Martin Shkreli Reveals How He Made His First $100M

25:56You know, it was 10 plus 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 like there was this East Coast versus West Coast mentality. You know, as a Wall Street guy, he was, you know, one of the top VC type guys. And this is a time where like he had Clarium, you know, their founder's fund was just getting started and stuff like that. And, you know, the wheeling dealing like Wall Street sort of style of like, oh, we're going to do a reverse merger, which is basically kind of like a SPAC with no money.

26:33You know, it's like even worse than SPAC. You know, you do the listing and then you raise the money. But it's a way to go public. And we did it. And he was like, ah, you can't go public in a year or two. and you know the reality is you kind of can in especially in biopharma where the assets are like these very modular systems they're not like a base business that has x dollars revenue and it's 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 uh you know especially with the right business plan uh it could be worth a lot so anyway we we decided go public we raised some money we started doing clinical trials the trial worked uh and the rest is history but it took you It takes hundreds of million dollars to develop a drug.

27:16Again, the value of the company is 1.5. 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. So you didn't even get the drug. In this example, you didn't get the drug to the point where people were buying it or using it. It was you made money off just the fact that this will exist, hopefully in 10 or whatever years. Yeah, 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.

27:52Well, this drug was barely in human beings. It had been in like 30 or 50 people up until that point. And, you know, I made most of my money in sort of developments in environment on the research side. So, you know, this is a drug in clinical research. So no, it's not, 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. And, you know, as we started to do that, the value of the company increased and people said, okay, I think I get this.

28:24And then as the data came in, now it's FDA approved. It's called Filspari. I named the drug Sparsentam, you know, gave it its first chemical name. And, you know, it's, 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, you know, continued. Did you own most of it at the time or what was that? Did you have to divest when all the shit went down? So I went from 90, you know, when we started it to 50. When we're public, I think around 40 or 50 percent after our first financing, down to 30, under second financing down to 20.

29:01You know, so at the time of our IPO, when you do a worse merger, you often don't get on NASDAQ. So we did an IPO on NASDAQ in 2014 and the company was worth like 300 or 400 million and I owned about 15, 20 % of it. And again, this is sort of like my first wealth ever. But the funny thing is, as you guys maybe know, you have a situation like that, you actually don't have any cash. Yeah, you're not liquid. Yeah, you can't sell it. So, you know, I've got millions of shares of the stock, but, you know, I'm sitting there saying, okay, well, you're like, how am I going to buy this? Yeah. Well, you know, but well, before that, you think about like, how am I going to buy this$5 ,000 a month apartment and go to the$7 ,000 apartment, which is like a very funny discussion for somebody that, you know, has 50 or a hundred million dollars of, of, of stock value.

29:45And I would go to these banks and say, listen, can I borrow 5%, you know, of my money, uh, of my stock value? And they would say no. and you know i'd say you know uh you know why not you know they'd say well here it's a new stock you know it's it's kind of you know still you know a little bit unseasoned you're the big shareholder you know we're just not comfortable with it you know like sitting there like oh my god you know this is insane because i don't want to sell my stock because it sends a kind of a bad signal to the market um you know but i don't want to you know uh also be starving so it was a very like funny thing.

30:20And I don't want to 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 a very tumultuous and traumatic story in a lot of ways. And it led to my prosecution. You know, there was this fight with the board and it got very so nasty that 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.

31:01When I say law enforcement, I mean the attorney general, sorry, AUSAs, the associate U.S. 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 Arbs, pick your Paul Weiss, pick your biggest law firm. You say, hey, we have this guy. He did something bad. You know, look into this. You know, usually you'll get an indictment pretty fast. This happened to the Google guy that had the left. The Waymo? Yeah. Andrew. this happened to a Goldman Sachs trader that stole some source code, emailed himself home to work on the source code.

31:39Then he went to another hedge fund. They said, see, he stole an electronic property. The FBI got him 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 million bucks. And all those law firm partners worked in government, right? They worked literally in the job, they 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 like so ridiculous because a boardroom battle, a corporate squabble shouldn't turn into, you know, OK, let me just make a call and get, you know, get this guy arrested.

32:15Then we'll win the fight. Right. And it's like, you know, 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 just was sort of this company that they were able to sort of psyched millions of dollars out out of uh which is like for for a lot of talentless executives like that's that's really exciting.

32:58Like getting a$5 million paycheck a year plus a, you know, golden parachute, plus 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'd rather preside over a company that does nothing but pays them five million bucks a year than a company that makes a huge advance in a treatment or whatever. So it was this big fight.

33:33And I just basically said, I'll start a new company. I don't need you guys. And I started Turing. We should let you explain kind of the thing, because if people listen to this have basically only heard of you as the guy who jacked up the price of the drugs. And I've heard you explain this before many times where, 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. And then they would immediately not know what the hell to say. You raised the price of the drug and now people can't get it.

34:04You're like, tell me, who can't get it? Where are you getting that data from? And you would walk them through almost like the Socratic method of what actually happened, what your perspective was on it. And 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. And you didn't even, and it was another funny part related to that is you didn't even go to prison for that reason.

34:34If I remember correctly, you admitted you were wrong for a bunch of things, but it wasn't even related. Your persona was related. I think you being smug and being an asshole when maybe you should have just been like, yes ma 'am, I'm sorry, was maybe probably the more appropriate answer, but you weren't kind of like being smug and you got a lot of shit for that. So I think that hurt your thing, but you didn't even get prosecuted for that. No, yeah, it's not a, it's, I mean, I think that's why I was so smug is 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 or a partner or the listener, you can pick whatever price you want.

35:12You know, that's your call. You know, it's your job to explore the frontier of that price and volume curve and And it's your job to sort of find the maximum revenue. You can choose to do that or not do that. And I think that's why American capitalism is so great. It's like it's really the only person's call is 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.

35:46and we care the most about them, it's your call as 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. And any business owner - And what was that logic that Sean was referring to that you walked people through? The criticism would be, yes, 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. The reverse psychology is super important. I'll go through that in a second.

36:17But I think the most of what you said is really important because it's this like inviolable right. And 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 others to try to sort of take that right away through like this regulation by embarrassment. right like it was like this like we'll shame you until you change your mind it's like oh you're the shame me into changing my mind like you know that that's insane you're trying to take 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.

37:10And you're basically saying, well, if you do it to me, well, you can do it to Apple next? Are you going to tell them that the iPhone's too expensive? Are you going to do it to your podcast where an advertiser says, oh my God, you want$50 ,000 to post an ad on my podcast? Well, that's not right. I want that for 25 ,000 months. 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'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.

