Let's consider the power of prediction markets.

"I spent most of election night glued to two screens: CNN in the living room and Polymarket on my computer."

Good morning everyone. Yesterday, I threw a party in Brooklyn to celebrate two years of Feed Me. A few hundred people came through throughout the afternoon, and anecdotally, people left with new numbers in their phone with intentions to link and build on all ends of the romantic/professional spectrum.

Thank you all for coming and hanging out, thank you Primo for making the most vertically impressive focaccia sandwiches, and to whoever gave me the miso ginger cookies: please reveal yourself.

Natasha Stagg

wrote about the party this morning:

“Yesterday, I went to Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me merch sale/focaccia sandwich pop-up/anniversary party at Rhodora and the first thing I noticed was a hardcover of Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter on a table. That wasn’t the tone for the rest of the afternoon, though. Emily’s strength is knowing interesting people and getting them interested in each other.”

---

Some housekeeping:

• There’s new merch. Unsurprisingly, we sold out of the embroidered crewnecks and hats yesterday but I’m making more. A lot of you are asking about shipping — it’s a bit timely for me to pack and ship all of these but I’m working on what 3PL could look like for a business of my size. I have a few more t-shirts so drop a note in the comments if you want one and I’ll see what we can work out.

  

  

• I went on Lauren Sherman’s podcast, Fashion People, last week. We talked about members’ clubs, and consumption. Someone last night told me I sounded media trained while discussing New York Magazine’s media power list but I was really just debating how confidently I should’ve said my real thoughts — me and Portnoy should’ve been on that thing.

• I spoke to Semafor about the future of Feed Me. “One of the most talked-about writers in business and culture journalism last year wasn’t employed by The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg.” Not bad.

• And Nat Ives quoted that interview in his WSJ newsletter today.

---

Stay Tuned is a guest column on Feed Me written by

Teddy Kim

. In this column, Teddy will be writing about when entertainment comes in contact with tech — and the implications of that.

PODCASTS & POLYMARKET

One of the interesting contrasts of the election was between 1) the powerful new personalities and faces behind political outreach and 2) the impersonal aggregate forces of prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi, where you could bet on who won what races among a million other things. Together, both have been crowned as kingmakers for being able to swing elections and then tell us decisively who won.

 Trump’s three-hour appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast got almost 70 million views and listens. What kind of numbers Harris would have done… we’ll never know. For context, Harris’s interview with 60 Minutes is sitting at 3.7 million on YouTube. 60% of Americans under 35 listen to a podcast every month, and 54% of all listeners view it as an important source of news and political analysis.

One of the big postmortem election narratives is that the Harris campaign didn’t lean hard enough into alternative media while Trump’s did, just as it was becoming clear that what we’ve thought of as alternative vs. mainstream has been turned on its head. As Adam Faze put it on election night: “Conservatives own digital media. Liberals own Hollywood. Hollywood is irrelevant.”

While the media landscape splintered a long time ago, large blocks of attention have been reaggregated into new hands, and that power can be used, not just to peddle AG1 and DraftKings sign-up codes, but to shape the fate of a nation. This was the year we saw both campaigns (with some bumps) adapting to the new reality.

At Trump’s victory party, UFC CEO Dana White made sure to shout out some of the new names: “I want to thank some people real quick. I want to thank the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin’ With the Boys, and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.” I felt somewhat old only recognizing two of the names but then I thought this was probably the first time a podcaster has been name checked so prominently at a presidential victory party. I don’t think it’ll be the last. I’d bet that in the next election cycle you’ll see a major uptick in campaigns and traditional media outlets partnering with the new creators.

And by the time that comes around, you’ll actually be able to make that bet on Polymarket. I spent most of election night glued to two screens: CNN in the living room and Polymarket on my computer where I was refreshing every 15 seconds. I started posting screenshots of the Polymarket map every hour and it was pretty clear by 10:30pm ET that Harris had probably lost. By midnight, hours before any major outlets had called the election, I went to sleep pretty confident that I wouldn’t be waking up to any surprises like I did in 2016. When I woke up, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan was on CNBC taking a victory lap.

Early observers were already looking to Polymarket last year to read the political tea leaves, but it really hit the mainstream leading up to Election Day, especially when news broke that a Polymarket whale had made a $30 million bet on Trump to win. Ultimately, the French trader put on $70 million and made a profit of $85 million. The really interesting part is how he was able to gain the conviction to make the trade in the first place:

“Polls failed to account for the “shy Trump voter effect,” Théo said. Either Trump backers were reluctant to tell pollsters that they supported the former president, or they didn’t want to participate in polls, Théo wrote. 

