The Yamanaka Secret

The Yamanaka Secret

At age 58, Paradigm’s AI and crypto authority James Altucher recently went to the doctor — for the first time in 40 years.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it” was his motto.

But it was more than that. “It's that I've never fully trusted the health system I'd be walking into.”

As he sees it, the system isn’t designed to make you healthy. It’s designed to treat illness.

“And those are two very different businesses,” he says. “Statins for your cholesterol. Metformin for your blood sugar. Something for the side effects of the something you're already taking.

“That model works well for the insurance companies, the hospital networks and the pharmaceutical executives. A patient is a revenue stream.

“It's how the incentives work — and I've spent my career following incentives. I write about money. I look for places where the money is moving, where the old model is breaking down and something new is taking its place.

“And right now, for the first time, there’s serious money moving into a completely different question: not ‘how do we treat disease?’ but ‘how do we not get sick in the first place?’”

For James, the picture became clear in a series of interviews with longevity experts for his podcast — such as David Sinclair, Sergey Young and Bryan Johnson.

They tipped him off to something called Yamanaka factors — “proteins that, when used together, can literally rewind the age of a cell back to its embryonic state.”

With that knowledge — and no small amount of badgering from a friend — James went to see an anti-aging specialist.

“I called him. He had me do bloodwork. Then he sent me a box of peptides.

“I've barely taken aspirin in my life. Now every morning I inject a small stack of needles into myself. They're subcutaneous — about half a centimeter — so it sounds more dramatic than it is.

“What are peptides? The simplest way I've found to think about them is as text messages to your cells. Each one carries a different instruction: lose weight, grow muscle, repair tissue, improve sleep, slow aging.”

Maybe you’ve never heard of peptides, but you’ve surely heard about the best-known category of them — the GLP-1s like Ozempic that tell the body to stop being hungry.

“The peptide market was $20 billion in 2020. Today it's $162 billion, doubling every two–three years,” says James.

“Ozempic proved the category works. The anti-aging movement gave it scientific credibility.”

Yes, James’ regimen is costly. “The bloodwork, the personalized protocol, the ongoing adjustments — it runs thousands of dollars a year.

“Most people can't access that. And the gap between what's available to someone with a concierge longevity doctor and what's available to everyone else is exactly where the investment opportunity lives.”

That’s because the regulatory dam is about to burst. Last month, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took 12 peptides off the FDA’s bulk substances list — including two of the peptides James is taking.

“That's not a regulatory footnote. That's Washington clearing the path for an entirely different category of medicine to go mainstream.”

James and his team have teased out the best-of-breed investment possibilities in the current issue of Altucher’s Investment Network.

Another Peace Deal!

The “war’s almost over” trade moved into a new and rather surprising phase today.

At midmorning, Axios reporter Barak Ravid posted another one of his so-called scoops: Citing three anonymous sources, he says “U.S. and Iranian negotiators have reached an agreement on a 60-day memorandum of understanding to extend the ceasefire and launch negotiations on Iran's nuclear program, but President Trump has yet to give his final approval.”

We’ve been giving Ravid’s reporting the side-eye for weeks now.

The pattern is oh-so-predictable: Ravid posts a story that suggests peace is at hand, and oil prices instantly tumble. Oh, and insiders place bets on falling oil prices in the futures markets shortly before Ravid posts his story — bets that prove enormously profitable within minutes.

Previous Ravid stories have sent oil prices down sharply, and they’d stay down for days.

But not today: Yes, U.S. crude futures instantly tumbled from $91 to $88.20 — but as we check our screens they’ve already rebounded to $89.74.

As a few sharp-eyed observers of the oil market have pointed out, Ravid’s story arrived only a couple of hours before the U.S. Energy Information Administration posted its weekly inventory figures.

They’re grim stuff — and they might be the reason the dip in oil doesn’t have much staying power.

• At the current pace of drawdown, the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve is two weeks away from falling to its lowest levels since the 1980s

• U.S gasoline inventories are now 6% below the 5-year average for late May, and down 5.2% from a year ago

• U.S distillate inventories (diesel, fuel oil) are now 11% below the 5-year average for this time of year, and down 2.5% from a year ago.

In the meantime, the war enters its fourth month today — and the Strait of Hormuz is still all but closed.

The Ravid story goosed the major U.S. stock indexes — and those moves seem to be sticking.