37:38You know, a friend of mine worked at Amex and got to talk to Buffett about this, where he said, Buffett 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 cents to make. I don't want to buy this for a dollar. You know, you just buy the soda because you love Coca-Cola. And the more that you can make people think with that side of their brain, the better.

38:08In healthcare, you kind of get this like very visceral like entitlement of like, no, I need this drug. I don't care what it costs for the producer. I don't care anything. Like this is my right to get this medicine. And obviously, you know, that's not quite right in my opinion. So getting back to sort of just like, 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 works on with that Socratic method is just showing people how little they know about they're in this industry.

38:42Right. 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 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 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. They're millions of dollars. You know, it's a million dollars for a drug a year.

39:15You know, so every year for the rest of your life, you've got to pay a million bucks. You know, there are drugs like that. But you don't pay necessarily out of pocket, right? Nobody's paying out of pocket for anything. It's the cost of the drug to the insurance company, not to the end patient. Correct. You know, we have this convoluted crazy system that generally needs to kind of be broken in half. But, you know, and again, I'll show you my product in a minute that unlike Mark Cuban's garbage might actually help. The, you know, the first question I always ask people is like, well, what do you where do you price a drug where you have?

39:51I had a drug at Ritrofen. 60 people took it. Six zero. And they needed it to save their life. What price should that be? Should it be the price of Viagra? No, I believe in this thing called utility theory of price, which I probably studied in economics a long time ago, but forgot. But this idea is that price has three or four different theories 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 lay terms like, well, it should cost what you made it plus a comfortable margin.

40:28I was like, OK, that sounds interesting. And other people would say, well, it should cost what it's worth to the user. And that's kind of how most medicine is priced. If you can forego some terrible operation, you know, then an operation is 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 hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. So it's kind of a bargain at, say, one hundred thousand dollars, because otherwise the insurance is going to spend half a million on you, you know, going to the hospital every week and so forth and so forth.

41:04If you price it on based on what it would cost, like, OK, well, price it at a break even. Well, a lot of incentive to make a medicine like that. Right. You want to kind of want this windfall profit if you're a drug company because you have this risk that this shit's not going to work. And then, you know, you'll be 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.

41:34So 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 literally legitimately out of their mind that say, oh, the drug should be just, should just be free. And of course, you know, who's going to pay for the office? Who's going to pay for lawyers? Who's going to pay for the accountants? Who's going to pay for the research? Who's going to pay for the next drug, right?

42:01If every drug is free, then nobody's going to want to go make drugs. And again, if that's the system society dictated to me, I'll haul those rules. But the system society dictated was it's your choice what the price your product at. It's the insurer's choice to pay for it. It's the doctor's choice to prescribe it. And there are countries like there's this miracle drug by Vertex, one of my favorite drug companies for cystic fibrosis. Miracle product, literally cure for cystic fibrosis. Amazing. Cystic is no longer a medical problem for 90 percent of people with cystic fibrosis. This company should have parades, parades every year for it, right?

42:36But instead, they can't shoot for it. And I have friends that their lives have been saved. One of my friends in high school died of cystic fibrosis at 19. And 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 ring because it's$300 ,000 a year. And my drug, I ask people all the time, well, how much is my drug? Well, I say they don't need$750. That's not what I'm asking. In pharma, we don't worry about what the price of the bullets. We worry about what does it cost for somebody to have to pay for this medicine?

43:07Not out of pocket. What is the insurance paying for a full course or a full year? Right? And they said, well, I don't know. How many pills do you have to take when you take this drug that you raise 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 down. But you know why they're criticizing you, which is like, as I'm listening to this, you talk, like you have this very classic issue, which is both an asset and a liability, which is you're quite logical. So you're like this one guy, I forget the guy's name, the guy who's running for president.

43:41He just did what I did and he did it times 10, but I did it early on, which is like you follow the very logical thing, which is 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. And 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, which is no, like, if A, then B, then C, like the very logical approach. But where you have fucked up is you weren't. It's like, it's like, you're so smart at studying the logic that you also kind of fucked up by studying like, okay, but if I do that, then people will hate me.

44:16Therefore, I should probably use these words or smile this way when they confront me. And like, that was like, it's kind of like what Elon's doing. It's like, dude, you're so fucking smart you're doing all this amazing shit don't call twitter titter like think of a different troll that's a like that's a net positive not a net negative and that was what it seemed like was your thing which is like yeah dude you're logical you're not wrong about this this and this but you're just being a fucking idiot when you're talking about it and you're not like like what don't smile that way in congress you know even if you're i respect it because i'm like 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 what every executive does.

44:57I'm not stupid. I can be just like the guy at Pfizer. Right. Just like it. Right. And I think it's cool that you're not that guy, but it's like, well, that's the issue. You could have saved seven years of your life maybe and only got less. You just would have been just like be a little bit more likable sometimes to save your own ass. And sure. And, you know, I wanted to straddle that line, but like how much or like when I when I talk at Ivy League schools, I get standing ovations because I think that the kids realize that their life, their personality is about to be choked out by the big pharma, big corporate world, right?

45:30Whether they're going to pharma or they're going to finance, their life is over. You know, their ability to express themselves the way they see fit is done, right? Their ability to wear what they want to work is over. And I think that I represent that fresh, breast of fresh air. They're like, okay, maybe you can actually keep a personality. Maybe you can actually be somebody real instead of, you know, look, look at the Agro CEO of corporate America. Look at Budweiser CEO, Anheuser-Busch CEO. It's like, oh, I got to say what is the maximally the least interesting and the least offensive possible road to walk.

46:06And I can't have a real personality because if I do, you know, someone's going to have an issue with it and it's going to be a problem for my business. And I just hate that the corporate world has gotten to that point 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. I agree. And the world wants you to be vanilla. I'm on. Look, this is why people like our pod. I also see the other side where it's like, yeah, dude, but you just fucked up all those. Like, 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 wanted to express yourself if you want to express yourself get a fucking dog go hang out with your cat like talk to them like you know what i mean like that's that that's that other argument one question that's really important how many people could not afford or did not were not able to access the drug that previously could when the price was lower because the price got raised?

47:00Was it 1%, 10%, 50%, 75 % of people who could no longer afford the drug? Because that's the key, right? Zero, zero, zero, zero. And so that's the thing that like, you know - Not how far it works. So explain that part, because I think that's the key consideration is 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 there's a I think that would support the argument against in a way, at least the emotional argument against.

