You Need a Pep Talk
Donald Trump loves to dance to YMCA at his rallies. But while his messaging attempts to empower young men, his administration is actually setting them up for some tough times. Like the YMCA, the MAGA movement promises an America that features “everything for young men to enjoy.” But that pleasure will come at a cost. In this newsletter, I’ve repeatedly warned about the damage that online sports (and everything else) betting, now made pervasive by the so-called prediction markets, is doing to young men in particular. While some states have tried to keep prediction markets from offering gambling inside their borders — the latest effort comes from Utah, where the state has brought criminal charges against Kalshi — the Trump administration has done everything it can to protect prediction markets from regulation. (If you can’t already surmise that this strategy is tied to Trump family investments, you really haven’t been paying attention for the last couple years.) While gambling attacks and addicts the minds of young men, RFK Jr is helping peptides have the same impact on their bodies. “Anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy has unilaterally passed a rule that will allow specialty pharmacies to sell six specific peptide drugs, overruling scientists at the Food and Drug Administration. The peptides are popular among members of Kennedy’s Make America Health Again movement, and many prominent MAHA figures and Kennedy allies sell them.” Social media influencers are already pushing unproven and untested peptides on a generation of young people trying to turn themselves into Macho Macho men, which has led to editorials like this one in The Lancet: Protect young people from the peptide boom.
+ “Peptides are the building blocks of proteins that play key roles for health. But the benefits and risks of supplementing with injectable peptides, which are popular on social media, are largely unknown.” Harvard Medical School: Peptides: What they are, potential benefits, and safety concerns.
+ Other than being a health-damaging quack, why would RFK Jr overrule his own FDA to promote untested peptides? You don’t need a prediction market to answer that question. The FDA “essentially banned peptides in 2023 because of safety concerns. But an FDA committee met in July to review the evidence on peptides and recommend whether or not to take the highly unusual step of allowing pharmacies to dispense them absent scientific review. The committee was made up of new appointees who consulted with or were employed by companies that were interested in promoting or dispensing peptides.” Lobbyists insist that legalizing these compounds will eliminate “the unsafe gray and black markets.” But, as is the case with prediction market non-rules, it’s more about keeping certain companies and individuals in the black; even if that means a generation of young men are turned into guinea pigs. Time: The Peptide Rush Has Begun.
2
On the Money
On one hand, you have remarkably negative Trump poll numbers and a groundswell movement for change. On the other hand, you’ve got Elon Musk. And that other hand has a deep pocket. The Philly Inquirer with an obvious and clearly stated look at the bigger meaning of this election. The people vs. Elon Musk. “This is a culmination of the pernicious combination of the country’s increasingly extreme concentration of wealth and a half-century of U.S. Supreme Court rulings unleashing those riches on our politics. These twin troubles perpetuate each other: The superrich spend more and more to elect a government that, in turn, does more and more to make them richer. And the cycle repeats.” (Modern American politics comes down to hoping that your billionaires spend more than their billionaires.)
+ Of course, financial power is only one of Musk’s levers of influence. Simon Shuster and Isaac Stanley-Becker in The Atlantic (Gift Article): How Elon Musk Turned on Ukraine. “In a series of posts on X over the weekend, he admitted to causing last week’s outages, and he lashed out at those who call for greater military aid to Ukraine. ‘I have nothing but UTTER CONTEMPT for the virtue-signaling evil warmongers who push for endless slaughter and offer no realistic solution to the conflict,’ Musk wrote. ‘May you burn in hell.’” (With Musk as arguably the most powerful person in the world, we just might.)
3
Brew Ha Ha
May the best team win? Yes, it may. The Milwaukee Brewers brought home the organization’s first World Series title by being really good at baseball. They were great all season, and even better during the playoffs, especially their otherworldly bullpen. And they’re a damn likable team (I’m not just saying that because they beat the Dodgers, but I’m mostly saying it because of that). ESPN: At last, Milwaukee Brewers are World Series champions. “There is simply no facet of baseball and of winning games at which the Brewers do not excel. Only one team scored more runs. They ranked fifth in steals, first in walk rate. They led the majors in batting average and on-base percentage. They did not rely on homers but could go deep when needed and ranked seventh in average exit velocity. In run prevention, the Brewers ranked second in team ERA and second in strikeout rate. The team defense was in the top five to 10 in most leading metrics.” In addition to all that, they had the man upstairs on their side. In this case, I mean the man upstairs in the back row. Brewers dedicate World Series to Bob Uecker.
+ The Ringer: The Brewers Hid in Plain Sight. And the most familiar sight of the playoffs might have been Aaron Ashby, the Brewers’ reliever who pitched 18 scoreless innings without allowing a run.
