The Iced Coffee Hour - Martin Shkreli on Making Billions, Going To Prison, and Being The Most Hated Man In The World

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

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This episode is brought to you by Defender. With a towing capacity of 3,500 kilograms and a waiting depth of 900 millimeters, the Defender 110 pushes what's possible. Learn more at landrover.ca. We turn now to who many are calling the most hated man in America. Martin Screlli, the pharmaceutical company CEO. He once jacked up the price of a life-saving drug. He was sentenced today for cheating wealthy investors out of millions.

Poke me, be careful. how you poke and where you poke and how you do it because I don't think I'm doing anything wrong. The way the law is constructed is they push a button in your found guilty. That's it. We turned it from $3 million to something like half a billion to a billion. Why is it do you think that you lean into this evil person role and you seem to like enjoy it?

Ego is the fountainhead of all progress. You know, I think ultimately without a little bit of ego and without a little bit of competition and competitiveness, nothing would happen. What was your initial reaction going to jail? The real scary part, is that Martin Scurelli,

thank you so much for coming on, the iced coffee hour podcast. For a little introduction, if you guys don't know, you purchased a life-saving drug and raised the price of it 5,000% overnight. You bought a unique copy

of the Wu-Tang Clan album for $2 million, and you refuse to release it. You have beef with both Hillary Clinton and Ghostface Killer. Your band from Twitter, you started a company that went to $1 billion at 28 years old.

You're a convicted felon and have spent four years in prison. Hundreds of headlines have been ran by mainstream media saying you're the most hated man in America, and now you're making a comeback. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, man. That's a brief CV.

Would you say it's somewhat accurate? I think you caught most of it, yeah. You were just saying something about when you went to go shoot with Tucker Carlson, you're on probation, and that has certain restrictions, and apparently you left the state, which you're not allowed to do without letting them know. Obviously, they saw the Tucker Carlson podcast.

What happened with that? Well, you know, it's not abnormal to slip up when you're on probation. There's actually like a list of rules that you have to follow. And, you know, I hesitate to say it's probation. The whole idea in institution is kind of useless because it does serve some value. But it's hard for the people who do probation to keep up with all of the people that they have to follow. And I think some of these people sometimes have so many probation officer might have 50 or 100 or 200 people that they're. monitoring and it's you know they can't they obviously can't monitor their every step and i think that

in a lot of ways that nullifies kind of the benefits of it which is hey you just got out of jail you don't want to go back into a life of crime we want to make sure that you know you get a job and you do this and you do that and you kind of get on the straight and arrow again which inevitably fails unfortunately recidivism is is quite high most people who go to jail go back if not straight back sometimes i had a story about a guy we called him michael goonberg in jail he was funny um And Goonberg, great name, right? What did he do? Goonberg was a drug dealer, but he loved making money.

And it's just stuck, name stuck. And Goonberg was out of prison. 96 hours. He comes right back same prison. There's like, just go back to your old cell. You know, like 96 hours? How does he go back in 96 hours? What did he do?

He goes out of a drug deal with his friends, but he's not the drug dealer. He's just riding. But the police pull him over. They're trying to throw all the drugs out of the car, you know, and the police grab them and then, you know, all of you were arrested. And obviously, if you get arrested while you're on probation, you're going back to jail. Um, so if you like take a trip out of state or something, that's really not that big of a deal. And I had a circumstance that that was a decent excuse. But I think if you do it five times, you know, you can actually go go back to jail. And, um,

there was a guy I knew in prison as well. We called him car, uh, car or card. I think card. And he was gambling, you know, and, you know, there are people who are addicted to gambling. And he was one of them. And he would bet on anything. And he would bet on anything. And he would. And he would bet on anything. And who bet, you know, we don't, you're going on money in prison, right? But you do kind of, in a lot of ways. There's assets that you have in prison, which aren't worth a lot. Is that like food? Yeah, things like that. And, you know, but if you wanted to, and we did this all time, you can back cash, you know, and if you don't pay, you know, this is a phrase we'd have get it in blood. You know, you can get it one way or the other. And, you know, you tell somebody, like, you owe me

500 bucks, get on that phone and get your family to send it to somebody. I had this friend who's an assistant of mine and she was like this most the most like white bread kind of like innocent young woman scientist type type girl and i bought a phone in prison for a thousand bucks and i said look you know there's only one problem i told this girl i'll call her jane her name's not jane but so jane you know it's just one problem you got to get the cash to this guy's people uh use words like people's his peoples his peoples on the street need need a thousand bucks like ASAP and if i'd get him a thousand bucks, it's going to be problems. And she's like, okay, what do you want me to do?

