Martin Shkreli Reveals How He Made His First $100 Million (#445)

Martin Shkreli

Yep, PubMed is the government database of all scholastic biomedical literature. So, 36,000,000 papers. If you sit there long enough and you have the passion, you can become a billionaire. It's just a matter of sitting there and sifting, and sifting, and sifting, which most people don't have the patience, desire, or willpower to do. But every single biomedical innovation is logged in on PubMed.

Shaan Puri

What's up? We just had a conversation with Martin Shkreli. If you don't know who he is, you can just Google his name and you'll find that he is, quote unquote, "the most hated man in America," or he is the "pharma bro." He touches on a bunch of different things. You know, the bingo card for *My First Million*—he's made hundreds of millions of dollars. He's super controversial; some people love him, some people hate him. He went to prison for something he did with his hedge fund. In this episode, he tells us a bunch of things. He shares how he made his first million, gives his side of the story on why he bought that drug and raised the price, and explains why maybe it wasn't as evil as it was portrayed. He also discusses why he hates vanilla CEOs who only speak in corporate jargon and why he refuses to do that. He thinks Mark Cuban is full of shit. Additionally, he unveils his new startup in the AI space for the first time ever. It's a pretty interesting conversation with Martin. One thing's for sure: he's not boring. I think we can all agree on that. Some people love him, some people hate him. In this episode, you can see a couple of different sides of him. I'm curious to hear what you guys think. I'd love for you to put in the comments whether you loved this episode, hated it, or felt somewhere in between. You know, we always commit on this pod that when we bring people on, we're not saying this is the best person ever or the worst. We just want to have interesting conversations with interesting people. I want to get into their mind and find out why they are the way they are, how they think, and how they operate. Then you can decide for yourself whether this is somebody you're into or not. So that's this episode with Martin Shkreli. It's about a two-hour interview. Enjoy! Sam, where do you want to start? We can either go more on the AI stuff, or there's some interesting things in your kind of start of your career that I think are fun. Like, you worked with Jim Cramer, is that right? When you were 16 years old, you worked for Cramer, the guy who's always yelling on CNBC. What was that like? What's Cramer like?

Martin Shkreli

Cramer's great. You know, hedge funds were a different world back then. It was a very, very small asset class, maybe $50 billion to $100 billion total. Any private partnership is technically kind of a hedge fund, right? If you have outside investors and you're charging them 1 and 20 or 2 and 20, and you're shorting stocks and doing exotic stuff, you know, that's a hedge fund whether you call it that or not. So, Warren Buffett had a hedge fund. All the folks had a hedge fund. But at the time, the biggest hedge funds were Galleon Group, SAC Capital, you know, a handful, kind of like Tiger, Soros. It was sort of a wild time for the hedge fund industry. It was a very, very small industry, maybe 30, 40, or 50 firms of any significance, and that means like, you know, $100 million or more. So, Cramer is one of those firms. I got to work there; I was very lucky. You were...

Shaan Puri

in high school at the time

Martin Shkreli

I was sort of in this weird state of being both a high school dropout, a high school graduate, and someone continuing their education. It was very strange. I went to this very special school called Hunter, where I fulfilled all my degree requirements pretty early. So, I was already sort of graduated in the state's eyes, but I continued to go to the school, pick up credits, and attend college at the same time. It was just a weird mishmash of education and sort of hard to explain, but I...

Shaan Puri

Were you kind of like... you're almost like a class clown of society now? Were you like that in high school, or were you just a straight-laced kid at that time?

Martin Shkreli

Yeah, absolutely. I was just like this in high school. I could always, if there was somebody that needed sort of dressing down, including, you know, teacher or principal... whatever. I remember my first day of school, I actually dressed down the principal a bit. That was sort of a funny thing to do. I guess I have the... fearlessness of...

Sam Parr

you know but did your parents like discipline you were they like dude what the fuck show some respect

Martin Shkreli

Yeah, you know... I think, but not really. Yes, you... *bitch*. You know, I don't know. I think there's like this... I've always had this opinion that people take themselves too seriously and take authority too seriously. And of course, you know, I landed myself in prison, but yeah, I think that... you know, there's...

Sam Parr

And you are right, they do take themselves seriously. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another prediction that you've gotten correct.

Shaan Puri

I remember one time Martin was on Blab, and again the numbers were going crazy. I thought, "I gotta see what happened. He must be acting a fool or something. I don't know what's going on." So, I go in, and there was a CNN reporter demanding an interview with him. She was like, "You, Martin, I've been watching this. It's really interesting. I would love to have a conversation with you on CNN." He's like, "No, no. You come on my show. This is my show. You want to interview me? We could do it right here." And she's like, "Okay, I'm not going to do that, but if you come on CNN..." He's like, "No, no. Come on the show." Then she starts trying to have a moment to tell him how bad he is. Then he asks her, "I'm going to the gala tonight. You want to be my plus one?" And then he bought her a plate together.

Sam Parr

didn't you end up going out didn't you go out there

Shaan Puri

Not this one, but I just thought, "Wow, what a... like, you know, they don't teach that in PR school." Just ask him on a date if the interview is not going well.

Martin Shkreli

Breaking down the fourth wall is like my specialty, right? You know, I... and what Elon sort of did to that BBC guy the other day, like I...

Sam Parr

yep

Martin Shkreli

I would always ask. I remember one of my analysts who was on the sell side before joining me on the buy side. He brought a management team over to pitch some stock or pitch a PIPE [Private Investment in Public Equity] or something. I asked the CEO why he didn't own any stock in his company. He was sort of hemming and hawing, like, "Oh, this, that... the temperature is kind of getting hot." I said, "You know, because I have your proxy right here."

Shaan Puri

and I

Martin Shkreli

I put it down on the table and I said, "It looks like you make $550,000 a year. That's a good amount of money. Can you promise me today that you'll buy at least $10,000 or $20,000 of your stock?" The guy was just sort of like, you know, it was the most uncomfortable meeting in the history of Wall Street. I kept hammering on it. I was like, "No, but just tell me, why can't you afford to spend $10,000 and buy your own stock? The stock price will go up, everyone wins, you'll show confidence." I just wouldn't let it go for 20 minutes. It was one of those moments where I was breaking down that fourth wall. You're not supposed to do that, you know? His personal finances are up to him, which is what most portfolio managers would say. He's allowed to not own his stock; it's really his call. But, you know, being able to cut to the chase on half these things and address the elephant in the room is kind of the thing that I like to do, even if it's really uncomfortable, difficult, or embarrassing. It's something that I'll just sort of cut to the chase with.

Sam Parr

Well, I remember when you got arrested. The headline was like you had to put up your Fidelity account or something like that, which had like $60,000,000 in it. At the time, you were, I don't know how old you were, 32 or something. I mean, early thirties, very young. It was a significant amount of money, and that was just your Fidelity account, let alone like your touring, the pharma companies that you'd founded. Did you make your first bit of money when you started the hedge funds? How did that come to be? Or were you already doing well just being at the hedge funds where you worked?

Martin Shkreli

oh it's a great question so I never made money at hedge funds I never really made a dollar

Sam Parr

working at or owning

Martin Shkreli

Both. So, when I started at hedge funds, I was young and, you know, didn't really earn money, which was fine. I wasn't optimizing for that; I was optimizing for learning, experience, and good relationships. I mostly succeeded in that, I think. I probably messed up some relationships, but regardless, I did the best I could as a young guy. I started my own fund, and I was pretty terrible at doing the fund management business. You know, investing and being a good investor is kind of like pretty different things, which I think most hedge fund entrepreneurs learn. You can be a really brilliant investor and not manage the actual business well. The business is to grow your assets as much as possible, provide the best sort of adjusted returns possible, and satisfy your clients. I didn't really want to do any of that; I just wanted to invest. I never took fees from any of my funds, which was very, you know, sort of bizarre. There were sort of technical or legal reasons for that, but I never really made any money in hedge funds. When I started my first drug company called Retrophin, which is now called Trevir, this was about 10 years ago. That's sort of where everything came together for me. I learned pharma by being a hedge fund person for 10 years, studying pharma, starting with the early Jim Cramer days, where I was just figuring out what a stock and a bond was, and then moving on to trading these things and working at hedge funds. Then, starting my own, I really mastered pharmaceuticals. I knew everything about pharma and impressed a lot of people in the field or working in hedge funds. It was easy for me to start a drug company and find some really good assets. The first asset I found actually received FDA approval just a couple of months ago, so I'm really proud of that. When our company went public, you know, I became a millionaire.

Shaan Puri

how how how old were you

Martin Shkreli

It was 2012, you know? I was born in '83, so I guess I was 29. I was the CEO of a publicly traded company, and the market cap of that company, like I said, now is roughly $1,500,000,000. The drug got FDA approved, so I'm really happy about that. So often in biotech, people start companies, extract some equity value out of them as they go public, and then the company's drugs don't work. They kind of move on. There are people that have coasted in biotech doing that every 3 to 5 years. I could name some names, but it doesn't matter. Getting a drug FDA approved, especially for me on my first try, was a very nice feather in my cap. I'm happy for the people that are now getting this prescription for this kidney disease. I'm really delighted by that. It was a lot of fun to see that. When people ask me, "Where did you make your first million?" I made my first $25,000,000 all at once. You saw it on the same day. It wasn't like, okay, you make... One of my great friends has a great story. One day, maybe you'll have him on your podcast. He started off trading sneakers when he was like 13 or something. Then he started trading cars, and he ended up trading stocks. He sort of went from $1,000 to $5,000 to $100,000 to $1,000,000 to $5,000,000, you know, etcetera, etcetera. That road isn't one everyone takes. Some people, like me, were literally almost starving and broke, trying to get that big win, and it finally came through.

Shaan Puri

And so, you said a couple of things I want to quickly clarify. You mentioned you didn't make much money in investing because you weren't really good at or interested in fund management. But presumably, if you're good at or interested in the investing side, you would still generate returns. So, what was it like? Didn't you do so hot on the investing side either? Or what happened there?

Martin Shkreli

Yeah, I had a mix of issues. You know, when you run a small fund, you have costs and stuff like that. So, you know, you have startups... how big?

Sam Parr

how big was the fund

Martin Shkreli

I had about $8,000,000. You know, ever since I started, you just can't, like, even with good investing, do that well with respect to returns if you have other costs and things like that. We had all kinds of issues happen along the way that led to that prosecution and stuff like that, which sort of limited our ability to do really well financially. Again, we didn't take any fees either because we had this big issue that came about, and we just decided to not take fees at all. But in the end, our investors did fairly well. The record shows that our investors all made money in our funds, so I was really happy to deliver that. Along the way, there were a lot of twists and turns and hiccups that are not worth going into. Hedge funds for me were kind of like a roller coaster of issues that just happened over and over again, with various unexpected twists and turns that didn't really add up to profit. Some people have hedge funds where if you get off to a good start for your first 3 or 6 months, you can often gain momentum in raising more capital, creating a virtuous cycle. However, you can also go in the other direction. Many funds are started by good investors and end up failing. Those investors often come back, take a few years off, and start a fund again. Hedge funds have the shortest lifespan. If you look at the top hedge funds from the nineties, almost none of them exist today. I think of those top 10 hedge funds of all time; about 5 were shut down by regulatory intervention. It's a very hazardous job. There's a 10% chance of going to jail or facing interference. It's really...

