Martin Shkreli Reveals How He Made His First $100M

Episode 445: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) talk with Martin Shkreli (@marty_catboy), aka "the most hated man in America", about how he got started in pharma, his logic behind raising the price of Daraprim, why he spent time in prison, and what business he's starting now. Vote for MFM to win a Webby: mfmpod.com/webby Click here to sign up for our event in Austin, TX on Saturday April 29th: mfmpod.com/atx Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. Check Out Sam's Stuff: * Hampton * Ideation Bootcamp * Copy That Check Out Shaan's Stuff: * Power Writing Course * Daily Newsletter ----- Links: *Dr. Gupta AI *@martinshkreli15 (Instagram) * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. ------ Show Notes: (00:30) - Intro to Martin Shkreli (02:10) - When Martin worked with Jim Cramer (23:00) - How he turned $2M into $1B in pharma (35:40) - Why did you jack up the price of the drugs? (54:20) - What do you do with your money? (01:00:33) - The Fun Strikes Back Movement (01:08:30) - Introducing Martin's New Company: Dr. Gupta AI (01:33:50) - Who are your heroes? ------ Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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

• 0:30Shaan Puri?

  What's up? We just had a conversation with Martin Shkreli. If you don't know who he is, you could just Google his name and you'll find that he is, quote unquote, "the most hated man in America," or he is "the pharma bro." And he's, you know, he touches kind of a bunch of different things. The bingo card for my first million. He's made hundreds of millions of dollars. He's super controversial and some people love him, some people hate him. He went to prison for something that he did with his hedge fund. And he comes on here and he tells us a bunch of things. He tells us how he made his first million. He gave his side of the story on why he bought that drug and raised the price and why maybe it wasn't so evil as it was portrayed. Why he hates sort of vanilla CEOs that just only speak in corporate speak and why he refuses to do that. Why he thinks Mark Cuban is full of shit.

• 1:15Shaan Puri?

  He also unveils his new startup in the AI space for the first time ever. So a pretty interesting conversation with Martin. He is, he's one thing, he's not boring. You'll, I think we can all agree on that. Some people love him, some people hate him. I think you see in this episode, you can see a couple of different sides of him. And so I'm curious to hear what you guys think. I would love for you to put in the comments whether you love this episode, you hated this episode, or somewhere in between. And, you know, we always commit that on this pod, you know, when we bring people on, we're not saying this is the best person ever or the worst. We just want to have interesting conversations with interesting people. I want to get into their mind and find out why they are the way they are, how they think, how they operate. And then you can decide for yourself whether this is somebody you're into or not. So that's this episode, Martin Shkreli.

• 1:58Shaan Puri?

  It's about a two hour interview and enjoy. Sam, where do you want to start? We could either go more on the AI stuff or there's some interesting stuff in your, your kind of start of your career that I think is kind of fun. Like you worked, you worked with Jim Cramer, is that right? When you were 16 years old, you worked for Kramer, the guy who's always yelling on CNBC. What was that like? What's Kramer like?

• 2:22Speaker 00

  Kramer's great. You know, hedge funds were a different world back then. It was a very, very small asset class, maybe 50 billion, 100 billion totals. You know, any private partnership is technically kind of a hedge fund, right? If you have outside investors and you're charging them one and 20 or two and 20 and you're shorting stocks and doing exotic stuff, you know, that's a hedge fund, whether you call it that or not. So Warren Buffett had a hedge fund, all the folks had a hedge fund. But at the time, the biggest hedge funds were Galleon Group, SAC Capital, you know, handful of kind of like Tiger, Soros, you know, it was sort of the wild time for the hedge fund industry, kind of, you know, very, very small industry, maybe 30 or 40 or 50 firms

• 3:06Speaker 00

  of any significance. And that means like, you know, 100 million dollars or more. And so Kramer was one of those firms. I got to work there. I was very lucky.

• 3:16Shaan Puri?

  You were in high school at the time?

• 3:18Speaker 00

  I was sort of in this like weird state of both being a high school dropout, a high school graduate and a high school, you know, continuing, you know, kind of education. It was very weird. I had, I went to this very special school called Hunter, where I fulfilled all my degree requirements pretty early. So I was ready, sort of graduated in the States eyes. But I continued to sort of like go to the school and pick up credits and like go to college at the same time. So it was just a weird like mishmash of education and sort of hard to explain, but

• 3:52Shaan Puri?

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

• 4:01Speaker 00

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

• 4:21Sam Parr?

  But did your parents like discipline you? Were they like, dude, what the fuck? Show some respect?

• 4:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. You know, I think

• 4:28Sam Parr?

  But not really.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  You know, I don't know. You know, I think there's like this, you know,

• 4:35Speaker 00

  I've always had this, you know, opinion that people take themselves too seriously and and take authority too seriously. And of course, you know, I landed myself in prison. Well, yeah, I think that, you know, there's a

• 4:46Sam Parr?

  And and you are right. They do take themselves seriously. Yeah. Another prediction that you've gotten correct.

• 4:51Shaan Puri?

  I remember one, one time, Martin was on blab, and again, the numbers were going crazy. I was like, I gotta see what happened. He must be acting a fool or something. I don't know what's going on. And I go in and the CNN reporter was demanding like an interview with him. He was like, she was like, you should, Martin, I've been watching this. It's really interesting. I would love to have a conversation with you on CNN. And he's like, no, no, you come on my show. This is my show. You want to interview me? We could do it right here. And she's like, okay, I'm not gonna do that. But if you come on CNN.

• 5:26Shaan Puri?

  He's like, no, no, come on the show. And then she's like refusing or whatever. He's like, she starts like, trying to like, have a moment to like, tell him how bad he is. And then he asked her, he's like, I'm going to the gala tonight. You want to be my plus one? Butter a plane ticket.

• 5:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, didn't you end up going out? Didn't you go out with her?

• 5:44Shaan Puri?

  No, not this one. But I just thought, wow, what a like, you know, they don't teach that in PR school. Just ask him on a date. If it's not going, if the interview's not going well.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  Break, breaking down the fourth wall is like my specialty, right? Like, you know, I, and what Elon sort of did out to that BBC guy the other day, like I

• 6:02Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  I would always ask, um, I remember one of my analysts, uh, who's on the sell side before joining me on the buy side. And he brought a management team to come over to this sort of skipping ahead in my career a little bit to to having my own funds.

• 6:17Speaker 00

  He brought a management team over to, you know, pitch some stock or pitch a pipe or something. And I, I asked the CEO why he didn't, he didn't own any stock in his company. And he, you know, he sort of like hemming and hawing like, you know, that temperature is kind of getting hot. And I said, you know, because I have your proxy right here. Like I put it on the table and I said, it looks like you make $550,000 a year. That's, that's a good amount of money. Can you promise me today that you'll buy like $10,000 or $20,000 of your stock at least? And, and the guy's just sort of like, you know, the most uncomfortable meeting in the history of Wall Street, you know, because I kept like hammering on it. I was like, no, but just tell me like, why can't you afford to spend $10,000 and buy your own stock?

• 6:58Speaker 00

  Stock price will go up. Everyone wins. You'll show confidence that, you know, and I just wouldn't like for 20 minutes, let it go. Uh, and it was just, you know, one of these like, you know, breaking down that fourth wall. You're not like, I'm not supposed to do that. You know, his personal finances are up to him is what most portfolio managers would say, you know? He's allowed to not own his stock. It's truly his call. But, you know, being able to sort of like, you know, cut to the chase on half these things and like, you know, address the elephant in the room is kind of the thing that I like to do, even if it's really uncomfortable or, or difficult or embarrassing or, you know, full paw. You know, it's, it's something that, you know, I'll, I'll just sort of, you know, cut to the chase with.

• 7:36Sam Parr?

  Well, I remember when you got arrested or the headline was like, uh, you had to put up like your fidelity account or something like that. That had like $60 million in it. And at the time you were, I don't know how old you were, 32 or something. I mean, early 30s, very young. And you, I mean, it was, it was a significant amount of money and that didn't, that was just your fidelity account, let alone like your, uh, you know, the touring, uh, you know, the, the farm, the farmer companies that you'd founded was, did you make your first bit of money when you started the hedge funds? And how did that come to be? Or were you already doing well just being at the hedge funds where you worked?

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Oh, it's a great question. So I never made money at hedge funds. I never really made a dollar.

• 8:19Sam Parr?

  Working at or owning?

