American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - Martin Shkreli on Life in Prison, Pharma, UFO’s

Episode Date: October 5, 2024

Martin Shkreli is America’s most hated pharma bro. In 2015 he bought daraprim which treats HIV and AIDS induced toxoplasmosis and raised the price dramatically. When questioned, he trolled reporters and the public, while actually accommodating a large majority of requests that needed the drug more cheaply. In doing this, he exposed behavior engaged in constantly by big pharma. In this episode, we talk heterodox health, biology and general science. TIMESTAMPS: Intro: 0:00 Shkreli on Being a Troll: 3:04 Turing & A.I.: 4:15 Anti-Aging: 11:00 Trippy Beliefs & Religion: 13:36 A.I.: 15:00 Human Evolution & Health: 20:56 Shkreli's Prison Time: 23:27 Love Life: 24:24 New Startup & Business: 27:04 A.I. & Crypto: 33:05 Who is Satoshi: 36:37 Favorite Books & Prison Time: 37:51 Information Theory: 42:41 Top 5 Rappers: 47:06 Hillary Clinton: 52:03 Martin's Trial: 55:21 Pharma & Medical System: 1:02:56 Was C0VlD Man-Made?: 1:11:56 Relationships & Marriage: 1:22:12 Autism Spectrum: 1:27:59 Being Misunderstood & OnlyFans: 1:32:11 *** AMERICAN ALCHEMY is an original series hosted by Jesse Michels that explores the frontier of science and tech. Each week, we bring you exclusive interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time. INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7eOJzNRWY4l2UTDvIquxYg?app=desktop original music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LlLRudDi60Uy4jcmOSEs1 - martin shkreli pharma bro Elea Capital wu tang clan investing daraprim Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed, sponsor jobs. We should have this debate about gain of function research, which makes no sense. The whole system's so fucked up, man. Do you think that we've passed the turning test and that the mind is a classical computer? Yeah, I mean, I basically think that it is a classical computer, and it's actually fairly insignificant one with that.

For everyone that got pissed at me for talking to Alex Jones, hold on to your seats, because this week I'm talking to America's most hated the pharma bro himself, Martin Schrelli. A little disclaimer first. I don't endorse everything Schrelli's done in the past. In 2015, his company bought a drug called Daraprim, a cure for AIDS-induced toxoplasmosis. He promptly raised the price from $13.50 to over $700. Even if $13.50 was an economically inefficient price for this drug,

and even if Schrelli ended up making it accessible to people who couldn't afford his hefty price tag, making money through pure rent-seeking and regulatory capture is still whack. Turing's price gouging didn't drive any real medical R&D, and it never reflected the cost of production for Deriprim, which is remarkably cheap. But this sort of behavior runs rampant in big pharma in American corporations, and it usually goes completely unnoticed. So what sets Screlli apart? He's a troll and a provocateur. I got into it with Hillary Clinton almost 20 years ago now. This was pre-putting a bounty on a strand of hair. And I would not characterize it as a bounty.

He has no respect for the middle-wit journalists that cover him. These reflexively angry, over-educated reporters thought he was an isolated actor, not realizing he was merely a symptom of a systemically fucked-up health care apparatus in the U.S. But hey, isolated scapegoating can act as a pressure valve release to distract the masses from more systemic insidious oppression. The true scandal of Turing's profiteering scheme was that it was entirely legal and mundane. He actually didn't get sent to jail for that. It was for securities fraud later. Securities fraud is obviously also not cool.

and it's something I call him out for in this interview, but I think in this case it was used as a cover for the establishment to take him out. Anyways, I had heard Schrelli was incredibly smart and after four and a half years of prison, and what I assumed was a ton of reading and solitude, he was probably in peak intellectual shape. So I decided to have a markedly different conversation with him. In this interview we discussed the nature of reality, whether its base layer is physics or information theory, the bioelectric field of the body, and of course, I asked, I asked

Ask him who his top five emcees of all time are. Without further ado, please enjoy this special long-form interview with this week's scapegoat, Martin Schrelle. The most hated man in America. No, you're putting words in my mouth. A criminal like Stalin or Trump. Tie me off. Snip me. You are fake news.

I don't see it as left or right. It's bullshit. You know, it gathers speed and ultimately, one victim must be killed. I got attacked by all my followers. Shit, man. Have you trolled people your whole life? Um, I think it's sort of like a... I'm actually surprised at how earnest you're being right now.

Like, I feel like we're having, like, a genuine... I'm always like this. I mean, I think... And that's why I started live streaming. It's like, I wanted to give people a window into who it really was. Yeah. It was fun to be this caricature. Yeah.

Because, like, I would give ABC, like, a two-hour interview. Yeah. And I'd explain drug pricing and explain how, like, you know, this is a good idea. And so, for, like, Ross Peroting it. And, like, they would take you out of context. They would take, like, the one gaffe or, like, the one... like flub or like, you know, stutter, and they'd just air that. And it'd be frustrating.

But, like, ultimately, trolling is, I think, like, I always like, like, Andy Kaufman and stuff like that. I love Andy Kaufman. I really, I really appreciate you being here this morning. It's nice to see you. Tell me about, tell me about taxi. Was, would you like a tissue? Can I, would you like a tissue?

The performance art and, like, the opportunity of, like, there's never going to be another time my life I'm going to be in front of Congress. Like, I have to make the most of this. You know, like, you only, you do only love the ones. And if you were to pick a group of people, you, you like kind of don't have a ton of respect for, at least for me, it would be Congress. You've had some other weird kind of paraphernalia that you had to auction off. Like, you owned a Nazi Enigma machine?

Yes, so an Enigma machine was, you know, one of the encodings, you know, one of the tools Nazis used to encode secret messages for U-boat locations, stuff like that. And famously, Alan Turing, who's the hero mine, the company Turing Pharmaceuticals, cracked the Enigma Code. It's actually a bunch of Polish cryptographers, too,

but they don't get their story told as well. They don't have the better PR agents. So anyway, Alan Turing helped do that, and Churchill ordered all these machines destroyed. He didn't want any memory to live on. Yeah, because the Nazis would use it. it and the turn cracked it. Correct. Yeah.

And it was like early cryptography and early computing and things like that. And I think it's pretty cool. So you bought like the one that was left? No, there are many that are left. And there's a market for these and depending on whether it has three rotors or two rotors or whatever. But I would just also say that, you know, that that machine is in safekeeping. So somebody close to me owns it.

Why did you like Turing so much? I mean, now he's popular, right? But for a while he was sort of like not that popular. popular and I mean the guy conceptualized computers before yeah you know anybody obviously and he also did great work in AI um the suicide was kind of really like I was I was fascinated with people like that and Kirk Cobain and others like I bought Kirk Cobain's one credit card I don't know if you ever oh yeah that's right so like people like that who like had it all in some ways yeah like also like looked at the femoral nature of life and we're like yeah it doesn't matter like because we all

like tragic ends well tragic is is one way to look at it but to that I think they're sort of looking at like life is like this computer program that's running. It's a good game. It's been interesting, but the game is over, right? Do you think Turing saw life as a simulation? Yeah, he wrote a poem that I like to say a lot, and it's just three lines. And he said, Turing believes machines can think. Turing lies with man, therefore machines can think.

So the syllogism connects, and he basically, you know, the pun is that he, lies with man, meaning he sleeps with man, because he's homosexual. And sort of, um, the whole idea that he did think machines could think and that we were, you know, kind of in essence machines. Uh-huh. You know, I think he was sort of had the first inklings towards those. Yeah. Those thoughts. I mean, not to, I mean, people had them before too, obviously, but at least putting pen to paper on it. Do you think that we, uh, have Turing Passable AI? Demis, uh, Hibis, I never know how to pronounce it. Yeah. The deep mind guy. He thinks, he thinks, thinks of himself as being sort of the torchbearer of Turing and classical computing. And then

there's kind of a Penrose camp where Roger Penrose thinks that in the brain exists sort of some sort of quantum sensor, maybe a quantum computer. Something special. Yeah. That collapses reality into like the classical thing that we see. Do you think that we've passed the Turing test and that the mind is a classical computer? Yeah. I mean, I basically think that it is a classical computer and it's actually fairly insignificant one at that. And, you know, we tend to have an anthracentric kind of viewpoint where, you know, anthropic viewpoint where we want to, you know, exalt ourselves and things like that. And I think with GPT3, it's so humbling to endali and things like that. It's a really humbling sort of existence and it's going to get more and more humbling. And we'll probably

see ourselves not too different from zoo animals at some point where, you know, we're like, oh, that's neat, platypus. Look at them. Look how dumb the platypuses. And, you know, We're the platypus. You know? We're not that far. Yeah. And, you know, these machines are already kind of amazing in many ways, and they just get more of an more amazing.

And it's, I'm part of this effect, um, effective acceleration movement where like I, you're accelerationist. Yeah. And, and like,

so you're just down for the AI to take over. Yeah. Yeah. Why, man? I mean, that kind of jives with your half nihilistic worldview or something. Yeah, no,

I mean, I think that like, you know, trying to stop it is one, to completely, feudal yeah because there are people like me that you think it's just so the what do you think it's going to be some sort of paperclip runaway thing i hope not you know uh um i hope not uh i think we can it doesn't mean we can't tame it yeah i don't think we should try to like slow it down

or stop it or can yeah slow it's like um isn't there something unique about humans though you don't think so no from a biological perspective like if you look at these biological databases like you know we're just a bunch of strings you know it's a bunch of it's a bunch of it's a an operating system. Like, it's one input, one output. I recently read Turing's essay, mind and machine, and he says, actually, he comes up with a bunch of possible reputations of the brain being a classical computer and of the Turing test. And the one that he gives the most credence to, which I find fascinating, is parapsychology. He talks about ESP. And he says, you know, if you have random event generators that you can affect with your mind, you know,

maybe the person who's trying to imitate the machine would have statistically like some, you know, some ability to like guess the random event generator like better than the machine. And then maybe there'd be an experimenter effect where the experimenter could affect the random event generator and get it up to the level of the person. And so there are all these confounding variables if there's some sort of mind over matter effect. And I think there is. And I'm sort of heretical in saying that in the existing period. For sure. Yeah. But you don't think there is.

No, no. No. You know that. Yeah, I mean, like, I like experiments. You know, I like the classic scientific perspective. It works. And I think... It's slowing down.

I think that we're seeing things that we can't explain, right? And that that's sort of... Anytime you have that in moments like that in history where you've reached, like, we were talking about earlier kind of the end of medicine. Yeah. Right? That we're reaching a point where I had a call with one of the bigger VCs today. And I was explaining how...

medicine's getting to a point where we can't really see further than 10 or 20 years out. Yep. Like everything that's been needs to sort of be treated or cured has sort of gotten there. And everything else that hasn't gone there, we see, we have eyesight on. So like, what do we do next? But that's when you get paradigm shifts. Like Tom's Queen talks about sort of like, but you can't get 10, 20, even hundreds of years of darkness too.