Shaan Puri

you know

Martin Shkreli

kind of dangerous job to be in and you know you're dealing with the markets and you're dealing with representations to investors just how to mark privates right is is kinda like one of these like real debates I know a guy who went to jail for that fairly recently you know anybody looking into your books can basically say oh well you marked this too high you know therefore you you know you're you're defrauding your investors for charging them too much well you marked it too low well now you're defrauding them because you know you're you're you're preferencing the other investors who are coming into the fund so you really can't can't win it's a very tough business you don't build any actual lasting value as you know almost no hedge funds have gone public so it's just kind of a crummy business in general and like I I I don't recommend anyone kind of get into it unless they're so interested in stocks that they can't you know help but like spend their whole time looking at stocks like cramer back then cramer's like a stock addict right so this guy again I I consider him you know not quite a friend but like I I I have a fond memory of working with him I mean he is like a a drug addict to their drug he is like that to securities like he cannot get away from it there's nothing he loves more in the world than stocks and you think about people like warren buffet and say maybe that's that's kinda like them and the average person who wants to get into hedge funds they wanted to get into it because oh I I can make $10,000,000 or I can make $50,000,000 in a year wow look at that jim simons made a $1,000,000,000 I can be like that that sounds great and you know that's a terrible terrible terrible way to look at it right if you wake up in the middle of the night thinking about s and p earnings estimates you should be a hedge funds right but if you don't care on a sunday you know what's what the news is gonna be on monday in the stock market or what you know your favorite company ceo is doing that night you know that that's it's not for you and I think there are people that the hedge fund industry has grown so much people come to finance not understanding that in the nineties and the eighties the only people that were in hedge funds were people like jim and buffet and people like like that that were just like so intensely insanely possessed by the gyrations of the market and if that's not you it's it's kind of not a good industry but for me I I was sort of intensely possessed with pharmaceutical companies and pharmaceutical assets which are drugs and medicines and you know it was actually a better fit to do private equity you know kind of style investing where you actually buy whole medicines whole companies you know that that worked really well for me and I've seen a lot of people in hedge funds sort of transition to that model of well if I can buy 5% of a software company why can't I buy a 100% of a software company right that that makes more sense to me and for me you lose that like one of the things I was very bad at at at trading and investing was kind of that impulse right where you have to have this insanely good discipline as a trader and my partner had this really really great discipline I didn't so I could value a security as good as anyone but when it came time to like executing and actually deploying capital and risk management and stuff like that it was it was much harder for me to be good at that so when it came to wait

Sam Parr

What is that? What does that mean? You're not patient. You wanted the dopamine hit. You wanted the dopamine hit. You wanted the dopamine hit. I'm...

Martin Shkreli

one of those things set it hit

Sam Parr

You're just like... you have normal anxiety, like a lot of people. Is that what that means?

Martin Shkreli

I think that asking someone to manage a portfolio well is one of the most impossible tasks in human psychology. There's this great book I've read, and I've gotten better at it over the years, for what it's worth. My personal trading is paradoxically like "sword and profit." I basically couldn't do that in private investing. The hardest thing to do is really to fight two or three different, for me, specific demons that are psychologically based. But everyone has their own demon. For me, it's avoiding this desire to double down. The market is like this really tough psychological battle where you're constantly going to be humbled by the fact that your opinion is wrong, that your thesis is wrong, and that this stock is not cheap. You're wrong; it's not cheap at all, and you have to sell it. That's really hard cognitively to embrace. You can embrace it every now and then, like, "Oh yeah, obviously I bought this crap stock and I'm wrong." But when you're right, you do get that dopamine hit, and you don't want to confront that loss of the dopamine hit or, even worse, the acknowledgment that you were wrong. You're going to be wrong like 40-50% of the time at best—say 35-40% of the time—and most people don't want to be wrong ever. So the desire is sometimes to double down and just say, "No, I know I'm right. This is an even better opportunity than it was before." If you keep doing that, you will basically go bankrupt. It's like the fastest way to go bankrupt. I've learned this lesson a couple of times now, and I think that I've gotten better at not doubling down. But to be a really great trader, you have to not just avoid doubling down; you also have to get out before all...

Sam Parr

the damage is done

Martin Shkreli

And so, I've started to do that as well. But, you know, these pains are not pains your investors want you to learn on their dime, right? They're pains you have to sort of be ready for when you start your own fund. I sort of started my fund too early and stuff like that, but I think I wouldn't change a lot. In the sense that when you have a fund, you learn more about your industry—if you do it right—than any other sort of job, other than actually being in that industry. You learn a ton about what Wall Street wants. So, let's say if you're a software analyst, it's really great to then have a software company because you know exactly what the exit looks like and what public company investors want to see. The same thing works in biotech. In biotech, to handicap whether this company or stock will be a good stock, you have to figure out if this drug will be a good drug. That's the exact same skill set you need when you're a CEO. So, you have that crossover happening quite a bit more in biotech. I've seen that it doesn't happen so much in tech. People who invest in tech generally don't want to be operators. The tricks you have to learn on the operating side in tech are very different from those in biotech. In biotech, you can actually learn to pick up most of the operating stuff from being an investor. Whereas, I think in tech, being an investor in a software company certainly doesn't make you a programmer, you know?

Sam Parr

Yeah, that's true. And that's what I was going to ask you because you were like, "Well, I started a pharmaceutical company because I love the asset and I learned through it through finance." Which is way different than, for example, my friend Cara's story. She started this company, Hint, which does flavored water. Her reasoning was, "My skin was bad, I didn't want to drink Gatorade or Coke anymore, so I went and boiled fruit peels and made this fruit water that tastes good and is good for you." And they grew from there. Your founding story was like, "Oh, I found assets that were interesting." It's like... that's foreign to me, you know what I mean?

Martin Shkreli

Yeah, so like, if there was a company, for example, my first hedge fund, we bought 10% of this publicly traded company. They had bought this asset from Bristol-Myers, the major drug company in New Jersey. Bristol-Myers spent like $50,000,000 developing this drug, and they quit. They basically said, "This doesn't fit our portfolio. We're not really going after the disease." The disease they were trying to target was hypertension, which is very boring and does not need another medicine. There are like 60 hypertension drugs; there does not need to be a 61st. They just quit on the drug, even though there are people who have really bad resistant hypertension and so forth. So, I really liked this asset. I liked the way it worked. After Bristol-Myers quit on it, the publicly traded company, during the financial crisis, merged with another publicly traded company. I went to the publicly traded company, and again, the only thing I had was a hedge fund moment. I said, "Let me buy." Nobody's told this story, by the way, so this is a good time to tell it because it's really, you know, it's basically a story about how we went to this company with $2,000,000 and turned it into over $1,000,000,000, which is kind of remarkable. But people do this in pharma every day. My friend, and at the time, he was actually my biggest investor, Vivek Ramaswamy, who is now running for president, basically took our business model and supersized it. And again, you know, who influenced who is a matter well left in history, but the...

Martin Shkreli

We went to this company that had the license from Bristol, and they weren't doing anything with it. We said, "Listen, we'll take this, we'll find investors, we'll build a company around it, and I'm going to figure out how to make this work." They said, "Okay, sure. We have this asset sitting here doing nothing. If you pay us $2,000,000, we'll send you the $2,000,000." Now, we sent them $1,000,000, which was really catastrophic because you never want to go back on your word. It was a dire circumstance; I forgot what happened exactly, but we just couldn't come up with the money. We sent them $1,000,000, and they were like, "What the heck? You can't do this!" I was sort of like, "Geez, this is a huge embarrassment or a huge problem." But they were going to have to give us like 30 days or 90 days. We worked it out, and we were able to give them the second million. It was a colossal embarrassment right at the start. I know that stuff happens, but ideally, it shouldn't happen like that. Again, it was really embarrassing and tough, but we got them to $2,000,000. I did all this research and said, "Instead of hypertension, we should go with this rare kidney disease called focal segmental glomerulosclerosis." If you just go on PubMed and have the willpower, you can learn a lot about medicine and really dive in.

Sam Parr

PubMed is just a database of articles. Yeah, PubMed is also for patents, I guess.

Martin Shkreli

Yep, PubMed is the government database of all scholastic biomedical literature. So, 36,000,000 papers... If you sit there long enough and you have the passion, you can become a billionaire. It's just a matter of sitting there and sifting, and sifting, and sifting, which most people don't have the patience, desire, or willpower to do. But every single biomedical innovation is logged in on PubMed, and...

Shaan Puri

and you were sifting for what what were you looking for when you went on pubmed

Martin Shkreli

Yeah, you have to put the pieces together. So, this drug was an endothelin receptor antagonist. What does that mean? It inhibits a protein called endothelin and its function. Well, what will that do? You have to decide. You need to learn where endothelin is expressed in the body, how it works, and what it does. If I stop it from working, what benefits will that have? What problems will that result in? You also have to look at the history. Other companies have tried this; what have they seen? What have they discovered? What's interesting about pharma is that you think these companies cover the waterfront, but they really just prod and poke a little bit. There are probably 10 diseases that this drug could be beneficial for. I made a list of those and said, "Okay, which one of these is going to work for sure?" There are companies that got half the answer and stuff like that. You just have to keep poking, and we found these handful of diseases that really made a lot of sense. Now, the problem was nobody on Wall Street really liked it. It was very early, and there was this tough problem: if you reduce the amount of protein in the urine of a patient, does that really save their kidney? I thought I convinced everyone that I could reduce the amount of protein in the urine, which was a very big endpoint to me, but not as conclusive as, "Okay, am I saving their lives? Am I preventing dialysis and kidney failure?" which is really the so-called hard endpoint. So, I had the soft endpoint that seemed almost certain I was right. I was starting to convince companies like AbbVie, Vertex, and other big biopharmas that I was onto something, but nobody wanted to write a check. I basically got one of the management teams that I used to deal with on Wall Street to invest, and I slowly cobbled together some money. I met folks like Peter Thiel and others to try to get some investors.