47:33But 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 I don't do the research on this, but you're saying that that's true. That completely changes the argument, in my opinion. I think so, too. And that's why, like, I was so bold. And to Sam's point, you know, seemingly like tone deaf right about this, because I wanted people to see, well, it's not a stupid person. Why is he being so tone deaf and obstinate? Hopefully it's because he's right. And let me look into that. And some people did, you know, and that's why I've got fans.

48:04And I'm not Billy McFarland or somebody like that. I'll be able to raise money and start a new business because, you know, I accomplish things and I'm a skilled guy. it's this like failure to, it's this desire to want to buy a narrative from media or buy anger or rent anger that's sort of accumulated here. People, when it comes to medicine, like I said, there are drugs far more expensive than Daraprim and like$500 ,000 or more per year. Daraprim's a one time, one course, right? So there's not an insurer in the world that didn't cover Daraprim because if you don't pay the$50 ,000 roughly what Daraprim costs for a whole course, forget per pill, about 50 grand if you end up needing Daraprim.

48:49If you don't pay that, you're going to pay for the guy's funeral. You're going to pay for his ICU visits. You're going to pay for a million bucks of this guy being in ICU for the next six months. It doesn't make sense financially to not pay for Daraprim. The other thing is it's such a small medicine. This was less than 0.1 % of an insurer's budget. Right. Not even a policy is being formed at Aetna or UnitedHealthcare because it's like, no, they have automated policies for this stuff. Like until the drug ends up being like a couple more basis points, several dozen basis points, it's not going to be a factor.

49:22Right. 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 prescription. That's the kind of policies health insurance 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 shooting at you, you know, and they don't know what your industry is about, you know, it's akin to me telling like a database programmer, well, you know, NoSQL databases are better than SQL databases.

49:55And he's like, why? Why are you saying that? Well, and he starts putting out all these data. I'm like, oh, that's just how I feel. You know, it's better to have a NoSQL than a SQL. 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 goal is to better understand how personal healthcare 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.

50:29and, you know, my new company has sort of an effort to sort of understand that, make amends, make penance 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 healthcare is virtually infinite. Well, amongst the three of us, nobody is willing to sacrifice marginal healthcare, right? You and I are probably willing to sacrifice marginal, you know, clothing, right? There's only so much money I'm going to spend on clothing. There's only so much money I'm going to spend on this or that. But if you had infinite money, like the thing you'd probably prioritize is your health, you know, your likelihood and well-being.

51:04And I think that that makes it kind of the special bit of service. And that's why we've spent we've gone from 75 percent of our GDP on health care to 20 percent. And I think that's going to go to 50 percent over time because our basic goods and needs are Maslowian kind of needs or med. You know, we can eat, we can have shelter, et cetera, et cetera. We ultimately just want to live forever. There's no reason why the Silicon Valley trillionaires, they want longevity, right? They want to be around forever because Larry Ellison, who I grew up a little bit fanboying or worshiping, his life goal is to live forever and he's not going to make it.

51:38But this idea that all these guys sort of have in their minds that if they spend their billions, they'll live forever. It's there because they love their life. The average person in Africa probably doesn't think about it that way. I think they'd like to, but their life is a lot harder. In America, we're really lucky. We want to 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 Milan CEO, the Pfizer CEO. They're going up because we all demand health care.

52:09We want health for everyone. Our families, our friends, our progeny. We all want health care, you know, to we're going to consume more and more of it over time. 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? And what do you do with your money now? What are you investing in now? Or are you just doing like, are you even allowed to trade? And are you just doing like boring index funds? Are you doing more risky stuff? What are you doing? Yeah, so I got into a very interesting litigation.

52:36So I was able to pay my criminal fines very, very relatively easily. It was around 8 million bucks. In that process, I decided to sell the Wu-Tang album, which is a funny thing because there's this NFT bubble. and I basically said, if I turn this into an NFT or sell to a crypto bro, like, you know, I might even get my money back on this thing because it was basically just, you know, a lark and I didn't think I'd, I marked it as down like 75%, but I was able to actually turn a profit on it. So I was happy to time that bubble well. So I was able to pay my criminal fines off, but then I got into this litigation with the FTC.

53:15The Federal Trade Commission actually personally sued me for Monopoly. I'm the first person in American history, the Sherman Act, which is 125 years old, the first person to personally be sued by the Federal Trade Commission, which is very odd because John D. Rockefeller, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, a 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. And they won. So I'm appealing that, but they won a$60 million hit against me. So until I figure that out, I'm sort of not not in the market.

53:52It's very like bizarre ruling that I think will get overturned. But again, it shows you that kind of like animus, like this judge that made that ruling. Will that make you broke? If I had to pay the 60, I think I could pay the 60. But it's it's just like a colossal fuck, you know, just a colossal like, you know, hit in the gears of like stopping like the production, basically. so uh the company i also am indemnified so the company will probably have to pay it but it's it's just a big like clusterfuck at the moment so you know i'm i'm sort of focused again the nice thing about being an entrepreneur and having faith in your talent and things like that is that even if you wipe me out and start at zero i wouldn't have a problem i think you know getting making several hundred million dollars i i think that any business i start you know it may not be this one or the next one, but eventually with perseverance, I'll have some great success.

54:47And I think that there's not, you know, a bone in my body that doesn't believe that. And I think when you can find great assets or great people and put capital together with that, that, you know, magic starts to happen and it's infectious and contagious. And, you know, as long as you have your sort of mooring straight, you should be able to do it. 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 of that's been paid by the company and I don't have indemnification, something like that, maybe I'll have to pay 30 or 40 million bucks and it would suck.

55:16Sure. You know, 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 a hundred percent sure, but you know, it all depends on the sale price. But, you know, even, even if you'd sort of took everything from me, you know, and, and added another a hundred million, I'd, I'd sort of be, you know, you know, cheery about it and say, all right, it's a big challenge, but I'll do it. You know? And I think that, you know, I don't, I don't view sort of wealth and success as symmetrical or the same thing. I sort of say that, you know, it's sort of almost like, you know, a challenge to sort of like do it the other way.

55:51I know a lot of people like they make money to be comfortable. Like, I almost feel like I make money to be uncomfortable. Okay, I want the bigger challenges, the harder things to do. Like, you look at Elon Musk and you got to ask yourself, like, why is this guy making his life so much harder? new businesses, new ideas. Like 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 at Twitter. Oh, by the way, you still have to pay the interest almost once. Like I should be sitting there like, oh my God, you know, this is so much pain.

