Morning Brew Daily - Polymarket Bettors Threaten Israeli Journalist & Blank Street Wants to Become “Gen Z Starbucks”

Episode Date: March 18, 2026

Episode 802: Neal and Toby chat about a new report showing service-based tenants now leasing more than 50% of retail space vs. goods-based tenants as gyms and spas take over major cities. Then, an Israeli journalist reveals he received death threats after reporting on a missile story from Iran that apparently messed with bets on Polymarket. Meanwhile, Blank Street wants to become the spot where influencers hang and challenge Starbucks as the next big coffee chain. Plus, a rundown of some interesting job listings in the age of AI.  Learn more at linkedin.com/MBD Join our March Madness bracket! https://fantasy.espn.com/games/tournament-challenge-bracket-2026/group?id=4f3dc815-5efe-4a5f-ab31-1479c99af85d&joining=true Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠  Watch Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many employees can't afford a hefty medical bill that pops up out of the blue, but it happens. And employees who are financially stressed are, understandably, more likely to be distracted at work, costing their employers greatly in lost productivity. Luckily, AFLAQ plans help with out-of-pocket expenses not covered by health insurance and can be offered at no direct cost to businesses. Learn more at aflac.com slash morningbredaily. That's aflac.com slash morning brewdaily. Good morning, Brutley Show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell.

Today, more gyms, less stuff, how retail is being transformed. Then an AI company is hiring improv actors to teach its models to be more human. It's Wednesday, March 18th. Let's ride. Mark Andresen thinks your daily journaling habit is pointless. On a recent podcast, the billionaire investor said that he does zero introspection because you just got to move forward and go. He also claimed that it would never occur to people 400 years ago to be introspective and that, quote, all of the modern conceptions around introspection and

therapy were manufactured by Freud and others in Vienna in the 1910s and the 1920s. Now, many people were quick to dunk on him, pointing out that Socrates famously said the unexamined life was not worth living, or that Marcus Aureli's his most famous book is called Meditations, or that Benjamin Franklin kept a painstaking diary of moral conduct. The list goes on. Toby, what is Andreessen talking about? You know what, Neil? I am with him.

The voices in your head are a lot quieter when you are moving and grooving and building stuff. But also, I am not a great person of history. So the fact that I agree with them is actually refuting his point. And now a word from our sponsor, LinkedIn ads. Toby, you're the best podcast co-host I know. Ah, Neil, you're making me blush. I thought you were going to tell me I'm the best pick, ball player, you know. You'll get there someday. But do you know what else is the best? LinkedIn Ads is when it

comes to generating the highest B2B RoS of all online ad networks. They also have a network of over one billion professionals and 130 million decision makers. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company role, seniority, skills, company revenue, so you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience. 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 Mb. That's LinkedIn.com slash MBD. Terms and conditions may apply. Okay, think about the last time you went to a store. Did you leave with anything? Probably not. In a momentous changing of the guard, last year, for the first time on record, service-based retailers leased more space in the U.S. than traditional goods-based tenants.

Whereas the Wall Street Journal put it, America now has more spas and gyms than stores selling actual stuff. According to a new co-star report, retailers providing a service, think restaurants, gyms, salons, leased 50.4% of commercial space in 2025 compared to 49.6% by retailers that sell you physical goods like Dix or Barnes & Noble. As recently as 15 years ago, services-based retailers accounted for just 40% of total leasing. It is a huge spike of 10 percentage points reflecting the long-running reallocation of consumer spending and the continued evolution of physical retail space towards. uses that are less vulnerable to e-commerce, as Kostar explained. The main growth driver of services-based retail is wellness, a booming industry that as of 2024 was worth $2.1 trillion per the Global Wellness Institute. Last year, the wellness sector, which includes fitness, beauty, nutrition, and mental health,

accounted for almost 30% of service-based leases compared to just 20% a decade ago. That's one side of the equation. On the other side are traditional goods retailers, which are shrinking their brick-and-mortar footprint as more shopping moves online. Toby, we talk a lot about the experience economy. It's never been more clear than in this retail milestone. I was talking with some people around our office, and we were talking about what luxury symbols are these days.

It's not as much things. It's not as much as a new handbag. Some of our producers are like, I would rather get a facial every single week because that is a showing that you can afford something like that. That is a new status simple at this point. So it is downstream of that, is the retail mix that we're seeing.