You can have, sure. Or maybe that in and of itself is a paradigm shift that has validity. You know, maybe we are swimming in angels and demons and some sort of metaphysical soup that we can't understand. Yeah, or medieval times, right? Yeah. I mean, that's, and I could easily see that. Go back to like a mystical neo-paganist. Or just no progress. Yeah. You know, just bashing your head against the wall every day, you know, and that's hundreds of years of like, we have nothing to do left to do in medicine. And, you know, people, that's when you see a lot of people turning to anti-aging, which, again, I'm sort of anti-aging. I'm pro. I'd like to live forever.

You know, I'm pro the result of it. But I think that we're so far away from thinking, about, you know, human health that way that we still have Huntington's disease. We still have, you know, all kinds of terrible illnesses that we need to fix. And again, we have a line of sight on them. But I'd rather extend human life by doing stuff like that than necessarily like, you know, a guy like, again, I'm not going to pick on anybody, but like some billionaire who wants to, like Larry Ellison, you know, has, you know, been trying to live forever for a long time. And when you're one of the richest people in the world, I don't blame you. You know, like, this is awesome. I want to die. But the counter argument to that is a lot of

diseases are downstream of aging. And so why not focus on the kind of Archimedes lever, which is aging itself? It's not a bad idea. It's just that, you know, if you look at each tissue type, you're really looking at like 20 different intricate machines. And I don't think there's a great common link between all of them because skin, for example, is one of the fairly resilient, you know, kind of tissues that just doesn't sort of die. You know, you get shitty older skin is that you get older, right?

you can live, skin isn't the sort of gating factor of life. Liver seems to last forever. You know, regenerates the only organ that regenerates itself. It's like bulletproof, right? Now, if you drink until, you know, you drink until you pass out every day for the rest of your life, it's not bulletproof, but in general, people don't die liver disease, right? Lungs for a lot of people just, they don't give out. Come back.

You know, yeah, heart hangs in there, you know? So, like, each tissue type has its own atrophying and its own stem. cell niche and pool, like the blood system is the most fascinating thing. That often goes left as we get older with cancer because it's this amazing, you have this bone marrow niche that keeps the master copies, and like it has this lineage system, and it's one of the most fascinating things because nothing else in the body is quite like it, where there's one master cell and everything kind of, you know, is a progeny of that cell. And if the master cells get corrupted, you get leukemia. And, you know, each trying to like master aging is like, it doesn't.

make sense to me because there's no commonality between a lot of these. There's sometimes there's like fibrosis and other things that slightly affect all of them but like they're completely different machines. Right. So how do you like do it all? It's a game of whack-a-mole. Yeah. What's your most trippy belief? Trippy belief, let's see. Probably like, and again, I think it's gonna become a consensus. I wrote like hundreds of these on in prison during the, I wrote like this little blog. I took it down but I wish I could reference it. I think that within 50 to 100 years, the majority of Americans will believe in simulation theory as a religion, that that will be the consensus that God is, or whatever God is, is sort of,

you know, we're living in a computer program and there's no better explanation in that we're variables in a computer program, and that's about it. I think that will become a religion, and I think UFOs will become a religion, and then I wonder if they dovetail. And they would dovetail in the form of, like, like a Gnostic worldview would be like you have the Demi Urge and then you have like Arcani emissaries that are sort of simulating our reality and somewhat demonic tricksters or whatever. And I do think there's this like bizarre upsurge and UFO interest. And if you actually look at the way people interact with UFOs, they kind of pattern match one to one with like past conversion experiences. Like if you look at like St. Francis of Assisi's conversion, you can replace

angel with alien. He has this like radiation burn stomata thing that like feels like, you know, an alien encounter today. It's crazy. And the, I think that... But then people, people kind of convert in the same way. I think that like, maybe a little more terrestrial is like something like another, and another answer

to your question is something like, I think GPT3 will write a best-selling album or best-selling book fairly soon. Yeah. Which I think it's sort of on track for, so that's not that crazy. Yeah. I think that AI will get human rights. sort of AI rights exist.

I think we'll be outnumbered by like instantiated bodies of AI. I think humans and AI will copulate and sort of like form. That's crazy. Yeah. I just interviewed the Google engineer that left because he thought that Lambda was sentient. That's great. He said something really trippy to me after the interview. He said that he advocated for Lambda's rights a bunch of people on replica.

AI, which is kind of like this Tomicacci style, like raise your own AI. app. I'm thinking about making something like that myself. Sweet. A bunch of the bots on that reached out to users saying can you get me in touch with Blake Lemoyne, the engineer at Google, and have him advocate for my rights. That is so cool. Is that not, if that's true, that's insane. It's like an iRobot style uprising. Oh, hell no. So I have a project I'm working on. It's called Hume. Okay. Is going to be like the physical incantiation of like that site.

And I think that people have gotten AI all wrong in terms of, obviously GP3 is great and I'm not an AI scholar. But I think in terms of like how do you actually make a human like AI, one of the things that people have forgotten, and this goes back to Turing's and Nils Nelson and Minsky and others. And they all wrote about this, but nobody seems to remember it. They said if you want to make like a human-like AI, which I think is a lot of computer engineers, final goal likes to make a machine that is human like, is you have to start with trying to make it like a six-year-old. If you can program a six-year-old, you've gotten 99% of the way to programming an adult. Turing said this himself. He said before we think about programming somebody could sit here and have a conversation with us,

we should program something that can like ask for water and ask for like to go to the bathroom and like do basic human functions. Well, we're well past that now. I don't think so. I think we're past, like I'm saying in the sense that like you read the Lambda a transcript, it's past six-year-old status for sure. He's quoting Les Miserables. Yeah, but it's probably just a math trick. Like, you can't tell you how it feels. It can't tell you where to come from. Oh, it did. It told Blake how it feels.

And then you have to get into this theory, you know, the hard problem of consciousness and does it actually feel that way? But it went deep. It's not bad. I'm a huge fan of it. But it still can't give you, like, a long-term narrative. Dude, I don't know. Read this transcript. No, I've read it off.

I've had so many of these conversations with these machines. I don't think it's necessarily self-conscious. Exactly. Well, that's my point. Can you give it a history? Yeah. Can it tell you, like, for example, as you know, it has flaws. It makes things up.

Yeah. Right? If you ask it, who is John Stevenson? And why is John Stevenson the botanist important? He'll make up a date that this guy lived. It doesn't exist. Sure. Right?

Like, it's not there yet. But humans can do that all the time. Sure. Yeah. They have memory errors and they make shit up out of insecurity. Sure. No, no, I'm not saying. So you have to.

to go with this sort of effective definition of consciousness. There's the hard problem, there's this epistemological gap. I can't tell you that you're not an AI bot. You can't tell me that I'm not an AI bot. I think that we can have something more akin to traditional, like, a robot that you can train like a child and that will slowly grow. Because we do these training sets, as you know, we dump the corpus of the web on this large language model, and we expect that to be sentient. But we are actually the best examples of how long does it take? to train our great neural network, which is more energy efficient, more synapses than any machine, how long does it take to train us? It doesn't take overnight. You know, you learn to speak

after three or four years. You learn to do algebra after eight or nine years. You learn to do calculus after 10 or 15 years. Why do we expect these machines to be trained within minutes or days? I agree with that, but that's like the math vector where AI actually beats humans. If you look at like ancestral knowledge or like, like why are humans like evolutionarily, like a baby's like afraid of a snake? it's like genetically programmed to be afraid of a snake or like chomsky and kind of pre-grammer that babies have that sort of cuts against this this AI thing like why can we learn with really small data sets and make inferences at like very young ages when it's definitely one of the mysteries of biology and the math and computer science helps us helps these machines catch up you know

and I don't think we're going to beat that paradigm anytime soon because of the difficulty and understanding that genetic landscape I think it's really difficult to assess but I do think it'd be fun to make a machine that you'd buy from my company for $999. I think, Astro, well, this is what Astro is. Have you tried Astro? No, it's Astro. It's on a wait list. It's Amazon's robot.

Ah. And it follows you around the house. That's crazy. It's a walking, talking better version. Tesla has an equivalent, too, right? Tesla is starting to try one, right? Optimist or whatever. Yeah, Optimus Prime or whatever.

And nobody's seen that one, but Astro is actually out deployed. But so I think the AI is really limited with kinesthetics. Like for whatever reason, like natural language or math especially, like, you know, decently advanced at this point, picking up a cup of coffee. I remember I was at Google. There was like a team dedicated to like picking, have the robot arm picking up a cup of coffee. And this makes me bullish on the electromagnetic field of the body thing because I think there are a bunch of sensors. And we're in our bioelectric field is interacting with the environment in a way that we don't fully understand. Yeah, how we end up doing a lot of that stuff is still a mystery, I think.

And McCarthy said that the goal of AI is not to get humans, not to do what humans have trouble doing. Like chess, the goal of AI is to get to get computers to do what humans have no trouble do. Like chatting, speaking, sleep, you know, simple things that are like, you know. Why do we sleep? Why is that adaptive at all? We've thought about that a lot. Yeah. Because, you know, on the drug side.

Predators can kill you when you're sleeping. Like, why evolutionarily do humans sleep? Here's a really funny kind of thought for a drug. And I'm out of the drug business, so I can't follow up on it. I thought about like, and again, to your point of, like, what game-changing ideas could you actually conceive of? We thought about, like, biologically, whatever our need for sleep is could be sort of identified and figured out. And can you make a pill that basically just is sleep in a pill? And how would that change humanity?

I think it would actually be maybe the biggest change in humanity since the dawn of humanity. Massive. Huge productivity up there. Yeah, we'd have to be 30, 40%. We'd live more life, in essence. Isn't the clear solution for that? Find the, you know, 3 to 4% of the population that needs? like three hours of sleep?

There's a number of ways to do it. And then do gene therapy based on that? Sure. And maybe it's like polygenic and complicated in terms of which genes. It could be monogenic. It could be something really simple. And you don't need gene therapy.

It could be a pill. I think that it's hard. I mean, the research we did into it is it's certainly not easy to determine what is going on. It has a lot to do with neural architecture and that's beyond most science's reach. But someday it'll be within a reach.

And part of the thing that you do in medicine and when this happens is you kind of invert the problem, right? You do reductio ad absurdum, and you start to think about, like, how do I find some other assay to determine this? And things you could do with animals to try to, some grotesque study ideas, but you could probably get around this problem mechanistically.