56:22Like why add this on top of my Tesla issues? Because you know that a hundred issues of that company, you know, is a hundred issues at SpaceX. And again, business is going great at those companies, but there's still intense issues that you have to deal with every day. and you've got other lawsuits and you've got other things going on in your personal life, you have eight kids. I mean, why add more shit to your thing? And I think the answer for me is like, I love it. You know, I love the game. And, you know, whether or not, you know, my bank's account's got this many zeros, that many zeros, you know, it's not like you're going to be spending it.

56:55You know, it's just work. You know, I sit in a room with my team and I work all day and that's it. So for me, it's like... I don't know if you follow Naval, but he has this great quote. He has this like Twitter thread called how to get rich without getting lucky. And he says something in there that I love, which he goes, I don't want to just get rich. I want to be a person who gets rich. Meaning if you could drop, if you took everything away from me and you dropped me, you know, sort of like butt naked in a third world country in 10 years, I want to be wealthy again. And I think I have this, I have built the skills in order to do that.

57:26And so that sort of reminds me of what you're talking about, which is like, look, you might lose everything that you made in the last decade or have have have this sort of like reset. But it give you 10 years, you'll build back up. And I think most great entrepreneurs are built that way and wired that way and almost in a sick way, kind of relish that that opportunity when that misfortune track. There is some fortune in that misfortune when a situation. Yeah, it's sort of fun. I mean, in some ways, like I think a lot of people, you know, like a comeback story to You talked about the, like, you know, you didn't want to be the Pfizer CEO.

58:04You didn't want, you kind of knew what you needed, you could have said, and you decided, like, F that. Like, I don't want to, I don't want to do business. I'm putting words in your mouth a little bit, but it's sort of like, I don't want to be a CEO, 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 versus being like this, like, very tightly wound, you know, corporate, you know, duck. And 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?

58:36Sam, have you heard about this? No. No, absolutely. It's 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 Stanford, 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.

59:05It 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, there's this frat party 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 party was over. People left. But the sand was still there. They're like, shit, what are we going to do with all this sand? We still have so much sand. They're like, what if we built an island with the sand?

59:38And 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 four or five 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 want to 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, all right, go ahead. And he like lets them in.

1:00:05They 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 is gone. The lake is gone. They shut everything down. nobody can visit 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 one by one they've kicked off all the fraternities from the campus for like whatever violation they hit a violation they removed them from campus they like scraped all the like 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 and So it's like, dude, we used to have like the biggest part of the year.

1:00:48Was this anything but clothes party? And they decided that that's too risky and it's not fair to everybody. And they're like, I always wonder, Sean, like, who are the pro like, what did my prosecutors and like judges and like regulators and people like Elizabeth Warren? What did they do in college? This is what they did in college. They shut down the party and they're like, no, this is offensive. We got to shut this party down. Right. You know, it's like, who are these people and why? Why do we ever let any of them have any power? And it's frustrating. To me that like, you know, schools like Sanford and many others have had to like go through this like identity crisis of like, I'm scared to say what I want because, you know, what if somebody is going to be offended?

1:01:24And it becomes this metagame where like we were talking about like, yeah, could I like do the party line and say, I'm really sorry. My actions have caused, you know, some misunderstanding and blah, blah, blah. And have this non-apology apology. But then in like Japan, the way you say no can be found to be insulting. So you just move the meta to like the next level where it's like, oh, you saw the way he said no. He didn't really mean it. You know, the way he said, I'm sorry, he wasn't really apologetic. There's a real way to say I'm sorry. You got to bow a little bit deeper. And it's like, OK, well, it's an insane meta where you're constantly just like getting to the next point of like inhibiting your personality.

1:02:01And what are you really saying? And just come on and say it, you know, and I think that that's a really freeing thing to do. Yeah, I don't know if it's on Substack, but I'm on your newsletter. and like you made some wild predictions. I don't remember all the predictions, but like you actually had a really good post where you said like, this is going to happen, I think in 2023, this will happen in 2030. I think in 50 years, this will happen. And it would actually be fun to look back at some of your predictions so far turning out to be true. But it's very interesting and you're pretty good at writing, actually.

1:02:32You're quite good, actually. Thanks a lot. You know, it's hard to write, you know, professionally. like you guys, I know Sam, well, 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 like a really painful thing to do because you have to provide for your investors, your coworkers, your own family, the business you love. You know, it's hard to do a lot of writing. In prison, it was a lot easier. You know, I had more time to think. But even then I was, I was actually really busy. People will ask me if I was, you know, uh, you know, bored in prison and like, it was the furthest thing from it.

1:03:15A 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, uh, 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 don't want to 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.

1:03:45You know, probably some of the craziest ones I've made, including things like there'll be kind of interspecies marriage between AI and humans. There'll be AI fundamental rights for voting and things like that. That'll kind of reshape society. So 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 Cormack, recently upgraded his estimate of AGI, so-called artificial general intelligence, from 50 percent by 2030 to 60 percent. You know, John is like this very precise, you know, calculating nerd who's, you know, created the first person shooter.

1:04:27He, you know, is a brilliant guy and he's working on his own company, which nobody's talking about, called Keen Technologies. Uh, 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. Uh, and you know, who knows? Uh, I think he's a good dark horse for this race, but no AGI is like how it 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.

1:05:06And it's really like just so profound that, you know, I don't think anybody can afford to ignore it. It's more profound than the Internet. You know, 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 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 open AI and some of the other startups that are coming out vis-a-vis sort of companies like Google and Facebook, you see that they kind of did that zooming out many years ago.

1:05:39And the companies that are sort of missing this and messing it up are kind of like too close to the sort of reality and the day-to-day product management to even see it and really understand it, that people wanted this. You know, Microsoft, both Facebook and Google had sort of equivalent technology to open AI, in my opinion, years ago. And they just still just haven't sort of seen the actual product, you know, making sounds and launching. And anyway, you know, it's a really interesting time, obviously. What's the new thing? So I'm releasing in the next day or two, maybe even today, an AI position.

1:06:18This will go live tomorrow. This will go live tomorrow. So it might be up. So is there a URL? So you're breaking the news. it's so funny in happenstance because we're talking to like TechCrunch and like all these places. We never, we didn't really find like the perfect reporter who could report on this. So here we go. It's called drgupta.ai. It's a, the first of its kind 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 sort of a synthetic AI doctor that can give you medical information.