Shaan Puri

a reverse merger what what's peter thiel like peter was great

Martin Shkreli

You know, it was, you know, 10+ years ago. He had never done pharma, so we got to meet, and this was going to be basically like his first pharma deal ever. We didn't end up doing the deal, but it was a very funny thing because there was this East Coast versus West Coast mentality. You know, as a Wall Street guy, he was obviously one of the top VC-type guys. This was a time when he had Clarium, and their founder's fund was just getting started and stuff like that. The wheeling and dealing, like Wall Street sort of style, was, "Oh, we're going to do a reverse merger," which is basically kind of like a SPAC with no money. It's even worse than a SPAC. You do the listing and then you raise the money, but it's a way to go public. We did it, and he was like, "Ah, you can't go public in a year or two." The reality is, you kind of can, especially in biopharma where the assets are like these very modular systems. They're not like a base business that has X dollars in revenue and is growing at X rate. These are like, "Okay, this asset's worth something, dead or alive." In other words, if it's being developed or not being developed, it's worth something. You know, especially with the right business plan, it could be worth a lot. So anyway, we decided to go public, raised some money, and started doing clinical trials. The trial worked, and the rest is history. But it takes hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a drug. Again, the value of the company is $1.5 billion. The value of that drug specifically is probably around $1 billion. Again, whether it actually achieves the sales goals or beats them or disappoints, we'll see as the drug launches, and I'm rooting for the company.

Sam Parr

You didn't even get the drug in this example. You didn't get the drug to where people were buying it or using it. You made money off just the fact that this will exist hopefully in 10 years or whatever.

Martin Shkreli

Yeah, and this is where a lot of people don't know my story about medicine. A lot of people think that I take medicines and raise prices. Well, this drug was barely in human beings; it had been in like 30 or 50 people up until that point. You know, I made most of my money in developments in the environment on the research side. So, this is a drug in clinical research. No, it hadn't been FDA approved. It would take 10 years to get it FDA approved. So, it was a long marathon of running studies, getting the evidence, running more studies, getting more evidence, and continuing that process. As we started to do that, the value of the company increased, and people said, "Okay, I think I get this." Then, as the data came in, now it's FDA approved. It's called Filspari. I named the drug Sparsentan; I gave it its first chemical name. You know, I'm so happy it's FDA approved now. I left the company halfway through this process, so I should acknowledge that. But, you know, all the same plans and so forth continued.

Shaan Puri

Did you own most of it at that time, or what was that? Did you have to divest when all the shit went down?

Martin Shkreli

So, I went from 90, you know, when you started it, to 50 when we went public. I think we were at around 40 or 50% after our first financing, down to 30 under our second financing, and down to 20. At the time of our IPO, when you do a reverse merger, you often don't get on NASDAQ. So, we did an IPO on NASDAQ in 2014, and the company was worth like $300 to $400 million. I owned about 15 to 20% of it, and again, this was sort of like my first wealth ever. But the funny thing is, as you guys may know, in a situation like that, you actually don't have any cash.

Shaan Puri

not liquid

Sam Parr

yeah you can't sell it

Martin Shkreli

so you know I've I've got millions of shares of the stock but you know I'm sitting there saying okay well you're

Shaan Puri

like how am I gonna buy this this thing hang on

Martin Shkreli

yeah you're like well you know but well before that you think about like how am I gonna buy this $5,000 a month apartment and go to the $7,000 a month apartment which is like a very funny discussion for somebody that you know has 50 or a $100,000,000 of of of stock value and I would go to these banks and say listen can I borrow 5% of my money of my stock value and they would say no and you know I'd I'd say you know you know why not you know and they'd say well you're it's a new stock you know it's it's kind of you know still you know a little bit on season you're the big shareholder you know we're just not comfortable with it you know it's like sitting there like oh my god you know this is insane because I don't wanna sell my stock because it sounds like kind of a bad signal to the market you know but I don't wanna you know also be starving so it was very like funny thing and I don't wanna be one of those greedy ceos that has you know an insane salary where you don't need it so it was very just sort of a funny circumstance but eventually we had a big squabble at the company I ended up leaving it's very tumultuous and and traumatic story in a lot of ways and it led to my prosecution you know there was this fight with with the board and it got very so nasty that the the the board you know kind of evil people here but the board sort of went to law enforcement as kind of one of their ways to win this fight and you know one of the things that a lot of people don't understand is that there's this big revolving door between corporate law and law enforcement when I said law enforcement I mean the attorney general sorry ausa is the associate us attorneys that work in the department of justice and it's not hard if you go to a law firm you know like a cooley cleary gottlieb skadden arbes pick your paul weiss pick your biggest law firm you say hey we have this guy you did something bad you know look into this you know usually you'll get an indictment pretty fast this happened with the Google guy that had the left yep andrew this happened to a goldman sachs trader that stole some source code but email emailed himself home to work on the source code then he went to another hedge fund they said see he stole an electronic the fbi got him in in 48 hours goldman makes a phone call they'll act on it quickly Google makes a phone call they'll act on it quickly you're a big enough law firm customer you're paying a law firm $10,000,000 and all those law firm partners worked in government right they worked literally in the job that could get united so they could pick up a phone and get it and make it happen and I actually have like the person's name who picked up the phone you know and it's it's like so ridiculous because a boardroom battle a corporate squabble shouldn't turn into you know okay let me just make a call and get you know get this guy arrested then we'll win the fight right and it's like you know I I was actually acquitted of those charges and I'm so proud of that to this day it's like the most the happiest thing that I have to look forward to or to talk about because like it was this clash of like these old hand old older incompetent sort of biotech people and this these younger sort of like aggressive executives that that I shepherded and the older guys kind of won in terms of control of the company but the stock never went up again really and you know it it it just was sort of this company that they were able to sort of siphoned 1,000,000 of dollars out out of which is like for for a lot of talentless executives like that's that's really exciting like getting a a $5,000,000 paycheck a year + a you know golden parachute + all the perks and the power of being the ceo like none of that stuff mattered to me I just wanted to make really big money and really big advances and for a lot of people like you know getting that the thing I just discussed was like that's their life goal that's their career goal there's no no need to do anything else they they'd rather preside over a company that does nothing but pays them $5,000,000 a year than a company that makes a huge advance in in a treatment or whatever so it was this big fight and and it I just basically said I'll I'll start a new company I don't need you guys and I started turing

Shaan Puri

We should let you explain kind of the thing because if people listening to this have basically only heard of you as the guy who jacked up the price of the drugs. I've heard you explain this before many times. Again, I said you were entertaining because somebody would come on and be like, "You're the worst! You're evil! You did this!" And then you would say, "So explain to me what I did exactly." They would immediately not know what the hell to say. They're like, "You raised the price of the drug and now people can't get it." You're like, "Tell me who can't get it? Where are you getting that data from? What?" You would walk them through almost like the Socratic method of what actually happened and what your perspective was on it. So I want you to share that because I think a lot of people have heard the other perspective, which is, "Guy buys drug, raises price, he's evil." That's one perspective. I'd like you to share your perspective, and then people can decide for themselves which they feel to be more true.

Sam Parr

And you didn't even... and there was another funny part related to that: you didn't even go to prison for that reason, right? You had... if I remember correctly, you admitted you were wrong for a bunch of things, but it wasn't even related.

Shaan Puri

unrelated your persona was related

Sam Parr

you're you're

Martin Shkreli

yeah yeah yeah

Sam Parr

But you're... I think you being smug and being an asshole when maybe you should have just been like, "Yes ma'am, I'm sorry," was probably the more appropriate answer. But you were kind of being smug, and you got a lot of shit for that. So I think that hurt your... your thing. But you didn't even get prosecuted for that.

Martin Shkreli

No, yeah, it's not a... I mean, I think that's why it was so small. Because it's not a crime to choose the price of your product. You know, if you guys wanted to charge for this podcast, right? You know, whether it's an advertiser, a partner, or the listener, hey, you can pick whatever price you want. That's your call. It's your job to explore the frontier of that price and volume curve. It's your job to sort of find the maximum revenue. You can choose to do that or not do that. I think that's why American capitalism is so great. It's really the only person's call—the firm owner and the firm management team's call, right? It's not a politician's call. It's not the media's call. It's not the guy in the... you know, in the sort of grandstands' call, you know, hooting and hollering at you. It's not even the patient's call, even though they're your core constituent and we care the most about them. It's your call as the management team, right? You set that price when you email the distributor. That's the price that matters. It's the price that you picked, and nobody can tell you what that price is in any business.

Sam Parr

what was that what was that logic that you that sean was referring

Shaan Puri

To that, you walked people through criticism. It would be... Yes, you had the right to raise the price. That doesn't mean you're not a jerk or that people weren't hurt by that because they now couldn't afford it. So now address that part of it.

Martin Shkreli

the reverse psychology is is super important I'll go through that in a second but I think the most of you know what you said is is really important because it's this like inviolable right and I I was really pissed off quite frankly that there was this effort by by paul wannabe would be politicians that didn't end up winning and and others to try to sort of take that right away through like this regulation by embarrassment right like it was this like we'll shame you until you change your mind it's like no you're gonna shame me into changing my mind like you know that that's insane you're trying to take my my right away it's my right to run my business how I see fit now we'll go through all the logic of why I think it was a good idea and a tenable idea and it's not something a jerk would do it's not something an asshole would do but just first and foremost you know how dare you try to tell me you know what my price should be because ultimately every person in america is working for some business that sets their price and you're basically saying well if you do it to me well you can do it to apple next are you gonna tell them that the iphone's too expensive are you gonna do it to your podcast where an advertiser says oh my god you want $50,000 to post a an ad on my podcast well that's not right I want that for 25,000 notes well you know you're not getting the ad and you know I think that there's this special difference when it comes to healthcare and I I've learned this and processed it slowly and like I said I'll tell you briefly about my new company in a minute but people treat healthcare products and services in a different part of their mind you know a friend of mine worked at amex and got to talk to buffet about this where he said buffet likes businesses where consumers think about the brand with a different part of their mind they don't think about it with the rational part they think about it with the emotional part and amex is an emotional product coca cola is an emotional product you don't think about it and say well this soda water costs you know sugar water costs 20¢ to make I don't know if I wanna buy this for a dollar you know you you just buy the soda because you love coca cola and and the more that you can make people think with that side of their their brain the better in health care you kinda get this like very visceral like entitlement of like no I meet this drug I don't care what costs for the producer I don't care any like this is my right to get this medicine and obviously you know that there that's not quite right in my opinion so getting back to to sort of just again getting past my just annoyance that there'd be people that sort of felt like you know they had a right to tell you what your prices should be without knowing anything about your business in the first place I think the biggest thing that worked on with that socratic method is just showing people how little they know about they're in this industry right most people don't know much about the pharma industry I don't blame them for that right this is the industry that I spent my life in to know that it's an ins and out of pharma you know I wouldn't I wouldn't be I'd be surprised if anybody did so the first thing I tend to ask is well what price do you think product should be and this is sort of where like it all falls apart for for the interlocutor because the average pharmaceutical price would shock most people you know there are rare disease drugs like spinraza and the avexis product for sma there are 1,000,000 of dollars you know it's $1,000,000 for a drug a year you know so every year for the rest of your life you gotta pay $1,000,000 you know there are drugs like that but you and you don't pay