• 8:21Speaker 00

  Both. So when I started at hedge funds, I was young and, you know, didn't really earn. Money, uh, which was fine. You know, I wasn't optimizing for that, you know? Was optimizing for learning stuff, experience, uh, good relationships. Uh, I mostly succeeded in that. I think, you know, probably messed up some relationships, but regardless, you know, did the best I could as a young guy. Started my own fund, um, pretty, pretty terrible at doing the fund management business, you know, investing, being a good investor and being a good fund manager, kind of like pretty different things is what I think most hedge fund entrepreneurs kind of learn. You know, um, you know, there, you can be a really brilliant investor and not manage the actual business well.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  And the business is to grow your assets as much as possible, provide the best sort of adjusted returns possible and satisfy your clients. And I didn't really want to do any of that, you know, I just wanted to invest and um, I never took fees from any of my funds, which was very like, you know, sort of bizarre. Uh, and there were, there were sort of technical or legal reasons for that, but so I never really made any money, uh, in hedge funds. When I started my first drug company called Retrophin, which is now called Trivir, this is about 10 years ago. Uh, that's sort of where everything sort of came together for me. I, I learned pharma by being a hedge fund person for 10 years and, and hedge funds, studying pharma, starting with the early Jim Cramer days where I was just figuring out what a stock and a bond was.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  And then moving on to, you know, trading these things and working at hedge funds and stuff like that. And then starting my own, I, I really mastered pharmaceuticals. I, I knew everything about pharma. And I impressed a lot of people in pharma who are working in the field or working hedge funds. And, you know, it was easy for me to sort of start a drug company and find some really good assets. The first asset I found actually received FDA approval just, just a couple of months ago. So I'm really proud of that. And um, when our company went public, uh, you know, I was a millionaire. How, how old were you? It was 2012, um, you know, so I was born in 83, so I guess I was 29 and um, I was a CEO of a publicly traded company and the market capital of that company, like I said,

• 10:32Speaker 00

  now is 1.5 billion roughly and the drug got FDA approved. I'm really happy about that. Like so often in biotech, people start companies, they kind of extract some equity value out of them as they go public and then the company's drugs don't work and they kind of move on. And there are people that have like coasted in biotech, doing that like every three, five years. You know, I named some names, but it doesn't matter, you know, and getting a drug FDA approved and for me, kind of on my first try was sort of like a very, you know, a very like nice feather in my cap and I'm happy for the people that are now getting this prescription for this kidney disease. I'm really delighted by that, but the, you know, the, it was a lot of fun to see that. So when people ask me like, where'd you make your first million?

• 11:18Speaker 00

  I made my first like 25 million all at once, still on the same day, you know, like it wasn't like, okay, you make, like one of my great friends started off making, um, you know, he's a great story and one day maybe we'll have him on this podcast. Uh, he started off trading sneakers and he was like 13 or something and then he started trading cars and he ended up trading stocks and he, he sort of went from a thousand bucks to 5,000 to 100,000 to a million to 5 million, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, that, that road isn't what everyone does, right? Like some people, I was like literally almost like starving, you know, and like broke, you know, trying to get that big, big win and it came through.

• 11:59Shaan Puri?

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

• 12:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I had a sort of like a mix of of issues. Like when you run a small fund, you have like costs and stuff like that. So you know, you have startup costs.

• 12:28Sam Parr?

  How big was the fund?

• 12:29Speaker 00

  I had about eight million, um, you know, ever since I started. So like, you know, you just can't like, even with good investing, you just kind of can't do that well. With respect to to returns, if you have other costs and things like that. And, you know, we had like all kinds of like. Issues happen along the way that that led to that prosecution and stuff like that, that sort of limited our our ability to to do really well financially. And again, we we didn't take any fees either because again, we had this sort of big issue that that came about and we just decided to not take fees at all. But in the end, our investors did fairly well. Um, you know, the record shows that our investors all made money in our funds, so I was really happy to deliver that. But.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  You know, along the way, there are a lot of twists and turns and hiccups that are they're not worth going into. But hedge funds for me were kind of like a. Just sort of like a roller coaster of of. Issues that were just over, you know, and over again, kind of like various like, you know, unexpected twists and turns that didn't really. Add up to profit. Some people with hedge funds, like if you get off to like a good start. For your first like three or six months, often you can get this momentum of raising more capital and raising more capital and you get this like virtuous cycle. But you can also go in the other direction where, you know, if you, you know, many funds are started by good investors and they end up failing. And those investors sort of come back and take take a few years off and start a fund again. Um, you know, hedge funds have like the shortest lifespan.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  You know, if you look at the top hedge funds from the nineties, almost none of them exist today. And I think of those like top 10 hedge funds of all time, like five were shut down by regulatory intervention. So like, it's a very hazardous job. You know, there's, there's a, you know, 10% chance of going to jail, being had from the intercords. It's a, it's a really, you know. Kind of dangerous job to be in. And, uh, you know, you're dealing with the markets and you're dealing with representations to investors. Just how to mark privates, right? Is is kind of like one of these like real debates. I know a guy who went to jail for that. Uh, fairly recently, um, you know, anybody looking into your books can basically say, oh, well, you marked this too high, you know, therefore you, you know, you're, you're defrauding your

• 14:38Speaker 00

  investors for charting them too much. Well, you marked it too low. Well, now you're defrauding them because, you know, you're, you're, you're preferencing the other investors who are coming into the fund. So you really can't, can't win. It's a very tough business. You don't build any actual lasting value. As you know, almost no hedge funds have gone public. So it's just kind of a crummy business in general. And like, I, I don't recommend anyone kind of get into it unless they're so interested in stocks that they can't, you know, help but like spend their whole time looking at stocks. Like Kramer, back then Kramer's like a stock addict, right? So this guy, again, I consider him, you know, not quite a friend, but like I, I, I have a fond memory of working with

• 15:16Speaker 00

  him. I mean, he is like a, a drug addict to their drug. He is like that to securities. Like, he cannot get away from it. There's nothing he loves more in the world than stocks. And you think about people like Warren Buffett and say, maybe that's, that's kind of like them. And the average person who wants to get into hedge funds, they wanted to get into it because, oh, I can make 10 million bucks or I can make 50 million bucks in a year. Wow. Look at that. Jim Simon made a billion dollars. I can be like that. That sounds great. And, you know, that's a terrible, terrible, terrible way to look at it, right? If you wake up in the middle of the night thinking about S and P earnings estimates, you should be a hedge boss, right? But if you don't care on a Sunday, you know, what's, what the news is going to be on Monday in the stock market, or what, you know, your favorite company CEO is doing that night, you know, that's, it's not for you. And I think

• 16:00Speaker 00

  there are people that the hedge fund industry has grown so much, people come to finance not understanding that. In the nineties and the eighties, the only people that were in hedge funds were people like Jim and Buffett and people like, like that, that were just like so intensely, insanely possessed by the gyrations of the market. And if that's not you, it's, it's kind of not a good industry. But for me, I was sort of intensely possessed with pharmaceutical companies and pharmaceutical assets for drugs and medicines. And, you know, it was actually a better fit to do private equity, um, you know, kind of style investing where you actually buy whole medicines, whole companies, you know, that, that worked really well for me. And I've seen a A lot of people in hedge funds sort of transitioned to that model of, well, if I can buy 5% of a software company,

• 16:44Speaker 00

  why can't I buy 100% of a software company, right? That that makes more sense to me. And for me, you lose that, like, one of the things I was very bad at, at, at trading and investing, was kind of that impulse, right? Where you have to have this insanely good discipline as a trader. And my partner had this really, really great discipline. I didn't. So I could value a security as good as anyone. But when it came time to like executing and actually deploying capital and risk management and stuff like that, it was, it was much harder for me to be good at that. So when it came to-

• 17:15Sam Parr?

  Wait, what is that? What, what, what does that mean? You're, you're not patient? You, you wanted the dopamine hit? You wanted the dopamine hit?

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Every one of those things. You have said it.

• 17:21Sam Parr?

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

• 17:27Speaker 00

  I think that like, to ask somebody to manage a portfolio well is one of the most impossible tasks in like human psychology, because the, and there's this great book, I've gotten better at it over the years, For Less Worth. And my, my personal trading is, is paradoxically like sword and profit as my, you know, I basically couldn't do that in, in private investing.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  The, the hardest thing to do is, is really to fight two or three different, for me, specific demons that are psychologically based, but everyone has their own demon. For me, it's avoiding this, this desire to double down. So the market is like this really tough psychological battle where you're constantly going to be humbled that your opinion is wrong, that your thesis is wrong, that this stock is not cheap. You're wrong. It's not cheap at all and you got to sell it. And that's really hard cognitively to embrace every day. You can embrace it every now and then. Oh yeah, obviously I, I, I bought this crap stock and I'm wrong.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  But when you're right, you do get that dopamine hit and you don't want to confront that loss of the dopamine hit, or even worse, the- Acknowledgement that you were wrong and you're going to be wrong like forty, fifty percent of the time at best, you know, say thirty-five, forty percent of the time. And most people don't want to be wrong ever. So the desire is sometimes to double down and to say, no, I know I'm right. This is an even better opportunity than it was before. If you keep doing that, you basically will go bankrupt. And it's like the fastest way to go bankrupt. And you know, I've learned that trick, you know, a couple of times now. And, and I think that, you know, I've gotten better at sort of not doubling down, but to be really great trader, you got to not just not double down, you also have to get out, you know, before all the damage is done.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  And so I've started to do that well, too. But you know, these, these pains are not pains your investors want you to learn on their buying, right? They're, they're pains you have to sort of, you know, be ready, you know, when you start your own fund. So I started my fund too early and stuff like that, but I think that I wouldn't, I wouldn't change a lot in the sense that when you have a fund, you learn more about your industry. If you do it right, I think you learn more about your industry than, than, than any other sort of job other than actually being in that industry. So you, you learn a ton about what Wall Street wants. So let's say if you're a software analyst, it's really great to then have a software company because you know exactly kind of what the exit looks like and what like public company investors want to see. And the same thing works in biotech and in biotech to handicap like, oh, this company

• 19:58Speaker 00

  or stock be a good stock. Well, you got to figure out, well, this drug be a good drug. And that's the exact same skill set you have to do when you're CEO. So you have that like, you know, crossover that's happening quite a bit more in biotech. I've, I've seen that, you know, it doesn't happen so much in tech. People who invest in tech generally don't want to be operators. And the tricks that you have to learn on the operating side in tech are very different from biotech. And biotech, you can actually like learn to pick up most of the operating stuff from being an investor. Whereas I think in tech, like, you know, being an investor in a software company certainly doesn't make you a programmer. So, you know.