The S&P 500 is in record territory — up over a half percent to 7,561. The Nasdaq’s gain is even stronger, while the Dow is nearly flat. The software stocks are showing signs of life after being given up for dead in February — IGV, the big software ETF, is up 2.7% on the day.

Congratulations are in order for Chris Cimorelli’s 10X Trade Club readers — who yesterday collected 700% gains in a matter of weeks playing Apple call options.

Elsewhere, “crypto is a wreck,” says Trading Desk editor Greg Guenthner.

“Bitcoin has fallen for three straight days and is now well below $74K. I was starting to get more bullish on Bitcoin as it appeared to finally snap out of its funk earlier this month. But it couldn't manage to take out its 200-day moving average -- and was hit with a textbook rejection near $82K. It has yet to recover.

“Now we're seeing one-month lows for BTC and ETH. Not bullish! At least not in the short term.”

That said, we got a nice email from a reader thanking James Altucher and Chris Campbell for three alt-coin recommendations in Early Stage Crypto Investor that are looking stout this month.

Today’s the big day this week for economic data — and they’re proving a disappointment.

Begin with the Commerce Department’s monthly “income and spend” report — which reveals that personal incomes were flat in April. Literally no one among dozens of Wall Street economists saw that coming — the typical guess was a 0.4% increase.

Contrast that with consumer spending, which grew 0.5%.

In other words, Mr. and Mrs. Average America are spending out of an empty pocket thanks to war-fueled inflation. Thus the saving rate sank like a stone from 3.2% in March to 2.6% in April. That’s the lowest since the record low of 2.2% in June 2022 — when gas prices inched past $5 a gallon.

This report also includes “core PCE” — the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation. It’s up to 3.3%. That’s the fastest clip since late 2023 — and nowhere near the Fed’s 2% inflation target.

Don’t expect the Federal Reserve to cut short-term interest rates under these circumstances — at least not at the next meeting in mid-June. Futures traders are pricing in a 99% likelihood the Fed will leave rates alone.

Also in view today are durable goods orders — orders for anything built to last longer than three years. The number leaped 7.9% in April, but that’s deceiving — driven mostly by a 166% jump in orders for civilian aircraft.

Orders for aircraft and military hardware are very “lumpy” month to month. A more reliable stat called “core capital goods” backs out those two categories. Here, the picture is much more discouraging: March saw a 3.9% jump as everyone was trying to beat price increases. April brings the hangover — a decline of 1.1%.

Gold Is Cheap. But This Is Cheaper

Precious metals are licking their wounds after a two-day sell-off — gold at $4,468, silver at $74.47.

To be sure, gold is down more than $1,000 from its late-January highs. But at that point it had risen too far, too fast. The metals need time to consolidate before the next leg higher.

And present circumstances are setting up that next leg higher beautifully.

“If we look back at history, gold performs great in situations like today,” says Paradigm natural resources pro Matt Badiali — “specifically, when oil shocks create stagflation. If you add rising inflation and falling interest rates to that, it’s even more bullish for gold.”

Rising inflation? Check. Falling interest rates? Not right away — but as Matt says, “gold will do just fine against the dollar if the rates stay the same. And that’s the likely scenario for the rest of 2026.”

Still, as Matt sees it, there’s a better bargain than gold bullion right now. “Gold miners are generating massive amounts of cash at the current gold price…

“The big companies like Newmont (NEM), Agnico Eagle (AEM) and Barrick (B) are cheap today. On a trailing price-earnings (P/E) basis, these companies trade for 14, 17 and 11 times earnings, respectively. To put that in perspective, the S&P 500 average is 25.5–26.5 times earnings.

“That means gold miners are trading at a huge discount to the stocks in the S&P 500.

“But that’s looking backward. If we project forward, gold miners look even better. The S&P 500 forward P/E is 21–22 times. Those same major mining companies’ forward P/Es are: 9.3, 11.9 and 9.5 times respectively.

“That’s cheap. Really cheap. And we believe gold prices are going to go up.

“That means the earnings for these companies should go up further.”

Juking the AI Stats

Some people use AI on the job to become more efficient. And others use AI on the job to look as if they’re becoming more efficient.

The latter is what seems to be going on at Amazon — which has been implementing its in-house “MeshClaw” tool this spring. With MeshClaw, employees can create AI agents to automate tasks on their behalf.

