Hi, happy Friday. This week we’ll head to both South Texas and Cambodia’s Kandal province to explore this global economy of ours. We’ll also meet the young people ditching their smartphones and picking up doorstop novels — until they need a specific app for work. I’ve also got a fun selection of EEK-onomic stories and a spooky song of the week. Happy Halloween!  — Tony Wagner, newsletter editor

A parrot named Fran Fran squawks at the entrance of SPI Excursions. It’s a water tour company right along the ocean on South Padre Island.

“We do parasailing, jet skiing, sunset cruises, dolphin watches, and we do banana boat rides as well,” said owner Brandy Buntin.

He’s a big fan of SpaceX and has expanded his business to include boat rides to see occasional launches, which happen roughly seven miles south of here.

“We've integrated that in, so we actually just go out and watch the launch from a vessel,” he said.

Buntin brings about 50 people out on a boat to watch when SpaceX launches rockets. Other boat companies are out there too. SPI Excursions has seen steady growth. That’s not from the occasional SpaceX boat rides, though he does think they help.

“Definitely not bread and butter, but I mean, any amount of bread or any amount of butter is good,” he said. “We have amazing fishing, amazing parasailing, great food, great people — but now we have rockets that are leaving from our backyard.”

About a 45-minute drive from there is downtown Brownsville, where some walls and businesses have space-themed murals and signs.

The Brownsville economy has long lagged behind much of Texas, with lower hourly earnings and higher unemployment. But as SpaceX has expanded its rocket production and launch facility near the area, analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas shows lower unemployment, higher wages and an uptick in home and retail sales, though exactly how much is attributable to SpaceX is unclear.

Gilberto Salinas, CEO of the Greater Brownsville Economic Development Corporation, remembers the day about 15 years ago when his team visited SpaceX in California.

“We come back to the boardroom, and then in comes Elon Musk. And he starts walking us through the project as well,” Salinas said. “He started getting into the physics of launching the rocket, why it would make sense launching from South Texas.”

That’s when Musk mentioned Boca Chica Beach.

“I was kind of taken aback. It's like, wait a minute, somebody outside of Brownsville, Texas, knows Boca Chica Beach,” he said.

Salinas understood Musk’s vision at the time and had one of his own. Having Starbase — its own launch facility — could redefine Brownsville.

“We could become the next space city … how cool would that be?”

As Apple's first foldable iPhone hits stores, some customers are making the choice to forgo smartphones entirely and opt instead for "dumbphones," scaled-back devices that will stop them from doomscrolling.

Dumbphone companies and consumers who use these minimalist devices say that they allow people to have greater control over their time, escape the constant bombardment of notifications, cultivate better relationships with their friends and family, and focus more on their hobbies.

Sarah Givens, a 23-year old from Georgia, felt that smartphones hindered her ability to fully connect with other people. "If your main mode of communication is always through your smartphone, then the relationship is with the smartphone. It's not with the person," Givens said.

So in 2025, she got a Nokia, which came with a few basic features like a note app and an outward-facing camera (no selfies).

Givens said cutting back on screentime and limiting the information you post about yourself can cultivate closer relationships in real life.

"If you're constantly updating your profiles, at a certain point, people don't have to ask questions because you're freely giving [information]," Givens explained.

She now takes the initiative to strike up conversations with the people around her.

"I would just learn to turn to the person next to me in my class and ask them questions, or the teacher, or the random person in the coffee shop," Givens said.

And she's started reading more, picking up books like Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre" and David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest."

Cyber scam operations in Southeast Asia nab an estimated $10 billion a year from unsuspecting Americans.

In November, the Department of Justice formed the Scam Center Strike Force to target Chinese organized crime affiliates operating in the region. The U.S. has pressured Cambodia, a major scam hub, to put a stop to the industry, issuing 146 sanctions tied to fraud operations in the country last year.

At first glance, the Jin Zi Hui Property Management compound in southeast Cambodia looks like an office park. There are basketball courts, restaurants, and building after building of office space, just like a campus of a tech company. The only thing missing is the workers.

Inside the deserted offices of the abandoned online fraud center are rows of empty desks, upturned chairs, and scattered AT&T and T-Mobile sim cards. The people that sat at these desks until early this year were messaging people in the U.S., the U.K., and China, and scamming them out of money.

Left behind are stacks of call scripts and notebooks. One handwritten note describes how to connect romantically with a victim: Imagine a life together, a yard, a cat, a daughter, sunshine, breakfast.

“What they are trying to do is to get people to make investments in some sort of a fraudulent crypto-trading app,” said Jason Tower, senior expert at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

The scam is pretty straightforward.

OK, it’s not the spookiest song. But it’s a great one, and it’s about the phone! 

Young folks aren’t just dumbing down their devices, they’re also embracing retro tech like physical media and wired headphones. And just with the dumbphone trend, there are all-but-forgotten brands ready to cash in.

 

RadioShack endured two bankruptcies in the 2010s, but it’s leaning into the trend this holiday season. Retro tech makes up about a third of the brand’s business, managing director Kevin Hamann told “Marketplace Morning Report,” mostly online. Hamann said he hopes those purchases will drive young customers into physical stores.

“We intend to expand also very much on the STEM toys and DIY products that RadioShack's been known for,” Hamann said. “We want to create RadioShack as a destination not only for retro tech, but also for consumers to be able to build things that really get kids off their phones.”