The Guy That Raised The AIDS Drug Price By 50x Is Interesting...

Shaan Puri

So, Martin Shkreli, if you just Google "most hated man in America," I think he comes up as number one. Yeah, at least he did at the time when I first heard about him. He is known for, or he's known and hated for being a kind of price gouger with a drug. What he did was he owned a pharmaceutical company that focused on small, less popular drugs that were niche. He bought this drug called Daraprim and increased the price from about $13 to over $500. I don't know the exact figure, but the percentage was like he increased it by 5,000%. So, people were outraged, and then immediately the news picked this up. It was like, "Oh man!" They started calling him the "Pharma Bro." Because first he did this, they were like, "How dare you?" But instead of apologizing and walking it back, he was like, "Fuck yeah, I did! I own this; I can charge what I want, you know? This is America; that's the price of this drug."

Sam Parr

he doubled down

Shaan Puri

He doubled down, and he loves attention. He's amazing at getting attention. A lot of the attention is hate, but he's amazing at getting it.

Sam Parr

But he was only 33 or 34 when he did this. He basically controlled two pharmaceutical companies that were each public at north of $1 billion in market cap, I think.

Shaan Puri

I don't know who... I can't confirm those. That might be right, but he also had a hedge fund before that where he invested in biotech stocks.

Sam Parr

yeah just like he had done big things

Shaan Puri

And so, he is a very smart guy. Now, people think he's a crook. Some people said he was a crook because he raised the price of a drug. That's not a crime; that's just something you don't like. Then, he actually got indicted and went to jail for doing something that was legal. I think he basically paid investors from one company with the stock of his other company and then wasn't clear or something like that. I don't know exactly what he went to jail for, but...

Sam Parr

any way

Shaan Puri

been in jail for 2 years

Sam Parr

He went back to jail. He didn't get released early or something like that for threatening Hillary Clinton. He didn't really threaten her, but he made a stupid joke on Twitter.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so he just got out last week. That's kind of the funny part of this. He gets out and it's like, you know, I don't know who's a famous person, like everybody wanted to be freed. It's like "Free Young Thug" or whoever.

Sam Parr

like martha martha stewart

Shaan Puri

Yeah, free Martha! Like, whatever. There was a group of people that were excited about his arrival. I was excited too because I enjoy reality TV. I enjoy, you know, the drama of it.

Sam Parr

the drama he's like our version of kim he's he's our kim k he's

Shaan Puri

Exactly. So, I wanted to see a plow. He comes back, and I just started thinking about Shkreli in general. I have a couple of ways we can go. We can discuss things I find very interesting, or borderline admire, about the way he does things. Then there's what he has been up to in prison, and what's interesting there. Where do you want to go? I have both.

Sam Parr

I like both of those. So, what has he been up to in prison? And the backstory... you actually need to mention this. The backstory was that he was an early user of your product, Blab. I spoke to him a couple of times on Blab. When the hustle first launched, we were in our first office. This was in the first six months. One of our reporters was this young woman named Brina, who was, you know, like a pretty good-looking woman. She DM'ed him for a story, and he was like, "Hey, do you just want to fly up here? We could hang out." He was asking her out. So, I had a little interaction with them as well.

Shaan Puri

So, we had an app called Blab that was basically, if you've seen Clubhouse, it was Clubhouse before Clubhouse. It had video on it, so it wasn't just audio. It got sort of popular. We tried using it; we tried getting podcasters to use it. We got some marketers to use it for promoting their stuff. Then we started getting some bigger brands. The NBA started using it, UFC started using it, Oracle... but none of them could hold a candle to our number one power user, Martin Shkreli. Martin Shkreli came on the app and basically broke it from day one. The first time he came on, instantly the room filled up to about 5,000 people. It was more people than we had ever had in one room before. It hit our max limit. We were like, "Who is this guy?" That's when I first Googled him and found out he was the most hated man in America. He was famous enough to draw a ton of people in, but he was not famous enough to have other things to do, which was the perfect sweet spot. As I said, he was the most lethal weapon in social media. He has since been surpassed by Donald Trump and Elon Musk as the most lethal weapon in social media, but before that, it was Martin Shkreli. The reason I say that is because he created a ton of content. He would go on Blab every day from about 5 PM till 2 in the morning. He would be on that whole time, and he was the master at creating nightly entertainment. You know, Jimmy Fallon, Jay Leno... you guys can't touch this guy in terms of nightly entertainment because he had no producers, no script, nothing. He would hop on and somehow cause enough ruckus that this room would have thousands of people in it all night long watching. We were hooked to it. We would see this in our data; people wanted us to kick him off because, again, he's a bad guy for raising the price of this drug and for saying things that weren't cool. But this guy was driving in hundreds of thousands of new users to us every single month. So, I was like, "I'm not trying to kick this guy off. This guy is where the action's at."