Shaan Puri

that way out of pocket right it's

Martin Shkreli

nobody's paying out of pocket for any of those so you know that's that's an you know the they're starting you know

Shaan Puri

to the insurance company not to the end patient correct

Martin Shkreli

you know we have this convoluted crazy system that generally needs to kinda be broken in half but you know and again I'll show you my product in a minute that unlike mark cuban's garbage is is might actually help the the you know the the first question I always ask people is like well what what do you where do you price a drug where you have I have a I had a drug at recrofen 60 people took it 60 and they needed it to save their life what what price should that be should it be the price of viagra no yeah yeah I I believe in this thing called utility theory of price which I probably studied in in economics a long time ago but forgot but this this this idea is that price has 3 or 4 different theories of of price there's theory of kind of value there's theory of utility and there's sort of other types of theories like it should cost a lot of people sort of like would give me their theories in in lay terms like well it should cost what you made it + a comfortable margin I was okay that that sounds interesting and other people would say well it should cost what it's worth to the user and and that's kinda how most medicine is priced if you can forego some terrible operation you know then and that operation's really expensive by taking this medicine it should sort of cost the price of you foregoing that operation and it's like but for analysis right so for a lot of rare diseases it's like well but for this drug you would be spending 100 of $1,000 a year so it's kind of a bargain at say a $100,000 because otherwise the insurance is gonna spend half a1000000 on you you know going to the hospital every week and so forth and so forth if you price them based on what it would cost like okay well price it at a breakeven well not a lot of incentive to make a medicine like that right you wanna kinda want this windfall profit if you're a drug company because you have this risk that this shit's not gonna work and then you know you'll you'll be a you'll be on applying to a job at pfizer you know after your biotech startup fails so if you do win you can't just break even you know you have to overcome the risks and the risk adjusted possibility that you would have failed otherwise nobody would invest in companies like this if all the benefit was you would break even so you have to have this extra return and so when you do the pricing I think that the best logical thing to do is pick a price that the alternative care in other words a world without this drug you would forego all those costs for this drug and so I think that price works there are people who are you know just littered legitimately out of their mind that say oh the drug should be just should just be free and of course you know we're we're who's gonna pay for the office who's gonna pay for lawyers who's gonna pay for the research

Shaan Puri

who's gonna pay for the next drug right if if every drug is free then nobody's gonna wanna go make drugs

Martin Shkreli

And again, if that's the system society dictated to me, I... you know, all hail its rules. But the society, the system society dictated was: it's your choice what to price your product at, it's the insurer's choice to pay for it, and it's the doctor's choice to prescribe it. There are countries, like there's this miracle drug by Vertex, one of my favorite drug companies for cystic fibrosis. It's a miracle product, literally a cure for cystic fibrosis. Amazing! Cystic fibrosis is no longer a medical problem for 90% of people with the condition. This company should have parades... parades every year for it! But instead, they get sued for it. I have friends whose lives have been saved. One of my friends in high school died of cystic fibrosis at 19. These guys are doing, I use this term very carefully, "God's work" by saving people with CF. There are countries that refuse to pay for the medicine. This is $300,000 a year. And my drug? I ask people all the time, "Well, how much is my drug?" Well, I say, "Oh, you'd pay $7.50." That's not what I'm asking. In pharma, we don't worry about what the price per pill is; we worry about what it costs for somebody to pay for this medicine out of pocket. What is the insurance paying for a full course or full year? And they said, "Well, I don't know. How many pills do you have to take when you take this drug that you raised the price of?" And I said, "Well, why are you ready to criticize me when you don't know what the total cost is? You know, you're already jumping in."

Sam Parr

But you know why they're criticizing you? As I'm listening to this, you talk about a very classic issue, which is both an asset and a liability. You're quite logical. You're like this one guy—I forget his name—the guy who's running for president. He just did what I did, but he did it times ten. I did it early on, which is like you file the very logical thing. We hear this all the time, and we have friends like this where it's like, "Well, I thought it could work because of X, Y, and Z." In most people's heads, they would say to themselves, "Yeah, but no one else is doing it; therefore, it's impossible." In your head, which is a very common thing in entrepreneurs like you, it's like, "No, if A, then B, then C." It's a very logical approach. But where you've messed up is that you're so smart at studying the logic that you also kind of messed up by studying, "Okay, but if I do that, then people will hate me. Therefore, I should probably use these words or smile this way when they confront me." That was like a... it's kind of like what Elon is doing. It's like, "Dude, you're so smart, Elon. You're doing all this amazing stuff. Don't call Twitter 'Titter.' Think of a different troll that's a net positive, not a net negative." And that was what it seemed like was your thing. It's like, "Yeah, dude, you're logical. You're not wrong about this, this, and this, but you're just being a... well, you're being an idiot when you're talking about it. And you're not like... don't smile that way in progress, you know, even if you're..."

Shaan Puri

I respect it because I think... you know, and I'm sure you were told by people what the "correct" way to frame and spin this is. And it's not every executive guy...

Sam Parr

that I

Martin Shkreli

so so I I can be I can be just like the guy at fiserv right just like it

Shaan Puri

like right

Martin Shkreli

and I can and I

Sam Parr

and I think it's cool that you're not that guy but it's like

Martin Shkreli

well that's the issue

Sam Parr

You could have saved 7 years of your life, maybe, and only gotten one less. You just want to be a little bit more likable sometimes to save your own ass.

Martin Shkreli

And sure, I wanted to straddle that line. But how much are... like when I talk at Ivy League schools, I get standing ovations. I think the kids realize that their life, their personality, is about to be choked out by the big pharma, big corporate world. Whether they're going into pharma or finance, their life is over. Their ability to express themselves the way they see fit is done. Their ability to wear what they want to work is over. I think I represent that fresh breath of air. They're like, "Okay, maybe you can actually keep a personality. Maybe you can actually be somebody real," instead of looking at this average CEO of corporate America, like the Budweiser CEO or Anheuser-Busch CEO. It's like, no. I have to say, "What is the maximally least interesting and least offensive possible road to walk?" I can't have a real personality because if I do, someone's going to have an issue with it, and it's going to be a problem for my business. I just hate that the corporate world has gotten to that.

Martin Shkreli

Where, you know, showing who you are or the kind of person you are, or having an opinion of any kind, can be held against you.

Sam Parr

I agree, and the world wants you to be vanilla. I'm... Look, this is why people like our podcast. I also see the other side where it's like, "Yeah, dude, but you just fucked up all those..." I don't know if this is true, but maybe it is. You just messed up all the people who wanted this drug because you got locked up. And/or you hurt your family, or you hurt people who cared about you, all because of you wanting to express yourself. If you want to express yourself, get a fucking dog, go hang out with your cat... like, talk to them, you know what I mean? That's... that's...

Martin Shkreli

that argument

Shaan Puri

That's a really important question: How many people could not afford or were not able to access the drug that previously could when the price was lower? Because the price got raised, was it 1%, 10%, 50%, or 75% of people who could no longer afford the drug? That's the key.

Martin Shkreli

right 0% 0 0%

Shaan Puri

And so, that's the thing. You know, not how far it works... So explain that part because I think that's the key consideration. If you raise the price of the drug and these people who needed it to pay for their illness could no longer afford it, and now they were sort of out... you know, shit out of luck because you bought the drug and decided to reprice it, that would have been one thing. I think that would support the argument against, in a way, at least the emotional argument against. But when you add the fact that nobody lost access to the drug, or a very small percentage—if that's true, I don't know if it's true; I don't do the research on this—but you're saying that that's true, that completely changes the argument in my opinion.

Hubspot

I think so too and and that's why like I was so bold and and to to sam's. You know seemingly like tone deaf right about this because I wanted people to see well he's not a stupid person why is he being so tone deaf and obstinate hopefully it's because he's right and and let me look into that and some people did you know and that's why I've got fans and I'm not billy mcfarland or guy like that you know I'll be able to raise money and start a new business because you know I accomplished things and I'm a skilled guy it's it's this like failure to it's this desire to wanna buy a narrative from media or buy buy anger or rent anger that that's sort of accumulated here people when it comes to medicine like like I said there are drugs far more expensive than deraprim and like $500,000 or more per year deraprim's a one time one course right so there's not an insurer in the world that didn't cover deriprim because if you don't pay the $50,000 roughly what deriprim costs for a whole course forget per pill about $50 if if you end up needing deriprim if you don't pay that you're gonna pay for the guy's funeral you're gonna pay for his actually you visits you're paying for his you know you're gonna pay for a $1,000,000 of this guy being in the icu for the next 6 months it doesn't make sense right financially to not pay for darabrum the other thing is it's such a small medicine this was less than 0.1% of an insurer's budget right it's fucking not even not even a policy is being formed at aetna or unitedhealthcare because it's like no they have automation policies for this stuff like until the drug ends up being like a couple more basis points you know several dozen basis points it's just not gonna be a factor right they're more worried about is somebody taking insulin when they could be taking metformin which is much cheaper right make them make 20,000 people move from insulin to metformin you know or 50,000 or 500,000 people our policy is you got to take otc before you get this expensive prescription that's the kind of policies healthcare health insurers care about again you wouldn't know that unless you're in the healthcare industry right and the problem is when you have people that are that are shooting at you you know and they don't know what your industry is about you know it it's it's akin to me telling like a database programmer well you know no sql databases are better than sql databases and he's like why why why are you saying that well and he starts putting out all these data I'm like well that's just that's just how I feel you know it's better to have a no no sequel than a sequel it's like I wouldn't do that because I'm not that intellectually dishonest but people are very willing to be intellectually dishonest when it comes to things they don't know about because you know it's a personal thing and again my my goal is to better understand how personal health care is to people that it actually is this cherished good and service it's not like food it doesn't have the elasticity of other things it's a very unique product that we put in a different place and you know my my new company is has sort of an effort to sort of understand that make make amends make penance in a in a way because I think that again healthcare is one of these goods that unlike most other goods there's a marginal the marginal demand demand for marginal health care is virtually infinite but amongst the 3 of us nobody is willing to sacrifice marginal health care right you're you and I are probably willing to sacrifice marginal you know clothing right there's only so much money I'm gonna spend on clothing there's only so much money I'm gonna spend on on this or that but if you had infinite money like the the thing you'd probably prioritize is your health you know your your likelihood and well-being and I think that that makes it kind of the special bit of service and that's why we've spent we've gone from sending 5% of our gdp on health care to 20% and I think that's gonna go to 50% over time because our basic goods and needs our maslowian kind of needs are met you know we can eat we can have shelter etcetera etcetera we ultimately just wanna live forever there's no there's reason why the silicon valley trillionaires they want longevity right they want like the they wanna be around forever because you know larry ellison who had grew up kind of you know a little bit fanboying or worshiping you know his his life goal is to live forever and he's not gonna make it but this this idea that all these guys sort of have in their minds that if they spend their billions they'll they'll live forever it's it's there because they love their wife right the the average person in africa probably doesn't think about it that way I think they'd they'd like to but their their life's a lot harder in america we we're really lucky we wanna live forever because of that and I think that makes health you know one of these things where it's demand side driven you know we like to think that health care expenses are going up because of people like me or people like the mylan ceo or the pfizer ceo they're only up because we all demand health care we want health for everyone our families our friends our progeny we all want health care you know to to we're gonna consume more and more of it over time our software is the worst have you heard of hubspot see most crms are a cobbled together mess but hubspot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous I think I love our new crm our software is the best hubspot grow better

Sam Parr

I want to ask you about your new thing, and then I want to ask about your predictions, but first: When you got out of prison, how much of that nut did you still have left? What do you do with your money now? What are you investing in now? Or are you just doing... are you even allowed to trade? Are you just doing like boring index funds? Are you doing more risky stuff? What are you doing?