• 20:31Sam Parr?

  And, and that's what I was going to ask you because you, you, you were like, well, I started a pharmaceutical company because I loved the asset and I learned through it through finance, which is way different than like, for example, my friend Cara started this company Hint, which does like water because she was like, my skin was bad and I didn't want to drink Gatorade or Coke anymore. So I like went and formed, I went and boiled fruit peels and made this fruit water. That's like, tastes good, it's good for you. And we grew from there. Your founding story was like, oh, I found assets that were interesting. Like, it's like, that's like foreign to me. You know what I mean?

• 21:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, so like if if there was a company, for example, my first hedge fund, we bought 10% of this company, publicly traded company, and they had bought this asset from Bristol Myers, the major, major drug company in New Jersey. And Bristol Myers spent like 50 million bucks developing this drug and they quit. They basically said, this doesn't fit our portfolio. We're not really going after the disease they were trying to go after was hypertension, which is very boring and that does not need another medicine. There's like 60 hypertension drugs, you know, it does not need to be a 60 first. And they they just quit on the drug. There are people who have like really bad resistant hypertension and so forth. So I really liked this asset. I like the way it worked. And I, after Bristol Myers quit on it, the publicly traded company in the financial crisis, they merged with another publicly traded company.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  So I went to the publicly traded company. And again, the only thing I have is a hedge moment. And I said, let me buy, and nobody's told a story, by the way. So this is a good, good time to tell it because it's really, you know, it's basically a story about how we went to this company with $2 million and turned it into over a billion. You know, which is is kind of remarkable, but people do this in pharma every day. And my friend, and at the time, it was actually my biggest investor, Vivek Ramaswamy, he's now running for president. He basically took our, our business model and supersized it. And again, you know, who who would influence too is is a matter, well, left, really left to history. But the, the point is, we went to this company that had the license from Bristol. And they, they were doing anything with it. And we said, listen, we'll take this.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  We'll find investors, we'll build a company around it, and I'm going to figure out how to, how to make this work. And they said, okay, sure, you know, we, we got this asset sitting here doing nothing. If you pay us 2 million bucks, we'll, we'll send you the 2 million bucks. Now, we sent them a million dollars, which was really catastrophic, because you never want to sort of go back in your word. But it was really like a dire circumstance where I forgot what happened exactly, but we just couldn't come up with money. And it was like, we sent them a million and they're like, what the fuck, you know, you can't do this, you know? And I, I was sort of like, you know, geez, this is a, you know, huge embarrassment and a huge problem, but she's just gonna have to give us like 30 days or 90 days. And, you know, we, we worked it out and we were able to give them the second million.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  But it was like this colossal embarrassment at right at the start and um you know shit does happen but you know it ideally shouldn't happen like that um and again really embarrassing and tough but we got them to 2 million and we decided I I sort of did all this research and said instead of hypertension we should go this rare kidney disease called focal segmental glomerulosclerosis and if you just go on PubMed and you have the willpower you can learn a lot about medicine and you can dive in and really

• 23:34Sam Parr?

  PubMed PubMed just being like a database of articles

• 23:38Speaker 00

  Yeah PubMed is

• 23:39Sam Parr?

  And patents I guess

• 23:40Speaker 00

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

• 24:01Shaan Puri?

  And you were sifting for what what were you looking for when you went on PubMed?

• 24:04Speaker 00

  Yeah you you have to put the pieces together so the the this drug was an endothelin receptor antagonist uh and what does that mean it it it inhibits a protein called endothelin and its function well what will that do right you have to decide well you have to learn where is endothelin expressed in the body how does it work what does it do if I stop endothelin from working what benefits will that have what problems will that result in and you have to look at the history of okay well other companies have tried this what have they seen what have they discovered and what's what's interesting about pharma is that you think that these companies cover the waterfront but they really just prod and poke a little bit there's actually a probably 10 diseases that this drug could be beneficial for and uh I made a list of those and I said okay well which one of these is gonna work for sure and there are companies that like got half the

• 24:49Speaker 00

  answer and stuff like that and you just have to keep poking and we found like these handful of diseases that really made a lot of sense now the problem was nobody in Wall Street really liked it um you know it was very you know kind of early you know there was this sort of tough problem of If you reduce the amount of protein in the urine of a patient, does that really save their kidney? And I thought I convinced everyone that I could reduce the amount of protein in the urine, which was a very big endpoint to me, but not as conclusive as, okay, am I saving their lives? Am I preventing dialysis and kidney failure, which is really the so-called hard endpoint? So I had the soft endpoint that like seemed like almost certain I was right.

• 25:30Speaker 00

  And I was starting to convince companies like AbbVie and Vortex and other like big biopharmas that, you know, I was on to something, but nobody wanted to write a check, you know? So I basically got one of the management teams that I used to deal with on Wall Street to invest. And I slowly kind of cobbled together some money, met folks like Peter Thiel and others to try to sort of get some investors, did a reverse merger. What's Peter Thiel like? Peter was great, you know, it was 10, 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, it was a very funny thing because like there was this East Coast versus West Coast mentality, you know, as a Wall Street guy,

• 26:14Speaker 00

  he was, you know, he's obviously, 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, uh, 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. It's like even worse than SPAC. You know, you do the, 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, 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 is growing at X rate. These are like, okay, this asset's worth.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  Something dead or alive. In other words, if it's being developed or not being developed, it's worth something. You know, especially with the right business plan, it could be worth a lot. So anyway, we decided to go public, we raised some money, we started doing clinical trials, the trial worked, and the rest is history. But it took, you know, it takes hundreds of million dollars to develop a drug. Again, 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. But

• 27:32Sam Parr?

  So you didn't even, 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.

• 27:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is where, well, a lot of people don't know my story about medicine. A lot of people think that I take medicines and raise prices. Well, this drug was barely in human beings. It had been in like 30 or 50 people up until that point. 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. And then as the data came in, now it's FDA approved. It's called Philspary. I named the drug Sparsentan, you know,

• 28:31Speaker 00

  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.

• 28:44Sam Parr?

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

• 28:50Speaker 00

  So I went from 90, you know, when we started it to 50 when we're public, I think around 40 or 50% after our first financing, down to 30, and our second financing, down to 20. You know, so at the time of our IPO, when you do a merger, you often don't get on NASDAQ. So we did an IPO on NASDAQ 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. 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 gonna buy this? This album?

• 29:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, well, before that, you think about like, how am I gonna buy this $5,000 a month apartment and go to the $7,000 a month apartment? Which is like a very funny discussion for somebody that, you know, has 50 or 100 million dollars of stock value. And I would go to these banks and say, listen, can I borrow 5% you know, of my money, of my stock value? And they would say, no. And, you know, I'd say, you know, uh, you know, why not? You know, and they'd say, well, here, it's a new stock, you know, 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. And I was like, sitting there like, oh my God, you know, this is insane. Cause I don't want to sell my stock, cause it sends a kind of a bad signal to the market.

• 30:14Speaker 00

  Um, you know, but I don't want to, you know, uh, also be starving. So it was very like funny thing. Um, and I don't want to be one of those greedy CEOs that has, you know, an insane salary, uh, where you don't need it. So it was very just sort of a funny circumstance. But eventually, uh, we had a big squabble at the company. Uh, I ended up leaving, uh, it's very tumultuous and, uh, traumatic story in a lot of ways. And it led to my prosecution. Uh, you know, there was this fight with, with the board, and it got very, so nasty that the, the board, you know, kind of evil people here, but the board sort of went to law enforcement as kind of one of their ways to win this fight. And, you know, one of the things that a lot of people don't understand is that there's this big revolving door

• 30:59Speaker 00

  between corporate law and law enforcement. When I say law enforcement, I mean the Attorney General, uh, sorry, AUSAs, the Associate US Attorneys that work in the Department of Justice. And it's not hard if you go to a law firm, you know, like a Cooley, Cleary, Gottlieb, Skadden Arbs, 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 in a indictment pretty fast. This happened at the Google guy that had the The Waymo? Yep. Andrew, this happened to a Goldman Sachs trader that stole some source code, like emailed himself home to work on the source code. Then he went to another hedge fund. They

• 31:40Speaker 00

  said, see, he stole an electronic property. 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 indicted. So they could pick up a phone and get it and make it happen. And I actually have like the person's name who picked up the phone, you know, and it's, it's like so ridiculous because a boardroom battle, a corporate squabble shouldn't turn into, you know, okay, let's make a call and get, you know, get this guy arrested, then we'll win the fight, right? And it's like, you know, I was actually acquitted of those charges.

