Peptides Win Support from FDA Committee & Philly Gets LeBron on a Bargain

0:01Good morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, it could get a lot easier to add peptides to your medicine cabinet. Then the open versus closed debate is splitting the AI world in two. It's Monday, July 27th. Let's ride.

0:24Good morning and welcome back to the week. You know, Toby, I thought I was done with school forever, but a new program from Arizona State is getting a bunch of attention. The school, famous for its party culture, is launching the first ever bachelor's degree in content creation, which, according to the website, quote, prepares you to become an influencer and strategic storyteller who thrives in the rapidly evolving creator economy. Administrators say, joke, all you want about a degree in influencing. This is a useful way to build skills in this rapidly evolving media environment. And if you want to pad your resume even more, they're even offering a minor in Rizsler appreciation.

1:00I gotta see what this class load looks like. Man, I'd love to go to this party, but I got an 8 a.m. seminar on ring light set up. Dude, I'm way behind on my Mr. Beast face thumbnail practice. Obviously, it's easy to joke about, but learning multimedia production and how to communicate effectively in today's day and age is absolutely a marketable corporate skill. So you can roll your eyes, but Becky and Chad who took TikTok 101 will likely either be famous or gainfully employed by a big five accounting firm before you know it. And now a word from our sponsor, Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Neil, what do you think people actually want from AI?

1:40More hours in the day? Close. When Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude, ran a massive AI interview study, people's hopes were surprisingly human. More time with family, learning the thing they never got to learn, finally starting that business. And the fears? More of the same. hopeful and worried all at once. Which is why Anthropic takes both seriously. They're asking hard questions and doing the work so the future people hope for is the one that shows up. So head to claude.ai.mbd to share your own hopes for AI's future and see what people around the world said. That's C-L-A-U-D-E dot AI slash M-B-D.

2:18The peptide floodgates could soon be opened. Late last week, an FDA advisory committee voted in favor of loosening restrictions on six peptides, despite the FDA's own scientists recommending against it. If the agency ultimately approves the recommendation, as expected, it could lead to a windfall for telehealth companies eager to grab a slice of this booming corner of the wellness world. Peptides are a broad category of short-chain amino acids that are produced in the human body and can also be made synthetically. Some approved peptides, like insulin or GLP-1 weight loss drugs, have proven miraculous for public health.

2:50But recently, a wave of unapproved peptides with names like BPC-157 are being marketed as remedies for everything from wrinkles to a pulled hamstring. These peptides are being sold through a regulatory loophole on the gray market, mostly by Chinese manufacturers pitching them as, quote, for research use only. Proponents of improving access to peptides who include wellness influencers like Joe Rogan and Health Secretary RFK Jr. say, look, people are using peptides anyway. Demand is booming. We might as well bring this above board to create safer, more transparent products. Opponents like the FDA scientists counter that there is basically no paper trail, no clinical evidence of these peptides actually improving health outcomes.

3:30Plus, they point to what seems to be a glaring conflict of interest in the makeup of this advisory panel. RFK Jr. appointed eight new members. Of them, six run clinics that offer peptides. W, it's about to be an amino acid gold rush. You know what the historic parallel that comes to mind here? It's the vitamin industry. If you go back to the early 1990s, it was in a very similar position that peptides are now, which were they were trying to organize this big lobbying campaign to keep Congress from putting FDA oversight on them, essentially. And Congress did respond with a law that exempted supplements from the same requirements pharmaceutical companies face.

4:07Fast forward today, supplement industry is a$70 billion market with lots of beneficial projects, but also lots of gray areas. So maybe that's the future that we are steaming towards as you kind of have this expanded support for peptides. Again, not all peptides are inherently bad, but if they are less regulated, then you start to get some of the gray areas that some critics are saying watch out for. Yeah, I want to talk about exactly what's going on here because there's FDA advisory committee. There's FDA scientists. Like, what is exactly happening? So back in 2023, the Biden administration banned more than a dozen peptides over safety concerns from being compounded.