Martin Shkreli

Yeah, so I got into a very interesting litigation. I was able to pay my court, my criminal fines very, very relatively easily. It was around **$8,000,000**. In that process, I decided to sell the Wu-Tang album, which is a funny thing because there's this NFT bubble. I basically said, "Oh, if I turn this into an NFT or sell it to a crypto bro, I might even get my money back on this thing." It was basically just, you know, a lark, and I didn't think I'd... I marked it down like 75%, but I was able to actually turn a profit on it. So, I was happy to time that bubble well. I was able to pay my criminal fines off, but then I got into this litigation with the FTC (Federal Trade Commission). They actually personally sued me for monopoly. I'm the first person in American history under the Sherman Act, which is 125 years old, to be personally sued by the Federal Trade Commission. This is very odd because John D. Rockefeller, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg—couple of people who are accused of monopolies—their firms got sued. I was actually the first person to personally be sued as a monopolist, which is very odd. They won, so I'm appealing that, but they won a **$60,000,000** hit against me. Until I figure that out, I'm sort of not in the market. It's a very bizarre ruling that I think will get overturned, but again, it shows you that kind of animus from the judge that made that ruling.

Sam Parr

just well and will will that make you broke

Martin Shkreli

If I had to pay the $60, I think I could manage it. But it's just a colossal... you know, a colossal mess. It's like hitting the brakes on production, basically. The company I work for is indemnified, so they will probably have to pay it. But it's just a big cluster... at the moment. You know, I'm sort of focused again. The nice thing about being an entrepreneur and having faith in your talent is that even if you wipe me out and I start at zero, I wouldn't have a problem making several hundred thousand dollars. I think that any business I start—whether it's this one or the next one—eventually, with perseverance, I'll have some great success. I believe that wholeheartedly. When you can find great assets or great people and put capital together with that, magic starts to happen. It's infectious and contagious. As long as you have your mooring straight, you can really make things work.

Sam Parr

should be able to do it

Martin Shkreli

And I think that we've already started that process. So whether this litigation turns out that I'll have to pay, you know, some amount that's been paid by the company, and if I don't have indemnification, something like that, maybe I'll have to pay $30 or $40 million. It would suck, sure. I'd have to sell my farm assets. I'd have to, you know, make room. Would I be able to cover it or not? I'm not even 100% sure, but you know, it all depends on the sale price. But even if you sort of took everything from me and added another $100 million, I'd be, you know, cheery about it and say, "Alright, it's a big challenge, but I'll do it." I think that, you know, I don't view wealth and success as symmetrical or the same thing. I sort of say that, you know, it's almost like a challenge to do it the other way. I know a lot of people make money to be comfortable; I almost feel like I make money to be uncomfortable. I want the bigger challenges, the harder things to do. Like, you look at Elon Musk, and you gotta ask yourself, "Why is this guy making his life so much harder?" New businesses, new ideas—what is going on in his head that he wants more pain? Because it's very painful to deal with all the headaches of these companies. "Oh, half your advertisers just left Twitter. Oh, by the way, you still have to pay the interest on those bonds." I should be sitting there like, "Oh my god, this is so much pain." Why add this on top of my Tesla issues? You know that 100 issues of that company is 100 issues of SpaceX. And again, business is going great at those companies, but there are still intense issues that you have to deal with every day. You've got other lawsuits and other things going on in your personal life. You have eight kids. I mean, why add more challenges to your plate? And I think the answer for me is, like, I love it. You know, I love the game. Whether or not my bank account's got this many zeros or that many zeros, it's not like you're going to be spending it. It's just work. I sit in a room with my team, and I work all day, and that's it. So for me, it's like...

Shaan Puri

I don't know if you follow him, but he has this great quote. He has this Twitter thread called "How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky," and he says something in there that I love. He goes, "I don't wanna just get rich; I wanna be a person who gets rich." Meaning, if you took everything away from me and dropped me, you know, sort of like butt naked in a third-world country, in 10 years, I wanna be wealthy again. I think I have built the skills in order to do that. So that sort of reminds me of what you're talking about, which is like, look, you might lose everything that you've made in the last decade or have this sort of reset. But give it 10 years, and you'll build back up. I think most great entrepreneurs are built that way and wired that way. They almost, in a sick way, kind of relish that opportunity when misfortune strikes. There is some fortune in that misfortune when a situation is bad.

Martin Shkreli

yeah it's it's sort of fun I mean in some ways like I think a lot of people you know like a comeback story too

Shaan Puri

You talked about how you didn't want to be the Pfizer CEO. You kind of knew what you needed to say, and you decided, "F that! I don't want to do business." I put pretty words in your mouth a little bit, but it's sort of like, "I don't want to be that type of CEO, and I don't want to play the game of entrepreneurship." I don't like the world when it's less interesting, when people don't actually say what's on their mind or can speak like a normal human being. Instead, they act like this very tightly wound corporate duck. So, I don't know if you've seen this, but have you guys seen this movement that happened at Stanford? The "Fun Strikes Back" movement? Sure, Sam, have you heard about this?

Sam Parr

no no what is that it's

Shaan Puri

awesome there's basically so there was like the student body election I guess and I don't know the full story because I just read about this I was reading about this this morning I was supposed to be prepping for this but the story fascinated me instead and basically there was a group of people that are at they have a group of students that were running at stanford and they won the election on this movement that they're calling fun strikes back and they're basically like dude the campus and the university has just drained us of our personality it is trying to shut down all the fun things so they're like we are pro athletics we're pro fraternities we are pro partying and we are pro weirdness and they basically talk about like the story they do a great job telling the story they're like you know back in 1981 the you know there's this frat party where that they threw every year where there was sand all over the house like a beach party or whatever and at the end of the night like the the party was over people left but the sand was still there they're like shit what are we gonna do with all this sand we still have so much sand they're like what if we built an island with the sand and they're like there's this little lake what if we took all the sand to the middle of the lake we made an island and that could be our island and they like rallied at 4 or 5 in the morning and they go there and then the groundskeeper's like guys you can't bring a bulldozer here like an excavator to like dump this here and they're like sir we wanna do this for this reason this is our moment this is our legacy like think about this years from now people will wonder how the hell this island was built and tonight is that night and the guy's like alright go ahead and he like lets him in they build the island and it's this epic party or whatever it's the epic finish and then like fast forward to today like the island got the island is gone the lake is gone they shut everything down nobody can visit that that little pond or that lake anymore because there was like an endangered salamander there so they're like no no no shut it down guys and then like 1 by 1 they've kicked off all the fraternities from from the from the campus for like whatever violation they hit a violation they removed them from campus they like scraped all the like each each neighborhood used to have its own name and its own like weird weirdness they like scraped it all off and now it's just like numbered cells it's like you are on the d block 657

Martin Shkreli

and so it's dripping yeah

Shaan Puri

They're like, "You did? We used to have the biggest part of the year, which was this 'Anything But Clothes' party." They decided that it's too risky and it's not fair to everybody, and they're like...

Martin Shkreli

I always wonder, Sean, like who are the... like what did my prosecutors, judges, regulators, and people like Elizabeth Warren do in college? This is what they did in college: they shut down the party and they're like, "No, this is offensive. We gotta shut this party down."

Shaan Puri

right

Martin Shkreli

You know, it's just like, who are these people and why do we ever let any of them have any power? It's frustrating to me that schools like Stanford and many others have had to go through this identity crisis of, "I'm scared to say what I want because what if somebody's going to be offended?" It becomes this meta game where, like we were talking about, could I do the party line and say, "I'm really sorry my actions have caused some misunderstanding," and blah blah blah, and have this non-apology apology? But then, in Japan, the way you say no can be found to be insulting. So you just move the meta to the next level where it's like, "Oh, you saw the way he said no; he didn't really mean it." You know, when he said, "I'm sorry," it wasn't really apologetic. There's a real way to say "I'm sorry." You gotta bow a little bit deeper. It's like, okay, well, it's an insane meta where you're constantly just getting to the next.

Martin Shkreli

Of like inhibiting your personality and what are you really saying? Just come out and say it, you know? I think that that's a really freeing thing to do.

Sam Parr

Yeah, I don't know if it's on Substack, but I'm on your newsletter and you made some wild predictions. I don't remember all the predictions, but you actually had a really good post where you said: "This is gonna happen, I think, in 2023. This will happen in 2030. I think in 50 years this will happen." It would actually be fun to look back at some of your predictions so far turning out to be true. It's very interesting, and you're pretty good at writing actually... you're quite good, actually. Thanks a lot.