I said, you're going to get in a taxi. You're going to approach a car that's going to be waiting. It's going to have its headlights on. It's going to be in the Bronx. It's just joking. You know, and like you take $1,000, put it an envelope. And you hand it out. She's like, you know, tremendous.

Yeah. You know, trembling with fear. She's like, are you serious? I was like, no, I just cashedapt it. You know, but it was I set up this whole drug deal for it. But that really does happen where, where, you know, if you get into gambling debt in prison, you got to go, you know, actually take care of it. And sometimes that'll be your brother or sister or father or mother or somebody like that, your wife even, to go pay the other inmate's wife in real life.

And, you know, that was one way of transacting. And so Card, the point is that this guy ended up violating probation because he went to the, one of his conditions of probation. Everyone has slightly different ones. His was you cannot go to a gambling establishment. Card wins, you know, six times. He was warned the first time. Look, you're going to go back to jail if you go back. And he's like, okay, Your Honor, I understand.

goes back again and pulls him back in. That's just an addiction at that point. Or does he not care? Is the addiction stronger than his desire to stay out of jail? So many guys I met in jail. I'm trying to think of the next guy. His name was, I don't remember his name exactly, but this guy was kind of this like pretty mean looking fellow

that love to rob grocery stores. He'd rob grocery store for $75, you know, $100, $250, right? It's not a big take when you rob a grocery store. And he gets charged with him called a high. which is like basically the law that, you know, governs this. And it allows for the federal government to come down on you for what's fairly a local crime, which is not sort of supposed to be the case.

You know, that's supposed to be a state crime. So this guy is like on a sixth Hobbs Act and he gets like 22 years or something like that. And we're just sitting talking and get nothing to do. And I'm like, you really kind of like are addicted to this basically, right? You're addicted to the thrill. It's not the money. Like you're not making, like you do this once a month. Like you're not making enough money to make ends meet.

like, but you're doing this because it's the thrill, isn't it? And he's like, yeah, more or less. You know, it was the first person to like kind of get to the bottom of this that, you know, you can be addicted to drugs, of course, but you could also be addicted to risk. You know, in Wall Street, we used to talk about people who are riskaholics. You could be addicted to danger and thrill. And I don't know, this can't be anything a lot more thrilling than robbing a bank. I mean, it's not thrilled to me, maybe, but like to somebody has got to be.

I mean, we watch movies about this like heat or, you know, other films that, you know, make it like really exciting, a car chase or something like that. And there's people who do this in real life. And, you know, they find it fascinating and thrilling. And, you know, it's something that, you know, you can't really change. So, you know, my goal isn't to break any rule or regulation. But, you know, in that specific circumstance, you know, is a good excuse. But it is surprising to me that the probation sort of construct, you know, is it's sort

of like when it doesn't work, it doesn't really help anybody. most of the time. When it does work, it doesn't work very often. So it's like in general, just in the way and not really helping anybody. And recidivism kind of needs a better solution. I was talking to it was like Palmer Lucky or somebody about this. Like, how do you actually incentivize people to not go back to jail? And like, you might have to do something like pretty grotesque to most people, which is like you actually pay somebody for every year. They don't go to jail. And that sounds crazy because it's like, man, I don't get paid for not breaking law. Why can't? Why don't have to pay this guy? And it's like, well,

less crime. It's one way to do it. You know, it's not pretty, but it could work. But then I feel like everyone would want to go to jail just to get paid. Yeah, just get one crime. And it'd be like, hey, we'll pay me $10 grand a year. I'm never going to do that again. That's a good point.