1:06:59And I think that, you know, most... Is there a site he was your doctor or what? Dr. Gupta, like G-U-P-T-A dot AI. The site's not up yet. Oh, dot AI, all right. He happens to be Indian, but it's also GPT, so Gupta. So anyway, Dr. Gupta will give you medical information and you can talk to him. It's free. It's, 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 optimistic, there were like 50 of them, is that 90 % of healthcare costs come from physicians. 10 % come from pharma. What do you mean come from? What does that mean? We spend$4 trillion on healthcare in this country.

1:07:41Most of that money goes to physicians and healthcare workers. And a lot of that, I love doctors, I love nurses, I don't have anything against them. A lot of those decisions can be done by machines. A lot of those decisions, thanks to open AI and deep learning and LM models, can be done by AI. So can we take that$4 trillion and make it$2 trillion? That would be a big deal. You know, whatever Cuban's doing, he's 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. Give us a 30 seconds on why Cuban's thing. You've referenced a couple times how it might be dumb or not that.

1:08:20It's such a shit show. So he's basically running the pharmacy, right? So he's trying to source drugs for cheaper. And mind you, every other pharmacy is pretty good at sourcing medicine. And I don't know how he's going to get a deal on, you know, say, Teva or Sun's generics. Any better than CVS or Walgreens? It seemed kind of hard to do that, right? He doesn't have the volume they have. Get that deal and then somehow get a margin. Pharmacy margins are razor, razor freaking thin, right? You cannot take a$3 drug and charge$100 for a pharmacy. They're a razor. Just look at 10Q for Walgreens and CVS.

1:08:58Like, oh, I'm making a fortune here. And so he's going to somehow get a margin out of that. 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. So I'm on Dr. Gupa AI. So 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 it in. and then what's going to happen next? It's going to say like, you should check out, you should work on this, this and this. 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.

1:09:33I was actually, you know, a lot of people are talking about auto GPT and baby GPT. And I talked to Yogi and I talked to all of the people that invented that stuff. You never know what people are doing privately, but we started doing the auto reflective GPT stuff six months ago and we were able to discover that depending on the technique you use, you can get better chat results than ChatGPT. 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 performance than ChatGPT by making it kind of like auto-reflect and do other kind of methods that again are a secret sauce that get the chat bot to succeed.

1:10:12So 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 got to go ask WebMD. And you don't know what you're reading half the time. 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 want to talk to somebody. You want to actually have a conversation. LLMs do that amazingly.

1:10:41This is an attraction of GPT-4 that will 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 an 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 a pretty profound product, I think, because again, we spend trillions of dollars on physicians. A lot of the physicians' work can be done by AI. And that's an uncomfortable truth that, you know, So again, it doesn't mean that we don't need doctors ever again.

1:11:19In 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. That's my future. I'm on the site. I can get 50 messages for free or I pay 20 bucks a month. What's the end game here? Do you think this is going to be a massive company or is this like a thing 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 five or 10 years with this business? Yeah, I'm trying to make it a massive company. I think that, you know, it will be a massive company.

1:11:49You never say never in business, but, you know, we're certainly going to try our hardest because I do think that you can audit. This is why technology has never really bent the curve for health care. The cost of sending a megabyte, the cost of sending, you know, storing data, the cost of compute, all that has dropped by not just like 90 percent. It's dropped by like 99 and six more nines percent. Health care has not moved a bit. Why? It's because of this lobby that exists. The AMA restricts the amount of people who could become doctors. The supply is constrained. You cannot just graduate a million more doctors tomorrow.

1:12:22If 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 have a huge, wouldn't be bankrupting us. If we had a million more doctors tomorrow, healthcare wouldn't be a problem in America. The problem is we don't have a million more doctors in America. One of the reasons is there's not going to be a million people who pass med school. The other problem is that AMA specifically says there's only this many med schools. There's only this many doctors graduating from med school. We're going to make it really hard to become a doctor, even though AI can do all these things very easily.

1:12:55And you're going to see a lot of industries collapse because of GPT, I think, whether it's law, medicine, accounting, there's going to be a huge change in society thanks to AI and GPT. So how is this not like self-driving cars where even though self-driving is almost like better than a human in a bunch of different circumstances, maybe not certain weather conditions. But if it gets one thing wrong, it's all the news and all the lawsuits. And so they need to be not just better, they need to be so much better that they can overcome that. How do you not just get sued out of existence for the one mistaken medical diagnosis or treatment plan or whatever it is here?

1:13:36How do you avoid that problem? Sure. I think it's a lot like self-driving cars where if you gave me the story where there's 50 ,000 auto fatalities a year in America and I can press this button right here and there's going to be 20 ,000. There's 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, you know, terrible, you know, automobile fatality. What a horrible, you know, thing. I'm so happy. I can't wait to push that button. You know, anything stopping me from pushing that button is insane, right?

1:14:14Why would you delay that for half a second? And 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. And obviously one side is right and one side's wrong. You know, but the technical progress of the world cannot be stopped. I'm part of this EAC group, Effective Accelerationism, which is this like new movement that's counter effective altruism. So you see the E forward slash ACC. We've got a lot of really exciting members, some of the biggest people in technology.

1:14:49And it's this sort of like underground movement of people who don't want to slow down AI, of people who don't want to slow down technology. And I think that, you know, the idea that we're here to stop progress because the technology might make one mistake. And remember, that's sort of like 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. And I think that's sort of, I know that's not how you feel, Sean, but that kind of criticism and that kind of like, attitude is such a terrible, pernicious threat to our well-being that we have to look at that glass, not just have full, because it's 90 % full.

1:15:30We can't look at the 10 % that's empty. Right. Yeah. I mean, I get it philosophically. It's like the trolley problem. It's like 10 people, the train's going to run over 10 people. If I pull this lever, it'll run over those other two. And there's a, whatever, people feel different ways about that. I guess what I mean is like practically speaking for this company, like how does this company not die because something like that's going to happen? What are you going to do? Like, what do you think is going to play out there? Our firms and policies make sure that you understand that this is medical advice.

1:15:59Dr. Goop is not a real doctor, that if you use our website for medical information, it's simply for informational purposes only. And you have to, I mean, I could reach the whole disclaimer, but the reality of the matter is that do you want somebody who's 75 years old, okay, who has pneumonia, but doesn't know that they have pneumonia? They have a cough, but they're going to die of pneumonia if they don't go to hospital 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? What's better? If you don't have the LLM, they're going to go to Google.

1:16:31They're going to go to WebMD. They're going to try to read it on their own. They're going to mess it up. There's a decent chance. 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. And if you don't want a net improvement, then you're Elizabeth Warren, you're a Luddite, you're et cetera, et cetera. And if you want the improvement, you're on the right side of history. And I think that if you look at the way technology informs regulation, not the other way around, right? Regulation has to serve the people. If the people are getting the benefit, the people will demand the right side.

