Blackjack Friday: a Thanksgiving handbook for gamblers.
Legally and ethically, we must inform you: these takes are for fun, not financial advice. Please gamble responsibly.
Good morning everyone. Feed Me will be publishing over the holidays. Ignore it if you’re busy spending time with your families. Enjoy it if you’re laying low and want something fun to read. Hang out in the comments if you need to take a break from debates at the dinner table.
Today’s newsletter includes: Bandit Running gave us the exclusive on their new leadership hires, people are advertising GLP-1s on Substack Notes, and A24 is pushing their brick-and-mortar strategy in 2026.
Some of you might know this, but back in 2020 I co-hosted a podcast about poker with my ex and our friend Jack Mankiewicz. It was called Chips and Dip. Like poker chips, get it? They were also both key producers of my cult classic documentary, The End.
Chips and Dip was ahead of its time. Unfortunately, it ended after eight episodes because dip was the least COVID-friendly food in the world. But we discussed everything from Roanoke Island to the casino scene in Macau.
Today, Jack wrote a guide to gambling over the holidays for all of you. He is not only my former roommate and former podcast co-host, but one of my favorite writers. If you decide to dabble in any gambling over Thanksgiving weekend, please be responsible and set some limits for yourself.
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All I want for Christmas is the Packers Moneyline.
By Jack Mankiewicz
I love gambling so much I’m practically addicted to it. My dad taught me how to play Texas Hold ‘Em when I was 7 years old, and I’ve been making bets ever since. I’ve bet on horses, ping pong, even my own little league games. In 2012, when the words “Draftkings” and “Polymarket” were just a gleam in America’s eye, I parlayed Obama to win the election with the Ravens to win the Super Bowl, and by God, I came out on top. But lately, my childhood love has been getting a pretty bad rap.
Revered NBA figures are involved in cheating scandals with mafia guys named Flappy and Albanian Bruce, betting apps have led to a scourge of young men placing money on same-game parlays that would be better spent on Natty Lite or Adderall, and even Las Vegas, America’s city of dreams, has lost its luster. Why is this happening? It’s the same reason movies aren’t as good and the internet isn’t as fun. Like so many other institutions in 2025, gambling has lost its magic and been stripped of its ritual by the corporate machine. It’s become passive, another part of the endless scroll.
“Parlays are like lottery tickets — lucrative yet foolish, consistently losing for the same reason I have great hair but am also 5’ 8”. God doesn’t give with both hands.”
You used to walk into a casino, hear the clatter of chips and the jingle of slot machines, smell the cocoa butter, and hand your money to an actual human being who would literally tell you “good luck.” You’d call your bookie and ask him about his kids before you asked about the Bears. Even online gambling used to have character. I can’t tell you how many friendly Russians I met in the PartyPoker chat in 2003. But today all the fun and all the personality have been removed. Now we do it slack-jawed in front of the TV, in between posts, while more gambling commercials play in the background. It’s depressing.
I know the apps are a major culprit here, and there are definitely changes that can be made to slow them down, but ever since the Ancient Mesopotamians invented dice, humans have been finding ways to gamble. As someone who had to explain to their parents why a Caribbean holding company was on their credit card bill my sophomore year of college, I’m aware that if you ban it in one form, people will find somewhere else to do it. But just because something happens on the internet doesn’t mean it needs to become just another button to press. We don’t have to do it mindlessly or irresponsibly. We can resist the enshittification and restore the romance.
Gambling isn’t supposed to be a distraction from reality, or the black hole that swallows it up. It is supposed to be the frosting on the flakes of life, connecting us to our fellow man, to that Latvian figure skater who we just put ten dollars on, who a moment ago was nothing but a stranger. As someone who is named after an actual playing card, I know there is a way to bet that is fun, sustainable, and actually means something. One that retains all the magic and mystery — that feeling of suspension when you put your money on the line, when you set your destiny loose in the ever-buffeting winds of fate, and, for just a moment, you’re flying. It starts with never betting on the Jets.
In case that’s not enough, here are five more principles I’ve picked up over the years. My fellow gamblers will already know these things (or strenuously disagree), but for the amateurs and the uninitiated, let these commandments guide you on your journey:
We’re Not Here to Win. We’re Here to Have Fun
Gambling is hard. Even professionals only win about 55% of the time, and to do that, they have to live in the suburbs of Las Vegas and spend their precious time on earth building computer programs about pass defense. That’s not how we do it here. We accept the fact that there are no sure things in gambling, just like there are no sure things in life. You’re going to lose sometimes, and you have to remember in those situations that gambling is no different than golf or chess or the trumpet. It’s something you play. It’s not a job. It’s a game. And even when you lose, games are still fun. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you’ll learn to love it.