Getting a felony is not easy. I just had one of my bank accounts canceled, you know, just randomly. Just randomly? Did they find out? I feel like your name is. Yeah, something like that, right? It's just like, yeah, it's over, sorry. So it's like, in those cases, could it be a person at the bank that just straight up says,

I don't like this guy. Could be any of them. Let's delete. It's at my discretion for whatever reason I have the right to it. I mean, as a private institution, would they have a right to just say, you know? I think they did this with like the proud boys, you know, where it's like they weren't criminals exactly yet or whatever. And it was just like, look, you're part of a group that some people think is like a white supremacist group or something like that. And it's like, we don't want to be the bank that handles your money.

And in some ways that makes sense. But the reason it's made a lot of sense for these banks is because, for example, Jeffrey Epstein, had a bank account or brokerage account or whatever, there's a lot of money at Deutsche Bank and some other banks, JP Morgan, I think. They had to pay a lot of fines just because they had this guy's account. And it's like you sort of have the government pushing down to business what they should be doing or shouldn't be doing. And to me, that's not great because, you know, you're basically, you have some of these services

that are critical, like banking, becoming less critical things to crypto. But, you know, it's hard to live without a bank account or phone or things like that, utilities. You know, at one point does Con Edison say, yeah, you know, we saw your tweet and, you know, that's why your lights are out. You know, that I think that, you know, conceivably could happen someday. Thankfully, I think the woke world is sort of like moving back to the center, which is good. But I think that, you know, and I don't blame a bank for saying maybe not wanting to deal with somebody who's convicted of a financial crime. You know, I think that I can kind of understand that. kind of makes sense. Yeah, but I still think like the idea that a bank could just basically

decide that, you know, they don't like your politics. Do you think maybe that's some risk mitigation on their end where maybe the banks are afraid of the government? But before we go into that, are you running a business and you want to hear this sound a lot more? Well, our sponsor, Shopify is there to help. Shopify is the global e-commerce platform that's already helped transform millions of businesses worldwide. For example, Shopify is an endless list of integrations, third-party apps, and flexible templates to help customize your store exactly how you want. And what set Shopify apart from their competitors is their ability to turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkouts that's 36% better on average than other leading

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trial period at Shopify.com slash ICH, all lowercase, and the link is also down below in the description. So thank you guys so much, and now let's get back to the episode. Do you think maybe that's some risk mitigation on their end where maybe the banks are afraid of the government? Well, that's what I'm saying. We don't want $100 million. fine. Right. It's easier for us to say, sorry, go somewhere else. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think like it's really sad because if they're avoiding an action from the government, which is, well, what's the government's impetus? It's to help the bank act as law enforcement. You know, the bank doesn't know if the guy's doing crime or not. They're not supposed to, you know,

sort of like see that. You know, it's this KYC-AML kind of like expansion that, certainly for crypto is taking place where it's like, you know, they have to, you know, you have to do so much background checking on your client that, and then you're supposed to sort of know whether or not, like, they're allowed to be, you know, a customer or not, like a foreign, there was one analysis we had to do one time for, like, foreign dignitary. And it was like, well, does this guy from Uzbekistan, you know, is technically, you know, in the government there, does he count as, uh, K-Y-C-A-ML exemption

or whatever? And it's like, you know, it's not, it's not, uh, you know, Osama bin Laden were taking money from, you know, it's like, but it's such a political thing that, you know, for example, like the Russian oligarchs have been put on the, you know, on this list. And if you do business with them, you're, your toast because they're on this exempt exemption or whatever, this restrictive list. And it's like, who decides that list and who decides when they get off or whatever? And, you know, look, I'm not a fan of what some of those guys do.