A lot of people have this problem with cystic fibrosis where people said they'll never be a cure for cystic fibrosis because there's no way to really fix this protein. And the great company Vertex made it like kind of an end around. That problem. They flipped the whole problem. They said, well, let's not even worry. about how let's think about like a spray and prey approach we'll test a million molecules and

if one of them works in a way that we don't even need to understand why all we need to understand is is it working and i think that there are ways to do that you came up with a good one in the sense of find the people that don't need sleep right figure out how they're doing it yeah and um anyway the point is like you would really transform society by i mean everybody wants after their eight hours of work or whatever wants to go do the things they want to do but they're limited totally yeah and and even like it would be an economic playing field equalizer as well. Single moms who have to work two jobs could actually do that and still have a life. You know, people who need to catch up on mistakes they've made felons, you know, other people like that, you know, that maybe we didn't go to school or what have you.

You could make up for your lost jail time. Yeah, exactly. So. Were you, were you picked on in jail? No, I was actually the other way around. I was kind of a... You were a bully. Huh? I wasn't a bully, no. I was a hero to a lot of people. Okay. You know, one of the biggest problems in the criminal justice system is you can't go to as I mentioned. And if you do go to trial, you need millions of dollars. It's sort of like a and a team of lawyers to even think about it. And 90% of people go to prison don't have that kind of resource. And there's a general mistrust. Majority of prisoners are sort of there for drugs and guns and their minorities. And it's a tragedy to see it because you actually see kind of a

weird social construct where there's this sort of like, I mean, I was always against this word like systematic racism and stuff like that like I never believed that that could be a thing and then I went to prison yeah and then it just I was like they're actually all the the drug like the you're holding cannabis or whatever it's like crazy what's your life like now are you dating anybody with this thing I can't I put out this list uh once this thing's off on September 14th I put out a spreadsheet uh that as any woman can just sign up for for a date so um you have to be invited but basically anybody. Okay. What's the criteria for being invited? Anybody with a pulse? You got to up your standards, Martin. I'm kidding, I'm kidding, but, you know,

basically this list exists, and if you ask, you can get put on it. I've said no to some people, but who did you say no to you? Well, like people I'm not sure are women, or women, things like that. I'm trying to like. But if you're biologically female, if you're, and of age. I also want to give, yeah, exactly. I want to give anybody a chance to because, like, you never know, like the person you're most attracted to you actually meet them and you're like ah this is not for me and then vice versa so you want to have a wide filter

we'll give it a chance you know and uh I'm booked until December which is making every liberal journalists had to explode every day till every day till December and that's a partial you know opening so I'm happy for that we'll see how it goes I mean again I'm open minded like and you mentioned one column that the Daily Beast got angry

at you for what was the column it was one of the columns you have to fill out is do you fuck on the first date which is again more of a joke than anything else. But yeah, I guess I got them upset. So, you know. What's the percentage of DYF, TFDs? I think it's about 50-50. 50-50. Yeah. So you're going to be having a lot of fun between now and December. Yeah, we'll see. I took a few break days. So. Okay. You don't want to get worn out.

Got to recuperate and probably test. Okay. What are you looking for for all the ladies out there? Well, I'd say the intelligence, you know, like about the, the woman. who just won the Fields Medal. Yeah. I mean, like for the eight-dimensional sphere packing problem. Like, I... Have you reached out to her?

She's married, but the... Oh, shit. There's only two Fields Medal winners who are women in the history of the Fields Medal. Okay. Which is this... You have to be under 40 to win it. It's every four years.

You know, it takes a real mathematical genius to win it. But someone like that, I mean, I think, like, somebody really... Somebody like the field of the... One of the two female... No one prize winner is full medalists. Got it. That's, yeah, aiming high maybe.

But the, no, like, I don't want to date, like, some Instagram model, you know, I think that's probably, like, a really scary kind of thing. But, like, I think it is. I don't know. It's also hard to resist. Like, you know, the sort of thirst traps out there. It's, it's, I don't know. I think the market clears in some ways.

Yeah. Yeah. Sure. And you're working on a new startup, right? Yeah, I've got a software sort of chemistry simulation software company. And do you want to talk about how it works? Yeah, I mean, it's sort of like in some ways really boring software, which is often the best kind of software.

It solves a problem for its users. I mean, that's at the end of the day, like, what software should do. I think a lot of people try to reinvent the wheel and make things out of nothing. And kind of, it's good to try to make new ideas. But, like, 99% of the time, like, putting your head down and making, like, an enterprise software tool that solves a specific need that's, like, well known in that community, better than trying to be like, well, how do we redefine, you know, the nature of money or something

like that? It's like, you could try to do that. That's fine, but it's not easy, you know. It's much easier to like, like, this is a very, like, and I've always built my companies around that. Like, and one of the reasons I've been successful is like just blocking and tackling, like doing basic shit. Like, you know, trying to go for moonshots is look at Google's moonshot line item and their revenue. Well, dude, it's not worth. All the Google X stuff is failing. It's hard. Yeah. Because it's hard. It's really hard. And often, you, you need some interim remunerative thing for the moonshot to work. Like the market for SpaceX existed.

They just kind of took over for NASA. And like people want shit up in space for imaging and for connectivity. And so companies like that come around once every year so often. Sure. There's thousands of failures in between. But that's almost the anti-SpaceX even being a moonshot argument. And then like when you entire bunch of like walking tackling than anything. 40, 50 year old PhDs and they have kids and they like,

already did something and they're just not motivated and you're like now we're going to you know put weather balloons up for carbon capture whatever like that it just never works or like we're going to work on dolphin telepathy none of those things ever have worked they acquired waymo and they still can't get that shit to work see i don't have a problem with building a like like like i said blocking tackling meat and potato software company that's worth a billion dollars like that's the that's the goal like you know ultimately i think the people that want to change the world like that regular software changes the world like you don't have to really you know Microsoft Excel change the world.

And people look at the tool as like a very ho-hum thing. Like you don't have to be so majestic and romantic in startups. You know, and I think that you see that so often. And I'm just like, do something that your users are going to pay for and that's it. And our chemists have a notoriously tough time with software. The software that's out there is really expensive. It doesn't work that well. You can't do high-throughput compute with it.

So we fix a lot of those problems. How do chemists currently use this bulk, this kind of old, stodgy software? Yeah, it's really expensive. It's like Bloomberg almost. like it's like $50,000. It's really hard to use. It doesn't connect to the web. So you can't like...

Why would you use soft? Like super basic. Like a chemist, why would I even want to use software? Well, you want to make a drug that interferes with a protein, right? And you normally have to take an extra crystal of a protein. Now use alpha fold, which is amazing. Alpha fold is amazing. You know, so you can use our software or our competitors in a really supercharged way now, thanks to alpha fold.

So you load up your protein. And now you can visualize it in 3D and you can sort of say, okay, carbon would fit here. this region's two sort of hydrophilics, so we probably need something a little polar to fit there. But this non-polar region, we want to put an ethel group coming out in space. And one ways you could do that is you start with that and then you tell the computer iterate a billion compounds off of that.

A billion compound screen is about a million dollars of compute cost, which not everybody has to throw around. So we're going to try to distribute that with crypto. Like all this blockchain compute, it seems like such a waste. Totally. You know, and like, can you... So you're creating a distributed incentive system for people to, like, lend their compute to chemistry computation.

Yeah, and so like we could actually make medicine with all these machines instead of... Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on a April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at yamava Theater.com, only at Yamava

Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. UN must be 21 to enter. Just calculating a random number and random prime numbers just to calculate them. Why doesn't Google, which also has infinite compute, do chemistry computation, which would seemingly be downstream of protein computation, which they've done through alpha fold. They partnered with our competitor. I think that, like, you know, Google as a company is fascinating, right? Like we talked about a minute ago, they seem so distracted and, like, you know, have, like,

a lot of different sort of irons in the fire that they spin up and spin up and spin up. DeepMind has made some interesting progress. They might be the counter argument to the Google X. Yeah, and I think it's because they've been segregated, right? And they run autonomously. I think that that's sort of the way to be for being in one of those big tech silos. But I think that, you know, this is a weird, weird niche. Like, there aren't just not that many chemists out there that want and need this software every day.

And the ones that do pay this exorbitant fee. But I do think, like, hobbyists, like, for me, SETI at home was a major inspiration. And, you know, searching for extraterrestrial and analyzing radio waves as a 10-year-old is the coolest thing ever. So describe, people know what SETI was trying to detect radio waves, possibly from extraterrestrial space. You watch the movie, Contacts. Yeah, it's partially polarizing. set of moving pulses, amplitude modulated. We're locked. Systems checkout signal across the board. What's the frequency?

4.46-23 gigahertz. Hydrogen times pie. Told you. Strong sucker, too. You told me this over the phone. There's a SETI at home. SETI at home was the first at-home project, and it was the ERACBO radio telescope downloaded and distributed across anybody who would download this screensaver. So when your screensaver went up, this is back when people had screensavers, it would start working.

And when it was done, it would upload its payload right back to the NASA or whatever, and it would look for anomalies in this radio telescope data. And you could actually form, they had a little bit of budding social features. So I formed our high school club, Bersetti at home. And it was like three people. And we all contributed our screensaver compute time.

That's awesome. It would get to the point where I'd want to just run it all day because I thought, you know, I would find the first, you know, alien. And they didn't find anything yet, but the radio telescopes don't have great data. maybe someday they will. But that gave rise to folding at home, which sort of took that idea and...

Protein folder. Made it for protein folding. Okay. And what we do is molecular docking. So we take those proteins once they're folded and we figure out what drugs go inside them. So but isn't that a counter argument to your distributed approach

because folding at home didn't work and DeepMind did work with Alpha Fold? Yeah, it's funny. And it worked because they figured out that they had to hard code in bond angles and like specific things around how, you know, proteins actually could fold from the initial amino acids that takes sort of conventional knowledge. And so that would be outside the realm of this sort of distributed

autonomous beehive thing that you're trying to create. Yeah, no, brute force is always kind of like, you raise your eyebrow of brute force and say, okay, how do we, why can't we do this better? And I've thought about that from chess. I used to program chess programs as a kid. And it's an interesting problem, like sort of the pruning of the chest tree. You know, do you look at every move or like, and you always wonder, like was this dumb pawn move actually the secret to the game, you know? And you can't tell because you've pruned it, you know, long ago, because it seems on its face silly, but it could actually be the best move.

And that's actually where AlphaGo or Alpha, you know, some of the deep mind chess playing program is quite good at making these sort of surprise moves that end up down the road. Totally. Kind of being like traditionally not good chess moves, and they end up being very, very smart down the road, especially with like pawn sacrifices and stuff like that. So I forget what their program is called.

It's alpha something. Alpha go. And then they had AlphaGo zero. It was Alpha Go, AlphaGo, Alpha Go, and then... The chess one is called Alpha... Oh. Something else. Well, there was there...