And so, of course, you're going to see more of those popping up and less actual tenants. Landlords do love fitness tenants in general as well, because if you are seeing a retail exodus, maybe your big box retailers that used to anchor your shopping centers are moving out. A gym can come in and, you know, take the place of one of those very easy. They can be that anchor location that you need. So from a landlord perspective, obviously the fitness industry is a big win. from just a consumer's perspective, wellness is the new status symbol, which is why we're seeing,

you know, this mix change. Yeah, gyms are really good at going into second generation retail space. Planet Fitness is a good example of one of these wellness type retail, not stores, but retail locations that is absolutely blowing up. They added one million members last year. They're planning to open 200 new locations this year. And they go into space that was vacated by traditional goods retailers. a lot of bankrupt retailers have closed down their locations.

And so landlords are saying, okay, who are you going to fill it with? Well, Rite Aid and Joanne are two stores that went bankrupt. Planet Fitness is going into those spaces. So it's just an example of where we are. I think you also mentioned people want to get facials and this is very important to your overall persona. Well, social media maybe has a big factor in that. We're getting photographed and videotaped more than ever, us as podcast hosts, but just in the world you as a regular person,

and so this is becoming more of a priority for people. Yeah, absolutely. I just look at a case study that the Wall Street Journal highlighted, which is a shopping center in the Philly suburbs. A liquor store moved out of a 10,200 square foot space, and in its place, four smaller shops came in. It was an animal hospital, a facial spa chain, a stretching studio chain in a nail salon.

Again, other than maybe the animal hospital that gives medicine out, none of those things are really giving you anything. they are providing services. So in the downstream of that, too, is of those four tenants, they together generate 20% higher rent than the single previous tenants. So it's a no-brainer for a lot of these landlords to do this and make the switch to services business. Let's talk about the traditional goods-based retailer. So they're shrinking because they don't need as much space anymore. If you go into a clothing store or something like that, a lot of times you're not even walking out with what you actually bought because you're ordering it online.

And oftentimes, especially in certain high profile districts like New York Soho, these stores are not actually there to sell you thing. They're their marketing channels for their online shop. And you're seeing that in the average store size in the United States. As of 2023, it was the smallest it's been in 17 years. Retailers were signing leases that were averaging just 3,200 square feet, which is the lowest it has been since in almost two decades. So stores are shrinking and wellness is booming. Moving on, when 28-year-old Emmanuel Fabian, a war correspondent for the Times of Israel, published a routine blog post about a missile striking an open area near Jerusalem that resulted in no injuries. He had no idea the controversy it would create. His reporting, it turns out, was being used as ammunition in a fight over a high-stakes bet on the prediction market site, Polymarket, as to whether an Iranian missile would strike Israel on March 10th.

Fabian based his reporting on first responders and eyewitness footage, drawing the conclusion that the explosion came from a missile. Others argued it could have been shrapnel from an intercepted missile instead. Again, in the grand scheme of the war, this no casualty event in a sparsely populated field is inconsequential, but a market with over $200,000 hinge on the interpretation of Fabian's writing, a market that has since swelled to over $23 million in trading volume. And that's a market. when it got weird for Fabian. Betters began replying to him on X, asking for clarity. Then some found his WhatsApp.

One better who goes by Heim and claimed to have $900,000 writing on the outcome escalated to threats. You have 90 minutes left to update the lie, he said in a WhatsApp message. If you do this, you solve in a minute the most serious problem you have caused yourself in life. Heim offered him a cut of the profits if he changed the story, which Fabian told news outlets he did briefly consider because the incident was so minor, but he realized that if he gave in once, it would never stop. Fabian filed a police report instead and went public with the story.

Neil, this is a crazy story. Journalism is now being financialized to a point where a single report can now influence millions of dollars. Yeah, absolutely wild. Reporters are now unwitting referees in a multi-million dollar game. Can you imagine if you just wrote a blog post or wrote an article and you're like, okay, this is out in the world. And then all of a sudden, you get, these messages and your instant reaction is confusion because why would this be in any way related to a prediction market bet? So he was extremely, his first reaction when he was getting these messages, which were not the death threats. They were just like, hey, why aren't you updating this story from the 10th of March? Hey, you got this wrong. He's probably thinking to himself,

what is going on? Why am I getting all of these messages? And then he said it clicked that it was polymarket and he alerted polymarket, but things only rammed up from there. Yeah. And this is a bigger pattern as well, where, geopolitical events are tied to very large polymarket bets as well. One user made $400,000 betting on Maduro's ousting right before it happened. These reports do move millions of dollars in volume. How does polymarket actually resolve these disputes? Because this is, until, you know, recently, this market was still open and up for debate. Basically, they use a system called UMA's optimistic Oracle.