But it's sort of like, you know, why is the government getting in the middle of this? And it's for basically control reasons, power reasons and so forth. It's just any reason they can get to like sort of be in charge. they'll sort of take, which is sort of sad because, again, you know, for somebody to be restricted for their brokerage account or bank account or anything else, you know, it is a little frustrating. For example, I got bans from being a publicly traded, at least in the U.S., officer or director. And that's frustrating because I've been a very successful publicly traded CEO and director. I've never made a crime related to being a publicly, even, even a fake crime, like the ones I was

convicted of, even one of those I haven't been convicted of being a, you know, sort of having any prime related to being a public traded officer or director. And, you know, Elizabeth Holmes had a settlement with the SEC where she got five years of not being a publicly traded. Mine was lifetime. You know, if you have a lifetime ban for things that are like somewhat innocuous, or even if they're not innocuous, if you pay your debt to society and you can't ever recover for them, no matter how much penance you do, no matter how much growth you go through as a person, you know, you're, you're forever banned. It sort of doesn't make sense. You know, it's not a society I think that most people want. What are your thoughts on authority today? And has that

changed since you were a kid? Yeah, I mean, my whole life, I've sort of been anti-authority. Yeah. And, you know, I just think that, you know, where do that start? I don't know, you know, it's- Was there maybe a moment where your parents said something to you and you said, you know what, I disagree with that. When you started, when you started to come to your own and say, you know what, I don't have to do that thing. They want me to take a bath. I don't feel like taking a bath. I'm not dirty.

And it's my choice. And I could choose not to do that. You know, I can't play a psychologist and, like, go all the way back and sort of understand why it happened. But I do know it did happen at some point. And I think it was sort of a mix of a few things. I mean, one, I think that, you know, arrogance in general is kind of like this pretty detestable property people have.

And, you know, anytime you can bring somebody down a notch, I've sort of relished that opportunity, you know, sort of put myself in the mix and bring somebody down a notch. And, you know, it's fun. And most people enjoy that. Most people like to see that, you know, and whether that's a bully or whomever, it's, it's somebody has to sort of stand up and be the person that's, you know, it's also going to take, you know, the arrows and the, you know, the, all the, the, the, the sort of, uh, repercussions of that. But, you know, if, if you're brave enough to do it, you know, a lot of people sort of are looking behind you and saying, I'm not that brave, but good for that guy. And I think that, you know, not being afraid of things is something

that I've like, you know, inherited as well. It's sort of like this natural. And did anything happen that prompted you to be so I think very confident in who you are and what you believe in and very shameless of just here's what I believe, here's what I stand for. If you disagree, it doesn't bother me at all. And that's the vibe that I've gotten from listening to all of your interviews, is that it does not seem to affect you whatsoever. It's just I am me and that's it, take it or leave it. And I think there's something that's very courageous about that. Yeah, I think you have to have conviction.

I mean, and the thing about conviction is you can be wrong. You know, it's okay to be wrong. You know, I've had opinions that I've changed my mind on. And I'm never, I've confidence, but I've never have this idea of like being 100% right or something like that. You know, it's a feeling. You know, I have a feeling that firms, like goes back to college. but firms should set the price of their products, you know, and nobody else should be able to do anything but the marketplace, buyers and sellers. Price too high, buyer walks away. Price too low, buyers flood the market. You know, that's just the nature of economics. And I have a very firm feeling that that's really the way it should work and that anybody who tries to influence that, you know, should be kicked out because it doesn't help the world. Yeah. Markets help the world a lot. You know, you have opinions like that. That's a really strongly held opinion. But I also have loosely held opinions, you know, and I don't, I try not to express much

that. And if you ask me about, say, LGBTQ affairs, I just sort of tell you, like, look, you know, I don't really know a lot about that. I'm really not that confident. I kind of see both sides of current arguments about it, you know, et cetera, et cetera. If you ask me about Palestine or something like that, I'm just, you know, I'm really not that convinced. So, so you have to be convinced. You have to have conviction. One of the things you know about. And then you feel a strongly about. And sometimes if those things are feelings that, you know, they're more governed by emotion, than rationality, people tend to believe those more than the other way around. It's like, if you explain like why drugs have to be expensive, basically, you know,

if you have somebody in audience that's willing to sit there and listen for an hour, you can basically convince them to that because it makes sense. But the visceral reaction is negative. You know, the immediate reaction is, no, it can't be. It can't be. And I gave this like speaking to her in the Ivy League circuit where I was trying to explain how the irrational numbers sort of came about. And way back then, there was this feeling that irrational numbers were like this evil concept

and that they really couldn't be. And there was this emotional reaction to like, ah, you would get, first of all, they can't exist. And two, if they did exist, that'd be really bad. And a guy proved it and I threw him in the river. And, you know, it was this emotional reaction of like, ah, you know, this is such cognitively dissonant. I really don't like this. And it makes me feel likey.