But that’s not how everyone is using it. “Some employees said colleagues were using the software to automate additional, unnecessary AI activity to increase their consumption of tokens — units of data processed by models,” says the Financial Times.

“They said the move reflected pressure to adopt the technology after Amazon introduced targets for more than 80% of developers to use AI each week, and earlier this year began tracking AI token consumption on internal leader boards.”

Yep. If you set up a numerical target, people will do whatever they can to meet and exceed it — even though in theory Amazon discourages its managers from looking at token use when evaluating their underlings.

“When they track usage,” said one anonymous employee, “it creates perverse incentives and some people are very competitive about it.”

Mailbag: Musk, the 1970s

“Elon is not who you think he is!” says the first entry in today’s mailbag.

“I am new to investing, but not unfamiliar with gaslighting. For years, and now daily, there has been constant discussion about SpaceX going public. It seems as though repetition has led many to believe the narrative being promoted.

“I question whether the investment will primarily benefit Elon personally. Will he share more of his wealth with China? Will he support implanting brain chips under the promise of curing blindness? Will Cybertrucks continue to struggle in sales and then require the company to buy them back? Will Tesla Robotaxis ever launch successfully? Will the Roadster ever achieve flight capability? Will he explain the black eye he displayed in the Oval Office? Will it be acknowledged that his bot called Ani is so sexual it warrants prohibition?

“So many questions remain, alongside so many deceptions.”

Dave responds: Skeptics are always welcome here — along with a healthy suspicion of the wealthy and powerful, and their motives.

I won’t attempt to address the questions you raise here. What I’ll do instead is tell you that for many years there was a vigorous and vocal community of finance pros on social media who were convinced Tesla was a zero — the “Tesla shorts.”

One of them labeled Musk “Subsidy Fraud-Boy” and “Mr. Fraudsperger.” They gravitated toward the hashtag $TSLAQ — because the letter “Q” at the end of a ticker symbol denotes the company is bankrupt.

These individuals put their money where their mouth is — betting against TSLA stock, either by short selling or via put options.

They had valid points. Musk does have a certain carnival-barker quality to him. And while he sought to portray Tesla as a cutting-edge tech leader in those days, the company ultimately was in the business of making automobiles — which unlike your typical tech venture of the 2010s was insanely capital-intensive.

The Tesla shorts’ reasoning was sound, their research flawless.

Didn’t matter. Time and again, the Tesla shorts had their asses handed to them.

They fared all right amid the bear market of 2022 when TSLA’s share price got slashed by nearly 75%. But TSLA has since roared back and notched an all-time high at year-end 2025.

So I’ll leave you with two things to chew on today: First, as colleague Enrique Abetyta is fond of saying, “Price is truth.” The price might be grounded in a BS narrative, but the price is the price. You can’t argue with the price; you might as well bark at the moon.

And second, if you’re going to bet against Elon, you need to do so with eyes wide open.

“When it all went to hell,” says the subject line of our next email.

“I am 80 years old and can tell you that everything went off of the rails in the ’70's when we were so full of our own BS that we decided that we could run everything while someone else did all of the actual work.

“We said, ‘Let all the third-world countries do all the laboring and we will just oversee their efforts.’ So we closed down our manufacturing industries, shut our coal mines, stopped drilling for oil and gas, etc., and gave our existence to a world that hated us. It should come as no surprise that we are in a world of excrement of our own devising.

“Like him or not, at least Trump is saying, Enough is enough. It is time for the United States to get back to where we were before the stupidity overtook us.’

“I do not always agree with your positions but I am grateful that you can provide an alternative view whether I like it or not. Keep up the good work!”

Dave: Thank you. There was another event preceding everything you describe that took place in the 1970s — and from which I’m convinced all the other bad stuff followed.

It was President Nixon blowing up the Bretton Woods agreement and cutting the dollar’s last tie to gold in August 1971.

Without any gold backing for the currency, it was easy-peasy for Washington to crank out all the dollars it wanted, send them overseas and get voluminous inexpensive consumer goods in return. Such a deal!

But the result was the hollowing out of America’s industrial capacity and the “financialization” of the economy.

In the immediate post-WWII years the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, real estate) made up under 10% of the economy. Nowadays it’s between 20–25%.

It comes back to one of my favorite pop culture quotes — from Season Two of The Wire, where union boss Frank Sobotka tells a lobbyist friend, “You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make s*** in this country, build s***.

“Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.”