• 32:20Speaker 00

  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 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 cycle millions of dollars out, out of, which is like for, for a lot of talentless executives, like that's, that's really exciting. Like getting a, a five million dollar paycheck a year, plus a, you know,

• 33:03Speaker 00

  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.

• 33:26Sam Parr?

  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 and I just basically said, I'll start a new company. I don't need you guys. And I started Turing.

• 33:38Shaan Puri?

  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. Like you raised the price of the drug and now people can't get it. You're like, tell me who can't get it? Where are you getting that data from? Like what? And you would walk them through almost like the Socratic method of what actually happened, why, 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

• 34:21Shaan Puri?

  price, he's evil. That's one perspective. I'd like you to share your perspective and then people could decide for themselves which they feel to be more true. So.

• 34:29Sam Parr?

  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. You, if I remember correctly, you admitted you were wrong for a bunch of things, but it wasn't even related.

• 34:39Shaan Puri?

  Related. Your persona was.

• 34:40Sam Parr?

  Your, your, yeah, yeah. But you're, I think you being smug and being an asshole when maybe you should have just been like, yes, Pam, 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, your, your thing. But you didn't even get prosecuted. You didn't get prosecuted for that.

• 34:57Shaan Puri?

  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, partner, or, or the listener, hey, you can pick whatever price you want. You know, that's your call. You know, it's your job to explore the frontier of that price and volume curve. And it, 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, 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.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  It's not the guy in the, you know, in the sort of grandstands call, you know, you know, hooting and hollering at you. It's, it's not even the patient's call, even though they're your core constituent and we care the most about them. It's, 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.

• 35:59Sam Parr?

  And what was that, what was that logic that you, that Sean was referring to?

• 36:03Shaan Puri?

  Well, the criticism would be you, you, 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.

• 36:14Speaker 00

  The reverse psychology is the super important. I'll go through that in a second, but I think the most of, you know, what you said is, is really important because it's this like inviolable right. And I, I was really pissed off, quite frankly, that there was this effort by, by Paul wannabe, would be politicians that didn't end up winning and, and others to try to sort of take that right away, uh, through like this regulation by embarrassment, right? Like it was this like, we'll shame you until you change your mind. It's like, no, you're not going to shame me into changing my mind. Like, you know, that, that's insane. You're trying to take my, my right away. It's my right to run my business how I see fit. Now we'll go through all the logic of why I think it was a good idea and a tenable idea. And it's not something a jerk would do. It's not something an asshole

• 36:59Speaker 00

  would do. But just first and foremost, you know, how dare you try to tell me, you know, what my price should be because ultimately every person in America is working for some business that sets their price. And you're basically saying, well, if you do it to me, well, you can do it to Apple next. Are you going to tell them that iPhones too expensive? Are you going to do it to your podcast where an advertiser says, oh my God, you want $50,000 to post a, an ad on my podcast? Well, that's not right. I want that for $25,000. No, it's both, you know, you're not getting the ad. And you know, I think that there's this special difference when it comes to healthcare. And I, I've learned this and processed it slowly. And like I said, I'll tell you briefly about my new company in a minute, but people treat healthcare products and services in a different part of their mind. You know, a friend of mine worked at Amex and got to talk to Buffett about this where he said,

• 37:42Speaker 00

  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 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, you just buy the soda because he loves Coca-Cola. And, and the more that you can make people think with that side of their, their brain, the better. In 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 any, like this is my right to get this medicine. And obviously, you know, that there, that's not quite right in my opinion.

• 38:22Speaker 00

  So getting back to, to sort of just again, getting past my just annoyance that there 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. Uh, I think the biggest thing that worked Sean with that Socratic method is just showing people how little they know about. They're in this industry, right? Most people don't know much about the pharma industry. I don't blame them for that, right? This is the industry that I spent my life in, uh, to know that it's an, 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, for the interlocutor because the average pharmaceutical price would shock most people.

• 39:05Speaker 00

  You know, there are rare disease drugs, uh, 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. You know, so every year for the rest of your life, you gotta pay a million bucks. You know, there are drugs like that.

• 39:20Shaan Puri?

  But you don't pay necessarily out of pocket, right? It's

• 39:22Speaker 00

  Nobody's paying out of pocket for anything.

• 39:26Shaan Puri?

  It's the cost to the drug to the insurance company, not to the end patient.

• 39:30Speaker 00

  Correct. You know, we have this convoluted crazy system that generally needs to kind of be broken in half. Uh, but you know, and again, I'll show you my product in a minute that unlike Mark Cuban's garbage is, might actually help. Uh, the, uh, the, um, you know, the, the first question I always ask people is like, well, what do you, where do you price a drug? Where you have, I have, I had a drug at Retrophin, 60 people took it. Six zero and they needed it to save their life. What, what price should that be? Should it be the price of Viagra? No, yeah, I believe in this thing called utility theory of price, which I probably studied in economics a long time ago, but forgot. But this, this, this idea is that price has three or four different theories of, of price.

• 40:15Speaker 00

  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. Okay, that, that sounds interesting. And other people would say, well, it should cost what it's worth to the user. And, and that's kind of how most medicine is priced. If you can forego some terrible operation, you know, then, and that 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 a hundred thousand dollars.

• 40:58Speaker 00

  Cause 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. If you price them based on what it would cost, like, okay, well, price it at a break even. Well, not 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, you'll be, you'll be on, uh, applying to a job at Pfizer, you know, after your, your biotech startup fails. So if you do win, you can't just break even, you know? You have to overcome the risks and the risk adjusted possibility that you would have failed. Otherwise, nobody would invest in companies like this if all the benefit was you would break even. So you have to have this extra return. And so when you do the pricing, I think that the best logical thing to do is pick a price

• 41:41Speaker 00

  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, we're, 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?

• 41:59Shaan Puri?

  Who's going to pay for the research? Who's going to pay for the next drug, right? If, if every drug is free, then nobody's going to want to go make drugs.

• 42:04Speaker 00

  And again, I, if this, if that's the system society dictated to me. I you know, all those rules, but the society, the, the, the system society dictated was it's your choice what the price for 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% of people with cystic fibrosis. This company should have parades, parades every year for it, right? But instead they get shit for it. And I have friends that if their lives have been saved, one of my friends in high school died of cystic fibrosis at 19.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  And these guys are doing, I, I use this term very carefully, God's work by, by saving people's CF. There are countries that refuse to pay for the medicine, right? This is $300,000 a year. And my drug, I ask people all the time, well, how much is my drug? Well, I say, I don't know, you'd 750 pills. That's not what I'm asking. In pharma, we don't worry about what the price put bullets. We worry about what does it cost for somebody to have to pay for this medicine? Not out of pocket, what is the insurance paying for a full course or full year? Right? And they said, well, I don't know, how many pills do you, do you have to take when you take this drug? That you raise the price up? 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, you're already jumping down.

• 43:24Sam Parr?

  But you know why they're criticizing you, which is like, as I'm listening to this, this, you talk, like you have this very classic. Issue, which is both, uh, uh, it's a, an asset and a liability, which is you're quite, uh, logical. So you're like, this one guy, I forget the guy's name, the, the guy who's running for president. He 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 it's a very logical approach, but where you have fucked up is you weren't.

• 44:07Sam Parr?

  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. Therefore, 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, Elon. 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, don't smile that way in Congress, you know?

• 44:44Shaan Puri?

  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's done. So, so-

• 44:57Speaker 00

  I can be, I can be just like the guy at Pfizer, right? Just like, right?

• 45:01Sam Parr?

  And I can, and I, and I think it's cool that you're not that guy, but it's like, "Well, that's the issue." You could, you could have saved seven years of your life, maybe, and only gotten like less. If you just would have been up, just like be a little bit more likeable sometimes to save your own ass.

• 45:13Speaker 00

  And sure, and, and you know, I, I wanted to straddle that line, but like, how much are, 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, the big pharma, big corporate world, right? Whether they're going to pharma or they're going to, to finance, their life is, is over. You know, their ability to express themselves, the way they see fit, is done, right? Their, their ability to wear what they want to work is over. And I think that I represent that fresh breath, 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, our CEO of Corporate America. Look at Budweiser CEO, Anheuser-Busch CEO."

• 45:58Speaker 00

  It's like, "Oh, I, I gotta say, what is the maximally, the least interesting and the least offensive possible road to walk? And I can't have a real personality, because if I do, you know, someone's gonna have an issue with it and it's gonna be a problem for my business." And I, 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.