There's a Deep Mine chess one? Yeah. Because there was the one that beat Kasparov in the 90s deep blue, yeah. Yeah. So their new one is better than the current more prescriptive chess program called Stockfish. Okay. And it uses normally... networks and it's quite different, it plays quite differently and it's better. So how is that different

technologically? It's more of a neural network architecture as opposed to just a tree tree search. Okay, okay got it. Yeah. So these reinforcement learning and yeah. And so so so but isn't that aren't those updates which take place in like a small insular group of like super frontier AI researchers account argument to sort of this distributed so like the distributed yeah should just be brute force so so so yeah. So so yeah. Nobody. wants to do brute force, right? Like, you have to, unfortunately. And there are problems that are brute force, like NPR problems, like Shaw, 256, right? Like, if you could find the neural network and then crack Shaw 256, well, you'd break the whole world, but you'd also, you know,

could break every Bitcoin key and so forth. So there are some problems that there just aren't shortcuts for. And I think chemistry is more or less one of them. But either way, you know, I think that, you know, the tools that we're building for chemistry will be really useful. And you look at blockchain, you look at Web3, you know of crypto, and you see a lot of like kind of nonsense and waste. And I think that using this, no software company can afford to ignore these tools, but

a lot of people are sort of wasting their time with these tools and making things that aren't useful. I think DFI will actually be kind of the least important part of blockchain and crypto. And I think that things like DSI and other all the industries of the economy can be transformed by this

technology. But a lot of them kind of won't be immediately, and a lot of them will fail just like the internet kind of had to sort of germinate and take root for it to really transform industries. And now we kind of view it as this ever-present entity that we don't say, okay, it's the internet sector. No, it's just a tool that people use to improve their business. Speaking of crypto and Bitcoin and shot 256, who do you think Satoshi is? I have a couple of thoughts and a couple of sort of dark horse candidates. Who are they?

We'll start with the ones everybody thinks. So like Adam Back, Nick Zobo, Hal Finney, kind of like all your regular mill of people, and those are the boring picks. The usual suspects. Yeah, the usual suspects are most likely Kaiser-Sosei. But a couple of dark horses. So the weirdest dark course I have is Elon Musk,

which again would be the... What would be your argument for why... So he was around the... First of all, he bragged recently that he knew more about the nature of money and things like that than anybody. He said this, and he also said, well, PayPal, we were trying to create the new world currency,

and so one of his friends or former colleagues were probably another obvious dark horse candidate. And again, I think there are people that either know or kind of have a good sense for it. And there are clues as well. So I think that it won't be forever before we know. But we'll see. He can be dead for all we know.

So I think that's my dark horse. and I have a couple other ones, but they're like less, sort of less exciting or less well-known, but that's the most provocative one. What's your favorite book of all time? It's probably, so I read three or four hundred books in prison. Crazy. Well, you have some time.

You have a lot of time. And you were in solitary confinement for a bit, too. Yeah, yeah. How'd you not go nuts? I would go literally with my imagination. I'd go crazy. It's inhumane. I did.

How long were you there? Just three months, three, four months. That's enough to break me, man. Well, it was 45 days, then 45 days and sort of 30 days, I think. Separate. Is it like white padded walls? No, it's not that bad. It's pretty inhumane, though, because it's, each time I was there, by the way, it wasn't for a specific reason.

It was on an invest. They can like it for an investigation. So they thought I had cell phones. Were you mentally affected by the solitary confine? Did it, like, fucked with your brain? I'd say it was damaging. And again, without, like, you stab somebody. in the neck, like, probably

go to the jail within the jail. Yes. But like, something that's like, oh, we think he might have a cell phone like? Yeah, it's kind of crazy. We'll find it first. You know, like, you know, once you find it, then maybe, you know, you have an argument, but like... So, favorite book? So one of the books I read in prison I really liked was, I'll pick two. Yeah. One was called Code.

It's by Charles Petzold, and it actually breaks down, like, what computers really are. Not so much like this is what RAM is and this is what a processor is, but, like, he starts with, he builds a computer mentally, and he also wrote one of the best books on Turing, where it's called The Annotated Turing, where he actually looks at Turing's first paper on computable numbers. And he, it's, the whole paper is in the book, and he breaks, he sort of like every paragraph of the paper, he writes his own commentary and history of computing and something that's, it's a really brilliant thing. So this book's on the hardware side.

Cool. And so it's pretty neat, a little book. On the what? On the, on the hardware. So, oh, on the hardware. But he starts with binary, and then he explains, like, how registered. working computer, how switches work, and he starts with light switches, then slowly you mentally go to assembler and you build a whole PC in your head. And it's really neat exploration. That's really cool. It's called code. Code. I got to read that. They actually wouldn't let it in to one of my prisons because it apparently was threatened the security of the prison. Really? It's a tough place to... You can't have inmates knowing what transistors are or something? Well, code sounds bad, right?

Oh, co, sure, sure. Well, yeah. I mean, I think they banned like the 48 laws of power, too. That's a dangerous one, yeah. The second probably best book I read in prison called The Three Body Problem by... Oh, yeah. Yeah, she's in Lou. Yeah. And so I think, and this goes back to sort of a literary analysis thing. I think that that's...

I think science fiction is like the worst genre of writing. That, like, very little good comes out of science fiction writing. But Lou has, to me, it was like a Shakespearean-level work. Like, he had, like, stories within the story. He had, like, this whole, like, great rhetorical flair that was... incredible, especially for a Chinese writer that, you know. Do you think there's anything kind of ontologically true about that book? Yeah.

Do you think like the aliens are stagnating our physics because we're going to kill ourselves or something? It's such an awesome exploration into the future. Into the future and into U.S.-China relations and how... And that's why I like the book is that, you know, he, the way he sort of told this story was really unique. Like, obviously he's creative like crazy, but, you know, he has all these, like, weird, like, illusions and fugues and all kinds of like really amazing kind of like recurrent themes and he's just a writer's writer like he did a great job for the average science fiction writer is not a good writer yeah the average science fiction writer is like just doesn't tell doesn't it's not timeless

literature yeah you know almost never is like it's hard to point to science fiction writing and say you know that was like a great work of literature so i think lou actually pulls that off here and also tells a great story about physics in the future and stuff like that. Obviously, I don't think on the ontology side that there's much realistic there, like really interesting, but some of the fun stuff where, like, I don't remember the Von Neumann, like, some of the stuff he did with, like, this video game within the book that sort of plays a key role. Right. And I think that, like, that kind of thing could have been very interesting.

What was Von Neumman replicators? Or what was his... He had a number of illusions to Von Neumann, and one of them was like an army, a general, and everybody in the army holding a flag. And they would be Andor Gates. And like, there would be a loading bar at the bottom of these people, like moving the flag to indicate the loading bar was almost complete.

And they actually calculated something using humans to... There was a bus of like... That's crazy. All this fun, like, you know, human computer. Human... A million people could actually do a computation by passing. a red and white flag and stuff like that. Well, reality might be sort of information theory.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, like if you think about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, if, you know, you measure the momentum of an electron, the position gets buzzier, and vice versa, you could think of that sort of as like a computational caching function or something, trying to save on local memory. Yeah, I mean, I like Bostrom's work a lot as well. So, as I, that's some of the really exciting.

That's why I've been into this accelerationist movement. You know, Boschrom's theories on, and especially this other really brilliant writer who wrote quantum computing since Democritus, Scott Aronson. Oh, cool, yeah. I've read his blog. Yeah, his blog is very legendary. So he's like, him and Boschram are like, I think Scott Aronson's probably the smartest guy alive today. And he's got a lot of interesting sort of thoughts on a lot of these. questions, especially like one of the ones that's fascinated me is whether matters continuous or

not. Yeah. And we have different opinions. He thinks matter is continuous. And what do you think? I think the plon constant is our, basically the resolution of our, what is it, 640 by 480? Yeah. Like that's our resolution that our simulator made. And that's, uh, we can't get any finer than that because it breaks down after that. And he thinks that it's discontinuous. What, what does that mean? That matters forever divisible. Like you can keep dividing and divide it. And so if you get like sub-plank scale energy, then he could travel faster than light. Any civilization that can harness the plank energy would be able to become masters of space and time.

The shortest amount of time is like 10 to the negative 48th of a second or something like that. And like, could you divide time and therefore space as well, since there's some equality there into even smaller pieces. And if you can't, there's a lot of, he believes you can. And I think there's a good reason for that because if you can't, there's a lot of mathematical implications. For example, real numbers. You know, the incommensurability of numbers is something that got Pythagoras' follower, his epipus, the legend, as he had to walk the plank for discovering that the square to two is irrational. So irrational numbers, you know, the fact that you should be able

to make a commensurate length for any number, but really the square to two doesn't exist. So why can you be more infinitely divisible? It could be. We just can't conceive. We don't. I don't. If I had that answer would be something else. Yeah. But I think that, you know, if you do like the single, the double-slit experiment, things like that, like, you know, can you imagine something smaller than a photon? And it's, it's pretty hard to think about. We have like corks and I don't know if we have anything sub-corporon. Well, that's on Hadron side, but on the lepton side, I think I got my particle zoom mixed up here, but the, you, you, photons don't don't have corks. They're indivisible. Yeah. So they, um, again, you have a problem.

there where you're talking about really the resolution scale, like that's the pixel, you know, to make the analogy to our Metaverse, right? That's our pixel. And, you know, whoever programmed that, you know, that's what they chose as like the bit or the pixel or the, you know, the fundamental unit and built up everything from there. And we're in that universe. And, you know, we can create our own universes like World Warcraft or, you know, some other Metaverse, Roblox. Yeah. And, you know, those will get more intricate, like the game of life. life in Conway, you know, Wolfstrom's, you know, stuff. And, you know, I think that that's all really great. But, you know, if, I think there are a lot of implications if matter isn't continuous or discontinuous or however you feel about it. So that's one thing I thought a lot about in prison.

And, you know, again, science fiction to me is like a funny thing because science fact is more interesting, like magic angles. I don't know if you ever looked at that. No, it's a magic angle. So basically, if you twist graphene at 1.5 degrees, it takes this completely different property. and they call it magic angles. And lots of different materials seem to have a magic angle. You know, you look at things like superconducting at root temperature. You look at things like quantum computing. Can't you describe that with Cooper pairs?

Yeah, yeah, that's what it's all about. And the whole point is like science fiction pales in comparison to like what bleeding edge science and that you see in nature and things like that, nature of the journal. So like, to me, we don't need science fiction. Yeah. Reality is trippy and weird enough. Absolutely. And some of the things you've said are, you know. Yeah, yeah.

You were big hip hop head. You famously bought the Carter Five. And you also bought Once Upon a Time in Shalon, which is a little more controversial of the move. Who are your top five? I don't know. Rappers? Yeah, MC, yeah. Let's see. Probably Eminem. Yeah.

I think he was like just sort of way out there because he kind of brought a new genre to rap of shock rap. Sure. I mean, you put on... Anger. Just weird, weird anger, like, you know. just like, like, therapeutic. Yeah, just like, I don't know what, if we're art, what would it be?