Martin Shkreli

you know it's it's hard to write you know professionally like you guys I know sam well I I know sean does for sure when you're an entrepreneur doing anything other than working on your business seems like a waste of time and and like a really painful thing to do because you have to provide for your investors your coworkers your old family the business you love you know it's it's it's hard to to do a lot of writing in brisbane it was a lot easier you know it was it was you know I had more time to sync but even then I was I was actually really busy people will ask me if I was you know you know bored in prison and like it was the furthest thing from it a lot of people ask me why didn't you get jacked up you know in in in prison I didn't have the time you know I was I was working the whole time so you know it's it's always hard to write I love writing but but to to do anything a lot of people ask me if I don't why do why don't I do a podcast and it's the same reason and you know the predictions about ai are are you know some of them echo kind of like other people's predictions you know in a lot of ways we have large language models now they're really interesting they certainly provide for more eye opening potential predictions you know probably some of the craziest ones I've I've made including include things like they'll they'll be kind of interspecies marriage between ai and humans there'll be ai fundamental rights for for voting and things like that that'll kinda reshape society so they're they're pretty wild predictions but I do think they'll happen years from now and I do think we're starting to see some of those things pull in and get accelerated one of my favorite people john clermak recently upgraded his estimate of agi so called artificial general intelligence from 50% by 20 30 to 60% you know john is like this very precise you know calculating nerd who's you know get it you know created the first person shooter he you know is a brilliant guy and he's working on his own company which nobody's talking about called keen technologies I think he's the only employee if I'm not mistaken so he's just sitting there like trying to create like this this brain and you know who knows I think he's a good dark horse for this race but no agi is like how is super captivating to everyone right like it's it's to me if you look at the history of humanity next to maybe relativity or you know a couple of other like magnetism electricity like this is like probably more important and it's the first time humans will have created a mind from from nothing that's stronger than a human and it's really like just so profound that you know I don't think anybody can afford to to ignore it it's more profound than the internet you know it's it's really you know something wild now we don't know when we'll get it we'll get a partial version of it or we're already seeing a partial version of it you know it's it's sort of early days but while I was in prison I was able to think sort of zoom out and think about that a little bit more than maybe the average person and it's funny if you look at sort of openai and some of the other startups that are coming out vis a vis sort of companies like Google and facebook you you see that they kinda did that zooming out many years ago and the companies that are sort of missing this and messing it up are kind of like too close to the to to sort of reality and and the day to day product management to even see it and really understand it that people wanted this you know Microsoft both both facebook and Google had sort of equivalent technology to openai in my opinion years ago and they just still just haven't sort of seen the the actual product you know making sense and and launching and anyway you know it's it's a really interesting time obviously

Sam Parr

what's your what's the new thing

Martin Shkreli

So, I'm releasing an AI physician in the next day or two, maybe even today.

Sam Parr

This will go live tomorrow. So, it might be up. What is there, a URL?

Martin Shkreli

So, you're breaking the news. It's so funny and happenstance because we're talking to places like TechCrunch and all these other outlets. We never really found the perfect reporter who could report on this. So here we go. It's called DoctorGupta.ai. It's the first of its kind: an AI physician. It's basically going to be, what I hope, something that could drastically reduce healthcare costs and drastically improve healthcare quality by providing an AI physician mimic. Basically, it's sort of a synthetic AI doctor that can give you medical information. I think that, you know, most is...

Sam Parr

there is there a btw with a doctor

Martin Shkreli

Or what, Doctor Gupta? Like Gupta.ai, but the site's not up yet.

Sam Parr

oh dot a r

Martin Shkreli

He happens to be Indian, but it's also GPT, so Gupta. So anyway, Doctor Gupta will give you medical information, and you can talk to him. It's free. To me, what a lot of people didn't understand about my price increase and stuff like that—one of the other reasons I was up there, like 50 of them—is that **90% of healthcare costs come from physicians**; **10% come from pharma**. What do you mean, "come from"?

Shaan Puri

what does that mean

Martin Shkreli

We spend **$4 trillion** on healthcare in this country. Most of that money goes to physicians and healthcare workers. I love doctors and nurses; I don't have anything against them. However, a lot of those decisions can be made by machines. Thanks to OpenAI, deep learning, and LLM models, many of those decisions can be handled by AI. So, can we take that **$4 trillion** and make it **$2 trillion**? That would be a big deal. You know, whatever Cuba is doing is not going to save anybody any money, and it's not going to make Mark any money either. But this could actually change the curve on healthcare.

Shaan Puri

Give us 30 seconds on why Cubit's thing... You've referenced it a couple of times, how it might be dumb or not that it's...

Martin Shkreli

Such a shit show. So, he's basically running a pharmacy, right? He's trying to source drugs for cheaper. Mind you, every other pharmacy is pretty good at sourcing medicine. I don't know how he's going to get a deal on, you know, say Teva or some generics any better than CVS or Walgreens. That seems kind of hard to do, right? He doesn't have the volume they have to get that deal and then somehow get a margin. Pharmacy margins are razor-thin. You cannot take a $3 drug and charge $100 for it. Just look at the 10-Q for Walgreens and say, "Yes, like, oh, I'm making a fortune here." So, he's going to somehow get a margin out of that? There's just... it's just hocus pocus. There's no actual way to do that. You know, it's a bunch of lies, basically. He's being dishonest.

Sam Parr

So I'm on Doctor Goopa AI. I see the thing, so I tell it my age, how tall I am, my weight, some of my vitals. If I have lab results, I enter them in, and then what's going to happen next is it's going to say like, "You should check out... you should work on this, this, and this."

Martin Shkreli

no you don't actually even have to enter any of your vitals you could just have a conversation and we've programmed it using these like very you know intricate techniques I was actually you know a lot of people are talking about auto gpt and and baby gpt and I talked to yohe and I talked to all of the people in the middle of that stuff you never know what people are doing privately but we started doing the auto reflective gpt stuff 6 months ago and we were able to discover that depending on the technique you use you can get better chat results than chat gpt and I don't think openai disputes this we've screened thousands of messages that we've tried with the system and we get better better performance than chat gpt by making it kinda like auto reflect and do other kind of methods that again are our secret sauce that get the chatbot to succeed so it's not so much about that medical view it's you can get physician quality advice for free at any time any hour so you and I may be able to call a doctor friend but most people cannot just decide at midnight that if they have a medical question that they can get an answer you have to go on Google you gotta go ask webmd and you're you don't know what you're reading half the time if if you're the average joe you know you're not trained in medicine if you say well what about my chest pain what should I do you wanna talk to somebody you wanna actually have a conversation lms do that amazingly this is a is a is an attraction of gpt 4 they'll actually let you have a natural dialogue with something that as you guys know gpt 4 scores 90% on the usmle it's a 90% performing most doctors don't score 90% on the boards gpt is a ace doctor when it comes to medical knowledge so being able to ask an ace doctor at any time for free about medical information medical advice you know it's pretty profound product they think because again we spend 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars on physicians a lot of the physicians work to be done by ai and if it's an uncomfortable truth that you know again it doesn't mean that we don't need doctors ever again in my world in my vision 50 years from now there's no such thing as a medical doctor there's no such thing as a physician oh

Sam Parr

So that's my future. The site allows me to get 50 messages for free, or I can pay $20 a month. What's the end game here? Do you think this is going to be a massive company, or is this more of a situation where you're like, "I don't know what's going to happen; let's figure it out"? Or are you trying to get after it? What are you trying to do in the next 5 or 10 years with this business?

Martin Shkreli

Yeah, I'm trying to make it a massive company. I think that, you know, it will be a massive company. You never say never in business, but we're certainly going to try our hardest. I do think that you can audit this. This is why technology has never really bent the curve for healthcare. The cost of sending a megabyte, the cost of storing data, the cost of compute—all that has dropped by not just like 90%, it's dropped by like 99.6% more. Yet, healthcare has not moved a bit. Why? It's because of this lobby that exists. The AMA restricts the number of people who can become doctors. The supply is constrained. You cannot just graduate a million more doctors tomorrow. If we could do that, what would happen? The price of medical services would drop like a rock. Our country would be saved. Medicare and Medicaid wouldn't be going bankrupt. We wouldn't be bankrupting ourselves if we had a million more doctors tomorrow. The problem is we don't have a million more doctors in America. One of the reasons is that there are not going to be a million people who pass med school. The other problem is that the AMA specifically says there are only this many med schools and only this many doctors graduating from med school. They make it really hard to become a doctor, even though AI can do all these things very easily. You're going to see a lot of industries collapse because of GPT. I think whether it's law, medicine, or accounting, there's going to be a huge change in society thanks to AI and GPT, I think.

Shaan Puri

So, how is this not like self-driving cars? Even though self-driving is almost better than a human in a bunch of different circumstances—maybe not in certain weather conditions—if it gets one thing wrong, it's all over the news and leads to lawsuits. So, they need to be not just better; they need to be so much better that they can kind of overcome that. How do you not just get sued out of existence for, you know, the one mistaken medical diagnosis or treatment plan or whatever it is? How do you avoid that problem?

Martin Shkreli

Sure, I think it's a lot like self-driving cars. If you gave me the story where there are 50,000 auto fatalities a year in America, and I can press this button right here to reduce that number to 20,000, there are two types of people in the world. There's the first type of person who says, "That's amazing! 30,000 lives saved, 30,000 less funerals, 30,000 less torn families destroyed by needless, terrible automobile fatalities. What a horrible thing! I'm so happy. I can't wait to push that button." Anything stopping me from pushing that button is insane. Why would you delay that for half a second? Then you've got the kind of person, similar to the Stanford party, who says, "Well, wait a second. Are there going to be 20,000 deaths from this? That's an outrage! I can't believe it. Don't push that button." Obviously, one side is right and one side is wrong. But the technical progress of the world cannot be stopped. I'm part of this EAC group, Effective Accelerationism, which is this new movement that's counter to Effective Altruism. You see the E forward / A C C. We've got a lot of really exciting members, some of the biggest people in technology. It's this sort of underground movement of people who don't want to slow down AI, who don't want to slow down technology. I think that the idea that we're here to stop progress because the technology might make one mistake is similar to stopping the automobile because the automobile itself was an improvement over the horse. We have to move forward in the world. We can't look back and nitpick on every single mistake in life. I know that's not how you feel, Sean, but that kind of criticism and that kind of attitude is such a terrible, pernicious threat to our well-being. We have to look at that glass not just as half full because it's 90% full; we can't focus on the 10% that's empty.

Shaan Puri

Right, yeah. I mean, I get it philosophically. It's like the trolley problem. It's like, "10 people, the train's gonna run over 10 people. If I pull this lever, it'll run over those other 2." You know, there's a... whatever. People feel different ways about that. What I mean is, practically speaking, for this company, how does this company not die? Because something like that's gonna happen. What are you gonna do? What do you think is gonna play out there?

Martin Shkreli

Our purpose and policies make sure that you understand this is not medical advice. Doctor Gupta is not a real doctor. If you use our website for medical information, it's simply for informational purposes only. I could read you the whole disclaimer, but the reality of the matter is this: Do you want somebody who's 75 years old, who has pneumonia but doesn't know it? They have a cough, but they're going to die of pneumonia if they don't go to the hospital in the next three days. Do you want that person running around Google trying to figure out if they have pneumonia or not? Or do you want them to go to an LLM (large language model)? What's better? If you don't have the LLM, they're going to go to Google, they're going to go to WebMD, and they're going to try to read it on their own. There's a decent chance they'll mess it up. Whereas if you go to the LLM, you might actually get the superior technology that may save their life. So you're net improving it. If you don't want a net improvement, then you're Elizabeth Warren, you're a Luddite, etcetera, etcetera. If you want the improvement, you're on the right side of history. I think that if you look at the way technology informs regulation, not the other way around, regulation has to serve the people. If the people are getting the benefit, they will demand the right side. If you have people that want to stand in the way of improvement, that's up to them. Listen, if we're told we have to block Doctor Gupta in this state or this country, okay, the Philippines will have it. Remember, GPT knows every single language; it's lingual in every single language in the world. So Japan will have this for free tomorrow.