• 46:22Sam Parr?

  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 wanting 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? That's, that, that's.

• 46:48Shaan Puri?

  Let me ask one question, which is really important.

• 46:52Shaan Puri?

  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. Was it? 1%, 10%, 50%, 75% of people could no longer afford the drug because that's the key, right?

• 47:06Speaker 00

  Zero percent, yo, zero percent.

• 47:08Shaan Puri?

  And so, so that's the thing that like, you know.

• 47:10Speaker 00

  Not how far it works.

• 47:12Shaan Puri?

  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, 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, 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. But when you add the fact that nobody lost access to the drug or a very small percentage, if that's true, I don't know if it's true. I don't do, I don't do the research on this, but you're saying that that's true. That completely changes the argument, in my opinion.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  I, I think so too. And, and that's why like I was so bold and, and to, 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, and let me look into that. And some people did, you know, and that's why I've got fans. And I'm not Billy McFarland or 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, it's this like failure to, it's desire to want to buy a narrative from media or buy. Buy anger or rent anger that, that's sort of accumulated here.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  People, when it comes to medicine, like, 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 is not an insurer in the world that didn't cover Daraprim because. If you don't pay the $50,000 roughly what Deraprim costs for a whole course, forget per pill, about 50 grand if you end up needing Deraprim. Uh, if you don't pay that, you're gonna pay for the guy's funeral. You're gonna pay for his ICU visits. You're paying for his, you know, you're gonna pay for a million bucks of this guy being in ICU for the next six months. It doesn't make sense, right? Financially to not pay for Deraprim. The other thing is, it's such a small medicine. This was less than 0.1% of an insurer's budget, right?

• 49:07Speaker 00

  Fucking not even, not even a policy is being formed at Aetna or United Healthcare. 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, you know, several dozen basis points, this is not gonna be a factor, right? They're more worried about, is somebody taking insulin when they could be taking metformin, which is much cheaper, right? Make them, make 20,000 people move from insulin to metformin, you know, or 50,000 or 500,000 people. Our policy is, you gotta take OTC before you get this prescription. That's the kind of policies health insurers care about. Again, you wouldn't know that unless you're in the healthcare industry, right? And the problem is, when you have people that are, that are shooting at you, you know, and they don't know what your industry's about, you know, it's akin to me telling like

• 49:51Speaker 00

  a database programmer, well, you know, NoSQL databases are better than SQL databases. And he's like, why? Why, why are you saying that? Well, and he starts putting out all these data. I'm like, oh, that's just, that's just how I feel. You know, it's better to have a NoSQL than a SQL. It's like, I wouldn't do that because I'm not that intellectually dishonest. But people are very willing to be intellectually dishonest when it comes to things they don't know about because, you know, it's a personal thing. And again, my, my goal is to better understand how personal 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. And, you know, my, my new company is, has sort of an effort to sort of understand that, make, make amends, make penance in a, in a way.

• 50:35Speaker 00

  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 probably prioritize is your health, you know, your likelihood and well-being. And I think that that makes it kind of the special good and service. And that's why we've spent, we've gone from sending 5% of our GDP on healthcare to 20%. And I think that's going to go to 50% over time, because our basic goods and needs are masolion kind of needs are med,

• 51:18Speaker 00

  you know, we can eat, we can have shelter, et cetera, et cetera. We ultimately just want to live forever. There's no, this reason why the Silicon Valley trillionaires, they want longevity, right? They want like the, they want to be around forever. Because, you know, Larry Ellison, who I grew up kind of, you know, a little bit fanboying or worshipping, you know, his, his life goal is to live forever and he's not going to make it. But this, this idea that all these guys sort of have in their minds, that if they spend their billions, they'll live forever. It's, it's there because they love their likes, right? The average person in Africa probably doesn't think about it that way. I think they'd like to, but their, their life is a lot harder. In America, we were 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 healthcare

• 52:02Speaker 00

  expenses are going up because of people like me, or people like the Mylan CEO, the Pfizer CEO, they're going up because we all demand healthcare. We want health for everyone, our families, our friends, our progeny. We all want healthcare, uh, you know, to, to, we're going to consume more and more of it over time.

• 52:16Sam Parr?

  I want to ask you about your new thing, and then I want to ask about your predictions. But first, when you got out of prison, how much of that nut did you still have left? 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?

• 52:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I got into a very interesting litigation. So I was able to pay my court, my, my criminal fines very, very relatively easily. It was around eight million bucks. In that process, I, I decided to sell the Wu-Tang album, uh, which is a funny thing because there's this NFT bubble. And I basically said, oh, like if I turn this into an NFT or sell it to a crypto bro, like, you know, I'll, I might even get my money back on this thing. Cause it was basically just, you know, a lark and I didn't think I'd, uh, I marketed 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 FTC. The Federal Trade Commission actually personally sued me for monopoly.

• 53:19Speaker 00

  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. It'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 just. Well, will that make you broke?

• 54:03Speaker 00

  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, hitting the gears of like stopping like the production, basically. So the company, I also 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 that 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, 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.

• 54:46Speaker 00

  And 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, 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, we've already started that process. So whether this litigation turns out that I'll have to pay, you know, six, some amount of that's been paid by the company. And if I don't have indemnification, something to be, maybe I'll have to pay 30 or 40 million bucks. And it would suck. Sure. You know, I'd have to sell. My farm assets, I'd have to make room. Would I be able to cover it or not? I'm not even 100% sure. But it all depends on the sale price. But even if you'd sort of took everything from me and added another 100 million, I'd sort of be

• 55:32Speaker 00

  cheery about it and say, all right, it's a big challenge, but I'll do it. And I think that I don't view sort of wealth and success as symmetrical or the same thing. I sort of say that it's sort of almost like a challenge to sort of do it the other way. I 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 gotta 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.

• 56:16Speaker 00

  Oh, by the way, you still have to pay the interest on those bonds. Like, I should be sitting there like, oh, my God, you know, this is so much pain. Like, why add this on top of my Tesla issues? Because you know that 100 issues of that company is 100 issues in 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 whether or not 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. You know, it's just work. You know, I sit in a room with my team and I work all day and that's it.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  So for me, it's like...

• 57:03Shaan Puri?

  I don't know if you follow Naval, but he has this great quote. He has this Twitter thread called How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky. And he says something in there that I love, which he goes, "I don't want to just get rich. I want to be a person who gets rich." Meaning, 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 built the skills in order to do that. And 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 this sort of like reset.

• 57:38Shaan Puri?

  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 strikes, there is some fortune in that misfortune.

• 57:53Speaker 00

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

• 58:00Shaan Puri?

  You, you talked about the like, you know, you didn't want to be the Pfizer CEO. You didn't want you. 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 put 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 seen, have you guys seen this movement that happened at Stanford, the fun strikes back movement? Sam, have you heard about this?

• 58:37Speaker 00

  No.

• 58:38Sam Parr?

  No, what is that?

• 58:39Speaker 00

  It's awesome.

• 58:40Shaan Puri?

  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, you know, the campus in the university has just drained us of our personality. It is trying to shut down all the fun things. So they're like, we are pro athletics, we're pro fraternities, we are pro partying, and we are pro weirdness. And they basically talk about like the story, they do a great job telling the story. They're like, you know, back in 1981, the, you know, there's this frat party where that they threw

• 59:24Shaan Puri?

  every year where there was sand all over the house, like a beach party or whatever. And at the end of the night, like, the, the party was over, people left, but the sand was still there. They're like, shit, what are we gonna do with all this sand? We still have so much sand. They're like, what if we built an island with the sand? And they're like, there's this little lake. What if we took all the sand to the middle of the lake? We made an island. And that could be our island. And they like rallied at four or five in the morning, and they go there and then the ground Keepers 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. They build the island and it's this epic party, whatever. It's the epic finish.

• 1:00:08Shaan Puri?

  And then like fast forward to today, like, uh, the island got, the island is gone. The lake is gone. They shut everything down. Nobody can visit that, that little pond or that lake anymore because there was like an endangered salamander there. So they're like, no, no, no, shut it down, guys. And then like one by one, they've kicked off all the fraternities from, from the, from the campus for like whatever violation. They hit a violation, they remove them from campus. They like scraped all the like each, each neighborhood used to have its own name and its own like weird, weirdness. They like scraped it all off and now it's just like numbered cells. It's like you are on the D block six, five, seven.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  So it's dreadful.

• 1:00:45Shaan Puri?

  They're like, dude, we used to have like the biggest part of the year was this anything but clothes party and they decided that that's too risky and it's not fair to everybody. And they're like,

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  I, I always wonder, Sean, like, who are the, 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, they shut down the party and they're like, no, this is offensive. We gotta shut this party down.

• 1:01:07Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  You know, it's, it's like, who are these people? And why, why did we ever let any of them have any power? And it's, 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, uh, what if somebody's going to be offended? And it becomes this meta game where like, we were talking about like, yeah, could I like do the party line and say, you know, I'm really sorry, my actions have caused, you know, uh, 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, you know, level where it's like, oh, you saw the way he said no, he didn't really mean it. You know, where the way he said I'm sorry wasn't really apologetic. There's a real way to say I'm sorry. You gotta bow a little bit deeper.