Sam Parr

this was 2017 2018 cancel culture wasn't a thing yet

Shaan Puri

Yeah, and I was like, "Dude, I'm a startup. I'm gonna do what it takes to get off the ground." Like, yeah, Bitcoin used the Silk Road to get off the ground. And, you know, YouTube started as a dating site. Facebook, you know, before this, did face mask comparisons, like which girl is hotter. Not everything starts with the most clean-cut, you know, thing. Airbnb started by faking and scraping Craigslist sites and emailing them as fake people saying, "I'd love to book your thing. Can you just list on Airbnb?" Like, dude, people do what they have to do to get their project started. So we had Shrilli, and I used to watch it. At first, what I noticed was everyone who came in came in to throw stones at this evil man who raised the price of this drug. But he did not sit there and apologize or whimper. He fought back. He would give his side of the argument and invite you up for a debate. That's when you saw how strongly held opinions could be with no logical backing, with no real rationale behind it. The argument was so hollow. This was not just average people; these were very successful business people who would come on trying to stand on their high horse, telling him what he should do. Then he would dismantle their argument. Journalists from CNN and other places would come on, and he would dismantle them too. He was doing a combination of making fun of them, hitting on them, and breaking down their logical arguments all at the same time. I've never seen anything like him. I just thought, "Wow, this guy is very entertaining." I don't agree with everything he's saying, but I think he's very entertaining. So, the data doesn't lie; he is very entertaining. He is.

Sam Parr

I think the one guy

Shaan Puri

that plays

Sam Parr

Later on, in some of the Blabs, he would have these cute women in the background. They clearly had just met him on Blab, and he was just like, "Hey, I'll fly you out. You wanna hang out?"

Shaan Puri

So, this is what started happening. Everybody started off hating him. After about three weeks, he developed an army of believers—people who were... there was a guy who became known as "Creeps." His name was Young Shkreli. When Martin was tired or had to go eat, Young Shkreli would go hold court. He was just an extreme knockoff version of Martin. He would defend him until Martin came back to defend himself. Then, all these women started joining, and they loved him. They would just hang out there all the time. They weren't just cam girls or models; they were actual fashion models, OnlyFans creators, and whoever. They would get on and say things like, "You know, Martin, I don't know... I would date you." The room was always filled with his posse. It was like going to where a mob lord is at, and he had his goons. His army was just growing. Within a couple of months, the number of people who loved him outweighed the number of people who hated him. It was the most surprising thing; it was like watching a cult form in real time. It was fascinating. I remember a CNN journalist came on, and she said, "Martin, I know everybody kind of attacks you, blah blah blah. I don't want to attack you; I just want to ask you some questions." He replied, "Well, you're on my show. Let's go." She said, "No, no, no. I want you to come on CNN." He responded, "This is better than CNN. You're on my show. You have questions? Let's go. These are my terms. You can ask any question you want, no holds barred, right here, right now. If you're not prepared, come back and prepare, but you can do it right here on my show." She said, "I'm not going to do that, Arden. I can only do it there." He said, "Alright, fine. Come with me to my fundraiser gala tonight. I'll fly you out." He goes to screen share and buys her a plane ticket. He asks, "What's your email address? I'm sending this to you." She replies, "I'm not going on a date with you, Martin." He says, "Yes, we said it's a date." Then, he was just playing people perfectly.

Sam Parr

Didn't she end up quitting? One of the women who hollered at him from the Washington Post ended up quitting the job. And so, the student of...

Shaan Puri

The day was remarkable when he went to jail. A woman from the Washington Post, or some place, was assigned to cover him and the story. She fell in love with him, but she had a family—she had a husband and kids. I think she left them for Martin. She fell in love with Martin while he was in prison, and then Martin broke her heart. Now she's heartbroken. You know, whatever, she gave it all up. She gave up her career and her family for Martin and fell in love with him. This guy's got some cult leader qualities to him. So anyway, he did some crazy stuff when he was on Blab. He was so loyal to his army that he'd say, "I've got a date tonight, but don't worry, I'm leaving Blab on." So he would leave it on in the other room, and you could eavesdrop and overhear his date, which is again...

Sam Parr

oh my god

Shaan Puri

Primetime entertainment. Is it wrong? Yeah. Is it entertaining? Yeah, it is. So, this guy was phenomenal. Anyway, I found this guy interesting. I was observing, from a marketing perspective, how he was staying relevant. That drug situation was years ago. How is he still relevant? He would just do things. For example, Wu-Tang Clan had an album that they were selling as a one-of-a-kind for their biggest fans. He bought it for $2,000,000. So now, this guy, whom they didn't want and even got into a feud with, had this thing. Then, on Blab, he would play snippets—like 10 seconds of the album. No one had ever heard it before besides him, but he would just tease it, dangle it.

Sam Parr

like the original nft

Shaan Puri

When there was a building for sale in Times Square, he tried to buy it for $10,000,000 to erect a statue of himself in Times Square. Again, it gets covered, so he was just newsjacking constantly. He was just hijacking the news and putting his own name on it.

Sam Parr

On the phone, did he have money when he got arrested? I think he actually showed a brokerage account that had like $70,000,000 in it.