To solve this problem, Théo argued that pollsters should use what are known as neighbor polls that ask respondents which candidates they expect their neighbors to support. The idea is that people might not want to reveal their own preferences, but will indirectly reveal them when asked to guess who their neighbors plan to vote for…

As Théo celebrated the returns on Election Night, he disclosed another piece of the analysis behind his successful wager. In an email, he told the Journal that he had commissioned his own surveys to measure the neighbor effect, using a major pollster whom he declined to name. The results, he wrote, “were mind blowing to the favor of Trump!”

This is where the power of prediction markets might actually be socially useful. Many people, justifiably, think of these markets as akin to sports betting. But while your buddy’s 11-leg parlay might not be a lock, collectively, sportsbooks and prediction markets themselves are incredibly accurate. And when bettors like the Polymarket whale do their own quality research and make bets accordingly, they’re effectively sharing that information with everyone else. Markets are working like they should and prices are delivering quality information.

The spread of betting into more and more areas of life is probably not a good thing, but especially under a crypto-friendly Trump administration (Polymarket isn’t legal yet in the US), these prediction markets are here to stay. The silver lining is that we’ll all be better informed for it. And in a media environment where trust in mass media is at an all-time low, is it entirely such a bad thing to have something rigorous we can test pundits against? What would history look like if there’d been a market for “Does Iraq have WMDs?” In our strange new world, not only are questions like that not hypothetical anymore, they’re not just for the talking heads on cable news or even the podcasters. They’re for you.

In other news:

• On the heels of the last Stay Tuned, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney sold a minority stake in their football club to the Allyn family of New York and acquired Wrexham Lager, the oldest lager brewery operating in the UK

• Director Hiro Murai (Atlanta, Station Eleven) is directing his debut feature for A24, Bushido, based on a script written by Henry Dunham (I’m a fan, of both really). I can only hope the success of Shōgun has triggered a samurai phase, the way Gladiator (the first one) and Troy kicked off the sword-and-sandal run in the 2000s.

What to watch:

I’m super excited about FX’s Say Nothing (Hulu) which came out on Thursday. It’s based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s excellent book about the Provisional IRA and the Troubles in Ireland, and follows the story of the major characters and the forgotten victims on all sides of the conflict. My friend Arthur recommended it to me this year, and once I started the book I was completely absorbed. Don’t just take my word for it, take Dua Lipa’s.

It’s especially hard not to draw parallels to the violence now in Ukraine and the Middle East. If it ever feels like all of that “stuff”, tragic and senseless as it is, is something that happens “over there”, the book will completely disabuse you of that idea. I’m a bit surprised they dropped the whole thing at once instead of weekly, but if FX did as good a job adapting this as they did with The Looming Tower, I wouldn’t be surprised if people are talking about this show as one of the best of the year. If you watch the show, let us know what you think.

This concludes Stay Tuned by Teddy Kim.

---

• The Infatuation published their list of Best New Restaurants. Arden Shore, Infatuation’s Editor in Chief, told me, “When we say our team really puts in the work to prepare these guides, we aren't kidding. We feel confident in discussing the comeback of American diners because our New York staff actually spent 24 hours straight in a Brooklyn diner this year. We love helping people choose where to spend their time and money — but it's also a responsibility we take seriously.” She also predicts tiny martinis will be big this year — don’t get me started on the Casa Cipriani martinis.

• I’m inspired by the way

  Alison Roman
  talks her viewers through the levels of dairy in her Thanksgiving mashed potatoes.

• Dan’s Papers, the iconic Hamptons newspaper, is moving to the Big Apple. Kind of. During Hamptons off-season (November through April), Dan’s Papers will publish a New York edition of the paper. The issues are being mailed to Hamptons homeowners whose primary residences are in Manhattan. The goal is staying connected with readers who love the Hamptons — “even when they are in the city after the sun sets on summer.” My dad had a funny take:

  

• I met a man on Friday who called New York Magazine’s review of The Corner Store “scathing.” I responded, “You call that scathing????” and he quickly retracted the statement.

• Which bring me to Feed Me’s Semi-Anonymous Restaurant Critic’s most recent post about the state of restaurant criticism. “Food criticism is dead. It’s so sad. Food criticism was the last man standing. The last kind of criticism with real impact, in my admittedly very biased opinion. (tech reviews are super influential, but not sure if thats criticism) Food is just so different from art, dance, books, or even music.”

• Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor, (daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Edinburgh) is dating an ice cream scooper.

• Coworking space The Malin is opening their fifth location in the Flatiron District. “The new location for The Malin will debut next spring. It will have a 2,700-square-foot mezzanine, 20 private offices, 36 dedicated desks, five meeting rooms, 23 phone booths, a library and two kitchens.”

---

🎟 A SPECIAL MESSAGE FROM OUR FRIENDS AT HOW LONG GONE 🎟

How Long Gone is having a LIVE show this weekend at Webster Hall with Sam Jay & Special Guests.

• Saturday 11/23

• Doors @ 7pm

• GIVEAWAY: The first person to respond to this email naming Jason's favorite Persian restaurant gets a FREE pair of tickets.