• 1:01:52Speaker 00

  And it's like, okay, well, we're so, it's, it's, it's, it's an insane meta where you're constantly just like getting to the next point of, of like, inhibiting your personality and, and what are you really saying? And just come on, say it, you know? And I think that, that's a really freeing, you know, thing to do.

• 1:02:08Sam Parr?

  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 made, you, 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 I, it would be 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 were, you're pretty good at writing, actually. You're, you're quite good, actually.

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  Thanks a lot. You know, it's, it's hard to write, um, you know, professionally, like you guys, I know Sam, well, I, I know Sean does for sure. When you're an entrepreneur, doing anything other than working on your business seems like a waste of time and like a, a really painful thing to do, uh, because you have to provide for your investors, your coworkers, your own family, the business you love, you know, it's, it's, uh, it's hard to, to do a lot of writing. Uh, in prison was a lot easier, you know, it was, uh, 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.

• 1:03:15Speaker 00

  A lot of people ask me, why didn't you get jacked up, you know, in, in, in prison? I didn't have the time, you know? I was, I was working the whole time. So, you know, it's, it's always hard to write. I love writing, but, but to, to do anything. A lot of people ask me if I don't, why don't, why don't I do a podcast? And it's the same reason. And, you know, the predictions about AI are, are, you know, some of them echo kind of like other people's predictions, you know, in a lot of ways. We have large language models now. They're really interesting. Uh, they certainly provide for more eye-opening potential predictions, you know, probably some of the craziest ones I've, I've made, including, include things like there'll, there'll be kind of interspecies marriage between AI and humans. There'll be AI fundamental rights for, for, for boating and things like that. That'll kind of reshape society.

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  So they're, they're pretty wild predictions, but I do think they'll happen years from now. And I do think we're starting to see some of those things pull in and get accelerated. Uh, one of my favorite people, John Klimak. Recently upgraded his estimate of AGI, so-called artificial general intelligence, from 50% by 2030 to 60%. You know, John is like this very precise, you know, calculating nerd who's, you know, created the first-person shooter. He, you know, is a brilliant guy and he's working on his own company, which nobody's talking about, called Keen Technologies. I think he's the only employee, if I'm not mistaken. So he's just sitting there like trying to create like this, this brain. And, you know, who knows? I think he's a good dark horse for this race.

• 1:04:45Speaker 00

  But no, AGI is like how it's super captivating to everyone, right? Like it's, it's to me, if you look at the history of humanity, next to maybe relativity or, you know, a couple of other like magnetism, electricity, like this is like probably more important. And it's the first time humans will have created a mind from, from nothing that's stronger than a human. And it's really like just so profound that, you know, I don't think anybody can afford to, to ignore it. It's more profound than the internet. You know, it's, it's really, you know, something wild. Now, we don't know when we'll get it. We'll get a partial version of it or we're already seeing a partial version of it. You know, it's, it's sort of early days, but while I was in prison, I was able to think, sort of zoom out and think about that a little bit more than maybe the average person.

• 1:05:28Speaker 00

  And it's funny, if you look at sort of OpenAI and some of the other startups that are coming out, uh, these, these sort of companies like Google and Facebook, you see that they kind of did that zooming out many years ago. And the companies that are sort of missing this and messing it up are kind of like too close to the, to this 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, both Facebook and Google had a sort of equivalent technology to OpenAI, in my opinion, years ago. And they just still just haven't sort of seen the, the actual product, you know, making sense and launching. And, um, anyway, you know, it's, it's a really interesting time, obviously.

• 1:06:10Sam Parr?

  What's your, uh, what's the new thing?

• 1:06:12Speaker 00

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

• 1:06:18Sam Parr?

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

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  So you're, you're breaking the news. Uh, it's so funny in happenstance because we're talking to like tech crunch 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. Uh, it's called Dr. Gupta.ai. Uh, it's a, the first of its kind, AI physician. Um, it's basically going to be, uh, what I hope, something that could drastically reduce healthcare costs and drastically improve healthcare quality. Uh, by providing an AI physician mimic, basically sort of a synthetic AI doctor that, that will, can give you medical information. And I think that, you know, most of-

• 1:07:01Sam Parr?

  Is there a site?

• 1:07:02Shaan Puri?

  Was your doctor or what?

• 1:07:04Speaker 00

  Dr. Gupta, like G U P T A dot AI.

• 1:07:08Shaan Puri?

  The site's not up yet.

• 1:07:10Speaker 00

  Oh, dot A R. He happens to be Indian, but it's also GPT. So Gupta. Um, so anyway, Dr. Gupta will give you medical information and, uh, you can talk to him. It's free. Um, it's, uh, 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 out there, there are like 50 of them, is that 90% of healthcare costs come from physicians. 10% come from pharma.

• 1:07:35Shaan Puri?

  What, what do you mean come from? What does that mean?

• 1:07:37Speaker 00

  We spend $4 trillion on healthcare in this country. Most 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 OpenAI and, and deep learning and L M 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, the, whatever Cuban's doing is not going to save anybody any money and it's not going to make Mark any money either. But this could actually change the curve on healthcare.

• 1:08:13Shaan Puri?

  Give us a 30 seconds on, give us a 30 seconds on Y Cuban's thing. You, you, you've referenced a couple of times how it might be dumb or, or not that-

• 1:08:20Speaker 00

  It's such a shit show. Like, so, so he's basically running a pharmacy. Right? So he's trying to source drugs for cheaper than, 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 Son's generics, any better than than CVS or Walgreens. It seemed kind of hard to do that, right? He's they they he doesn't have the volume they have. Get that deal and then somehow get a margin. Pharmacy margins are razor, razor freaking thick, right? You cannot take a $3 drug and charge 100 bucks for it at the pharmacy. They're razor. Just look at 10Q for Walgreens and CVS. Like, oh, I'm making a fortune here. And so he's going to somehow get

• 1:09:01Speaker 00

  a margin out of that. There's just it's just hocus pocus. There's no actual way to do that. You know, it's it's a bunch of lies, basically. He's being dishonest.

• 1:09:10Sam Parr?

  So I'm on Dr. Oopa, Dr. Gupta 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 entered 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.

• 1:09:25Speaker 00

  No, you don't actually even have to enter any of your vitals. You could just have a conversation. And we've programmed it using these like very, you know, intricate techniques. I was actually, you know, a lot of people are talking about Auto GPT and Baby GPT. And I talked to Yogi and I talked to all of the people that invented that stuff.

• 1:09:43Speaker 00

  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, better performance than ChatGPT by making it kind of like auto reflect and do other kind of methods that, again, are our secret sauce, that get the chatbot to succeed. So it's not so much about that medical view. It's you can get. Physician quality advice for free at any time, any hour. So you and I may be able to call a doctor friend, but most people cannot just decide at midnight that if they have a medical question that they can get an answer.

• 1:10:28Speaker 00

  You have to go on Google, you gotta go ask WebMD and you're, you don't know what you're reading half the time if, if you're the average Joe, you know, you're not trained in medicine. If you say, well, what about my chest pains? What should I do? You want to talk to somebody, you want to actually have a conversation. LLMs do that amazingly. This is a, is a, is an attraction of GPT four. They'll actually let you have a natural dialogue with something that, as you guys know, GPT four 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.

• 1:11:11Speaker 00

  A lot of the physicians work can be done by AI and it's an uncomfortable truth that, you know, again, it doesn't mean that we don't need doctors ever again. In my world, in my vision, 50 years from now, there's no such thing as a medical doctor. There's no such thing as physician.

• 1:11:25Sam Parr?

  Wow.

• 1:11:26Speaker 00

  That's my future.

• 1:11:26Sam Parr?

  I'm on the site, I can, 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, let's figure it out. Or are you, you trying to get after it? What are you trying to do in the next five or 10 years with this business?

• 1:11:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm trying to make it a massive company. Um, I think that, you know, it, you know, it will be a massive company. You'd, you'd never say never in business, but you know, we're, we're certainly going to try our hardest because I do think that you can all, this is why technology has never really bent the curve for healthcare. The cost of sending a megabyte, the cost of sending, uh, you know, storing data, the cost of compute, all that has dropped by not just like 90%, it's dropped by like 99 and, and six more nines percent. Healthcare 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. If we could do that, what would happen? The price of medical services would drop like a rock.

• 1:12:27Speaker 00

  We our country would be saved. Medicare and Medicaid wouldn't be going bankrupt. We have a hu- wouldn't be bankrupt 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 gonna 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 per med school. We're gonna make it really hard to become a doctor. Even though AI can do all these things very easily, and you're gonna see a lot of industries collapse because of GPT, I think, whether it's law, medicine, accounting, there's gonna be a huge change in society thanks to AI and GPT.

• 1:13:06Shaan Puri?