4:49And what compounded is, is there are these pharmacies out there in the United States and elsewhere where they make individualized medications for people. So maybe they remove an allergen because you're allergic to a specific dye or they put something in pill form and not liquid form. So these compounding pharmacies are not able to make peptides. So what the boosters of this industry say, well, now Chinese manufacturers are making them. You can get them online. They're labeled as for research use only. people are getting them, but it's dangerous because they're just off the market. It's a very murky area.

5:22Why don't we bring this above board? And you've heard a parade of telehealth companies like Hims and Hers, which actually bought a compounding pharmacy a few years ago, saying, yes, we need to bring this above board. So these are the supporters saying we need to allow compounding pharmacies in the United States to create peptides, to just create a more cohesive industry and respond to market demand because people clearly want this. But a lot of people are saying that's not what compounding pharmacies are intended for at all, because you are right. Like they are initially supposed to fill individualized patient needs, not become this alternative pathway around FDA approval.

5:59So on a broader scale, that's one thing that a lot of critics are saying. This just opens up a really slippery slope. We do not think that this is what compounding pharmacies, this is not the niche they should occupy in the greater health space. So that's one question. What do critics want to happen instead? That's the big question because, again, peptides are not inherently bad. Insulin is a peptide drug. Ozempic is a peptide as well. So these are a viable medical technology. So what do critics want? They just want funding on clinical trials. That's the big thing. That's how every drug makes it through to the market eventually.

6:36peptide companies should conduct the research necessary for full FDA approval. That's kind of the big thing that they are putting out. More research needs to be done in this so you don't have the murkier gray area peptides coming in from China, especially. Moving on, Jensen Huang does not spend a lot of time on social media, probably on account of him being the CEO of the biggest company in the world. But just before the weekend, the NVIDIA leader dusted off his Twitter fingers and made his first ever post on X. Was it a new product announcement, a recommendation on which leather jacket to buy?

7:10Nope. Huang instead weighed in on one of the biggest debates in AI right now. Should AI models be open for everyone or kept closed and controlled? His post shared an open letter signed by more than 30 companies from Microsoft and Meta to VC firms like Andreessen Horowitz. Conspicuously absent initially were OpenAI and Anthropic who have been cautious about endorsing open approaches, though OpenAI eventually co-signed. What is an open model? If you go for an open approach, the developer releases model weights in code, allowing others to modify and fine-tune it. Closed Models, on the other hand, sees the developer keep model weights in training methods as locked up as the Krabby Patty secret formula.

7:49There are benefits and drawbacks to both approaches. Open Models, Jensen's letter argues, expands access and improves competition by allowing startups to build, preventing a few companies from controlling the AI ecosystem. They also strengthen security because more researchers can find vulnerabilities and improve them, the letter argues. Of course, the closed model camp led by Anthropic sees things differently. They believe frontier AI is becoming too dangerous to release openly, especially because it makes it easier for geopolitical rivals like China to copy the technology. Jensen's post does come right as the US government is debating whether to restrict open-weight AI models, particularly China's Kimi K3, which is the most powerful open model in the world.

8:31Neil, the open versus closed debate is something that dates back to the early software development days in the 80s, but it's just as relevant today in the age of AI. Yeah, two recent incidents have brought this debate to a fever pitch. I've never seen tech leaders agree on this same thing all at once. You had a parade of them saying, yes, I support open source. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk saying that a Google CEO, NVIDIA's Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, eventually at OpenAI were just like, yeah, we support OpenAI, not the company, but the concept on Twitter. So the two incidents were, one is these Chinese AI startups releasing very powerful models that rival those from Anthropic and OpenAI, ZAI and Moonshot AI.

9:13That happened over the past couple of weeks, and it spooked kind of everyone. It's been a deep seek moment 2.0. And the second incident was this Hugging Face attack last week. This is the thing that shook the AI industry to its core. A rogue AI model from OpenAI escaped this lab sandbox, this contained environment, went rogue, and then hacked another AI company called Hugging Face. Now, to respond to the cyber attack, Hugging Face first turned to an anthropic model, a very highly effective cybersecurity model called Fable 5, and it wouldn't respond. They said, because this is a proprietary model from the Anthropic and it just wouldn't do what it wanted to.

