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

Summary

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Morning Brew Daily

Episode: Polymarket Bettors Threaten Israeli Journalist & Blank Street Wants to Become “Gen Z Starbucks”

Date: March 18, 2026
Hosts: Neal Freyman & Toby Howell

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Neal and Toby unpack the shifting landscape of retail (with services outpacing goods), explore the surprisingly high financial stakes prediction markets can place on journalists, and analyze Blank Street’s big bet to become the Starbucks for Gen Z—plus a roundup of 2026’s most unusual AI job postings and some zippy headlines (from Amazon’s delivery wars to the social lives of sharks). The tone is witty, informed, and conversational, offering both fresh business analysis and cultural context.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Rise of Service-Based Retail (02:35 – 07:20)

• Shift in Retail Leasing:

  • In 2025, for the first time, service-based retailers in the US (gyms, salons, restaurants) leased more commercial space than traditional goods retailers—50.4% vs. 49.6%.
  • Compared to 15 years ago, this is a surge from just 40% for service businesses.

• Driving Factors:

  • The wellness industry (fitness, facials, mental health) is the engine of this growth—worth $2.1 trillion as of 2024.
  • Service-based retail is less vulnerable to e-commerce disruption.

• Changing Status Symbols:

  • Toby notes, “it's not as much as a new handbag...I would rather get a facial every single week because...that is a new status symbol at this point.” (04:04)

• Impact on Landlords & Consumers:

  • Gyms and wellness tenants easily take over vacated big-box spaces; Planet Fitness is highlighted as a top example.
  • Wellness, not goods, now signals affluence—with social media further driving interest in personal services.

• Case Study:

  • A Philly shopping center replaced a 10,200 sq ft liquor store with four service businesses, generating 20% higher rent collectively. (05:57)

• Traditional Retailers Shrink:

  • New leases for goods stores now average just 3,200 sq ft, the smallest in 17 years.
  • Many in NYC/SoHo use stores chiefly as marketing for their online operations.

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2. Polymarket, Prediction Markets, and the Pressure on Journalists (07:20 – 11:00)

• The Story:

  • Israeli war correspondent Emmanuel Fabian innocuously reported on a missile event, which became central to a $200,000+ (now $23M+ trading volume) bet on Polymarket about whether Iran had struck Israel by missile on March 10.

• Journalist Under Pressure:

  • Bettors, one claiming a $900,000 stake, pressured and even threatened Fabian to “update the lie,” offering him a cut if he’d change his reporting.
  • “If you do this, you solve in a minute the most serious problem you have caused yourself in life.” (08:23, paraphrased)

• Fabian’s Response:

  • Briefly considered the apparent insignificance of the incident, but recognized the risks to his integrity and filed a police report.

• Implications:

  • Neal: “Reporters are now unwitting referees in a multimillion dollar game.” (09:02)
  • Journalistic reports can have outsized financial consequences in the era of prediction markets.

• How Polymarket Resolves Disputes:

  • Toby explains: uses UMA’s ‘Optimistic Oracle’ system—a decentralized, bond-based process where an answer can be challenged and resolved by a jury, with financial incentives meant to discourage bad-faith disputes. (10:15)

• Broader Issues:

  • Pattern extends to geopolitics (e.g., one user made $400,000 betting on Maduro’s ouster).
  • Lawmakers (Chris Murphy & Greg Caesar) push the “Bets Off Act” to ban trading on sensitive topics.
  • Arizona files charges against Kalshi, another prediction market, highlighting regulatory scrutiny.

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3. Blank Street’s Gen Z Starbucks Ambition (11:00 – 15:32)

• The Pivot:

  • Blank Street—previously focused on small, rapid “to-go” coffee shops—launches a new, larger (~1,300 sq ft) store design, complete with seats, “conversation booths,” social media-ready mirrors, and coffee-lighting setups.

• Target & Strategy:

  • Wants to be the “Gen Z Starbucks;” aiming for hangout spaces, not just caffeine stops.

• The Matcha Factor:

  • Toby: “The unexpected variable here was the rise of Matcha...it gives the chain an afternoon sales boost...You probably don’t [hang out at a coffee shop] at 4pm. But Matcha completely changed the game here...” (12:58)

• Growth Story & Funding:

  • Raised $130M; valued over $500M.
  • Missed targets (aimed for 100 NYC locations by 2022, now has 97 total); growth slowed from 50% to 21% in 2025.

• Operational Innovations:

  • Neal: Blank Street uses automated espresso machines—leaner ops, freeing baristas for customer service.
  • The “pour” is staged for social media: “Employee...puts their drink on [a] platform with good lighting, ...finish[ing] the drink off in front of them. Made for social media...” (15:14)

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4. New & Unusual AI Job Listings (17:30 – 22:28)

• Improv for AI:

  • Handshake AI hires improv actors ($74/hr) to film scenes, providing emotional, natural conversational data for training multimodal models.