Bet With Your Heart, Not Your Head
So-called “gambling experts” will tell you to never bet on your favorite team, to “follow the numbers,” look at the trends, and make your picks without emotion or bias. I call this the Coward’s Way Out. We eschew the scientific method, and rely instead on faith, emotion, and vibrations. I’ve loved the Lakers since I was a boy, and for that reason I’m taking them every time. Betting against them would be like betting against my childhood. But this approach doesn’t just apply to your lifelong allegiances. If you just discovered that Clemson’s best player has a cat named Derrick who taught him about love, take ‘em. The truth is, you can have all the numbers, do all the research, and still lose. If you’re going to be wrong, at least be wrong for the right reasons.
Blame the Bet, Not the Boy
One of the most fucked up things about the rise of sports gambling is how many fans now take their anger out on the athletes themselves. Players who underperform are being bullied online, and even receiving death threats. This just isn’t right, and we gotta stop doing it. The truth is, if you lose a bet, you’ve got nobody but yourself (or me, if you took my advice) to blame. Now, have I ever gotten upset at a 19 year-old child at San Diego State University for missing a key free throw and costing me 11 dollars? Possibly. But when that happens, I don’t find his Twitter and hurl invectives at him. I take a deep breath, and remember what I was doing at 19 — having wine-drinking contests, skipping 17th Century Poetry class to have more wine-drinking contests, and making zero free throws whatsoever.
Life’s A Gamble
If you’ve ever leaned your knee on your crush’s knee, ordered the quail instead of the chicken, or told a prospective boss that you are proficient in Photoshop, then you already know this: you can’t win anything in this world if you don’t risk something first. Whether you are betting on yourself or the Detroit Pistons, you gotta put something in the middle if you want to get it back. I like to look at gambling on cards or sports as practice for the real thing.
Be Responsible
The thing about losing all of your money is that once it’s gone, you can’t gamble anymore, and that’s the last thing we want. And the truth is, it’s really not about the money. Gambling isn’t about getting rich, it’s about feeling alive. It’s about that moment when the dice are in the air, when you’re suspended between two outcomes. That is why we do it. So don’t bet any more than you’re ready to lose, and remember that even if you don’t win, you still got something for your dollar —it’s called excitement, and it’s priceless. This will make your gambling habit sustainable. Like I said, I have been gambling for 25 years, and I’ve never had my legs broken or had to sell my Hyundai Elantra. If you follow these principles, neither will you.
Now that we’ve laid out our gospel of gambling, it’s time to take what we’ve learned, and put it into action. This week is Thanksgiving, which means turkey, “going on a walk” with your cousins, and watching football, which any gambler worth their salt will tell you is the best sport to bet on. If you are looking to impress your uncle or worry your aunt, I’ve got some picks for you. I can’t guarantee they’re all going to be winners, but I can guarantee you’re going to have fun.
Now, real heads will be familiar with these terms, but for the beginners, we’re keeping it simple, and only dealing with two types of bets: the Moneyline, which means your team has to win the game. If you see something like +240, it means a $10 bet wins you $24. And the Spread, which means your team either has to win by a certain number of points or lose by fewer than that number. There are also parlays, where you combine multiple bets and only get paid if they all hit. They are incredibly popular these days, and we do not make them. Parlays are like lottery tickets — lucrative yet foolish, consistently losing for the same reason I have great hair but am also 5’ 8”. God doesn’t give with both hands.
Packers Moneyline (+125) over Lions
If, like me, you were a seven-year-old boy in Los Angeles in 1998, then you were probably a fan of the Green Bay Packers. We had no local team to root for, Brett Favre was cool, and the jerseys were iconic. To a child, the words “Green Bay, Wisconsin” evoked an Oz-like land of magic and wonder. I’ve been unable to quit them, despite Favre being embroiled in a major welfare fraud scandal and Aaron Rodgers, their other iconic QB, taking so much ayahuasca that he stopped believing in vaccines. I don’t know much about our current quarterback’s beliefs, but his name is Jordan Love, which is beautiful. If that’s not enough for you, I also think Detroit’s internal issues with their offensive coordinator are going to come back to bite them. See, I can do research too.
I’m not breaking new ground when I say the Chiefs are annoying. Their quarterback is one of the all-time greats yet still complains about every single call, and their tight end’s fiancée has stopped taking musical risks. After almost a decade of dominating the league, they’ve become boring. The Cowboys kind of suck too, but they are the underdog, and we love the underdog. They’re also playing in their home stadium, which is supposedly state of the art but also features a huge fucked up window that blinds people. If that’s not home field advantage, then I don’t know what is.
Blackjack at Caesar’s Atlantic City Wild West
I don’t really care about the Bengals or the Ravens, so instead of picking the night game, I’d like to make a suggestion. One that can break us out of the passivity bred by sports gambling and put us where the action is. That’s right — it’s called “Going to the Casino.” Maybe don’t do this one on actual Thanksgiving unless you have a very enthusiastic uncle, but last week, on a crystal clear Monday morning filled with possibility, I hopped into the Elantra, and drove 2 hours down the Garden State Parkway to that city called Atlantic.