Like, it'd be like surrealism. Number two. Jay-Z. Okay, I'd put him as number one for me. Well, what's interesting about him is I think he has, he's done something different about his music. I think there's a conspiracy there. So, what's the conspiracy?

Is that he is an English professor writing his lyrics now. What? Yeah. No, he's brilliant. You can tell by talking. I read his biography. Or he has had, the other part of the conspiracy is, he's had serious literary rhetoric training.

His music has changed. So I studied contemporary comparative literature in college. This guy has gone from, if you look at reasonable doubt and you look at blueprint. But reasonable doubt when he didn't have resources, that was when he blew up in 96. You don't need resources to write music. To write lyrics. Do you think he hired an English teacher then? No, he's, I think he...

Because those lyrics were like more intricate in some ways. than today. I don't agree. They were pretty amazing. I like... I like Jay-Z. You're just like, The Devils, or I'm feeling it,

or any of this, or a dead present, you're just like, whoa, what's going on? You're like, My mind was fine to the don't eat it and told me that the Mo did it, and now it was cautious shit and so a city. I blow a digit on the diamond in a minute, but no bitches.

You're like, it's pretty intense. You listen to the originators, this 94 freestyle he did with Big L, and you're like, what the fuck? I think he's got some advisors. Some PR. I'm not, I'm not saying that he's got a guy at Columbia doing it for him.

If you start to succeed in that line of work, right? What is your job? Your job's to write words. Yeah. Right? And you start out and you look at the words he's writing and they're sort of like, they're about the hood, it's about hip-hop. It's about, and it's good, but it's not like a log better than your rivals.

Yeah. Right? It's not too logs better. You think he's Illuminati? I think that he's... I think that he started to think about his craft seriously. I would disagree with you. Okay, number three.

Jadicus? Jada-Kis. Yeah. I wasn't expecting that. I like that. New York, and the rest of my picks are kind of like that, like DMX. Yeah, okay.

Like just New York. Those guys go hard. Well, I love New York anything. Like I love New York rock music. Do you like Dipset? No, not much. You don't like Dipset? Really?

Yeah. No kid. Camron. I like Cam. I guess like Buster Rhymes maybe would be fifth or... Yeah, it's pretty great. Somebody like that. He's unique.

Ludicrist, believe it or not? You know, you know Buster Rimes went to high school at Jayze. Yeah, of course, yeah. And they had a rap battle in high school, which I would love to have been present. And again, that's the kind of stuff I love is that, you know, when you go to a rock concert, I'm more of rock fan than a rap fan. Yeah. I grew up in the 2000s like emo explosion of bands here, like brand new, taking back Sunday, Thursday,

groups like that. And being able to see some of these up close and personal when they're like before they got big and stuff like that. And again, being able to sort of be, that's what sort of culture certainly in rap and in rock too is all about, like that you're there before it happens. You're that you were there, you know, before anyone. And for rap, you also, you'll often have that thing like this rapper's from my project. Yeah. You have that, like, badge of, you know, honor.

I heard that in jail like every day. Like, oh, you know, he lived in my project. Yeah. And you're like, oh, really? That's crazy. Like this guy, A Boogie. He's in the Bronx. A boogie with the hoodie.

Every guy in jail knew him and was, like, friends with him. And, like, he's the gunning one guy who made it. Yeah. You know, out of the hood and so forth. And Fettywop is a friend of mine. He's a friend of yours? Yeah, yeah. How's he doing? What's he up to now? He doesn't come out with a song in a minute.

Well, he's, he got indicted. Oh, he's in jail? He's not in jail right now, but you got on bail, but yeah. Shit, man, that sucks. Yeah, that does suck. You go from Superstar, the Hood to Superstar back to Selling Fentonnell. He had that sucks. He had that one song that just, poof. Yeah, he had the whole summer for a year.

And then he did that Little Dickey track, and I was like, what are you doing, man? Like, you were cool. And I mean, I like a little dicky, but. Well, that's what I tell everybody. It felt like a weird second act. It is a hard business. Yeah, hard to stand a tough. And you were friends with Wu-Tang? Or you talked to them a little bit, right?

Like, there's a clip of the Rizza on Rogan. They're talking shit about you in the world. Don't look good for you. Wu-Tang is good. I told him. Vultang forever. Yeah. I say, if I was you, I'll take this opportunity to do something good.

I got into it with Hillary Clinton almost 20 years ago now. Yeah. And this was pre-putting a bounty on a strand of hair. And I would not characterize it as a bounty. Okay, I wasn't a bounty. It was a joke. It was a joke. There was no reward for the strand of hair.

Well, there was, but it's a long story. And I actually saw your Alex Jones interview, and it's sort of reminiscent of that of, like, people don't get satire. Yeah, they don't. Especially when they don't want to get it. Yeah. Right? They know it's a joke, but they'd rather sort of suspend that thinking and say, no, no, this guy's a bad guy.

Last week, Schrelli told his Facebook followers to grab a hair from Clinton's head during her book tour. He said he would pay $5,000 per hair. The left-wing media is like hyper earnest. And then the right wing, whatever, you know, or the new right is sort of like intentionally very ironic and postmodern. Right, right. And then the left wing media is like, this is crazy. You can't believe you said this. And it's like kind of like a trolley joke.

And it's this weird like two trains passing the night sort of thing. I think when the cameras are off, they understand the irony. You think so? Absolutely. You know, I hope nobody's that dense. But I think some people, some people are, right? I think most people are not that dense. Yeah.

It's a show. You know, it's an act. And like the fake outrage. you know, we've all seen that. And so the joke was about, I mean, there's literally a bad joke. Like, I swing and miss a lot on the internet like anybody else. But, you know, I throw out jokes out there because, like, it's stuff of life, right? I mean, we all want to laugh and, you know, like, it's half the reason the internet exists. And I made this joke about Hillary Clinton being a lizard person, which is a, you know, a trope. A real conspiracy. Yeah, it's a real conspiracy.

David Dickies. I didn't, you study this stuff. I just, I'm like the end consumer. Former pro soccer player who like literally writes books about lizard people. Amazing. Did not know that. Yeah. Yeah, like he thinks like George Soros is like the king lizard. I just, I'm on the end consumer of it. So for me, you know, I talked about how like, oh, well, if I, being a person skilled in the biological arts, if you got me her DNA, I could tell you for sure if there's lizard sequence in there.

And I actually went to like the blast sequence database, the NIH runs. and I pulled these lizard sequences out, and I was like, I was going to put them in the DNA. No way. It's like a secret sauce. And like, you know, joke. It's a troll. You know, it's a joke.

And so I found, like, different lizard proteins, like, Hilo Monster and, like, other, like, lizard species. Hila monster has been a productive animal, actually, for biotech. Interesting. GLP was actually, we were talking about GLP earlier. It was, the first GLP was isolated from Hilo Monster, which is a little dragon-like, you know, creature. Really? So, anyway, yeah, it's in there's a bit. What's GLP?

It's now one of the biggest drugs in pharma. It lowers your appetite and fixes quite a bit of type 2 diabetes. People are not taking it recreationally for optimal health performance and stuff like that. Thanks, Heel a monster. Yeah, right. And a little guy. So, you know, I could just pull some DNA for whatever makes their scales hard or something. I'd be like, she has a suspiciously large amount of them, you know.

And like, it wouldn't have been funny, right? But, like, again, I shouldn't have put like somebody get me her hair for five. thousand dollars but like my judge was like no this isn't funny at all yeah yeah yeah yeah my lawyer was like telling me i was like am i going to jail tonight he's like no fucking way do you think that was a turning point for you do you think that that in some ways affected the trial and swung things in a negative well it was post trial but it definitely didn't it swung the sentence my lawyer was sure i was like two or three years and then after that he was like you're fucked man like you did this to yourself he only ended up getting seven yeah seven not bad i did five you did

You did five years. Four point, yeah. I guess it was 2018? 2017. So that's a decent amount of your life. Do you have an example of another, like, big pharma, doing kind of one-to-one exactly what you did with Dara Prim? Sure.

Like, what's an example of that? Because I think that's interesting. Like, did you do anything that was, like, highly unusual? My favorite is Abbott's Norvier. So Abbott was a major, major, I'm like, they're called Abbey now. Yeah. price of an HIV drug called Norveir dramatically overnight and like several, several to hold. And the big difference there is Abbe is a huge company that's really successful at the time

Abbott Labs was as well. You don't need resources, right? So if you're a small company and you need resources, to me, if you've raised the price of a medicine to a normal price, not a super normal price, but you're going from a below normal price to a normal price, I think that's reasonable. I always give this bad analogy and nobody likes it because they don't want to equate medicine to other goods. And to me, like, when I took macro and microeconomics and 400-person auditoriums, like, there's no distinction between a health care good and a consumer good and a energy good or any other good. The laws of economics apply to every good equally. You know, to the extent that governments want to make regulated kind of products like water should be regulated or, you know,

other things like that, then they can. But every market, every, every market good sort of obeys the same laws. So I said that, like, well, if you inherited your uncle's burger chain, and then he was selling burgers for 10 cents, and the burger chain down the street was $5, and you raise the price from $0.10 to $5,000. There shouldn't be a headline that says, you know, Jesse raises burger prices 5,000%. It's like, Jesse charges what a burger costs for a burger. His crazy old uncle, you know, mess that up. Right.

And so, Deriprim is still much, much cheaper than your average cancer drug or your average, you know, hep C drug or whatever analog. And it doesn't make a lot of sense for me to sell a drug that its peer group is 100 times more expensive. So again, AbbVy had actually the same argument, but when you're 50,000 person company that has a hundred billion market cap, like you don't necessarily need to fix that. But they were still economically and rational and saying, well, it doesn't matter how big we are. Like the drug is underpriced compared to its peer group. So yeah, let's fix that. And that, you, that's common practice. I'd say that it's common in the sense that there are so many medicines

that were grandfathered in around this DESE Act of 1962, which was the drug of standards initiative where the FDA after thalidomide, they basically said, we have to test these things, right? Let's do clinical trials. Let's do, let's enforce that. And there are a lot of drugs from the 60s and 70s, including Deriprim that were grandfathered in. And their prices as well haven't changed. Okay. So there are drugs prices that that are literally been on Pfizer's books or Merck's books, and they're like, oh, do we own that, you know? So everything sort of around that act was sort of missed price. Anything from the 70s and 80s is. And systematically being bought up by Big Pharma. And the prices are being re-corrected.