9:52And then instead, Hugging Face turned to ZAI's model, GLM 5.2, and they said that the situation was resolved very quickly. So they kind of put it out there and said, look what happens when we try to use a proprietary model and an open AI model. Which one was better? They said the open model. This also hits on another kind of controversy in the AI space, which is around distillation, which is essentially using one model to train another model's outputs. We have again seen Anthropic mainly complain to the US government about Chinese companies stealing their models, essentially, copying their homework.

10:28And they say, obviously, we need to protect our own proprietary data. We do not want Chinese companies doing this. And yet, Jensen's letter kind of said, distillation is not necessarily inherently a bag thing. It's a standard technique that actually accelerates innovation. We don't necessarily want to crack down on anything that decelerates innovation. So that's another flashpoint in this debate that, oddly enough, most people are on the side of let freedom ring. Let everyone kind of— Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Exactly. Let more people have access to this data so we can push forward the frontier more quickly.

11:08So that's another—the other part, too, is that it seems like Jensen Huang is aligning himself with what China is putting forth right now. So China just had a big world AI conference in Shanghai, and President Xi Jinping called for a symphony of global cooperation rather than a solo performance by any single country. It seems like a lot of the tech world is arguing for the exact same thing. Yeah, ball is in the Trump administration's court right now because they were making hints that they might want to ban or place heavy restrictions on open models, which sparked this big backlash from most of the American tech industry.

11:44industry. So we'll see whether regulation comes down the pipeline. But this is a debate that is not going away. And it hasn't since, you know, the tech industry started in Silicon Valley in the 70s and 80s. All right. Welcome to winners of the weekend, the segment where Toby and I picked two things that ordered an extra scoop of ice cream just because I won the pre-show game of backyard baseball. So I get to go first. And my winner is cockroaches who just won unprecedented concessions from the Indian government following months of meme fueled protests. Since May, India's Gen Z have been demonstrating against the government under the banner of the Cockroach Janta Party, a satirical political movement inspired by the indestructible insect.

12:21Over the weekend, the cockroaches earned a stunning victory after India's education minister resigned one of their core demands. The Cockroach Party was formed in May following a major education scandal. A high stakes rigorous medical school exam was leaked, forcing more than two million students to take it again. For some, that was too much to bear and at least a dozen took their own lives. Then, two days after the leak, India's top judge reportedly despairs the country's youth as cockroaches with no career direction. Thus, a movement was born spearheaded by Abhijee Deepke, a 30-year-old former Boston University grad student.

12:54Initially targeting India's mess of education system, the cockroaches expanded their protest to a broader critique of the government for failing to provide economic opportunities for young people. With 370 million people in Gen Z, India has the largest youth population in the world. Memes, social media, and self-deprecating humor were the heart of the campaign from the very start. The Cockroaches Party original tagline was a voice for the lazy, unemployed, and chronically online, and even going up against a hostile government that routinely stifles political dissent, they won. After the education minister resigned, Deepkay said, as the saying goes, the world bends if you know how to make it bend.

13:29The demographics involved in this make this such a big story because you mentioned 370 million people. that is the largest youth population in the world, nearly 40 % of graduates in that same age range are unemployed, according to a 2026 study. That is more, four out of every five unemployed Indians are under 30. So that is just a massive base of very discontented people. And especially when it comes to this pressure cooker of an exam environment, that was just the thing that kind of broke the camel's back. The way that this movement spread too is just how modern protests happen. and we've seen it in other countries, Nepal comes to mind, is that it mostly spreads through memes, through reels, through edits, through satire.

14:12This is what the culture is that spreads a protest movement at this point. And there were lots of funny jokes within this very serious movement as well. Protesters were fleeing police and joked about their Strava streaks. There's videos running from police where they edit it like subway surfers. So this is just the language of Gen Z right now. and it can cause massive change via very funny memes and edits. Yeah, obviously. It's not like they went to Arizona State, but clearly they have a knack for attracting followers and getting people engaged online. So the BJP, which is Narendra Modi, the prime minister's party, is considered the world's biggest political party by membership.