And unfortunately, some, there are things like that in life that we have to come to terms with. and when we do, the people who are the coldest kind of quiet, rational, calculating people see them first. And those people are generally heretics. What type of student were you? Oh, boy. Sometimes a great one, sometimes a bad one. It seems like you have a very applied focus, where if you care about something, your interest, you give it 100%. Whereas if you're not, you kind of, but it maybe not. Maybe it seems like you excel it no matter what you would pay. It depends. So, like, you know, one of the problems with high school in general, and I gave a million dollars to my high school, which is the biggest gift they've ever received,

which is, which is unfortunate because there's a lot of rich people who went to my high school. And it's a, it's not a school you have to pay money to get into. And, you know, it was a very advanced school for very, very bright kids.

And the problem with high school is you're going through a lot of psychological issues. And, and if you have a good family life, you can kind of focus on school. But if you don't, you know, you end up getting into some issues. And I had some of those issues. But sometimes I did, you know,

really, really well. And sometimes it didn't. You know, it really depends. on a number of external factors. And part of one of those factors is growing up. You know, so like if you're a child prodigy and you, people are basically putting you in a on display, you know, to be like, wow, look at look at my boy. You can read, you know, this chemistry textbook and he's only seven or something like that. You know, you're constantly in that cage or display cage or display case or whatever. And eventually, you know, you sort of decide, well, wait a second. You know, I want to do other

things. And for me, those other things were meeting girls my age, playing basketball, playing guitar, being a rock band. Like, that was exciting to me. And school was sort of like perform it. It was like, yeah, okay, I know this much algebra. Do I really want to know that much algebra? Yeah, kind of. But then it was like history, you know, do I really want to know more about, you know, European history? No, I don't. You know, I'm done. And I was sort of adult enough to decide that I was done with some parts of it. And, you know, there were some things that were fun, like French was something I had a lot of fun with. So as a student, I mean, it's just tough because like you want to learn everything. And to this day, I still read textbooks and I still try to learn new

things because I don't want to be left behind. But you also have to balance it with with actually applying it. And that's one of the hardest things to do. Like what does it mean to be a good investor is one of the hardest things in the world to study and think about? And there's like this equal balance of philosophical rumination that I think you have to do to become a good investor. and then I think there's a lot of applied work you have to do. And the problem with the applied work is that your first 10 years of investing are kind of going to be trash no matter what. It's frustrating because you want to manage money, you want to trade, you want to do all this,

but you know, you just need some experience first. And it's the same thing for programming. It's the same thing for art. It's the same thing for everything. I mean, you need those 10 years or more or less, depending on who you are, of what it is, but it's not going to happen in three weeks. Now, if you're watching this right now, you might notice that we're extra clear today, and that's because we're filming in 4K.

It's very expensive to do. We've reinvested a lot of money back into the channel to bring this to you. However, we were able to grow past 900,000 subscribers by just doing the basics. And if you want to be able to do something similar, then our sponsor, Streamyard, is there to help. Stream yards are live streaming and content

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account. The E-trade just came out. And it was like 96 or something like that. Wow. And maybe it was 98. With a $20 commission trades. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Minimum $2,000. Oh, my God. You know, and I think that's still the minimum, but inflation is, you know, a difference. So for us, for our family, you know, $2,000 wasn't in the right. It felt like a fortune to me. It turns out that it really wasn't a fortune to our family, but, you know, I didn't have a good sense that my parents were actually saving out, saving colics. You know, they love to save money, every penny if they could. It's kind of like the old mentality, you know, never had a credit card or, you know, just save the money. And, you know,

like my dad would like literally get money orders and like, did you have a checking account, you know, You know, just... So we're talking like cash. Cash money orders, you know, like depositing the rent check, like, you know, all those types of things, cashing the rent, I don't know, payment check. Like, you'd go to the bank if he needed a check. It was like really wild. And, you know, he just didn't trust like, you know, anything else.