1:17:05If you have people that want to stand in the way of improvement, that's up to them. Listen, if we're told you got to lock Dr. 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. It's like Pitbull. It's Mr. Worldwide, 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. Dr. Gugden knows every language. They beta tested this in Spanish.

1:17:39we might localize him and make him like Dr. Somebody Else in Latin America, but Dr. Gupta matches GPT. Our other option was Dr. Lim, LLM. So we pick Dr. Dr. Gupta because he's literally Dr. GPT. Honestly, it's kind of a genius name as an Indian person. I will give it my seal of approval. I think that's very clever. Now, six months ago or nine 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 did you do both? It's all under one hood. So our company is called DL Software. We've raised some money from some really well-known people in the valley.

1:18:26It's been 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 a stint of venture I watched a ton of those. I watched all those. Thank you. And like, I'm so lucky that these people, some of whom started some of the biggest software companies in our industry, literally like maybe the top five unicorns in software, like three of the four C. Hey, it was like that where we're like, I messaged these guys like, oh, you're my teacher. I'm like so flattered, you know, that these billionaires are, are, are like on my side.

1:19:03That really happened? And they're like, yeah, I, sorry. That really happened? Yeah. A billionaire? several billionaires, you know, several billionaires are investors in our billionaires have smashed the subscribe button, hit the turn notifications on, leave a, leave a message in the comments on YouTube. I love it. It's really, really humbling because it's like, you know, you know, you couldn't find that kind of content where like you could, you could talk to somebody who was a publicly traded company CEO showing you like step-by-step kind of what their job was like. And I think more than just like how to read a balance sheet, I taught an attitude to that kind of the one thing I learned from grammar, which is like this hardcore attitude of like, you love this stuff.

1:19:41You're up, like people would watch me stream like four in the morning, like getting ready to go, you know, tear, tear the world and a new asshole. Cause I'm so like excited about doing my job. And I think it got a lot of people out of a funk or out of like a hard time and like just pushing people to like push harder, push harder. That worked for so many people at, at these, at these unicorns, these mega unicorns, these like 10X unicorns that, that. Yeah, that's why I said you're amazing at content because you have the trifecta. There's three things it takes to be great at content. The first is unique perspective or unique POV, right?

1:20:13So you have a unique specific set of knowledge that the average person doesn't have. Okay, most people would expect that. Now, here's the unexpected ones. You do energy transmission. So most content is actually just a transfer of my energy and excitement or outrage about whatever it is to you. And 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, you do pushups on the ground. You're pumped up about whatever or you're calling somebody out or whatever it is. It's energy transmission. And the last thing, you're like a reality TV person.

1:20:48You kind of know what you're supposed to say, but you don't really care. and you want to say what you like, you don't really care. You care more about like, uh, saying the thing than what people will think of you saying the thing. And, uh, some, for some reality TV people, it's cause they're just not aware. They don't know it, you know, it, and you just don't care. You like override that sensor. And you're like, no, that sensor doesn't get to decide what's going on here. And so you have, you have all three. And I think that that's what makes your streams so impressive. Like you said at the beginning of this, I don't do the, like, just wing it, but I've seen you just wing it.

1:21:22And I actually think that's your best content. So I don't know what you meant by that. Well, just like closing the loop on it, like I only started those streams because, you know, I didn't want people to think I was the pharma bro, which I was like being characterized as. And I basically wanted people to like judge for themselves, like see a day in my life, see if like you think I'm a dick or not. And some people said, yeah, I still think you're a dick. But some people said, yeah, I kind of like this guy. And, you know, maybe this is like a little bit of what I want to be like. And so the point is, like, I'm so lucky that the people who watch that in 2015, 2016, obviously not all of them became successful, but a handful of them, the top couple of people became unbelievably successful.

1:22:00And that's maybe because of me, maybe not because of me, maybe it's in spite of me, you know, but the whole point that they, some of them thank me for it is, I'm really lucky for that. I have three software products under our sort of umbrella here, But I think the key thing for our company is getting amazing talent in any industry, but especially in tech. The only really thing that matters is this combination of capital and people. And capital is easy to get. There's infinite capital in the world. It's about, do you have the people to execute the plan? And I'm so lucky that a little bit of this personal profile gets great engineers to come to the table and talk.

1:22:36It doesn't always get them in the door. but the fact that like we can do that and like the one skill I have as a manager to your point is that energy transfer of like getting people, like can I pump you up about making a synthetic doctor? Well, to some people that might be really boring. And if you pitch it the wrong way, if you're like at a big healthcare company, you're like, well, we're gonna make a medical information, you know, diagnostic tools, et cetera, et cetera. It sounds like shit, you know, but if you do it the right way and you explain to the engineer that there's, if we do our jobs right, there's no such thing as a doctor in 30 years.

1:23:07that every operation, every prescription, every piece of medical advice you ever get from now on comes from a machine and it costs 10 cents. That changes the world. That's something that you're going to leave a legacy. We're going to make a fortune. We're going to have a lot of fun. And it's going to change the world for everyone. For the Indonesian that can't see a doctor for 30 days and the doctor they're seeing is a very questionable variety, you know, and provenance to be able to get the best medical expertise of an American physician. That's insane, right? And And we're getting that tomorrow.

1:23:37And I think that, again, you can't get a prescription from Dr. Gugda and he's not going to cut out your bunion. But I think that the fact that we can even touch 5-10 % of healthcare costs, that's hundreds of billions of dollars. It's bigger than Google's TAMP. So, like, you know, healthcare is one of these just gigantic spots that has never been chunked by technology despite the best attempts of Sand Hill Road. Like, billions of dollars flew 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 like very AI, simple problem for AI for that little advice of, yeah, you should take this beta blocker or should not take this beta blocker.

1:24:19We should do the surgery or not do the surgery. And that human advice is really important. But at the same time, like, you know, a good chunk of it could probably be automated. The last thing I wanted to bring up was like, so I ran this company called The Hustle, which we wrote about you. And you actually were homies with Brina, this woman who worked for me. And you were like, at one point, we're like, hey, come visit me in San Diego. And I remember like, yeah, and Trong. Yeah. And I remember like, right when your story broke, it was Pharma Bro. And then I got to like, you and I chatted on Blab before.