14:54Their Instagram page has 9.4 million followers. Well, the cockroach party has grown to over 25 million Instagram followers. That's almost as much as Vozinha from Cape Verde, their goalie. But clearly, this is a huge movement. And they have said they're going to stop their protests after the education minister resigned and Modi bowed to some of their demands. But clearly, this is a playbook that will be copied by Gen Z all over the world. India, the leaders of this movement said, look, we know this has happened in Sri Lanka and in Nepal over the past few months that we've touched upon. But we're a separate case.

15:28But you can see that Gen Z is now a political force. And they're going to be using memes and Subway Surfer edits and Instagram pages to get their job done. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with my winner of the weekend right after this. Every day, shareholders meet to discuss important matters about the companies you invest in. Now you can easily make your voice heard too. Vanguard Investor Choice makes it easy to set your proxy voting preference for your eligible Vanguard index funds. In just a few clicks, you can have a say on important shareholder topics like executive pay and director elections.

16:01Visit Vanguard.com slash investor choice to learn more. It's your shares. It's your voice. It's easy. Vanguard investors own shares of their index funds, and those funds own shares of the companies they invest in. Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor. Neil, do you have any idea how expensive the housing market is? You're just finding out about this? Yes, but thankfully, there's BILT. Built is the membership for where you live that rewards you with points on every housing payment. Renters and owners can earn points to use toward Flights with United and Hyatt, Lyft rides, Amazon.com purchases, and so many more.

16:35Built members also get access to a neighborhood concierge. It can make restaurant reservations, book fitness classes, and find new local spots. Check it out at joinbuilt.com slash mbd. That's join b-i-l-t dot com slash mbd. AI is only as good as what you put into it. So it needs more protein? No, nothing needs more protein. But that's why ShipStation's AI isn't a general purpose tool. It's specialized, trained on decades of real shipping data and billions of actual orders. It can adapt to your unique business, alerting you to low stock, recommending carrier selections and rates, and automating tasks so you can stay one step ahead.

17:13The sooner you switch, the sooner you start saving time and money. Get started today and get 60 days free at ShipStation.com with code MBDS. That's shipstation.com, code MBDS Shipstation.com, code MBDS Taxes and fees apply My winner of the weekend, as much as it pains me to say it Is the Philadelphia 76ers for signing LeBron James While there will be plenty of debate on if the 41-year-old is the missing piece of the puzzle That would make them championship contenders What's undeniable is that the 76ers got a fantastic deal for the Grizzled Goat LeBron is coming to Philly on a two-year,$8 million deal.

17:53The minimum per year salary allowed for a player with over 10 years of NBA experience. While$4 million is a lot of money for normal people, it's the equivalent of a 92 % pay cut for LeBron, who made$52 million with the Lakers last season. I'm not going for money, James' post announcing the movement read, which is good to hear for the guy who just went from having the 11th highest salary in the NBA to the 292nd highest. The reason one of the greatest players ever is willing to play for the equivalent of NBA peanuts is because he wants to give Philly enough roster flexibility to contend, choosing to sacrifice dollars for the chance of adding to his trophy cabinet.

18:32Plus, LeBron has made$581 million in the NBA so far, the most of any player ever, so he's not exactly short on cash. For Philly, the LeBron effect is already in full motion. Its championship odds jump to the third best in the NBA after his signing, and the cheapest ticket to Philadelphia's first home preseason game just hit$283. For context, the average price for a Sixers regular season game last season was just$68. Neil, you have a certain glow to you these days. The LeBron effect is hitting you too. Life is good. The past couple of days have been pretty exciting. And the city of Philadelphia and the region actually may have just made an incredible investment.

19:12Obviously, you just mentioned they didn't pay a lot, but the dividends could be huge. The consultant group, the Boyd Company, projected that LeBron James joining the Sixers could generate between$250 to$430 million in total regional economic activity next season. He is like the Taylor Swift of basketball. And you already saw this. I mean, hours after LeBron signed with the Sixers on Friday, there were already vendors on the Wildwood boardwalk selling LeBron jerseys. So everyone is cashing in. And I saw huge advertisements of planes bringing those banners across the beach towns in New Jersey. So there clearly is a LeBron effect.