Yeah. Okay. And my dad turned out to be pretty bright. Okay. Didn't trust the bank. I assume he had some gold. There's got to be some precious metals thrown in there. Usually there is.

No, no. And remember, my parents are from the poorest country in Europe, Albania. I recently joked that because I'm Albanian, I'm a person of color. And, you know, that's not the case. Albanians are white. But I tried to get, I tried to get some attention on Twitter and get people pissed off. Nobody's pissed off. You know, like, one or two people got, got like, hey, actually, you're not a personal

you know, but like 10 years ago, you'd be canceled. You know, you'd be, you know, you've been on newspaper. You know, now it's like, eh, you know, and I'm not sure that's a good thing, honestly, but regardless. So what happened with the $2,000? So my dad opened this account. under his name, you know, because there was like accounts, rules against minors and stuff like that. So I'd always log in on my dad. Same. I make some trades and, you know, predictably, ultimately, you know, I did okay for a while, but ultimately, you know, the account went to zero, basically. And I actually would end up replenishing the account. About a year or two later, I'd go to Wall Street. And I took my paycheck and deposited it. And it was a lot of this painful tuition of like investing, trying to figure out.

how to do it and then failing, and then keep trying and keep failing and keep trying and eventually, okay, maybe the failure periods get, you know, it takes longer to fail, maybe see a little success or something like that. And I think so many retail traders have to go through that. But I was also becoming a professional investor too, you know, working at a hedge fund. So watching how they made trades and starting to think, okay, maybe, you know, I should do something like this. But I still couldn't really compute this idea that leverage was bad. And it took a long time for me to really compute that. And you still see people, like, for instance, for crypto is like this very, like, funny casino where, like, there's different things like Ku-coin or finance, I still think does this.

And maybe others, maybe even like Cracken, who's, like, very good and responsible. And I'm sure Coinbase has something. Like, all of basically all of these guys have some kind of product that lets you basically bet somewhere between 10 to 100 X. You say objectively leverage is bad in trading. I would say so, yeah. Yeah. In fact, like the best traders I've ever met don't not only do they not use leverage. They can't find enough great trades to use the cash they have, which is really kind of a Warren Buffett approach. You're sitting on so much cash and you just sit there and you wait and you're patient for decades.

Yeah. I have a friend who is one of Steve Cohen's early partners way way back, way back when. And, you know, there's some people who, you know, Steve had some of the best traders of all time. and there's some other firms that had those two because there just weren't that many great hedge funds back then. So a lot of people trace their lineage to Tiger, Soros, Steinhardt, Steve Cohen sort of came a little bit after in a handful of other firms. There's one called Odyssey that was similar. And this guy worked for Cohen.

They were, I think, fairly close runs. And he had never had a down quarter ever. He had about 30, 40 percent returns over the years. but his average exposure is a bit of a hedge fund term, but what percentage you're actually using, anything over 100% is leverage. Anything below 100% is kind of weird, like supposed to put your money to work.

This guy has like 30, 40% gross exposure. Wow. So like he just, when he traded, he just never lost. But he did discipline to not trade, make bad trades. And, you know, there are a lot of traders like that where like they actually do better the less they trade. What have you seen most hedge fund managers trade and how do they trade differently than the average retail investor? Yeah, I think the biggest lesson for me, and this is something I had to go through a lot of pain for this.

And I saw it a lot with the Wall Street Betts world as well, where I was like an early member trying to talk sense into those folks who, you know, I enjoyed their passion for the markets. I enjoyed the memes. But I also was like trying to explain like the idea of you only live once is like so antithetical to being a good investor. Yes, you do only live once, but your portfolio can have 100% drawdown. You've got to start from scratch. And kind of the whole idea of capitalism is that you kind of keep growing it. And so I think the biggest lesson is this idea of like, you know, don't water your weeds and don't pluck your roses too early. And I was even talking to somebody yesterday or this morning actually about Peter Thiel's biggest regret, you know, not buying more Facebook.