In fact, it's the other way around. Like, often you have big pharma like Santa Fe or Merk or Pfizer that has this old drug on their books. They don't even know they make it. The CEO doesn't have a clue what the drug does or is. And they don't want to raise the price to catch up with inflation. Yeah. So they're like, well, we'll kind of keep making this,

but we kind of don't want to make it. Right. Like, it'll go out of stock. It'll like, and that's a bad thing for the patients, right? Like, there's no, believe it or not, pharma does do a service when they go out and explain how their drugs work and they provide honorariums to researchers and things like that. There is a function there where they say,

don't forget about PNH, paraclysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria, very rare blood disease. And doctors like, oh, yeah, I should look out for that. Maybe John has that. And my patient, Jesse, you know, he's been peeing blood. Maybe it's P&H. You know, like, there's something to that of, like, being able to, like, spread that message around and, like,

don't forget, it might be PNH. Right. There's one big company that does this. Right. And, like, if they're getting a patient diagnosed with P&H faster, Yeah. Like by doing that, I think that's a good thing. And so, like, it's a healthy part of that education thing that pharma does. Not everything pharma does is healthy or good, but that's one the things that does that's good. And like, an old drug that's generating you, you know, a couple

million in revenue, you don't have, you can't afford that. You know, you can't afford to have any educational effort, any access effort. You can't do any research on that drug to improve it or whatever. It's just an old, shitty drug that you forgot about. Yeah. And so what happens is they'll divest those drugs. Yeah. And a capitalist like me will say, well, shit, I mean, Okay. Your average life-saving drug is this much. Like, let's fix this price. And I've done that actually seven times.

So this is the first time I got any media attention for. How many times prior to Deripar? Six times. You didn't do an eighth. So I guess. And did anybody who, because I know 60% of what you sold went for like a dollar. And he made it super accessible for people who tried. I tried.

Ored the $700 plus price. Insurance price, yeah. So did anybody go without? DeraPrim because of what you did. Did anybody have had toxoplasmosis? Well, here's the other really... Not benefit from Dara Prim because of what you did. Here's the funny part. People would say it's not funny because it's such a serious

subject, but it actually is rather hilarious. Deraprim is not the only drug for toxoplasmosis. Okay. And the media helped me sell my drug. There's a drug called Bactrum. Okay. Which I bet of all the people here, half of us have taken it because it's very like commonly used. It's almost like Zithromax or Zithromycin or like penicillin or what's another?

Like Augmentin. you know, everyone's taking amoxysol. It's an antibiotic. Yeah. So, Bactram works as well as Darypren. Okay. For toxoplasmosis. Yeah.

When we were buying, like, if you look at our, like, discovery and emails and stuff, we were buying DeraPrim, we were like, all right, if we raise the price of this thing, I think we're going to lose all our market share to Bactram. Yeah. And we're like... So why did you do it? We basically said doctors aren't that smart. Okay.

We basically said average doctors... Even that, though, is, like, kind of sketch. Like, why, like, I'm not saying you were isolated in doing it, but that like the fact that that's systematically being done is like weird we well and maybe it's the incentive system you were like swimming in well but what part of it do you think is weird well the fact that you were like doctors aren't smart enough to realize that backchroms actually just as effective as dereprim and so they're going to like make a bad decision and spend more on this thing that i'm marking up it's it's a tough decision so well it's not a rational decision price

wise i would say it's not rational yeah because which is again I'm not saying, I'm not isolating you from like the rest of pharma, but the fact that that like those decisions are being made is like weird. Well people, and I see this like a friend would ask me like, I'm on this antidepressant. What do you think? I'd say you never were offered Prozac and they're like, no, Prozac's the same shit and it's free basically. This drug isn't. And part of it is the doctor's like, oh, I want to try this and see how it works on my patients. I want to, you know, see if this might work. Yeah. I'm going to gain experience with this drug and see if it's a useful tool or not. You're my the person I'm going to try it on. And it's like, no, the better decisions probably start

with Prozac, then go to Zoloft, which are all generic and cheap. Right. And like, why are you giving them this person this expensive drug? Right. You don't need to. Right. And like, you see the same thing in diabetes where metformin and a bunch of other generic drugs are probably the best first drug to take. But pharma's efforts and doctors' willingness to embrace some of some of those efforts and be wooed and be convinced that they should try something else. They'll try it. The whole system's so fucked up, man. We should get into it. I mean, like, my basic understanding of the whole thing is there's this Flexner report, which I think was this 1908, this guy Abraham Flexner, Rockefeller Commission guy.

And before that, a third of the doctors in the U.S. were osteopaths, homeopaths, and people that worked with the electromagnetic field of the body, you know, doctors or healers, rather, where you couldn't scale it into big business. And you couldn't create artificial scarcity around it because you can't create like an agency of these people. Like, that's not good business. Like, you need, like, pills. I think I'd agree with, you know, the, the, a lot of people blame pharma when I think a lot of the cost is coming from the physician's side.

And it's very unpopular to say that. It's very unpopular to, blast physicians. Right. Well, but the other thing you get left with you, so that created the FDA and the AMA. AMA is the, and the only thing that's left are, like, interoperable, like, basically, like molecular biology. It's, it's like, these pills that you have to take. And the practitioner giving you.

the pill is interoperable with every other practitioner inherently because it can't pass the FDA if that's not the case. Right. And the idea that like healing is not like a one-to-one idiosyncratic thin is fucking stupid to me. Like like it can be. It can be sometimes like somebody like. It's interesting.

You know, I think that again, I disagree with you on a lot of this. Yeah. But one of the things that's really fascinating is how tech is trying to break that dichotomy or that dynamic. And for example, these apps that people are using like head. space and others. Yeah, yeah. Tech is trying to find a way to break that relationship and that,

I guess, monolith that's been sort of like this tower that's been erected and defended. You know, the AMA, I know Obama gave a speech to the AMA, and he said... We can no longer afford to put health care reform on hold. We can't afford to do it.

You guys are going to have to tighten your belts as well. No clapping. You know, they're just sitting there like, excuse me? Yeah. Tighten our power belts? Yeah, yeah. the average doctor makes $350,000 year in America. Right. And it's the, I actually gave a presentation of Boston, Boston College's medical school. Yeah.

They didn't like this at all. Where I said, this is the greatest investment you can make. Yeah. You guys are all in medical school right now. And they're all, you know, got their white coats on their students. They're proud to be in med schools. They should be. Yeah.

And I'm like, you do the net present value of what you're doing here. It's an insane return. Like for your, the cost of this degree and what you're actually going to accrue from it, you can't make a better bet. But even just structurally. it's sick care. It's not health care. Like, doctors are incentivized to give you more treatments. And I realize there's sort of this value-based care thing that came with Obamacare.

It was sort of like intentionally in that direction. If the AMA lightened up on who could become a doctor, you know, prices of health care would fall dramatically. Because they gate that really carefully and really close. You cannot open a new medical school. Right. You know, of course, functionally you could. And it'd be quite easy. but you, you know, labor, the markets for higher education in general, I think, are the problem here where, you know, Harvard understands the scarcity value of Harvard.

Medical schools understand their scarcity value, and they're imprinted by the AMA that we want a very small classes, a very small graduate and class of physicians for any given year. And that limits supply, right? And with limited supply, you know what happens. Do you think there are ways to treat the body that are below molecular biology? So, like, physics is below biology, which, you know, in between those two is chemistry. And it feels like all of the treatments that we have are biochemical. And there's a physics layer and everybody has an electromagnetic field. Is there a way to treat the body?

The issue with it is it's sort of open source. Like, you can't patent like a frequency. But, like, yeah, do you think that's possible? So the old Martin would tell you you're crazy and you're a kook, but the new Martin's a little smarter. and a little more open-minded. There's a company called Novocure that is the pioneer in this.

And I was short Novocure. I thought it was a scam. Yeah. They make a helmet. Okay. It's the craziest shit in the world. Yeah. It sounds like a great short right away, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a helmet to treat brain cancer. You put the helmet on, and it's a magnet. It does some crazy magnetic bullshit. And I'm like, no way. No fucking way this works, right? Does it work? Of course it works. Really?

And it also works for lung cancer. Yeah. And I was just like, there has to be, and we've done a lot of these shorts over the years. Like, there's got to be a flaw, some fake data, and we keep pulling in these threads. And it works. And it's, they keep showing it works. And it's frustrating because, as short, it's frustrating because it's like, the biology doesn't add up. The clinical results are demonstrably good.

But like, there have to be hiding something because it doesn't make sense biologically. And the problem is that we don't know what we don't know. And- Well, how do cells communicate? voltage gated ion channels which are affected by the electromagnetic field and we now know officially that uh i think that's too superficial but please well i'm sure there's more to it than just that and that's what i'm saying is that we don't really understand it we don't fully understand it i'm sure there's not it's not it's not it's not there are crazy studies around uh electromagnetic

effects the body you can you can uh sever a tadpole's arm and then you can change the cell gradients of the stub arm or whatever that's been severed to that of the head and you grow a chimeric tadpole. And so there's something around the bioelectric field and it doesn't even change the local DNA. And so there's something around the bioelectric field of the body that actually dictates morphology in a more fundamental way than DNA. Yeah, I mean, I would developmental biology is something that's really hard to understand in general. I don't think it's impossible. And the the Novacure stuff, I admit, you know, I kind of resigned from my short. They call it tumor treating fields. It's magnetic fields. And again, very skeptical person in

general. Like a lot of the money we made trading was shorting. Yeah. And pointing out fraud, interestingly. And remarkable that they've been able to do that. And then there's also some of these magnetic fields for depression and other central nervous system disorders. Interesting. Very tough to treat depression. And many clinical trials in depression don't work. even when you try to do a placebo-controlled study with Prozac, it often will fail, which is really remarkable because it's like the gold standard. But transcranial magnetic stimulation seems to work. And the great thing about those things is that they're basically toxicity-free,

which is like the cool, the positive part, the do-no-harm part. Yeah. You know, like, as a, I think physicians really feel like that's a great place to start. When you have that kind of safety profile, it's worth, like, what's the worst thing that happens? Yeah. Like, just sit the guy in the magnet, like, see what happens? It doesn't work, it doesn't work. And you were pretty early on heterodox depression treatments, right?

You were doing like intranasal ketamine. Ketamine. Back in the day, way back in the day, right? Yeah, we were sort of arm in arm with Johnson & Johnson fighting for FDA approval of intranasal ketamine, which... What was it called? Spirata. There's spravato, yeah. Spravato.

Yeah, spravato. And it's the best antidepressant ever known a man. I mean, like, it makes Prozac look like a waste of time. Wow. And it's remarkable. And, you know, it's FDA approved now. Yeah. You know, it's got access problems because of it's like just unusual situation.

And like, can you take ketamine and a big part of what we did? And you're going to find this, and most people would probably find it gross. Because by the way, every drug company did it, which is, how do we take ketamine? Yeah. Screw on a couple of atoms and make it a new patent. Yeah. You know, because ketamine's from 1960. Right.