Shaan Puri

it's like pitbull it's mister worldwide

Martin Shkreli

Right, it's a global product, and that's the amazing thing about being a developer. You normally have to worry about localization, right? Language, all that crap—it's gone now with GPT. This Doctor Gupta knows every language. They beta tested this in Spanish. We might vocalize him and make him like Doctor somebody else in Latin America, but Doctor Gupta matches GPT. Our other option was Doctor Lim, LLM. So, if we pick Doctor Gupta, it's because he's literally Doctor GPT.

Shaan Puri

Honestly, it's kind of a genius name. As an Indian person, I will give it my seal of approval. I think it's very clever. Now, 6 months ago or 9 months ago, I was talking to you and you had a crypto company that was like a 3D modeling company for drugs. What happened to that company? Did you ditch it, or are you doing both? What are your thoughts?

Martin Shkreli

On it, it's all under one hood. So, our company's called Deal Software. We've raised some money from some really well-known people in the Valley. It's been, you know, again an interesting dilemma where you have people who want to support you. All these people actually said that my YouTube finance videos— you mentioned content creating— that it got them through like a stint in venture platform.

Sam Parr

I watched a ton of those I watched all

Martin Shkreli

Thank you! I'm so lucky that these people, some of whom started some of the biggest software companies in our industry—literally, maybe the top 5 unicorns in software—like 3 of the 4 CEOs. I messaged these guys, and they're like, "Oh, you're my teacher." I'm so flattered, you know, that these billionaires are on my side. It really happens, and they're like, "Yeah, I..."

Shaan Puri

sorry that really happened

Sam Parr

yeah a

Martin Shkreli

billionaire yeah several billionaires you know several billionaires are are investors in our

Shaan Puri

several billionaires have smashed the so subscribe button hit the turn notifications on leave a leave a message

Martin Shkreli

in the

Shaan Puri

comments on youtube I love it

Martin Shkreli

It's really, really humbling because, you know, you couldn't find that kind of content where you could talk to somebody who's a publicly traded company CEO, showing you step by step what their job was like. I think more than just how to read a balance sheet, I taught an attitude too. That kind of hardcore attitude is something I learned from grammar, which is like, "You love this stuff!" People would watch me stream at 4 in the morning, getting ready to go, you know, "tear the world a new asshole" because I'm so excited about doing my job. I think it got a lot of people out of a funk or out of a hard time, just pushing people to push harder. That worked for so many people at these unicorns, these mega unicorns, these 10x unicorns. That's why.

Shaan Puri

I said you're amazing at content because you have the trifecta. There are three things it takes to be great at content. The first is a **unique perspective** or unique point of view. You have a specific set of knowledge that the average person doesn't have. Okay, that's what most people would expect. Now, here are the unexpected ones: you do **energy transmission**. Most content is actually just a transfer of my energy and excitement or outrage about whatever it is to you. If I'm able to express it, if I can show you that I'm juiced up about this... I've watched you at your computer, then you get up, do push-ups on the ground, you're pumped up about whatever, or you're calling somebody out. Whatever it is, it's energy transmission. The last thing is, you're like a **reality TV person**. You kind of know what you're supposed to say, but you don't really care. You want to say what you like. You care more about saying the thing than what people will think of you for saying it. For some reality TV people, it's because they're just not aware. You know it, and you just don't care. You override that sensor and say, "No, that sensor doesn't get to decide what's going on here." So you have all three, and I think that’s what makes your streams so impressive. Like you said at the beginning of this, "I don't do the 'just wing it,'" but I've seen you just wing it, and I actually think that's your best content. So I don't know what you meant by that.

Martin Shkreli

Well, just like closing the loop on it, I only started those streams because I didn't want people to think I was the "pharma bro," which I was being characterized as. I basically wanted people to judge for themselves, to see a day in my life and determine if they think I'm a dick or not. Some people said, "Yeah, I still think you're a dick," but some people said, "You know, I kind of like this guy, and maybe this is a little bit of what I want to be like." So, I'm so lucky that the people who watched that in 2015 and 2016, obviously not all of them became successful, but a handful of them—the top couple of people—became unbelievably successful. And that's maybe because of me, maybe not because of me, or maybe it's in spite of me. You know, but the fact that some of them thank me for it is something I'm really lucky for. I have three software products under our sort of umbrella here, but I think that the key thing for our company is getting amazing talent. In any industry, but especially in tech, the only thing that really matters is this combination of capital and people. The capital is easy to get; there's infinite capital in the world. It's about whether you have the people to execute the plan. I'm so lucky that a little bit of this personal profile gets great engineers to come to the table and talk. It doesn't always get them in the door, but the fact that we can do that is significant. The one skill I have as a manager is... [continues].

Martin Shkreli

Is that energy transfer like getting people... Can I pump you up about making a synthetic doctor? Well, to some people, that might be really boring. If you pitch it the wrong way, like at a big healthcare company, you might say, "We're going to make medical information diagnostic tools, etcetera, etcetera." It sounds like shit, you know? But if you do it the right way and explain to the engineer that if we do our jobs right, there may be no such thing as a doctor in 30 years. Every operation, every prescription, every piece of medical advice you ever get from now on could come from a machine, and it costs 10 cents. That changes the world! That's something that you're going to leave as a legacy. We're going to make a fortune, have a lot of fun, and it's going to change the world for everyone. Think about the Indonesian who can't see a doctor for 30 days, and the doctor they're seeing is of very questionable quality. To be able to get the best medical expertise from an American physician? That's insane, right? And we're getting that tomorrow. I think that, again, you can't get a prescription from Doctor Gupta, and he's not going to cut out your bunion. But the fact that we can even touch 5 to 10% of healthcare costs—that's $100 billion! It's bigger than Google's market cap. So, you know, healthcare is one of these gigantic spots that has never been disrupted by technology, despite the best attempts of Sand Hill Road. Like, a billion dollars has flown into digital hell. There's just no obvious way to take a sledgehammer to this. You have to understand that healthcare is basically all money that goes to people who just slosh it around for this very simple AI problem. For AI, that little advice of, "Yeah, you should take this beta blocker," or "You should not take this beta blocker," or "We should do the surgery or not do the surgery," that human advice is really important. But at the same time, a good chunk of it could probably be automated.

Sam Parr

The last thing I wanted to bring up was... So I ran this company called The Hustle, which we wrote about you. You actually were homies with Brina, this woman who worked for me, and you were like at one point, "Hey, come visit me in San Diego."

Martin Shkreli

and trung

Sam Parr

Remember like Yan Trung? Yeah, and I remember right when your story broke. It was "Pharma Bro." Then I got to, like, we chatted on Blab before. I don't know if you remember, but we've talked before. I'm like, it's funny; this guy is not really a bro at all. He's just a nerd. He talks a lot, and he's confident, but he's like a pretty nerdy guy. The reason it's so funny about media perception is that the way your story started was you have this picture—I'm looking at it now—it's you wearing Ray-Bans and a red polo. You have a picture of what looks like Flo Rida in the back, like on a music video to "Bugatti," and you're pointing down like this. Your jawline looks cut, and you look like the broiest of bros. I remember when we wrote the story in The Hustle, we tried a bunch of different photos, and that photo did best because you're just giving into this big old stereotype.

Martin Shkreli

just made this we just made this trade

Sam Parr

fucking picture ruined you man

Martin Shkreli

So, the backstory is funny. We had just done this stock trade in my personal account. We made **$20,000,000** shorting a stock called Vital Therapies. They were developing a liver dialysis machine. We spent day and night stalking this company and figuring out everything about their attempt to make a liver dialysis machine. It works for kidneys really well. They wanted to take that same idea and apply it to the liver. Sounds good, right? Well, it doesn't work. There are a lot of technical reasons. My two colleagues and I spent day in and day out figuring this out. We wrote a **40-page report** and put the report out. The stock fell like **40%** just on the report. Two weeks later, the device ended up proving that it didn't work; it didn't help anybody with severe liver disease. Then the stock went down like **90%**, and we were short the stock. So, the day it went down, we did that Flo Rida song called "It's Going Down" or something like that. I was like, "No!" doing this thing because we thought these guys were basically fraudsters, you know, lying about their liver device, which had proven that it doesn't even help people. It probably hurts them. But they were still trying to get through that venture grind and the public company grind of lying and trying to make things stick, putting the best spin on things. When we shorted it and it went down, it was "It's going down." That was the kind of joke. I was like, "Oh, how funny would it be if I dressed up like a bro for a second?" We had a couple of friends in the trade too. Putting it on Twitter was kind of like a "Oh, check it out! It's going down because of us, because we wrote the short report." Again, within the next two weeks, I made it my profile pic, and that's what everyone saw. Don, it's like, "Oh, holy smokes!" Picture.

Sam Parr

Yeah, this picture is just so funny. I don't know the whole facts of your story, and you admitted wrongdoing and everything, but it's like... it was amplified. This picture was like the beginning of the end for you. This *one* picture, that's what it seemed like. Because I remember this one picture going [viral].

Martin Shkreli

The beginning of an interesting story... I like to take it and try it. While many people look at it as the beginning of the end, I see it as life being just a crazy ride. It's a crazy movie, you know? It would be very boring to be a value investor for the next 50 years and make $100 billion doing grand and dog stock picking. So, it's right for somebody else, but it's not right for my life. It is the path I chose. You know, it wasn't necessarily an intentional choice. Maybe it wasn't the wisest choice, but it is the choice for me. I don't regret having had a really interesting and exciting life. There are moments that weren't fun, but it's still one of those things where I'm not deeply ashamed of something I did. It's a conscious choice I made to do the things I did. The photo was alarming to me; the media could take an image and say, "Okay, this is this person. Let's cast it this way." I think it sort of backfired in the long run. You know, I'm sort of more popular than ever and doing just fine.

Sam Parr

so if you there's a price to be paid if you

Shaan Puri

Could you go back? If you could go back and kind of whisper in the ear of yourself at any time, would you have told yourself, "Hey, if you go on TV, don't say that thing. Don't be smug. Don't do this. Don't do that." Would you have played it differently knowing what you know now?

Martin Shkreli

I think, like, you know, there's two sides to the story. The rationalist would say, "Of course, you know, tone it down here. Tuck in your shirt, straighten up there," metaphorically speaking. But I think the oldest wisdom is "Know thyself," right? It's like just be yourself. Know yourself. Be who you are. If you spend the rest of your life trying to make somebody else happy and conforming to society, it's going to be not a life worth living. If you spend your life answering to your own conscience, then, no matter what happens—no matter if they put you in jail for a lesser life—you'll at least have something nobody could take away from you, which is your own identity and your own personality. I think there's a lot...