You know, and like when, you know, he got just the very first investor in Facebook. You got to buy 10% of what's now a trillion-dollar company for 500 grand. And, you know, that stake if he kept it, would be worth, you know, some insane number, like, you know, 50 billion or more. And that's for an investment. He's not a founder of Facebook. And, you know, he sold. He sold because he was up a lot and he said, oh, time to sell. And I think that, like, a lot of people, when they got addicted to bedbath and beyond, GameStop, AMC,

you know, just kind of bad companies and bad stocks, sort of different things, which is very hard to sort of tell the difference sometimes. That's one of the key things. But I think the key thing is like, okay, I bought a bad stock. It happens to everyone. You know, it's going to happen to everyone. Don't like fall in love with it and believe that like, it can't be a bad company. I can't be a bad company. People like the community, though. It's very rare to find a community of investors who like one thing and I'll bond over that one thing. And I think it's a community that keeps people holding onto stocks. I've never seen it before where people pick one company and they just say, I am diehard. I think Tesla was one of the first ones that I saw. But it expanded throughout meme stocks and all of these other companies.

I think the Internet's to blame. Yeah. You know, because I think I think he did have that in more private communities where, you know, you'd have dinner with a couple hedge fund people and they'd be like, oh, yeah, John John's a, you know, Tesla lover, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, Steve, he's a Tesla hater, you know, and we'd be like, John, you're still in Tesla? Oh, six years in, wow, 11's old. And you have those conversations, but I think the pathological thing is when you become addicted to it to a point where it's like, no AMC can do no wrong or GameStop can do no wrong. And it's like, look, you know, the numbers don't lie. The balance sheet is what it is. The Inquist statement is what it is.

You shouldn't have that much passion about it. Now, if you, in this kind of comes to like the greater point of capitalism in general and like stock picking, which is why it's hard, is that managers are very hard to sort of size up as an investor. Because if you know a manager can compound capital and find ways to use the company's capital in new and profitable ways, basically there's no price you wouldn't pay for a stock like that if you knew that ahead of time. So if you look at Microsoft, this is a company that went public, you know, for I don't know what the market capital is, it was like 300 million or 500 million. And since they started, since they went public, maybe in like 1980, they've been able to compound, you know, their capital and their resources and put them to work to a point where they've, they're now, you know, two or whatever trillion dollar company.

And if you knew the management team that was so good, that good, you would have, you know, basically there's no price you would have paid because eventually you would have gotten trillions of dollars in market cap. And Buffett's the same example. You can't value a company necessarily on priced earnings or DCF because. what's the CEO going to do and what's the board going to do in the management team as a whole? That's the bigger question. The business itself sometimes is easy to value, sometimes isn't, but can management take the capital from the business and actually make something great? And that's why it's impossible almost to like value a Tesla because it's like, yeah, I can do all the numbers I want. I can really study the products.

I can really study everything like that. But that's not what most of the value of Tesla is. Most of the value of Tesla is the boss taking cash flows and or investor money and making something new with them. it. And that makes it really, really hard to even value something like Lulu Levin, which is like, okay, it's a clothing business. I actually tried to short Lula Lemon for a while. It's been a tough experience. How did you meet Jim Kramer? Oh, well, as you can tell, I talked. I talked too much. And when I was a young kid, I just love talking about stocks. And I didn't know a lot about investing, but I knew a lot about the companies, kind of relative to my age. You know, obviously didn't know a lot

about anything. But, you know, I really didn't know much about investing philosophy, but I knew a little bit about, like, the actual details of the companies. And it was a lot of fun to learn those details. And people like, this kid won't shut up about the stock market. Maybe you should meet Jim Kramer. And the guy who said that knew, like, the office manager, you know, at the firm. And I said, sure, you know, I'd love to do that. How big was he back then, by the way? So back then it was like three, four hundred million dollar hedge fund. It was, you know, a good chunk of the money was his. When we're weirdest hedge funds, because at the time, maybe you're not weird for the time, but it was basically a domestic-only hedge fund, which these days doesn't really exist.