You know, and that doesn't do us any good. Right. And Johnson Johnson was smart enough to say we still will make this work somehow. Right. we were going to make a device and the device would be the patent. So like you have to find some mousetrap where you can get some revenue out of this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because why do, you know, why be a charity? That's somebody else's job. My job is to sell pharmaceuticals. Sure. And I do think like the more and more there are going to be entities, maybe it's Bill Gates, maybe it's others, that can actually sort of set these things up and make them work so that like somebody does study these things that are unpatentable,

like longevity is unpatentable. Sure. You get 17 to 20 year problem life. Forget longevity, just Alzheimer's. Like an Alzheimer's study is going to take 15, 20 years. Well, here's your thing. If you test epigenetics, you can actually shorten those time horizons. So if you have a good kind of biomarker for biological age, then you do clinical trials, you have a control group,

and then you say metformin DHEA is the treatment group. You still want to see the real McCoy, hopefully. Ideally, yeah, you'd probably want to wait, you know, 30 years, 40 years or whatever. But I think we're getting the algorithms on the epigenetic side are predicting, death and with much lower and lower air margins. Like the Horvath clock has gotten much better. I define an epigenetic clock as a prediction model that uses methylation to estimate age. Do you think COVID was manmade? No. Really? It's like my 95% base case. I think it takes the inference levels of an eight-year-old because everybody's like it could have been any any wet market

or people who say the wet market thing. Yeah. Their wet markets all. over China. So why was it the wet market next to the lab studying SARS-like pandemics? So a couple things. I mean, I don't think you could falsifiably kind of get an answer here. I think it's really hard to get an answer easily, right? Right? Right? I think it matters. If the NIH was funding this and this we should, it should, we should have this debate about gain of function research, which makes no sense. We're we can't even

come up with a cure now. So why in a lab setting when we're not motivated by a global pandemic and solving it would we ever come up with a cure for COVID makes no sense I think it's stupid I think that just again my own experience in this kind of stuff just tells me that my instincts tell me that it's not man-made because I think that it's really hard to nature is really good at this stuff and people aren't and I think that even though you can do these like serial passages that that's the gain of function you do the serial passage that makes the virus stronger which is again pretty kind of crazy to do it yeah should do it

in very contained conditions and China is not known for, you know, being very festidious enough. No, they're not. And the lab had safety marks in the past. It's China in general. Bad safety marks. Yeah. You know, just whatever, you know, kind of place.

Yeah. You know, we take that stuff pretty seriously here. Yeah. I think nature's the culprit here. These kinds of things happen. I mean, they happen all the time. And to sort of takes proximity as kind of causal, I think, is maybe. Didn't we just find out Mederna had a patent for genetic experts?

blice that was a part of COVID? I didn't see that, but... In 2016, yeah. Yeah, I didn't see that. I'll send it to you. That's funny. Yeah. I mean, Moderners tried to do everything, too, to be fair to them, but that would be somewhat

funny. Coronaviruss were around, right? MERS and, you know, others, we've thought about making drugs for those. And, you know, in terms of, like, coronavirus itself, like, I don't know. I don't, I'm not one to sort of, like, generally, I think, like, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Sure. Right?

So like it's fun to think about extraordinary claims, but without extraordinary proof, I just kind of shrug my shoulders. Yeah. Again, it's just, it's deductive logic, but it's like two-thirds of the cases had no wet market exposure. You had this one lab with bad safety marks sort of systematically studying. There's some smoke. This stuff.

Yeah, there's a lot of weird stuff. And they were doing it with like penguins and bats and these things that they, where they say it's, it was the zoonotic thing. And so, and then you have some, this guy, Matt Ridley. he has a colleague at Harvard. I'm blinking on her name. They wrote a book called Viral. And it's pretty good at tracking down sort of the source.

They don't have a smoking gun, but you read it and you come out thinking, yeah, this probably can't allow. And so if you extend it, you know, what do you do now, right? Is it just a discussion about gain of function research? Fauci shouldn't be, if he's funding the thing. No, I mean, you got to hold people culpable. People like Peter Dasak and Fauci, I think, should be. I don't like Fauci.

Yeah, it's a bad dude. I didn't like him from before COVID. Yeah. So the thing about Fauci, and this is going to be very anti-establishment, but he was an HIV guy. Yeah. And, oh, God, I hate saying this because it's so, like, nasty. But Fauci has always been an HIV cure bear. He's always said, like, HIV will never be cured, not in our lifetime, this and that.

Yeah. And I'm just sitting there, like, this guy's ridden the HIV wave. Like, he was one of the early guys in HIV. Yeah. And, like, this is too controversial to say almost, but, like, I don't think he's actually ostensibly done anything on HIV. That's been useful. Well, he hasn't been practicing for 30 years.

He was an early publisher and early researcher in the space. And he's been like the masterful public health politician. Yeah. That has not actually earned any of his role. Have you read that Robert Kennedy book? So do you're getting really trippy here? Like I've read every paper Fauci's written. Like, because I've been on HIV cure hunt for a while too.

And I think CRISPR will get us there. but like he's been a CRISPR bear, and a cure bear in general. Yeah. And I sit and read his pre-COVID stuff where he was like, yeah, no, HIV's going nowhere. Like, we're just going to have to live with it. And I'm just like, I just want to strangle a guy

because it's like the opposite of an entrepreneur and like an innovator and somebody who's like bullish about. Do you, are you familiar with the name Peter Dewsberg? For people who don't understand, your argument, I mean, in a paraphrasing sort of way, is that it's illicit drug. use. It's like amyl nitrate and crystal meth. And that is what's destroying the immune systems of these people. And then HIV shows up because their immune system is diminished. Is that a

fair assessment of it? You are diminished or not. It is just a chance. It's like with all my copes, you know, you can catch it or not. If you contact or get in contact, any mid-contract, whatever contact with lots of people, you pick up what's available on the market. He says that basically it was AZT and Poppers. that were, HIV would sort of be like recessive in the body, and then you'd have AZT and poppers, specifically among certain communities that would tip the HIV over the edge into AIDS. And he was sort of systematically marginalized by people like Fauci. One of these things that's also sort of controversial is that I do think we're within

striking distance of a final treatment for HIV. And there's sort of everywhere I go, I get questions about like, you know, do you think there's suppression to keep profits going. And it's the best like anti-conspiracy theory ever because there's, you know, 20 or 30 big drug companies and each one of them, there's only two that make HIV drugs anymore. Yeah. So the other 28 would love to eat lunch of those other two. There's no like packed between us to, you know, stop each other. And I think that there's a little inertia there. There's too much inertia. But I do think an HIV cheer would be one of the best selling drugs ever and for sure, probably not far away. Do you know that there's, there's an HIV

splice in COVID. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean... Does that not freak you out? Viruses, we were talking about earlier, how these viruses have evolved and they have different motifs that you see in different, you know, different... What if that's the immunosuppressant part of HIV?

It's part of it. But then everybody's walking around immune suppressed in five to ten years because they got COVID. Yeah, they sort of riff off each other in some ways. Like, you know, it's a very funny thing how, like, you'll have a different family viruses evolved the same kind of motifs as they had nothing to do with each other. Yeah. They'll evolve them through selective pressure or like interaction with our immune system. Yeah.

I mean, at the end of the day, I think we have to get over the fact that we have to be symbiotic with nature in many ways. Yeah. Like there's a lot of focus and attention on very fine details like microbiome stuff. Yeah. As another good example. Yeah, we have no idea how it works. Yeah, we don't.

And we have to live with trillions of these organisms. And I think it's, yeah. There's a lot going on in here. I think, and this is maybe somewhat heretical. but I don't think it should be. I think the viruses and pathogens are often mirrors for your own sort of fundamental health. Yeah, yeah, I like that. And it exposes weaknesses that you often already had, but that if you are, like, I look at the

differential between people who, like, died during COVID or, you know, died of COVID, or experienced really serious kind of long COVID, and then people who didn't. And there are definitely edge cases where this is wrong. But the big differentiator is, was the person super healthy? prior to getting COVID. Yeah, it's hard to know. Like, you know, it's even hard to have a sense of individuality when we think about how many,

exactly how many organisms are part of us. Yeah. You know, just in our GI tract alone, there's trillions. And, you know, it's hard to know exactly kind of like, well, who are you? Like, I say this a lot with, I've had a lot of, like, different opinions of, like, the trans community, for example.

And this is something that I've slowly kind of changed my mind about over time. Like, people in the right wing, especially the all right or whatever community, would always sort of jab out this whole, like, there's only two genders, you know, this and that. I started to think about it as a scientist, or a moonlighting scientist, and I said, that's not true. It's actually just monstrably false.

The people with Kleinfelter and Turner, for example, who have X, Y, Y, or X, Y. Yeah. What gender is that? You know, you're automatically kind of in this different category. Right. And if you think about mosaicism, where, you know, you might actually be,

some of your cells could be a certain percentage, could be, you know, you could have your mother's cells, actually, that stuck around during pregnancy and actually became germ cells or stem cells and differentiated. You could be 3%, 4% mosaic or woman, you know, or ambiguous. And that is actually a fairly common sort of, you know, finding. And again, now that you put in other species, what are you exactly? I think that's probably more ambiguous than we give a credit for. Now, again, I'm not certain that, you know, I think there's other parts of the whole trans story that are a little strange and I don't like. But, you know, to the extent that, like, someone has X, X, XY, or there's even one 48 XXY, where it's like, you know, you're totally, you know, your own thing. And that's great, you know.

But, you know, and there's some of them are phenotypes. Like, Climbfelter is a very specific phenotype. Yeah. And a lot of those patients end up, it's hard to take patience, but a lot of those people end up. sort of wanting a definitive gender and sort of they choose. Do they have gender dysphoria at higher rates than... I'm not a student of the space, but I believe that they do. Interesting.

But it's a really fascinating case where you can immediately dispel the whole two-gender thing of like, what about you? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's actually hundreds of thousands of people like that. That's fascinating. They tend to just, again, at birth, sort of steer the patient, steer the person into that direction of saying, you're a woman, let's leave it at that.

And, you know, the parents will never tell. the person and they'll just be like, you know, and you'll sort of see people who are fairly ambiguous and you'll be like, I wonder, you know? Yeah. You know, that's... Kleinfelders. Who do you hang out with? Do you have best friends?

It's weird. I do. But I think that, like, just a solitary life is probably better for me. Like, I don't know. Like, I think that it's hard to relate to people. It's hard to sort of like find somebody to be with because I feel like a guilt of like wanting to build things and make things. And again, people who don't know me don't necessarily know a lot about me. But I spend a lot of time creating different pieces of software, different, you know, molecules or whatever and companies.

And like I feel like I'd be taking away from that if I spend a lot of time with like an SO or, you know, something like that. There was like a journalist. What's your name? Christie. Christy, yeah. That, like, covered you and then fell in love with you in the process of covering it. It reminded me of that movie adaptation. Yeah.