1:24:47And I don't know if you remember, we've talked before. I'm like, it's funny. This guy's not really a bro at all. like he's he's just a nerd he's just like he like you know he talks a lot like and he's confident but he's like like a pretty nerdy guy and the reason it's so funny about media perception the reason your story did i think the way it all like started was you have this picture i'm looking at at it now it's you wearing like ray-bans and a red polo and you have like a picture of what looks like flow rider in the back like on a music video in a bugatti and you're like pointing down like this and you're like your jawline looks cut and you look like the broiest of bros.

1:25:24And I remember when we wrote this story in the hustle, we tried a bunch of different photos and that photo did best because it's just like, you're just like giving into this big old stereotype. And, uh, we just, we just made this trade. That fucking picture ruined you, man. So the backstory is funny. Like we had just done this stock trade. It was in my personal account. We made$20 million shorting the stock called Vital Therapies. They were developing a liver dialysis machine. We spent day and night stalking this company and figuring out everything about the attempt to make a liver dialysis machine.

1:25:59It works for a kidney really well. They wanted to take that same idea and apply it to the liver. Sounds good, right? Doesn't work. There are a lot of technical reasons. Me and two colleagues spent day in, day out stalking, figuring this company out. We wrote a 40-page report. We put the report out. the stock felt like 40 % just on the report. Two weeks later, the drug, 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. And so the day you went down, we did that. The Floor Riders song is called It's Going Down or something like that.

1:26:31And so I was like, you know, doing this like thing. Because like 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 like venture capital grind and, and, and a public company grind of like lying and trying to make shit stick and, and make, put the best, you know, spin on things. And so when we shorted it and it went down, it's going down, you know, that was the kind of joke. And I was like, Oh, how funny would it be if I, you know, dressed up like a bro for a second.

1:27:00And then like, we had a friend in the trade too. We had a couple of friends in the trade, like putting it on Twitter was, was kind of like a, Oh, check it out. Like it's going down because of us because we wrote the short report and again what the next like two weeks the same i made it like my profile pic and like the next two weeks like that that's what everyone sees on it's like oh yeah man this picture yeah like this picture is like it's just so funny like i don't know the whole facts of your story and you admitted admitted wrongdoing and everything but it's like it was it was amplified and uh this picture was like the beginning of the end for you this one picture that's what it seemed because i remember this one picture going the beginning of an interesting story i like i to me like you know i'll take it and try it like you would look at it and many other people look at it as the beginning the end i look at it as life's just a crazy ride it's a crazy movie you know it would be very boring to like be a value investor for the next 50 years and make a hundred billion dollars doing gram and dot stock picking like something it's right for somebody else it's not right for my life and it is the path i chose You know, not like, you know, it was an intentional choice, you know, maybe not the wisest choice, but it is the choice for me.

1:28:09And, you know, I don't regret having had like a really interesting, exciting life. There are moments of it that weren't fun, but there's it's still one of these things where I'm not like deeply ashamed of like something I did or something like that. Like it's a conscious choice I made to sort of like do the things I did. The photo was, you know, it was alarming to me that the media could take like an image and say, OK, this is this person. Let's let's cast it this way. And I think it sort of backfired in the long run. You know, I'm sort of more popular than ever and, you know, kind of doing just fine.

1:28:41So if you there's a price to be paid, if you go, if you could go back, would you have advised, you know, if you can go back and kind of whisper in the ear of yourself at any point in time, you know, would you have told yourself, hey, if you're going on TV, don't don't don't say that thing. don't don't be smug don't do this don't do that would you have played it differently knowing what you know now i think i i think like you know there's two sides of the story with like the rationalist would say of course you know like tone it down here you know tuck in your you know tuck that in tuck in your shirt there you know straighten up there uh metaphorically but the the i think the the oldest wisdom is know thyself right and it's like just be yourself know yourself be who you are.

1:29:23And like, 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. And if you spend your life answering to your own conscience, I think then, you know, you can no matter what happens, no matter, put you in jail for a lesser life, you'll have the, at least have something nobody could take away from you, which is like your own identity and your own personality. And I think there's a lot of value to that. You sound like William Wallace, man. You're like William Wallace in Braveheart, you know, they'll take our freedom or what they say, they'll take our lives We'll never take our freedom.

1:29:54You know, there's a point in time where you have to be a real person. And I think like if you want to be a corporate sort of like mimic of like every other corporate person in the world, that's a life. If that's the life you want, that's the life you want. There's just only so much of that life that I can take. And for me, I had it when it came to like the media. Like you said, you know, with the Flo Rida picture or whatever, the typecasting, it was like, you know, I can't. That's a line that was too much for me. So I think it's it's probably more reactive than anything else. Like Hillary Clinton tweeting at me and stuff like that.

1:30:27It was like so surreal. Like me, you know, the mild mannered pharmaceutical executive. I'm the object of your fucking scorn. You know, this is nuts. You know, so a lot of it was that like provoke and be provoked. Like, you know, it was not like easy to to sit there and just do nothing. So like it's easy. Like, yeah, I'll turn it on you guys. Like it's very easy to sort of throw advice out. But when you are in a hot seat and somebody says, oh, aren't you this and aren't you that? And, you know, you say, well, you know, I'm sorry I caused some disturbance here and I'm just really, you know, it's really hard to do that, you know, sometimes.

1:31:06You, first of all, that's hilarious. Second of all, you don't know us super well, but before our old kind of podcast setup, Sam used to have these photos on the wall of like his personal hall of fame. and it'd be like, you know, some inspirations from business like Sam before he started the hustle. He really loved Ted Turner. He's like, dude, this guy like made the fucking news business and he's a baller. He like he attacked it in this way. He had Nate Diaz up there. He's like, I love this guy. He's a UFC fighter. He's like just a badass. It just takes this attitude into life that we like. I like Conor McGregor and I think he's interesting and I like certain things that he's done about his life.

1:31:41I don't like all of these people. I just like certain things. I took inspiration from certain things at certain periods of certain people's lives. Who were some people that you were inspired by, either in the business world or the non-business world that you think you sort of have admired or you've gone down the YouTube rabbit hole and just binged a bunch of their content or whatever? I'll start with Vince McMahon. So when I started to be this bad guy and I realized that there was nothing I could do to change that narrative. Like I could do a two-hour interview with ABC. You're the heel. And they would take the 30 seconds that fucked me and make the 30 seconds loop and like forget the other, you know, 119 minutes.