It is very hard to find a 10 dollar blackjack table these days, but Caesar’s Wild West is a rare exception. As a bonus, they usually have a country band doing Creed(?) covers. I played for several hours with a table-mate, Joaquin, who taught me the Martingale Method, which means doubling your bet every time you lose until you win it back. Scientists say it’s a flawed system based on the Gambler’s Fallacy that prior independent outcomes will affect future ones, but fortunately for me, Joaquin was not a scientist.
Did I immediately lose 80 dollars and then get told by the pit boss that I couldn’t double it because the table has a 100 dollar maximum? Maybe. Did Joaquin and I become friends for life and agree that we were going to one day attend each other’s weddings? Definitely. That’s another cardinal rule of gambling for you — every loss takes you closer to your next win.
Start 2026 with a better job (or better hires) with the Feed Me Job Board.
The boys are fighting: Semafor’s Ben Smith and The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner got into it on X on Monday after Chotiner questioned the ethics behind Semafor’s reporting on the Gulf. Chotiner called them out for running a piece by a writer who has previously published what he calls “pro-Saudi conspiracies” about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi; resharing another piece, about Saudi’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, he wrote: “You would have to be brain-dead to read this piece and not immediately wonder who is funding Semafor Gulf.” Smith shot back that Chotiner was “working on zero information” to smear them. Apropos of nothing, Chotiner’s most recent column, on MBS’s cozy relationship with Trump, is worth a read.
Speaking of Ben Smith, Breaker reported that he has been driving around Brooklyn in a car with the license plate “SEMAFOR.” That’s the closest to the ‘90s Condé Nast town car days that any news exec is getting right now.
SCOOP: The Mulberry, a small Nolita club for private equity guys and their hot girlfriends, is opening an all-day cafe. What I like about The Mulberry is that you can go there for an 8pm date or for bottle service that ends at 3am – our sources confirm that Eric Adams has closed it down partying with his friends. It’s also hard to find and equally difficult to get into. Last time
was there, she watched four fratty-looking guys get denied at the door (bad ratio) and walk straight back to Spring Lounge, where they’d just come from. If you, too, have failed at getting in, you can now try Café Mulberry, which is upstairs on street level. The Mulberry’s founders, Leo, Phil, and Justin, haven’t finalized the menu yet, but they tell Feed Me that they’ll be serving wine and Croque monsieurs when they open on December 9th, and that laptops won’t be permitted.SCOOP: Bandit Running just hired three new leadership team members from Netflix, Spotify, and Kith. Last night, Bandit’s co-founder Nick West told me that the running apparel brand hired Walta Nemariam (formerly Netflix) as Head of People; Steven Barrett (formerly Kith) as SVP of Operations, and Ben Sweeney (formerly Spotify) as Head of Data. I asked him how he thought about recruiting and his plans for the business:
Emily: What excited you about recruiting from tech companies? Was it about getting data-driven people?
Nick: I wasn’t targeting tech companies specifically. We ran a broad search across consumer, retail, and tech, and we chose these leaders given they hit the optimal balance of long-term leadership capability and proven experience scaling within high-performance environments. For the data role, Ben’s work in predictive modeling, marketing attribution, and building monetization engines directly maps to the challenges and opportunities we’re focused on as we scale. For our Head of People, Walta’s track record in recruiting, developing, and sustaining a high-performance culture at Netflix is highly transferable across industries. Ultimately, it wasn’t about hiring from “tech,” it was about hiring the people best equipped to help Bandit grow with discipline and ambition.
Emily: Can you tell us anything about your international expansion plans?
Nick: Almost 30% of our site traffic originated from outside the US this year, and as of now, our wholesale business with independent specialty running and fashion stores is larger outside of the US than it is domestically. To continue to grow our presence abroad, we’ve held pop-ups and activations in London, Madrid, Copenhagen, Berlin and Valencia just in the past 10 months and will be planting roots with a more solid European presence in the first half of ‘26. Details coming later.
Never thought I’d see a Black Friday GLP-1 sale on Substack Notes. But there’s a first time for everything. According to one Substacker, GLP-1 telemedicine prescriber OrderlyMeds is offering a 25% price decrease of “Tirz” (Tirzepatide) and “Sema” (Semaglutide).
And is there anything more American than skipping your Ozempic to feast on Thanksgiving?
A24 is opening shop-in-shops with Barnes & Noble starting in 2026. I’d love to see how much revenue their merch and books pull in each year. In a 2024 interview with Inverse, the film studio declined to provide any numbers around their book imprint.
The Infatuation published an NYC list of “15 Previously Impossible Reservations That Are Easy Now.” Bridges, Theodora, and COTE are some highlights. Everyone say “Thank you, The Infatuation!!!”
Today’s letter made me want to go back to the MGM in Northern Virginia that I loved so much in college
I'm gonna skip Thanksgiving w my family to go play blackjack at Atlantic City now