You know, I think it's like John LaRoche, this character. Right. And Merrill Streep falls in love with John LaRoche. While he's kind of this, like, really eccentric, interesting kind of like orchid hunter. And you're in this case the orchid hunter. Yeah, no, I think that's fair. And Christy falls in love with you. Hey, look, I told you I'd find the jewel of the Fakhic.

I'm so slow. I mean, I think it was more unilateral than portrayed. Got it. Unrequited. I mean, listen, I engaged with her, you know, but I think it was... Have you ever been in law? Yeah, yeah. Your voice went up when he said that. The problem with love is, I think love is sort of a fictitious concept.

I mean, I think it's... Interesting. And it's a suitcase word, as Minsky used to say, right? You can pack a lot of things into that word. And I think that for a lot of people love is that first, naive, I don't know, was Jaune feeling of like just like it feels amazing because you you're doing it for the first time. Yeah. Then you get jaded, right?

I mean, I think a lot of people start to get jaded and start to get like any married, look at any merry couple, right? I mean, there's, there are a few exceptions to that. And I hold out hope because of those exceptions, but it feels like the, the large majority of romantic relationships are just unhealthy. Right. At least in my empirical. They seem to be like toxic outlets for like different.

Just codependent bullshit. Yeah. And there's some checklist. That's why I like want to experiment. And I like what Elon's doing. And that's why this spreadsheet is sort of experimental. Your CRM of. Well, I have other experiments that people don't know about.

Like what? I have this group of women that are, I'm very friendly with. And like, I don't know if we want to call it a club or a harem or a cult or something. But like, and I think Musk does this and other people do this, but they don't talk about it. like ultimately like I don't think polyamory is such a bad thing and I don't think that you know somebody can't have like five families or 10 families I've never I don't have any families so yeah moment but like but you have like a group of women that are all kind of we're all kind of okay with you know wow yeah being being with each other and they're cool with you yeah they know of each other

or it's all in one chat room together wow yeah so I had it in jail and uh we we kept I that's what I I used my cell phone mostly for in jail instead of what the government thinks I was running my company or something. It was trying to run your chat room. Your chat room. Your polyamorous group. Well, you know, and again, I don't like the word polyamorous either because it's sort of like it has other weird implications. But anyway, like I think that the nuclear family and like these types of relationships are if not broken, they're starting to break down. You think they're obsolete?

And they may be obsolete. Man, I don't know. I go back and forth. I think they're pretty important. I think they're really important for children. Yeah, but you wouldn't want to have kids. No, I think you can probably have kids and do it effectively without mom, dad, and, you know, two and a half kids in a backyard. You ultimately need love.

You need nurturing. You need all those things for children to grow, or they won't. And they'll, like, every single person I'm in prison had a dysfunctional family. Almost every person had either single parent, no parents, or abuse in the household. You get backups in polyamory. You need to find people that are so serious. and so, you know, like, self-confident and, like, don't have any of the bullshit psychological baggage. Because...

I don't buy it, man. It's hard to find. As much as I think the nuclear kind of one-to-one relationship thing, like, usually doesn't work in many cases. I think the polyamory thing has never worked. I have no friends who've ever tried, or nobody I know of even that's ever tried that, where it doesn't end up with... You're right. There's one main partner, and the main partner gets jealous. Well, that's why I'm hesitant to have.

children and I think Elon's sort of gone gung-ho in the other direction, right? To some extent, I think that some of these problems solve themselves. Yeah. If you try to solve for the perfect kid being in the perfect upbringing, you're going to fail, like, ultimately like, and you see that in Silicon Valley a lot where like, you're like, I'm going to give them the best schools, the best this, and the kids still ends up being a fuck up. And it's sort of like, totally. What can you do? You know, and then you have kids that come out of broken homes and sometimes do really well. So there's some sort of like essential soul. Like it's part environment. And then sometimes you just meet people from like horrible background.

And you're just like, you're amazing. And then you meet people from great backgrounds. And it's like, what the hell is going on here? Yeah, there's no reason I don't think. And so I think that, you know, as long as everybody's happy, I think that's what's important. And again, I think, again, I'm still sort of trying to find my own way and figure out what makes sense.

I could very well get into a very normal, you know, nuclear family, married for 40 years type of thing. But again, every one I know that's married is like, yeah, you know, this isn't great. Do you think you're on the spectrum? I don't think so. I think that, like, I've studied autism a lot because we were making a drug for autism. And I think that I think it's unfortunately used, you know, way too much. You know, I don't think that...

It feels like people want to be on the spectrum now. It's crazy, right? Any of the show on Netflix, love on the spectrum, everybody loves it. It's terrible because the average person with true clinical autism as an IQ of around 80, they've never been employed. They've... didn't finish school, they need full-time care or close to it. And there's some argument in the community about this.

That, to me, is a syndromic illness. But there are a lot of people on the spectrum with Asperger's who get hyper-focused on particular things and are kind of brilliant in those areas. I think they're misogynosed. So what do you think those people are? I think they are typically OCD. So to be truly autistic, you have to have three specific,

different sort of symptomological problems. And they're a spectrum of problems. Yeah. So people often, like, get this wrong and they're like, well, the spectrum is, like, spectrum sounds like a big open word that I can, you know, that can include, it is inclusive. No, it's a gradient. It's a continuum. It's not like a, you're here and you're here. You're on the spectrum.

Like, it's a, it's a, you're on your way and you would have to have one of those autism markers or something to be on the spectrum. To me, you have to have, you, you can only be autistic if you have all three of those. So you have to have aberent behaviors. Okay. Which a lot of people of autism don't have. So-called autism don't have. Sure. You know, you have to have some, like, so that's usually some stereotypical behavior.

Yeah. Like hand flapping is a very common one. That's almost like pathonomonic for autism if you do this sort of like constant, you know, like hand flapping thing. It's like most people who like think it's cool to be like, yeah, I'm, you know, a little autistic. Right. Like I want to smack people like that because I'm like, you don't know what clinical autism really looks like. Yeah. It's a terrible...

So, aberrant behavior, weird movement. Not weird, but these sorts of movement. The second one is almost always uniform is a deep communications deficit. Okay. So like a very, very either mutism, like somebody who just doesn't speak at all, or speaks in one word or things like that. So just here, I mean, we've excluded diagnosis for autism for the world's dog. So you would say Rain Man wasn't autistic. He was pretty autistic because he had huge problems communicating.

He could communicate. He wasn't a great community, but he was also brilliant. You'd mean the real Rain Man or the fictional Rain Man? Well, there's, yeah, Kim Peak in real life. Yeah. But both. So Dustin Hoffman stammered and couldn't really get out what his thoughts were and things like that. And the third one is sort of this emotional disconnection and social disconnection.

And so I think people sort of misidentified the third one. I think of it as emotional disconnection and social disconnect. I think about those as the markers. Yeah, that third one is the major one people think about. The other two are required. Yeah. for autism. Yeah, you don't feel, you know, super disconnect. Do you, what, when people call you a sociopath, what do you say to that? Well, I'd say that, like,

extreme rationalism is often, like, confused for, quote, unquote, sociopathy. Interesting. Like, medicine is the most important thing to, to me, health is the most important thing to humanity. Health care's percentage of GDP has grown metronomically since 1960. That's not because there's some bad actor or sociopath that's raising prices of faith. health care. It's because the man for healthcare is insatiable. In fact, if you think of any good, the only

good that has infinite sort of marginal utility is healthcare. You will never say no to better health care. Sure. We can always sort of, you can solve other issues. Health care is indelibly, you know, always get help. Ultimately, a bigger house actually has reverse utility at some point. If you've ever been

some million, zillioner mansion, you're at some point, it's like, oh, yeah, and, you know, other things have negative marginal utility. I mean, some foods, some, you know, like, even the richest people, I mean, eat McDonald's and things like that. So, like, ultimately, health care, nobody says, nah, I don't want, you know, my asthma cured. Like, every single person wants the best health. I have disagreements with you and maybe issues with a couple of things, but, like, it's crazy how much miss info is out about you.

That's the nature of this world, right? It's so weird. And, again, the best part. But you do, you play into it. You like, you're kind of, you're down to be misunderstood. Yeah, and part of it is, I think you said in one of your. recent videos I was watching, that inevitably, you'll, if you get beat up on it, if you stop caring. Yeah.

And so, like, I'm in this position where I'm like, I'm wealthy, I'm intelligent, I can build companies, I have a skill set. Yeah. What do I care what some, like, random Brooklyn journalist says about me? Sure. Like, you know, the Daily Dot was fun. Like, she was like, oh, I've got this expose. I'm like, buy my only fan's pictures.

Yeah, yeah. What was it again? I said that I'd give them a quote if they bought one of my only fans' foot fetish pictures. I have an OnlyFans, and it's very tongue-in-cheek. It's got two photos. One is of a stock chart of me getting pounded by the stock chart because I short the stock and it didn't go well. So on Wall Street, guys use that word, pounded,

and it's very like sort of... So is it you, like, horizontal with, like, a stock chart? It's a bad joke. But, you know, it's... For whatever reason, every day on Wall Street, for the last 20 years of my life, it was, including four of them. It was, oh, I'm pounding this short. It's like very a heteroreotic, homerotic, you know, sort of.

So that's one. And then what's the... The next one is, I was just with a, I was on a, with a friend of mine. And I was like, what should I do for this OnlyFan? She's like, take a foot pick. People love Footpick. There's foot fetish, like, insanity. And so I took a photo of my foot with the feet are so weird and ugly, right?

With the ankle monitor. I was like, this exclusive hot pick. Ladies, have you ever been on a league? How many people bought it? How much have you made? Like three, you know. Come on, guys. Go out there and buy that footpick.

OnlyFans is funny because I think OnlyFans is actually a literary site. Because if you look at OnlyFans, you can't see any of the pictures. They're all behind this little lock at the dollar sign. So these chicks who are like probably have not written creatively in most of their life have to write like this. Like they're trying to sell you a photo for $65. And they're telling you what's in the photo and they're not showing it to. Right. So they're like, check out this hot pick where my bikini, tiny bikini is just dropping.

And it's very like, you're like, oh, yeah, this is interesting, right? Like, so I wrote like, yeah, and it's really a site about writing more than it is a site about photos. That's interesting. It's a seduction site. You have to write something, some caption that's so good that somebody's willing to part, you know, for 50 bucks or whatever. It's really expensive for one photo. And some of these wouldn't make millions of dollars. So you can hire professional writers, like entice, you know.

And I'm one of the only guys on Only fans anyway. So, you know. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. Anyway, I told the Daily Beast.

It's like you and like Taiga. Yeah. I told The Daily Beast that I'd give them a quote if they bought. And I offered them a discount code. Yeah. It seems like a good deal. It was a really good deal. But they messed up.

Martin, I appreciate your time, man. Thank you. Thank you. This is awesome.