19:51There was a 2018 study. This is a long time ago by the American Enterprise Institute that found that within a mile of the stadium where LeBron James played, there was a 13 % boost to restaurants and other similar companies within a mile of the stadium. Employments at those establishments jumped 23.5%. So we could be seeing at least a short-term boom in Philadelphia economic activity. Yeah, researchers of that study described the impact as statistically and economically significant. So the LeBron effect is not just a fake thing that makes Neal look happy these days. It is a real effect. He also fills arenas.

20:28I mean, I think Taylor Swift is not a bad comparison, even though we might get some hate in the comments for that. When he joined Cleveland in 2003, their average arena attendance was 11 ,496. It jumped up to 18 ,287. These are all just getting to capacity, essentially. Same thing happened when he went to Miami. Same thing happened when he went back to Cleveland. Los Angeles basically always has sold out arenas, so it didn't much change there. But he definitely is someone who puts butts in seats. This is not the first time that we've seen a basketball player specifically sacrifice some career earnings for the sake of winning a championship.

21:05That just happened with Jalen Brunson. Remember, he famously left about$113 million on the table to give the Knicks a better chance of building a championship roster. But it is not very often that we see a late career athlete like LeBron sacrifice earnings. If you go to Tom Brady, he earned a higher salary on the tail end of his career in Tampa Bay than he did at the Patriots. Again, he took a lot of pay cuts over his tenure with the Patriots. Peyton Manning made$15 million guaranteed in his final Broncos season. And then Cristiano Ronaldo is the king of maximizing late career. He's making$5.5 million per week over in Saudi Arabia.

21:42So even though it is not without precedent for a player to sacrifice some salary, when you are 41 years old, usually you try to eke every last dollar out of your career. We all know why LeBron actually is going to Philadelphia, and that's because it has incredible golf. And LeBron is a big golfer. And Saquon Barkley, who's on the Eagles, said, hey, if you want to tee it up sometime, let's do it. So whichever country club gave, whether it was Pine Valley or Marion, gave LeBron a membership, I thank you so much. First guy ever to go from Bel Air to West Philadelphia, too. Surprising. It's Monday, so here's what you need to know to stay ahead in the week ahead.

22:18The height of the summer season is causing dangerous weather situations on both sides of the Atlantic. In Spain and France, more than 300 ,000 people have evacuated or taken shelter from deadly fires that are blazing near Madrid and the wine hub of Bordeaux. Spain's prime minister said the scale of this crisis is very difficult to grasp after fires burned through an area larger than Washington, D.C. in just 24 hours. In the U.S., another heat dome is expected to roast the central region of the country at the start of the week, sending temps potentially above 110 degrees from Texas to South Dakota.

22:49The fires also affected the Tour de France, which wrapped up this weekend. The route for the race's final stage was shortened, not because the fires themselves disrupted it, but because security and pleas for the event were reassigned to assist with the fires. That just shows how big of an impact they were having in Europe. Hope everyone is staying safe in America and abroad. Another week, another major slate of earnings that will determine whether your portfolio takes on a shade of green or red. after Google and Tesla stunk it up last week. The next few days bring us more heavy hitters, including Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, and Boeing.

23:26Investors are on the hunt for overspending on AI, and as Google found out, they will punish you if they find it. There's something that may overshadow earnings this week, and that's the Fed meeting. On Wednesday, new Fed chair Kevin Warsh is expected to keep interest rates steady, but a surprise could be in store given how secretive Warsh has been about the Fed's moves. The market has definitely been a little skittish recently, and I have no idea if Warsh and the Fed is going to be a soothing salve or a disruptive thorn. I'm actually kind of excited to see what the reaction to the Fed decision is.

23:58As of this morning, though, oil prices have fallen a bit, down about 6%, and stock futures are up as the U.S. and Iran pause fighting for a second straight day in a row, bringing some optimism that a resolution might be coming down the pipeline. And finally, at the box office, Odysseus might finally meet his match in Peter Parker. The new Spidey, starring Tom Holland in called A Brand New Day, hits theaters on Friday and is expected to make far more money than The Odyssey, despite Chris Nolan's film exceeding all expectations. Whereas The Odyssey opened to$124 million domestically, the new Spider-Man could easily top$200 million.