  So how is this not like self-driving cars, where even though self-driving is almost like better than a human and in a bunch of different circumstances, maybe not certain weather conditions. But if it gets one thing wrong, it's, you know, 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 kind of overcome that. Like, how do you not just get sued out of existence for the, you know, the, you know, one mistaken medical diagnosis or, you know, treatment plan or whatever it is here? How do you, how do you avoid that problem?

• 1:13:38Speaker 00

  Sure. I, I think it's a lot like, like self-driving cars, where if you gave me the story where there's 50,000 auto fatalities a year, right, in America? And I can press this button right here, and there's gonna 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? Why 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.

• 1:14:22Speaker 00

  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 slash ACC. We've got a lot of really exciting members, some of the biggest people in technology. And it's this sort of like underground movement of people who don't want to slow down AI, who people who don't want to slow down technology. And I think that, um, you know, the idea that we're here to stop progress because the technology might make one mistake.

• 1:15:05Speaker 00

  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, 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 like we have to look at that glass, not just have full, because it's 90% full. We can't look at the 10% that's empty.

• 1:15:32Shaan Puri?

  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, uh, you know, there's a, whatever, people have, 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?

• 1:15:56Speaker 00

  Our purpose and policies make sure that you understand that this is medical advice. Dr. Gupta is not a real doctor, that if you, uh, use our website for medical information, it's simply for informational purposes only and you have to, I mean, I could read you 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 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, they'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

• 1:16:40Speaker 00

  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 side, 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. If you have people that want to stand in the way of improvement, that's up to them. Listen, if, if we're told you gotta lock Dr. Gupta in this state or this country, okay, the Philippines will have it. Remember, GPT is, is, is, um, knows every single language. It's, it's bilingual in every single language in the world. So Japan will have this for free tomorrow.

• 1:17:25Shaan Puri?

  It's like Pitbull, it's Mr. Worldwide, right?

• 1:17:27Speaker 00

  It's a global product. And that's the amazing thing about being a developer. You normally have to worry about localization, right? Language, all that crap. It's gone now with GPT. This Dr. Gupta knows every language. He knows, we, they beta tested this in Spanish. We might localize him and make him like Dr. Somebody else in, in, in Latin America, but Dr. Gupta matches GPT. Our other option was Dr. Lim, LLM. So we picked Dr. Dr. Gupta because he's literally Dr. GPT.

• 1:17:58Shaan Puri?

  Honestly, it's kind of a genius name. As an Indian person, I, I will give it my seal of approval. Uh, I think that's, is very clever.

• 1:18:07Shaan Puri?

  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 is you doing both? Or what's?

• 1:18:16Speaker 00

  It's all, it's, it's all under one hood. So our company's called DL Software. Uh, we've raised some, some money from, from some really well-known people in, in, in the valley. It's been, you know, again, an interesting dilemma where you have like people who want to support you. Like all these people actually said that my YouTube finance videos, you mentioned content creating, that it got them through like a state in venture capital.

• 1:18:38Sam Parr?

  I watched a ton of those. I watched all those.

• 1:18:41Speaker 00

  Thank you. And, and like, I'm so lucky that these people, some of whom started some of the biggest software companies in our industry, uh, literally like maybe the top five unicorns in software, like three of the four C guys. It was all like that where, where like I messaged these guys, they're like, oh, you're my teacher. I'm like so flattered, you know, that these billionaires are, are, are like on my side.

• 1:19:02Shaan Puri?

  That really happened?

• 1:19:03Speaker 00

  And they're like, yeah. Sorry.

• 1:19:05Shaan Puri?

  That really happened?

• 1:19:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. A billionaire?

• 1:19:09Speaker 00

  Several billionaires, you know, several billionaires are investors in our.

• 1:19:12Shaan Puri?

  Several billionaires have smashed the subscribe button, hit the turn notifications on, leave a message in the comments on YouTube. I love it.

• 1:19:19Speaker 00

  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. You're up like people would watch me stream like four in the morning and 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 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.

• 1:20:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that, 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.

• 1:20:10Shaan Puri?

  The first is unique perspective or unique POV, right? So you, you have unique, a unique, specific set of knowledge that the average person doesn't have. Okay. That's, most people would expect that. Now here's the unexpected ones. You do energy transmission. So, uh, 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 like get up, you do pushups on the ground. You're like pumped up about whatever, or you're, you're calling somebody out or whatever it is, it's energy transmission. And the last thing, you're like a reality TV person. You kind of know what you're supposed to say, but you don't really care.

• 1:20:52Shaan Puri?

  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 because they're just not aware. They don't know it. You know, 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, I've seen you just wing it. And I actually think that's your best content. So I don't know what you meant by that.

• 1:21:26Speaker 00

  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 farmer 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, you know, I kind of like this guy. And, you know, maybe this is like a little bit of what I want to be like. Um, and so the point is like, I'm so lucky that the people who watched that in 2015, 2016, obviously not all of them became successful, but a handful of them, the top couple of people became unbelievably successful. And that's maybe because of me, maybe not because of me, maybe it's in spite of me. You know, but the, the, the whole point that they, some of them thank me for it is, is I'm, I'm really lucky for that.

• 1:22:07Speaker 00

  I have three software products under our, our sort of umbrella here. But I think the like, the key thing for our company is, is getting amazing talent, you know, in, in any industry, but especially in tech. Like the only really thing that matters is this combination of capital and people. And, you know, the capital is easy to get, you know, there's, there's infinite capital in the world. It's, it's about, you know, do you have the people to execute the plan? And, and I'm so lucky that like a little bit of this personal profile gets great engineers to come to the table and talk, 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, to your, to your point is that energy transfer of like getting people like, can you, can I pump you up about making a synthetic doctor? Well, to some people that might be really boring.

• 1:22:50Speaker 00

  And if you pitch it the wrong way, if you're like at a big healthcare company, you're like, well, we're going to make medical information, you know, diagnostic tools, et cetera, et cetera, it sounds like shit. You know, but if you, 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. That 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, and providence, to be able to get the best medical expertise of an American physician.

• 1:23:34Speaker 00

  That's insane, right? And we're getting that tomorrow. And I think that, again, you can't get a prescription from Dr. Gupta and he's not going to cut out your bunion. But I think that the fact that we can even tug, have a touch, five, 10% of healthcare costs, that's hundreds of billions of dollars. It's bigger than Google's TAM. So like, you know, healthcare is one of these just gigantic spots that has never been chunked by, by technology, despite the best attempts of Sand Hill Road. Like billions of dollars flew into digital health. There's just no obvious way to take a sledgehammer to this. You have to understand that healthcare is, is basically all money that goes to people who just slosh it around for this like

• 1:24:12Speaker 00

  very AI, simple, simple problem for AI, for that little advice of, yeah, you should take this beta blocker, should not take this beta blocker, we 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.

• 1:24:27Sam Parr?

  The last thing I wanted to bring up was like, so I, 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 were like, hey, come visit me in San Diego.

• 1:24:38Speaker 00

  And Trang.

• 1:24:38Sam Parr?

  And I remember like, yeah, and Trang, yeah. And I remember like, right when your story broke, it was Pharma Bro. And then I got to like, I, you and I chatted on Blab before and I, I don't know if you remember, we've talked before and 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, 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 it now. It's you wearing like Ray-Bans and a red polo. And you have like a picture of, it looks like Flow Rider in the back, like on a music video to Bugatti and you're like pointing down like this.

• 1:25:19Sam Parr?

  And you're like, your jawline looks cut and you look like the bro-iest of bros. And 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,

• 1:25:35Speaker 00

  We just, we just. We just made this trade.

• 1:25:38Sam Parr?

  That fucking picture ruined you, man.

• 1:25:40Speaker 00

  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. It works for a kidney really well. They wanted to take that same idea and apply 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 coming out. We wrote a 40-page report. We put the report out. The stock fell 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.

• 1:26:25Speaker 00

  And so the day it went down, we did that. The floor-er song is called "It's Going Down", or something like that. And 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 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, we was, "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?" And 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."

• 1:27:10Speaker 00

  And again, with the next like two weeks, the same, I made it like my profile pic. And like, next two weeks like that, that's what everyone sees on. It's like, "Oh, who is Martin Swely?"

• 1:27:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like this picture is like, it's just so funny. Like, I, I don't know the whole facts of your story. And you 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...

• 1:27:37Speaker 00

  The beginning of an interesting story. Like I, I, to me, like I'll, I'll take it and try it like you would look at it and many other people look at it as the beginning of 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 Graham and Dodd stock picking like so 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 and you know, I, 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

• 1:28:19Speaker 00

  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, okay, 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, I'm sort of more popular than ever and you know, kind of doing just fine. So.

• 1:28:41Sam Parr?

  So if you. There's a price to be paid.

• 1:28:43Shaan Puri?

  If you could go, uh, 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?

• 1:29:02Speaker 00

  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, then tuck in your shirt there, you know, straighten up there. Uh, metaphorically, but the, the, I think the oldest wisdom is know thyself, right? And it's like, just be yourself, know yourself, be, be, be who you are. And like, if you spend the rest of your life trying to make somebody else happy and, 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, you can, no matter what happens, no matter stick, put you in jail for a lesser life, you'll, you'll have the, at least have something nobody could take away from you, which is like your, your, your own identity and your own personality. And I think there's.