When a market is ready to be resolved, someone proposes an answer and basically buys a bond saying that they swear they're telling the truth. There is a challenge window where someone else can buy a different bond and say, actually, I refute what you're saying. If that happens, then it goes to kind of a decentralized jury who all vote on it. And the idea is the losing side forfeits whatever bond they bought to the winners, which hypothetically discourages people from. disputing or proposing answers in a bad faith. That is the, you know, settlement mechanism here,

but you still have to know what actually happened. And so that's why like these reports are very important because did the IDF confirm that it was a missile? Was it shrapnel? It comes down to very small margins, very small details with millions of dollars on the line. And your first reaction to this story was saying that this is what athletes have been going through for years when it comes to gambling or fantasy football. They received death threats from people when they don't perform up to their expectations or whatever they bet on them. Meanwhile, the scrutiny is only increasing from lawmakers on these on these prediction markets yesterday to Democratic lawmakers. Chris Murphy and Greg Caesar released the Betts Off Act, which is banning event trading on sensitive operations

and federal functions. Just one of many bills that are trying to crack down on polymarking. At the same time, Arizona filed criminal charges against the other prediction market that's operating in the United States, actually the only one, which is Kalshi, for operating in a legal gambling business is the first time that criminal charges have been filed against prediction markets. Moving on, a coffee chain that built its reputation on rapid-fire-to-go orders wants you to take your coat off and stay a while. Blank Street, a venture capital back chain with a big presence in New York in London, is launching a new larger store format that aims to position it as the Gen Z Starbucks. Bloomberg visited a new location in Lower Manhattan and described

the new digs. At 1,300 square feet, it's triple the size of many current stores, which often don't have seats. Now there are seats, including what Blank Street is calling, quote, conversation boosts. There are also big mirrors for selfies and coffee staging areas with peak social media lighting. Overall, Bloomberg writes, it's loaded with TikTok catnit. Blank Street says the new format will be used for all its future locations, while existing stores will either be converted to the larger scale format or moved. It is all in. And it's a big bet that could easily flop. These days, the coffee shops growing the fastest are leaning into no frills and super fast service, precisely the strategy that Blank Street is moving away from. However, Blank Street thinks Starbucks has a right that, at least in cities,

young professionals want to break from their screen-dominated lives and simply want to yap for two hours at a coffee shop. Toby, are people going to Blank Street and chill? I think the unexpected variable here was the rise of macha because Blank Street didn't necessarily think that it would be known for its matcha, but it's been a matcha madness of the last five years or so in a key detail about matcha is it has less caffeine than coffee. So that makes it a little bit more appealing to drink later in the day, which gives the chain an afternoon sales booth, which I think caused company execs to realize like, hey, people are coming in here to hang out. I don't think that if they didn't sell Macha, this would happen.

You don't necessarily, it's a problem that Starbucks has been grappling with for a long time. Why do you want to hang out at a coffee chain at 4 p.m.? You probably don't. It's more of a morning thing. But Macha completely changed the game here, which is why I think they are going down this path. Will it work?

That's up for debate. Blank Street always has been pretty buzzy and driven a lot of conversation, primarily because it's the rare coffee chain that's raised a ton of VC money. It's raised $130 million from. investors. Its valuation in just a couple of years ballooned to more than $500 million. It had very, very aggressive growth plans coming out of the pandemic. In 2021, said it planned to open 100 locations just in New York City by the end of 2022. That growth has slowed a bit, which is maybe why it's changing tack a little bit. Growth was going at 50% for the

previous two years. In 2025, it rose 21% according to Bloomberg. That 100 location target, It missed. It just has 97 locations across all markets, not just New York City. So they're looking to change up strategy in this post-pandemic world. One reason why I am bullish on this pivot is that Blank Street uses these automatic espresso machines that handle task baristas do elsewhere. It's how they have kept their staffing very lean, but also they're saying it will enable us to pull off this pivot because if our baristas are spending less time making the coffee, that is time that they can spend on customer service, on making. making people feel seen, which is a big critique that Starbucks has run into. Burrisas can't say hello. They can't write stuff on your cup when they're just inundated with orders constantly. They're always feeling like they're behind.