Shaan Puri

yeah I think he had like somewhere between $50 $75,000,000 if I remember like at the time

Sam Parr

but then he like had to declare bankruptcy yeah and I think

Shaan Puri

At one point, ironically, his attorney that was defending him raised his price by 5,000% and started charging him $60,000 per hour. I don't know if this is real or not, but Martin came out in the news and was like, "This is outrageous!" People were like, "Dude, the irony of pot calling the kettle black." I was like, of course, this is just another article he wanted written about him. He's just a master of getting attention. He did so many things like this; I can't even count the number of things he did. I was like, wow, this guy just knows how to stay in the cycle and constantly reinvent himself. Just when he pushes you away, he'd lure you back in. For example, on Friday nights, he would hold his nightly Vlad thing where he had thousands of people, and it was like a roast session. He'd say outlandish things, and you'd just feel yucky for being in there. Then, Saturday morning, he would wake up at 8 AM and do a live finance session where he would teach you how to analyze stocks.

Sam Parr

great and they

Shaan Puri

were phenomenal

Sam Parr

I watched a bunch of them

Shaan Puri

They're still on YouTube; you can go watch them. He is very smart, and he was so thoughtful and patient as a teacher. He's a fantastic teacher. So anyway, that's like the backstory. He gets out, and they're like, "How was prison?" He immediately jumps on Twitter Spaces. Oh, by the way, actually, that's another funny story. When he had to go speak in front of Congress—I don't know, yeah, Congress, I guess—he had to go testify. He goes there, and with a smug look, he kept saying, "I will take the Fifth. I choose to elect my Fifth Amendment rights to not speak." He just said that on loop for an hour, but he was smiling smugly and just pissing them off. He was drawing the whole time. As soon as he left the courtroom, he jumped on Blab from his phone on the train and said, "Alright, who wants to see my drawings?" He showed his drawings of, like, dicks and stuff that he was drawing on his piece of paper. He was live; the hearing was still going on, and he embedded it in one screen while talking mad shit about the Congresspeople in the other screen at the same time. Again, it was just like high-level social media usage. So anyway, he got on Twitter Spaces, and they're like, "How was prison?" He goes, "Oh, it was awesome." He was talking about the prison system and how unjust it is. He said, "You know, 95% of the people that were in there had traumatic childhood issues with parents and stuff like that." He said, "I hustled out other people's lockers so I could store more books." Basically, he was like, "So what was his summary?" So, first, he's been blogging. Have you read his blog from prison?

Sam Parr

No, but what did he say about prison? I mean, I bet you he was actually well respected there. Yeah, he's like, "Because everyone's like, tell me some stories."

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. So, he was kind of like, you know, he had his crew there or whatever. He said he created a crypto study group. What did he say? He goes, "When everybody else was working out in prison, I would read because brain gains are all that matters, not muscle gains." Because he's like, "Rosco, Arnie..."

Sam Parr

my god

Shaan Puri

He's like, "I created a group called Crypto Thugs in prison." It was just me teaching crypto to the rest of my fellow inmates or whatever. He had a bunch of interesting stuff. He had a lot of predictions about crypto in there. He basically spent his whole time studying crypto, artificial intelligence, and biohacking, and stuff like that. So, he's got this blog post with a ton of predictions about the future. I'll read you a couple of his.

Sam Parr

I'm on I'm on his it's just it's martinsquarelli.com right

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I think so. So, I'm going to read you some predictions here. **2025**: In about three years from now, self-driving cars will be the successor to mobile computing. They will trend upwards, and people will spend 8 hours a day in their cars. Tesla nears a $10 trillion market cap, and Musk becomes the first trillionaire. **2026**: An AI-generated song, maybe a GPT-4 song, gets created with zero human editing and direct participation, and it charts on Billboard. **2030**: Virtual reality and the metaverse will be ubiquitous and widely used. All you need is a comfortable, ergonomic optical interface; that's what was the limiting item.

Sam Parr

I think he's wrong on that one

Shaan Puri

2030: Vehicles, self-driving cars, reach majority penetration in the U.S. Car accidents drop by more than 50%. And he just keeps going. He goes out to like 2050, making predictions about things like, you know, in 2050, the lifespan for a newborn is now 100 to 125 years. Ninety percent of nonsurgical medicine is automated, blah blah blah. Most contract law is automated on-chain. He keeps going. Now, right or wrong, you could disagree with all these predictions, but he's just a very interesting thinker and a very interesting guy to follow. He does these book reviews that are like very hilarious, where he's like, "This book: 3 out of 5. You know, first three-fourths: giant waste of time. Last fourth: interesting about this topic." It's like, "Oh good, you saved me a bunch of time reading that book." I kind of trust your opinion on these things. So, I don't know, his blog is worth a read.

Sam Parr

We... I tweeted out asking to get him on the pod, but I had no Twitter handle to tag. I didn't know who he was, or you know, which is kind of hidden. We maybe found the right one. Yeah, but we should get him on. I feel like we're big enough that we can get him.