    • Toby (with dry wit): “Oh great, now AI is coming for our very lucrative improv comedy jobs.” (18:33)

• Bullying AI—Yes, It’s a Job:

  • Another gig pays $100/hr to “bully” AI models, stress-testing their resilience to antagonistic inputs.

• AI Red Teaming – For Weapons Experts:

  • Anthropic seeks a chemical/explosives expert (up to $455k/yr at OpenAI) to try to make AI leak or assemble weapon-related info: “Redlining” teams work to break systems before bad actors do.

    • Neal: “Does Diet Coke and Mentos count for five years of experience of chemical weapons and or explosives defense…?” (21:26)

• Broader AI Trends:

  • Data scarcity is real; specialized training gigs proliferate.
  • Multimodal AI demands more than just text—it needs conversations, emotions, and context.

• Wider Implications:

  • Training AI to recognize dangerous prompts could make it more (or less) secure—a subject of heated debate.

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5. Rapid-Fire Headlines (22:28 – 26:20)

• US Official Resigns Over Iran:

  • Joe Kent steps down as top US counterterrorism official, objecting to the Trump administration’s escalation in Iran. Trump minimizes the departure, exposing divides within the GOP. (22:28)

• Amazon Delivers in ~1 Hour:

  • Now rolling out 1 and 3 hour delivery on 90,000 products, but with a $9.99 fee for Prime members ($19.99 for non-members).
  • “At some point, delivery is just going to arrive before you’ve even finished checking out...” (24:09)

• The DoorDash-ification of Retail:

  • Neal: The convenience arms race will only amplify the shift from goods to service-based retail.

• Social Sharks:

  • New research shows bull sharks have rich, complex social lives. Juveniles avoid adults for survival—a detail Toby loves:
    • “You want to hang with, you know, the tweens and the teens instead of the adults that, you know, might have you for dinner.” (25:31)
  • The study involved repeated, in-person dives to observe shark behavior.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Wellness as Status Symbol:

  • “Wellness is the new status symbol, which is why we're seeing…this mix change.” — Toby Howell (04:04)

• On Prediction Markets and Journalism:

  • “Reporters are now unwitting referees in a multimillion dollar game.” — Neal Freyman (09:02)

• On Social Media & Coffee Shops:

  • “Overall, Bloomberg writes, [Blank Street] is loaded with TikTok catnip.” — Neal Freyman (12:00)

• On AI Jobs:

  • “Oh great, now AI is coming for our very lucrative improv comedy jobs.” — Reddit poster, quoted by Toby (18:33)

• On Shark Social Lives:

  • “Older sharks tend to socialize with older sharks…and the reason is younger sharks are scared of being eaten.” — Toby Howell (25:31)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Service-based retail overtakes goods: 02:35 – 07:20
• Polymarket and the financialization of journalism: 07:20 – 11:00
• Blank Street’s Gen Z Starbucks move: 11:00 – 15:32
• AI gig economy & odd job listings: 17:30 – 22:28
• Rapid headlines (US/Iran, Amazon delivery, shark friends): 22:28 – 26:20

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Takeaway

This episode spotlights how business, tech, and cultural trends increasingly intersect—from the new face of retail and the risks journalists shoulder in a gamified betting world, to coffee shops rebranding for the influencer generation and AI companies seeking ever-stranger gig labor. Through humor and sharp analysis, Neal and Toby bring clarity and perspective to tomorrow’s biggest (and weirdest) headlines.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

See homedepot.com licensenumbers Good Morning Brew Daily Show I'm Neal Freyman.

[C]

And I'm Toby Howell.

[B]

Today, more Gyms, Less Stuff how retail is being transformed Then an AI company

[C]

is hiring improv actors to teach its models to be more human. It's Wednesday, March 18th. Let's ride.

[B]

Mark Andreessen thinks your daily journaling habit is pointless. On a recent podcast, the billionaire investor said that he does zero interesting 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 Aurelius, 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?

[C]

You know what Neal, 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.

[B]

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[B]

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 US Than traditional goods based tenants. Or as the Wall Street Journal put it, America now has more spas and gyms than stores selling actual stuff. According to a new Costar 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 Dick's or Barnes and 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 toward uses that are less vulnerable to E commerce. As Costar 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. To we talk a about the experience economy, it's never been more clear than in this retail milestone.

[C]

I was talking with some people around our office and we were talking about like what like 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 you know that is a showing that you can afford something like that. That is a new status symbol at this point. So it is a 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. Fit 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.