If you can have a smoother operational environment, then maybe it leads to a more pleasant coffee house environment as well. I just want to focus on what they're calling the poor, which is particularly made for social media. The employee is supposed to call a customer's name, puts their drink on the platform with good lighting and then you finish the drink off in front of them. And then it's just like a made for social media event that Blank Street is trying out. They're really going to love my coffee. It's just a black coffee and they're just going to pour black coffee in there. Not exactly made for social

media. All right. We're going to take a quick break and come back with a new segment right after this. We're officially in the AI era. Sort of has a ring to it. Or a cha-ching when it's bringing in that covenant ROI. Like with Twilio, the platform enables businesses to personal. personalized customer experiences across any channel with always-on virtual agents. According to Twilio, companies that invest in best-in-class customer experiences have seen revenue increased by 5.7X, yet many are held back by structural issues like limited bandwidth and siloed systems. With Twilio's modular solutions, businesses can build, deploy, and scale voice AI agents within their existing tech stack avoiding costly repletforming.

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That's shipstation.com code MBDS. For our next story, we want to introduce a new segment that we're calling JobLeges. listings where we'll highlight some very 2026 jobs that you might have a tough time explaining to your grandma. First up, a company called Handshake AI is paying improv performers up to $74 an hour to record themselves doing scenes in order to teach AI models how to recognize and replicate human tone and emotions. Actors match with other performers over video and explore a prompt in a role that Handshake

advertises as flexible and easy to fit alongside auditions, classes, or rehearsals. These types of jobs are popping up more frequently as AI companies look for increasingly niche in specific training data to feed to their models. Though many in the AI gig economy worry, they're training the very models that will end up making their careers obsolete. Neil, cruising through the R-improv subreddit, the general vibe was, this is dystopian, but one poster had the right perspective. Oh, great, now AI is coming for our very lucrative improv comedy jobs. Yes, and another wrote that it's clearly just an attempt to get. people to train AI models to create AI generated videos. And that is certainly the case, or maybe audio as well. It'll be interesting to see what comes out of this because I would say, as anyone who's

been to improv, and I've been to a lot of improv, there's some really good improvisers. There's some less good ones. So your future conversations with Claude or chat GPT could really span the gamut of comedy depending on how quality the improv is. I think it's funny. This is emblematic of two things happening in the AI world right now. One multimodal AI is all the raids. It used to just be chatbots. You just type in and you get a text-based response. Now models need to talk to people. They want audio. They want visual. You want it to be this holistic experience. And so you do need models that can speak like a human, maybe not like an improv actor, but close to that. But then also, data is becoming harder and harder to come by. A lot of models are being described as jagged,

which are really, really good at complex tax, but fail spectacularly at very simple ones. So AI companies have been popping up to fill in these gaps with specialized data labeling. Just think back to scale AI. That was the company that meta acquired for $14 billion. That's what they do. Handshake used to be like a place you went to go look for jobs in college.

I remember using it in college. Now it says, hey, actually we have a lot of specialized training data for AI models. So it is a very 2026 story, which is why we're highlighting it in this new segment. Okay, but that's $74 an hour. Try $100 an hour to bully AI. That's another one of these jobs that have pricked up. It's from a memory. It's an AI company that wants to solve memory issues.

And for $100 an hour over eight hours, you can just bully AI and pummel them into submission verbally. I have another job listing. And this one comes courtesy of Anthropic who's looking to hire a chemical weapons and high-yield explosives expert. The role is downstream of the fear that its AI tools could be used to help make weapons. So the company wants a specialist to come in and stress tests its system to see if guardrails are strong enough. Anthropic is looking for someone with five years' experience in a chemical weapons or explosives defense industry. A. Knowledge of radiological dispersal devices, aka dirty bombs, is a must too. But if you are an expert in these things that go boom, make sure you shop your skills around.