1:32:23Those 30 seconds are the ones that are going to be on TV. I realized like there's no way out of this and I'm going to have to embrace being the bad guy. And 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. And I sort of embraced kind of being this jerk and trying to dress down, you know, the so-called authority figures by sort of pointing, you know, pointing the mirror back at them. So Vince, Vince sort of like had that like kafabe wrestling, you know, they call it a heel in wrestling where, you know, he's he's the owner of the company, but he's also kind of like breaking down that fourth wall of like some of the stuff he's talking about on the show is like related to actual boardroom battles.

1:33:04and like some of the, you know, stuff on the show is completely contrived. And, you know, 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. You know, I like a lot of like different scientists and stuff like that. You know, so business people themselves, you know, there aren't a lot that I like point to and say, well, 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, hated, by the way, in 94, Bill Gates was sued for Monopoly, but his company was, not him.

1:33:39And people wanted to tear this guy apart. And I was just sort of coming up. I was like 11 years old. I love computers. I started programming. And I was like, everyone hates Bill Gates. And the hacker community hated Bill Gates. And it's because he wanted to make money. And he's not apologetic about it. And 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 that we're all using Microsoft products right now like what would we be doing without it and you know the Linux nerds would be like well you know 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 just sort of liked taking that bad guy and at the time he was so really hated 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.

1:34:28And he spent the rest of his life like trying to walk back on that. And like how cool it had been if he sort of embraced the narrative. Like, yeah, you know, because privately he does embrace the narrative, right? It's just sort of this public image of like, no, no, I'm this benevolent philanthropist. You don't understand. You know, privately, the guy's still just as ruthless, still just as vicious and just as energetic and intense as he was when he was a kid. So, you know, it's all this like, you know, imagery for nothing. um and you know there's a number of other folks like uh henry nicholas who started broadcom you know i i mean i there's just so many people that you know i've studied in business over the years that i like tom petterfee from interactive brokers um so many people i admire that that did did things their way um and and made it work uh 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 true American success story.

1:35:24And people sort of forget that, you know, or don't understand that, like all this stuff in politics and like the sort of funded prosecutor and stuff like that, that 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 guy's 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 America to become truly successful.

1:35:54So 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 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 of sort of made me. I have Bill Gates on mine because of the interview about the chair, jumping over the chair. He jumps over the chair. I still think that's the most gangster, like CEO interview moment.

1:36:32I don't even know how this came up. And then he, he's. I think the interviewer was like, I heard a rumor that you could, you know how to jump over a chair. He goes, yeah. No, no, he goes. Do it. He goes, well, it depends on the height of the chair. And then it cuts to a chair and him clearing it like Tony Hawk. And I have no explanation why this was like, is this what TV interviews were like back then? Like, I can't imagine something like, that's like being like Donald Trump. Like, is it true you could win an arm wrestling match against anyone? He's like, well, rolls up his sleeve. And just like punks, punks.

1:37:05Dude, I'm watching this video, by the way. It's not that impressive. It's not a big chair. You don't think you could jump over a chair? I never would have thought. He's such a nerdy, nerdy, shrimpy guy. He's actually 5 '11". but like there's this like impression that he can jump over that chair yeah dude he takes a step i bet you could jump over a chair bro you need a chair i'll get you a chair we'll jump i want to recreate this scene we'll put it on our youtube i don't think i could jump over this chair and i was like i i played basketball i think i was i would in my head i'm more athletic than bill gates but honestly i can't claim that until i do this chair i don't know man he's probably only 35 in this video i think you could jump to turn 35 next week it's perfect uh me versus bill gates head to head pay-per-view we got to do it uh martin thanks for doing this man um we appreciate it we um i know that like i don't i won't out you but i know that you've got like some anonymous accounts online normally we say where can people find you but for you you get banned every like third week so it's not that useful and we were like is are we even talking to the real martin is he even gonna come like what is he we weren't even sure if we were talking to the right guy the um Interesting thing about that is I think the world's changing quite a bit.

1:38:15Like, like the sensitivity of banning people on Twitter has now given away. So I'm actually starting to talk to Twitter. I'm still in my old Twitter account is at Morton Shkreli. It's in the process, hopefully being on band. But any anybody that could help me get that on band, I'd really appreciate it. Right now, I'm at Marty underscore cat boy, which an ex-girlfriend made for me, which, you know, has stuck for some reason. and not my crowdest Twitter handle. And on Instagram, I'm martinscrawley15. But yeah, I love social media, but, you know, getting banned from, I'm banned from Tinder and Hinge and, you know, like so many odd, you know, social medias on YouTube.

1:38:54But you're banned from Tinder? Why? I don't know. I think like part of it is this. That's like the definition of a cock block, right? Like they just banned you from dating? What's going on? I think this cancel culture like extends into virtually anything, right? And for Tinder, you can argue that, 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 it is what it is. I'll live. But yeah, Twitter is like this. My lifelong goal is to get unbanned from Twitter because it's been seven years.

1:39:32And I actually went to jail for a shorter period of time than I've been in Twitter jail. so like you know i i was banned went to prison came out and i'm still banned well did you get banned just like you like asked somebody to get you a lock of hillary clinton's hair wasn't that the reason why it wasn't that it was it was i was teasing this woman who who i was it was like this very left-wing journalist and i was kind of like ribbing her a little bit over politics and stuff like that and apparently i went too far but like it was obviously you know selective bias i mean it It was like insanely selective for a lifetime ban.

1:40:05You know, it was a joke I made about her husband or something. And it was just like too far. And it's like, look, words aren't that dangerous. You know, nobody's getting hurt by these words, you know, and they're going back and forth. It's a two way street, you know. But, you know, what I did was way too over the line. And what she did was totally fine. You know, it was just this like insane perspective. So I'm hoping Elon or somebody can get me unbanned because it's been seven years. And I was skyrocketing with followers and views. And that's the thing about cancel culture, right? You have somebody who's taking off.

1:40:38Their narrative is boosting. They're improving. I was improving my reputation. Deriprim was starting to look like the rearview mirror for me. 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.

1:41:10It's kind of a disgusting thing. 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 we were like I'm not sure if he's coming or not it was 50-50 chance so I'm happy we made this happen and we appreciate you thank you so much guys we'll talk soon that's it, that's the pod

1:42:01All right, this episode is brought to you by Mercury. They are the finance platform of choice for over 200 ,000 companies. Shouldn't be surprised because I use it myself for not one, not two, but I have eight different Mercury accounts. I have seven for different companies that I'm a part of, and then I have my own personal account because now they have personal banking, which is a really cool feature. I highly, highly recommend it. Like I said, I use it myself. And the reason why is because the way that Mercury works is beautiful. It's very intuitive. And you could tell that it's actually made by a startup founder.

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