Sam Parr

Of people who are here, like William Wallace in *Braveheart*, you know, they'll take our freedom. Or what they said: "They'll take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom!"

Martin Shkreli

You know, there’s a time when you have to be a real person, man. I think if you want to be a corporate sort of mimic of every other corporate person in the world...

Shaan Puri

no

Martin Shkreli

That's a life issue. That's life you want. There's just only so much of that life that I can take. For me, I had it when it came to the media. Like you said, with the full write-up, picture, or whatever the typecasting, it was like, "I can't." That's a line that was too much for me. So I think it's probably more reactive than anything else. Like Hillary Clinton tweeting at me and stuff like that, it was so surreal. Here I am, the mild-mannered pharmaceutical executive, and I'm the convict of your scorn. You know, this is nuts. A lot of it was that: provoke and be provoked. It was not easy to sit there and just do nothing. It's easy to say, "Yeah, I'll turn it on you guys." It's very easy to throw advice out, but when you're in the hot seat and somebody says, "Oh, aren't you this?" and "Aren't you that?" you say, "Well, I'm sorry I caused some disturbance here." It's really hard to do that sometimes.

Shaan Puri

First of all, that's hilarious! So, well, you don't know us super well, but before our old kind of podcast setup, Sam used...

Martin Shkreli

to have these photos on the

Shaan Puri

In his personal hall of fame, he has some inspirations from business. For example, Sam, before he started the hustle, really loved Ted Turner. He said, "Dude, this guy made the fucking news business, and he's a baller." He attacked it in a unique way. He also had Nate Diaz up there, saying, "Oh, I love this guy. He's a UFC fighter and just a badass." He takes this attitude into life. I like Conor McGregor; I think he's interesting. I admire certain things he's done in his life. I don't like all of these people, but I appreciate certain aspects of their journeys. I took inspiration from specific things at different periods of their lives. Who were some people that inspired you, either in the business world or the non-business world? Are there individuals you admire or have gone down the YouTube rabbit hole to binge a bunch of their content?

Martin Shkreli

I'll start with Vince McMahon. You know, when I started to be this like bad guy, I realized that there was nothing I could do to change that narrative. I could do a two-hour interview with ABC...

Shaan Puri

you're the heel

Martin Shkreli

And they would take the 30 seconds that messed me up and make that 30 seconds loop, forgetting the other 119 minutes. Those 30 seconds are the ones that are going to be on TV. I realized there's no way out of this, and I'm going to have to embrace being the bad guy. Some people will get the joke, and some people won't, but you know, *fuck it*. If that's what people want, then I'll be the bad guy. I sort of embraced being this jerk and tried to dress down the so-called authority figures by pointing the mirror back at them. Vince, for example, sort of had that "kayfabe" wrestling persona. In wrestling, they call it a "heel." He's the owner of the company, but he's also kind of breaking down the fourth wall. Some of the stuff he's talking about on the show is related to actual war room battles, and some of it is completely contrived. It's just a fantastic product, and I like the company and what they've done with it over the years. So, you know, I'm a big fan of Vince's. I like a lot of different scientists and business people, but there aren't a whole lot that I like.

Martin Shkreli

To say, "Oh, that's somebody I'd like to be like," or something like that. But growing up, I always liked Bill Gates, who was kind of this, you know, smug figure. By the way, in '94, Bill Gates was sued for monopoly, but his company was not him. People wanted to tear this guy apart. I was just sort of coming up; I was like 11 years old. I loved computers and started programming. I was like, "Well, everyone hates Bill Gates." The hacker community hated Bill Gates, and it's because he wanted to make money and he’s not apologetic about it. I kind of liked this guy. I liked the contrarianism of being like, "You know what? I like Microsoft. I like Bill Gates." No one's willing to say that. And like, we wouldn't have these things if we weren't all using Microsoft products right now.

Sam Parr

I was

Martin Shkreli

like what would we be doing without it and you know the linux nerds would be like well you know we can we don't have to use them and it's like look the whole world's using them for a reason they're pretty good products and I I just sort of liked taking that bad guy and at the time it was so really aided and sort of saying you know I'm on his side you know the media was on his case because he was the richest guy in the world but couldn't afford a good haircut you know they always just dog him for no reason and he spent the rest of his life like trying to walk back on that and like how cool would it been if he sort of embraced the narrative and like yeah you know because privately he does embrace the narrative right it's just an it's just sort of this public image of like no no I'm I'm this benevolent philanthropist you don't understand privately the guy's still just as ruthless still just as vicious and and just as energetic and intense as he was when he was a kid so you know it's it's all this like you know imagery for for nothing and you know there's a number of other folks like henry nicholas who started broadcom you no I I mean I there's just so many people that you know I've studied in business over the years that I I like tom petterfi from interactive brokers so many people I admire that that did did things their way and and made it work people especially who who sort of have come from nothing or came from like with very little on their back a lot of people dog george soros you know who's you know a a true american success story and people sort of forget that you know or don't understand that like all the stuff in politics and like the sort of a funded prosecutor and stuff like that the guy barely pays attention to shit you know I think that like the idea that he's spending his day like plotting with you know the you know the world economic forum to like run the world is this like right wing meme that's just not not based in reality and you know the guys work in hedge bonds and investing is is like truly remarkable how he came from like sort of the you know world war ii basically to to america to come truly successful so people like that I admire you know anyone who's sort of had this against all odds type of success you know even people like robert smith you know who run vista you know people who have like really bucked you know any conventions and expectations of them to to be really successful so there's so many people that I have up there on that wall and again it's not you know every like you said it's not every piece of their life but little pieces have have sort of made me I

Shaan Puri

Have Bill Gates on my mind because of the interview where he jumps over the chair. I still think that's the most gangster-like CEO interview moment. I don't even know how this came up, and then he...

Sam Parr

she I think the interviewer was like I heard

Shaan Puri

a rumor

Sam Parr

that you could you know how to jump over a chair he goes yeah jimmy

Shaan Puri

No, no. He goes, "Do it." He goes, "Well, it depends on the height of the chair." Then it cuts to a chair and him clearing it like Tony Hawk. I have no explanation for why this was. Is this what TV interviews were like back then? I can't imagine something like that being like Donald Trump. Is it true you could win an arm wrestling match against anyone? He's like, well, rolls up his sleeve and just like punks the punks.

Sam Parr

the car dude I'm watching this video by

Shaan Puri

the way amazing

Sam Parr

it's not that impressive it's not a big chair you don't think you could jump over a chair

Martin Shkreli

Would you have thought it's such a nerdy, nerdy, shrimpy guy? He's actually 5'11", but like there's this...

Shaan Puri

he doesn't look pretty good over that chair

Sam Parr

Yeah, yeah, dude. He takes a step. I bet you could jump over a chair, bro. You need a chair? I'll give you a chair. We'll jump this chair.

Shaan Puri

"I want to recreate this scene. We'll put it on our YouTube," I said. "I don't think I could jump over this chair." I was like, "I played basketball. I think... in my head I'm more athletic than Bill Gates, but honestly, I can't claim that until I do this chair [jump]."

Sam Parr

oh no man he's probably only 35 in this video I think you can jump to the chair

Shaan Puri

I turn 35 next week. It's perfect! Me versus Bill Gates, head to head, pay-per-view. We gotta do it!

Sam Parr

Martin, thanks for doing this, man. Thank you! I know that, like, I don't want to out you, but I know that you've got some anonymous accounts online. Normally, we said, where could people find you?

Shaan Puri

but for you you get banned every like 3rd week so it's not that useful

Sam Parr

And we were like, "Are we even talking to the real Martin? Is he even gonna come? What is he?" We weren't even sure if we were talking to the right guy.

Martin Shkreli

The interesting thing about that is I think the world's changing quite a bit. The sensitivity around banning people on Twitter has now given way. So, I'm actually starting to talk to Twitter. I still need my old Twitter account, @atmartmuscharelli. It's in the process of hopefully being unbanned. If anybody could help me get that unbanned, I'd really appreciate it. Right now, I met @marty_catboy, which that ex-girlfriend made for me, and for some reason, that has stuck. Now, it's my proudest Twitter handle. On Instagram, I'm @martin. It's probably 15. But yeah, I love social media. However, I'm banned from Tinder and Hinge, and you know, so many odd social media platforms.

Shaan Puri

on youtube but you're banned from tinder why

Martin Shkreli

I don't know I think like part of it is this

Shaan Puri

That's like the definition of a "cockblock," right? Like, they just banned you from dating. What's going on?

Martin Shkreli

I think this cancel culture extends into virtually anything, right? And for Tinder, you can argue that, like, "Well, how do we know it's the real person?" That's sort of one argument. But even then, I just think there's somebody at the Match Group that just doesn't like me. But, you know, it is what it is. I'll live. Yeah, Twitter is like this. My lifelong goal is to get unbanned from Twitter because it's been 7 years. I actually went to jail for a shorter period of time than I've been in Twitter jail. So, like, you know, I was banned, went to prison, came out, and I'm still banned.

Shaan Puri

For you, didn't you get banned too? Like, you asked somebody to get you a lock of Hillary Clinton's hair. Wasn't that the reason why?

Martin Shkreli

It wasn't that it was... I was teasing this woman who was a very left-wing journalist. I was kind of ribbing her a little bit over politics and stuff like that. Apparently, I went too far, but it was obviously, you know, selective bias. I mean, it was like insanely selective for a lifetime ban. You know, it was a joke I made about her husband or something, and it was just like too far. Look, words aren't that dangerous. Nobody's getting hurt by these words. It's a two-way street, you know? But what I did was way too over the line, and what she did was totally fine. It was just this insane perspective. So I'm hoping Elon or somebody can get me unbanned because it's been seven years. I was skyrocketing with followers and views. That's the thing about cancel culture, right? You have somebody who's taking off, their narrative is boosting, and I was improving my reputation. Deraprim was starting to look like the rearview mirror.

Shaan Puri

for me

Martin Shkreli

I was moving on. The controversy was over, our revenue was doing fine, and then... you know, Twitter said, "No, can't let you keep going." Right? And it's like, if you try to stop people from taking back their narrative and you can halt them like that, it's a very dangerous thing for tech to be able to censor people like that. Imagine having somebody become really controversial and say, "No, I want to tell my side of the story," and somebody says, "No, you don't get that chance." You know, it's kind of a disgusting thing.

Sam Parr

Well, dude, we appreciate this, man. You're a fascinating person, and we hope that... I imagine we'll be talking more. I'm very curious to see how Dr. Gupta is going to do. But thank you for coming and doing this. We were, like I said, not sure if he was coming or not. It was a 50/50 chance, so I'm happy we made this happen. We appreciate you. Thank you so much, guys. Alright, we'll talk soon.

Shaan Puri

awesome that's it that's the pod