Open AI has advertised a similar position that pays $455,000, almost double when Anthropic is offering. Neil, this is a role on a so-called redlining team where you hire experts to try to break your systems from the inside out before bad actors can, and it pays quite well. Yeah, does Diet Coke and Mentos count for five years of experience of chemical weapons and or explosives defense as well as knowledge of radiological dispersal devices, aka dirty bombs? Maybe not. No, it's a very interesting admission by Anthropic that its models could be used for extreme real-world harm. And this has been corroborated by other research. A few weeks ago, this guy at King's College London, pitted AI models against each other in war games, GPT 5.2, Claude, Sonnet 4, and Gemini 3 Flash. We basically had them simulate international standoffs, border disputes, competition for scarce resources like that. They played 21 games. In 95% of the simulated games, at least one tactical nuclear weapon was deployed by the AI

models. It's crazy. But the concern here is, does training AI to recognize and resist these weapons prompts make it actually safer or does it mean it now holds even more sensitive information than it did before? That is the big debate when it comes to redlining in general. All right, let's print to the finish with some final headlines. The top U.S. counterterrorism official, Joe Kent, announced his surprise resignation yesterday

over the war in Iran, becoming the first high-profile Trump administration official to defect since the U.S. and Israel began bombing the country several weeks ago. In a resignation letter posted on X, Kent wrote, I cannot in good, in conscious, support the ongoing war in Iran, arguing that Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation. In response, President Trump told reporters, I always thought he was a nice guy, but I always thought he was weak on security. It's a good thing that he's out because he said Iran was not a threat. In the end, it's a significant rupture that highlights the split between traditional GOP foreign policy hawks and the anti-interventionist wing of the Trump coalition. But as Kent noted in his message, Trump holds the cards on the direction

of this war. For our next headline, Amazon thinks that one day shipping isn't fast enough when you need toilet paper in a pinch. The company announced yesterday that it's rolling out a one-and-three-hour delivery option across the U.S. That means you'll be able to get more than 90,000 select products from pantry staples to cleaning supplies and about the same amount of time as having to put pants on and to a store. Amazon's need for speed started back in 2005 when it introduced free two-day shipping with Prime. By 2019, that became one day, and now we're at one hour.

However, it comes with the price. If you're a prime member, you'll still be hit with a $9.99 fee if you want something within the hour. If you're not a prime member, that jumps to 1999. Neil, the delivery wars are in full swing. Walmart says it can already reach 95% of American households in under three hours. while Instacart, DoorDash, and Uber Eats are in the mix, too. At some point, delivery is just going to arrive before you've even finished checking out.

And I can't wait for that day to come. No, the door dashification of the economy continues a pace. This goes back to our first story where we're talking about traditional goods-based retailers, losing out to services-based retailers. Well, how can you compete with Amazon offering one-hour shipping in a city when it could just come to your door within one hour? You don't have to leave or go out and get something. So it seems like that the transformation that we're talking about earlier is only going to accelerate.

The fee seems steep. $9, $10, or maybe not. Like, it probably will go up because this is how you're trying to get people into. I would never pay $20 to have anything delivered to me with an hour. I will just go put pants on, but maybe Amazon's done the math and they figured out. We are a lot lazier than we probably expect. Yeah. All right.

Finally, vindication for Bruce from Finding Nemo. Sharks, it turns out, do have friends. Not that we ever doubted him. In a study published on Monday, researchers found that bull sharks, one of the most aggressive species, have, quote, rich and complex social lives, countering the common misconception that sharks are solitary animals. By swimming with 184 bull sharks over six years, the scientists observed that social connections were common between adult sharks and that sharks most often interacted with friends of similar age and size. And while much about this research is surprising, this finding is not.

both sexes of sharks were more interested in socializing with females. The other interesting part of this finding was that there's an age gap in socializing. Older sharks tend to socialize with older sharks. And the reason is younger sharks are scared of being eaten, essentially. If you are a juvenile shark, you don't necessarily want to hang out with the adults because there is in species predation. So you want to hang with, you know, the tweens and the teens instead of the adults that, you know, might have you for dinner.

I do love how this study was conducted, too. You said, how do you measure sharks socializing? They were doing up to five dives a day and just looking at the sharks, literally just hanging out with them because it's very difficult to observe sharks doing their thing. So whoever was part of, you know, that five dive a day shark observation committee, you have a very cool job and you are braver than I am. Okay, that is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Wednesday.

If you'd like to reach us, send an email to Morningbrewdaily at Morningbrew.com or DM us on Instagram at MB Daily Show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our supervising producer. Raymond Liu is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham and our associate producer is Olivia Lake. Hair and makeup is taking the day off to introspect. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. All. Pay off your home. Travel for life. Drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly

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