[B]

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 1 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 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.

[C]

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 tenant. So it's a no brainer for a lot of these landlords to do this and make the switch to services business.

[B]

Let's talk about the traditional goods based retailers. 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, they're 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.

[C]

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 in 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 hinged on the interpretation of Fabian's writing. A market that has since swelled to over $23 million in trading volume. And that's 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 Haim and claimed to have $900,000 riding 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. Haim 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.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely wild. Reporters are now unwitting referees in a multimillion 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 you. Your instant reaction is confusion because why would this be in any way related to a prediction market? But 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 the alerted polymarket, but things only ramped up from there.

[C]

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 this. 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 bad faith. That is the 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.

[B]

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 receive death threats from people when they don't perform up to their expectations or whatever, they bet on them. Meanwhile there, the scrutiny is only increasing from lawmakers on these on these prediction markets. Yesterday, two Democratic lawmakers, Chris Murphy and Greg Caesar, released the Bets 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 polymarket. 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 cow she for operating an illegal gambling business. 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 backed chain with a big presence in New York and 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 1300 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 booths. There are also big mirrors for selfies and coffee staging areas with peak social media lighting. Overall, Bloomberg writes, it's loaded with TikTok catnip. 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 it right that at least in cities, young professionals want to break from their screen dominated lives and simply want to yacht for two hours at a coffee shop. Toby, are people going to Blank street and chill?

[C]

I think the unexpected variable here was the rise of Matcha because Blank street didn't necessarily think that it would be known for its Matcha, but it's been a match of 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 Matcha that 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 4pm? You probably don't. It's more of a morning thing. But Matcha completely changed the game here, which is why I think they are going down this path. Will it work? That's up for debate.

[B]

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 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 are looking to change post

[C]

Pandemic world I One reason why I am Bullish on this pivot is that Blank street uses these automatic express 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, you know, people feel seen. Which is a big critique that Starbucks has run into. Baristas 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 coffeehouse environment as well.

[B]

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 it's just like a made for social media event that Blank street is trying out.

[C]

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 air.

[B]

Sort of has a ring to it

[C]

or a cha ching when it's bringing in that coveted roi.

[B]

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[B]

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[C]

Boy, have I ever.

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60 days with full access to all features. No credit card needed. Go to shipstation.com and use code MBDS. That's shipstation.com code MBDS for our next story, we want to introduce a new segment that we're calling Job Listings where we'll highlight some very 20, 26 jobs that you might have a tough time explaining to your grandma. First up, a company called Handshake AI is paying improv performers 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 and 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.

[B]

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.

[C]

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 chat bots. 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 tasks 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 Metta 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.

[B]

Okay, but that's 74 bucks an hour. Try $100 an hour to bully AI. That's another one of these job have that have picked up it's from a memory. It's a, it's a 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.

[C]

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 test test its system to see if guardrails are strong enough. Anthropic is looking for someone with 5 years experience in a chemical weapons or explosives defense industry. And 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. OpenAI has advertised a similar position that pays $455,000 almost double when Anthropic is offering. Neil. This is a roll on a so called redlining team where you hire experts who try to break your systems from the inside out before bad actors can. And it pays quite well.

[B]

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 for by Anthropic that it's 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 College London pitted AI models against each other in war games. GPT 5.2 Claude Sonnet 4 and Gemini 3. Flash 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 model models.

[C]

It's crazy, but the concern here is does training AI to recognize and resist these, you know, 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.

[B]

All right, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. The top US Counterterrorism official Joe Kent announced his surprise resignation yesterday over the war in Iran, becoming the first high profile Trump administration officials to defect since the US And Israel began bombing the country several weeks ago. In a resignation letter posted on X, Kent wrote, I cannot in good conscience 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.

[C]

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 1 in 3 hour delivery option across the US that means you'll be able to get more than 90,000 select products from pantry staples to cleaning supplies in about the same amount of time as having to put pants on and drive 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

[B]

out, and I can't wait for that day to come. Now the door dash of vacation of the continues apace. 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 go out and get something. So it seems like the transformation that we're talking about earlier is only going to accelerate.

[C]

The fee seems steep. 9. It'll come down $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.

[B]

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.

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Animals.

[B]

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.

[C]

The other interesting find, part of this finding was that there's an age gap in socializing. Older sharks tend to socialize with 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, because it's very difficult to observe sharks doing their thing. So whoever was part of, you know, that 5 dive a day shark observation committee, you have a very cool job and you are braver than I am.

[B]

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 Morning Brew daily at morning broadcom or DM us on Instagram @me. Daily Show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milian is our super 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.

[C]

Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.