4
The Walk of Life
Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked 31,000 miles in his shoes. “It was the mid-1990s and Mr. Bushby was a paratrooper in the British Army, obsessed with endurance tests. He was trying to find the longest distance he could travel by foot, but none of his options felt challenging enough, maxing out at a few thousand miles. Then his father suggested in the card that he look into traversing the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia when it froze in the winter — unlocking a path across four continents ... ‘That was when I realized that that’s the kind of thing I’ve been looking for,’ he recalled in an interview. ‘Now we had the ultimate journey.’ Mr. Bushby flew to South America and started walking home. Nearly 28 years later, he’s almost done.” NYT(Gift Article): After 28 Years Walking Across the Globe, He’s Almost Home. “Karl Bushby has walked 31,000 miles, crossing some of the world’s harshest landscapes. He plans to reach his mother’s house in England next week.” (When he hears what he’s missed, he’ll probably immediately go out for a walk...)
5
Extra, Extra
Let the Chips Fall Where They May? “Mr. Huang has not received a defensive briefing, warnings sometimes given to Americans who are being targeted by foreign intelligence services, people briefed on the surveillance said.” NYT (Gift Article): Nvidia Chief Seen as Target of Chinese Spy Plot. “A Chinese businesswoman who had a close relationship with Jensen Huang was found to be passing intelligence to Beijing. President Trump was briefed and took no action.” (So this is allowed to go on, but I can’t drive a Polestar?)
+ FlaviOMG: “Less than 24 hours after losing Brazil’s presidential election, Flávio Bolsonaro appeared to vanish into a convoy of four dark cars. After pulling away from his home in Brasília on Monday evening, the vehicles split in different directions, leaving journalists and authorities scrambling to determine which one carried Bolsonaro. By the next afternoon, the former presidential candidate’s allies were telling reporters he had already reached Florida.” WSJ (Gift Article): How Bolsonaro Fled Brazil: Decoys, a Private Jet and a Friend in the White House.
+ Watch, and Listen to, Your Six? “Some hosts and many guests argue that the United States was defeated in Afghanistan because our presidents and generals, more concerned with politics and optics than the realities of the battlefield, imposed crippling restrictions on Special Operations. Freed from constraints, they say, the lethal raiding machine that Team 6 was a part of — with its exquisite training, cutting-edge technology and overwhelming firepower — might have simply killed its way to victory.” A very interesting piece on why some vets think America is losing wars — it’s an argument that has a lot of influence on the current administration. NYT Mag (Gift Article): They Were the Military’s ‘Quiet Professionals.’ Now They’re Talking. Meanwhile, we’re in a war right now, and Hegseth just fired another top general.
+ Damn Daniel: After Trump made the demand on social media, “Republican Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy has ordered an investigation into the Democratic candidate running for the U.S. Senate in the state after revelations that her campaign appeared to be involved in recruiting another candidate with the same name as Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan.”
+ Strength Avenue Freeze Out: “One of the officials said the military investigators were in touch with their French counterparts about a similar cyberattack on commercial freezers that disrupted supermarkets there earlier this month.” Pentagon treating military base freezer malfunctions as suspected cyberattack.
+ Google Bugle Call: AI fears hammer Google parent’s stock, erasing $500 billion in value. Google is mostly getting stung financially because a lot of ad space goes away (for now) when it answers so many search results with AI. But everyone knows there’s a correction coming. Will Google’s bad day be the trigger? In other tech news, DoorDash to acquire Instacart for $17B. (If they had used Dashpass, they could have closed the deal for $16.9B...)
+ Behind the Eight Ball: However the midterms play out, there’s no denying that Trump has become much less accomplished when it comes to being terrible. “Many Republicans, and even some in Trump’s orbit, don’t quite get it. What has happened, they ask, to the instincts of the man who authored two of the most improbable victories in American political history? Trump’s superpower was his intuitive understanding of what motivated his supporters. Many Republicans privately tell me that he’s lost that feel. Trump now lives, they think, in a gilded bubble, palling around with billionaires, oblivious to—and, even worse, uncaring about—the problems facing so many voters.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): Trump Is Closing From Behind. (I guess that explains why he keeps talking about people’s asses...)
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Bottom of the News
“Reichow is one of the Clark Kents of the running world: superfast marathoners who work incognito day jobs selling shoes, either because they need the money or they just enjoy it. Most aren’t recognized by their customers, who typically take twice as long as they do to finish a marathon.” Your Humble Shoe Salesperson Might Be an Elite Marathon Runner. (Oh, good. Because it wasn’t humiliating enough buying running shoes so I can walk my beagles, slowly over short distances.)
+ “By the time it was behind my board, I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a really big fish.’” Drone video shows a California surfer’s great white encounter. (Our King Tides in California are so bad this year that we may come across sharks at the corner store.)
© 2026 Dave Pell
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