer by charging $5 extra to try to differentiate themselves and say, hey, we do have premium offerings. You're going to pay a little bit less if you book with our normal economy fares. Let's talk about Delta because they have an interesting ace in the hole to help mitigate these rise in jet fuel costs. And that's because they own a refinery. In 2012, they bought a refinery in Pennsylvania to process crude oil into kerosene or jet fuel and it's been a very interesting move. It's the only airline in the United States that has their own refinery. And sometimes in some years it looks absolutely genius and other years it looks like a money pit boondoggle. But right now it looks like a very savvy forward looking move as jet fuel prices go up and they can actually just make their own in Pennsylvania. Yeah, everyone roasted this when they first bought it because it was a Coenelco Phillips plant and they were planning to shut it down and Delta's like, hey, we'll buy it. And everyone's like, why would you buy something that in literal oil and gas companies said is not worth it to run anymore? And yeah, it ebbs and flows on whether this is a smart move or not based off of a thing called the crack spread, which is the difference in price between crude oil and jet fuel. The larger that crack spread is the smarter it looks to have your own refinery in United CEO Scott Kirby actually is a little bit jealous right now. He said over the life of the refinery, the benefit is shared by everyone because you can tell that fuel to everyone. But right now the crack spread is much higher. So they'll get real benefit from the higher crack spread that will be unique to them. So I think he's got some green with envy in his eyes right now. Yeah, Delta said that the refinery is going to boost its second quarter earnings by 300 million dollars. They're also pouring, you know, $1.6 billion into this thing for maintenance and repair since they bought it in 2012. But it would just be funny to drive on the Pennsylvania turnpike and just see like a big refinery and with a big Delta sign on it. I'll take a look next time I'm over there. Okay, let's bring to the finish with some final headlines. Home sweet home. The four astronauts on the Artemis II mission will, if all goes according to plan, complete their historic journey tonight with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. When they looped around the moon earlier this week, Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen traveled further from Earth than any other humans have gone before. They also became the first astronauts to visit the moon in more than five decades, testing key systems ahead of a planned lunar landing a couple of years from now. Toby, this won't exactly be a gentle reentry. The Orion spacecraft will reenter Earth's atmosphere in a fireball of 5000 degrees, going about 24,000 miles per hour or about 31 times the speed of sound. Oh reentry. Jeff Radigan, the NASA's flight director said it's 13 minutes of things that have to go right. And that is especially true for this specific Orion capsule because this spacecraft's heat shield has no flaws in its design. This is not the first time that Orion has gone to space. There was an unmanned mission a few years ago in 2022. NASA found unexpected damage to the spacecraft's heat shield when it re-entered. But unfortunately the Artemis II capsule had already been built, so they couldn't change the heat shield at that point. So the risk is still there. So what NASA did instead was actually change the path of reentry to minimize risk. It is now descending at a steeper angle to kind of quicken the amount of time it has to withstand the most extreme temperature. So they're literally bringing this thing down even faster through the atmosphere. So I'm sure there'll be some very nervous people at NASA. They say it's fine. Like we've done all the math. It's going to hold up okay. But I mean, it's nerve-wracking for sure. Yeah, we need these guys back home because I think these four astronauts over the course of this mission have just inspired a lot of people. They've had so much grace and wisdom. And if you just go through Reed Wiseman's Twitter, you just see these like unbelievable gems of wisdom. One of them that I saw yesterday was he had tweeted before when he, when he, after he space walked a few years ago, he said, while space walking, I realized something. I used to think I was scared of heights, but now I know I was just scared of gravity. I saw that too. And I don't quite understand it. Like you're just scared of the effects of like potentially feeling. I think that's what I'm like. Don't analyze it. I know. Just let it wash over you. It does sound deep for sure. All right. Moving on, no one is having kids these days. The general fertility rate hit a record low of 53.1 bursts per a thousand women, continuing a slide that's been consistent since 2007, according to the CDC's provisional birth report. For the sixth year in a row, the U S clocked in at right around 3.6 million babies born. Why is that curve flattening? For the first time ever, women in their late 30s had a higher birth rate than women in their early 20s. The teen birth rate is also in free fall down 72% since 2007. Thanks to better sex ed and longer acting contraceptives, Karen Benjamin Guzzo, a researcher at UNC Chapel Hill pointed out that for the past decades, teens were hammered with a don't ruin your life messaging when it comes to pregnancies. And once you know it, it lowered the pregnancy rate. But Neil, the U S is below replacement rate right now. Quick, go mingle out of the box. I'm working on it. This may not be as ominous as it sounds, because when you see declining fertility rates in the United States, you think, Oh God, we're going to have a baby bust and like, like what's happening in South Korea and Japan, we're going to have this demographic crisis coming down the pipeline. Some demographers say this could be a low, what they call a postponement transition. It's not that women are having fewer babies, but they're having fewer babies in their 20s. So this is a very interesting statistic in 2024, 49% of women who were 30 had given birth to at least one child. That's down from 63% a decade ago and 69% two decades ago. But today's 45 year olds are more likely to be mothers than women who were that age two decades ago. 88% of 45 year old women are now mothers up from 84% in 2004. So they may just be delaying things. Finally, for the first time in 20 years, a new Malcolm in the middle episode is on TV tonight. The beloved family sitcom is being revived on Hulu with mostly the same cast, including Frankie Muniz and Brian Cranston and Jane Kazmarek as his parents in the reboot. Muniz is now a parent too. Father to a teen daughter, Leah played by Keely Carsten. Suddenly it seems like all your favorite shows of the nineties and early 2000s are getting a second life, along with Malcolm in the middle, reboots of scrubs, King of the Hill, Prison Break, Baywatch, and Phineas and Ferb are all back on the telly or coming down the pipeline. Apparently we have Brian Cranston to kind of thank for this. Despite the fact that he became a very large star powered by Breaking Bad after Malcolm in the middle, he kept in touch with the crew. He kept in touch with the actors and basically when the serious creator said we want to do this, he jumped fully in and said I'm game. The first episode features Cranston standing completely nude as his wife shaves his back in another region. So he's not afraid of being Brian Cranston now. He's very much still Malcolm in the middle, Brian Cranston. So it will be fun. I do just think about stuck culture again though. You've listed all of those shows that are coming back. It feels like the only way to make something popular is to just find something that was popular a couple decades ago, reboot it today, and this show will work. Like it is going to be popular. I will say some of those reboots haven't been so successful. Some have been more than others. But my favorite anecdote about this revival is that I said most of the cast is coming back, but one person isn't. That's Eric Purcellvin who played Dewey, Malcolm's younger brother. So Eric is now 34 years old and he's just in a different place in life. He's studying Victorian literature at Harvard for his masters. So they approached him and said, Hey, would you like to make buckets of money? You'd probably make millions of dollars from this. And apparently he just said, nah, like I'm just I'm just studying Dickens here at Harvard and that's something that I want to do. So he turned them down and he will not be there because he's doing more erudite things. Okay, that is all the time we have. Thanks for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful Friday and an even better weekend. If you'd like to reach us, send an email to morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com or DM us on Instagram at mbdailyshow. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our supervising producer. Raymond Lu is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham and our associate producer is Olivia Lake. Hair and makeup is touring Vanderbilt. Devon Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show, Daniel. I wish you all well.