• 1:29:46Sam Parr?

  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, but we'll never take our freedom.

• 1:29:54Speaker 00

  You know, there's, there's, there's a point in time where you have to be a real person. And, and I think like, if you wanna be a corporate sort of like mimic of like every other corporate person in the world, you know, that's a, that's a life. If that's the life you want, that, that's the life you want. I, there's just only so much of that life that, that I can take. And for me, I had it when it came to like the media, like you said, you know, with, with the full write a picture or, or whatever, the typecast thing, it was like, you know, I, I can't, that's, 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. It was like so surreal. Like me? You know, the mild mannered pharmaceutical executive. Yeah, I'm, 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, and

• 1:30:39Speaker 00

  de-provoke. Like, you know, it, 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're in the hot seat and somebody says, oh, aren't you this and aren't you that? And yo, you say, well, you know, I'm sorry. I caused some disturbance here. And I'm just really, you know, uh, it's really hard to do that, you know, sometimes.

• 1:31:02Shaan Puri?

  You, um, first of all, that's hilarious. Second of all, uh, 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 hall of, his like 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. Like he, he attacked it in this way. Yeah. 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, into life that's, that we like. You know, I like Conor McGregor and I think, you know, he's interesting. And I like, you know, certain things that he's done about his life. You know, I 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

• 1:31:46Shaan Puri?

  lives. Who were kind of, who were some people that you were inspired by? Either in the business world or the non-business world, uh, that, that you think are, you sort of have admired or you've gone down the YouTube rabbit hole and just, you know, uh, binged a bunch of their content or whatever?

• 1:32:01Speaker 00

  I'll start with Vince McMahon. Um, you know, so when I, when I started to be this like 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.

• 1:32:14Sam Parr?

  You're the heel.

• 1:32:15Speaker 00

  And they would take the thirty seconds that fucked me and, and make the thirty seconds loop and like forget the other, you know, hundred and nineteen minutes. Those thirty seconds are, are the ones that are gonna be on TV. I realized like, there's no way out of this and I'm gonna have to embrace being the bad guy and some people will get the joke and, and some people won't. Uh, but you know, fuck it. If, if, if, 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 uh, figures, um, by, by sort of pointing, you know, pointing the, the mirror back at them. Um, so Vince, Vince sort of like had that like Kafabe wrestling, you know, they call it a heel in wrestling. Uh, where, you know, he's, he's the owner of the company, but he's also kind of like

• 1:32:58Speaker 00

  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 and like some of the, you know, stuff on the show is, 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. Um, you know, I, I, I like a lot of, like different scientists and stuff like that. Um, you know, so business people themselves. You know, there, there are a whole lot that I like point to and say, oh, that's somebody I'd, 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 ninety-four, Bill Gates was, was sued for Monopoly, but his company was, not him.

• 1:33:39Speaker 00

  And people wanted to tear this guy apart and I was just sort of coming up. I was like eleven years old. I loved computers. I started programming and I was like, everyone hates Bill Gates and the hacker community hated Bill Gates. And, and it's because he wanted to make money and he was 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. I was like, what would we be doing without it? And you know, the Linux nerds would be like, well, you know, we can, we don't have to use them. And it's like, look, the whole world's using them for a reason. They're pretty good products. And I, I just sort of liked taking that bad guy and at the time 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

• 1:34:23Speaker 00

  he was the richest guy in the world, but couldn't afford a good haircut. You know, they always just dog him for no reason. And he spent the rest of his life. Like trying to walk back on that and like how cool it had been if he sort of embraced the narrative and like, yeah, you know, because privately he does embrace the narrative, right? It's just on, it's just sort of this public image of like, no, no, I'm, 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, it's all this like, you know, imagery for, 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 Peterfee from Interactive Brokers.

• 1:35:06Speaker 00

  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 dogged George Soros, uh, you know, who's, you know, uh, a true American success story. And people sort of forget that, you know, or don't understand that like all this stuff in politics and like just Soros funded prosecutor and stuff like that. Guy barely pays attention to shit. You know, I think that like the idea that he's spending his day like plotting with, you know, the, uh, you know, the world economic forums like from 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,

• 1:35:50Speaker 00

  World War II basically to, to America to become truly successful. So people like that I admire, you know, anyone who's sort of had this against all odds type of success. Um, you know, even people like, uh, Robert Smith, you know, who run Vista, um, you know, people who have like really bucked, you know, any conventions and expectations of them to, to be really successful. So there's so many people that I have up there on that wall. Uh, and again, it's not, you know, every, like you said, it's not every piece of their life, but little pieces of, of sort of made me.

• 1:36:19Shaan Puri?

  I have Bill Gates on mine because of the, the interview where. About the chair, jumping over the chair.

• 1:36:25Sam Parr?

  He jumps over the chair.

• 1:36:27Shaan Puri?

  One of the, I still think that's the most gangster like CEO interview moment. I don't even know how this came up. And then he, he's.

• 1:36:35Sam Parr?

  She, I think the interviewer was like, I heard a rumor that you could, you know how to jump over a chair. He goes, yeah.

• 1:36:41Shaan Puri?

  No, no, he goes.

• 1:36:42Sam Parr?

  Do it.

• 1:36:42Shaan Puri?

  He goes, 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.

• 1:37:05Sam Parr?

  Dude, I'm watching this video, by the way. It's not that impressive. It's a big chair. You don't think you could jump over a chair?

• 1:37:11Shaan Puri?

  I never would have thought.

• 1:37:12Speaker 00

  He's such a nerdy, nerdy, shrimpy guy. He's actually 5'11". But like, there's this like.

• 1:37:17Shaan Puri?

  He doesn't look like he could jump over that chair.

• 1:37:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:21Sam Parr?

  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 this chair.

• 1:37:25Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 1:37:39Sam Parr?

  I don't know, man. He's probably only 35 in this video. I think you could jump a chair.

• 1:37:42Shaan Puri?

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

• 1:37:50Sam Parr?

  Martin, thanks for doing this, man. We appreciate it. We, I know that like, I don't, I won't out you, but I know that you've got like some anonymous accounts online.

• 1:37:58Shaan Puri?

  Normally we say, where could people find you? But for you, you get banned every like third week. So it's not that useful.

• 1:38:05Sam Parr?

  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.

• 1:38:12Speaker 00

  The interesting thing about that is I think the world's changing quite a bit. Like, like the sensitivity of banning people on Twitter has now given away. So I'm actually starting to talk to Twitter. I still need my old Twitter account is at Martin Shkreli. In the process, hopefully being unbanned, but any anybody that could help me get that unbanned, I'd really appreciate it. Um, uh, right now I met Marty underscore catboy, which that ex-girlfriend made for me, which, you know, uh, has stuck for some reason. Not my crowded Twitter handle. And on Instagram, on March, it's probably 15. But, um, yeah, I, 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, uh, on YouTube.

• 1:38:54Shaan Puri?

  Wait, you're banned from Tinder? Why?

• 1:38:55Speaker 00

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

• 1:38:58Shaan Puri?

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

• 1:39:04Speaker 00

  I, I think this cancel, cancel culture like extends into virtually anything, right? And, uh, for Tinder, it's, it's, uh, you know, you can argue that like, well, how do we know it's the real person, right? That, that's sort of one argument. But even then, like, I just think there's somebody at the match group that just doesn't like me. Um, but you know, it is what it is. Uh, I'll live. But yeah, Twitter is a, is like this, my lifelong goal is to get unbanned from Twitter because it's been seven years. And 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 from Twitter.

• 1:39:41Shaan Puri?

  Did you get banned? You like asked somebody to get you a lock of Hillary Clinton's hair? Wasn't that the, the reason why?

• 1:39:47Speaker 00

  It wasn't that. It was, it was, I was teasing this woman who, who I was, who 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, and apparently I went too far, but like it was obviously, you know, selective bias. I mean, it was like insanely selective for a lifetime ban, you know? It was a joke, uh, 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, they're, yeah, 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 it, 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

• 1:40:31Speaker 00

  because it's been seven years. Uh, and I was skyrocketing with followers and views. And that's the thing about cancel culture, right? You have somebody who's taking off, their narrative is, 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 like, 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. Like, imagine having somebody become really controversial and say, "No, I want to tell my side of the story." And somebody says, "No, you don't get that chance." You know, it's kind of a disgusting thing.

• 1:41:13Sam Parr?

  Well, dude, we appreciate this, man. You're a fascinating person, and we hope that, I imagine, we'll be talking more. I'm very curious to see how Dr. Gupta is gonna 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." We're not, it was 50/50 chance, so I'm happy we made this happen, and we appreciate you.

• 1:41:33Speaker 00

  Thank you so much, guys.

• 1:41:34Sam Parr?

  All right, we'll talk soon.

• 1:41:35Speaker 00

  Awesome. That's it. That's the pod.