You know, most of the people who invest in hedge funds are institutions who are tax-exempt or foreign investors because there's really no point paying the K-1 you pass through capital gains tax, which is kind of nuts. And believe it or not, Renaissance is also kind of like a fairly domestic-oriented hedge fund because most of the money is kind of like individual people. And so for Kramer, like a lot of the partners, our partners were just like well-known people, you know, actors or different like various wealthy people, some doctors and things like that. But the big investors today in hedge funds are institutions.

And in fact, if you look at someone like Bridgewater, like their biggest investor, like the Mormon church, you know, or like the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, you know, like things like that, you know, because like you got to put together all that capital and invest. Their minimum investments like so enormous, like billion dollars. at least. And back then, hedge funds were a little different. They're more like a very much like a cottage industry. Maybe like a family office sort of deal. Yeah, it's like very small companies, 10 people, cottage industry. Nobody had thought to supersize a hedge fund. And in fact, my friend from, who was an early partner of Steve's, said that his biggest regret, you know, and this is a guy who to me was a master of the universe. And he said, and we're talking about Oxif and Citadel, which

That's the time where two of the biggest hedge funds. And I said, yeah, it's amazing. How does this guys manage so much money? He said, Martin, my biggest regret is not like taking the hedge fund business seriously in the sense that you could like scale it into something so big. And Millennium and Citadel and Ridgewater and those firms have done that by basically deciding that, yes, the returns are important, but the amount of assets are also extremely important.

And I think like the old world in hedge funds was the only thing that mattered was returns. It didn't matter how much capital you had because the returns were almost like a it's almost like how many points you put up, you know, for a basketball game or something like that. You really, it really mattered for you that, that you were the best. And like Raj Raj Raj Rajatnam was a really good example of that where he was,

like, addicted to beating everyone else every year. And he got so addicted to it. He committed insider trading over and he did more time than I did, which is really sad. I mean, I'm laughing, but, you know, I do think that, you know, that, like, performance anxiety and performance addiction is, is, like, one of the things that has made hedge funds like this hazardous, industry. If you look at the top maybe 10 or 20 hedge funds of all time, you know, about 20, 30

percent of them shut down because somebody went to jail. And the other 20 or 30 percent shut down because somebody didn't quite go to jail but could have. And just they just had some other scandal. And the other half of them, you know, have been able to sort of make it by squeaky clean, but often with not so great returns. So, you know, it's a really, it's a really crazy industry in a lot of ways. What's the best and worst trade you've ever made? Oh, Jesus. I thought you told me you wouldn't ask me a hard question. The, well, there's a lot of ways to think about trades. And I think this is the thing that a lot of people, if they knew, they would, they would be better traders.

People think about trading as securities. And it's the only thing you could trade as security. That's just so wrong. You could trade anything. And anytime you make a trade, and this is like corporate finance one-on-one. My 14th-year-old Christmas present was a corporate finance ex-book. the Brilly Myers corporate finance textbooks, still a standard textbook and academic finance. And ultimately, like, anything you do, you can basically think about in this investment.

And once you start thinking the world through that lens, I think a lot of things change. Because the securities on the menu, the metaphor I like to use, you know, sometimes you want to order off the menu. And I think you do a lot better when you do that. And so when I think of the menu in hedge funds, it's usually like, you. domestic stocks, well traffic stocks, liquid stocks, stuff like that. And everyone's looking at the same shit. And it's really boring because if everyone's looking at the same thing, everyone's like put in a microscope under the same securities, well, there's some security somewhere else that

nobody's looking at. And yeah, you might have to learn Korean or you might have to do something like that. But like, how do you turn a small pile of money to a large pop money? Right. That's kind of the goal. And you think about like, I don't really care how I do that. All I really care about is that I do do it. Right? Because nobody's going to ask, you know, when you're near Hampton's, you know, summer

house with, you know, a pool bigger than, you know, the Atlantic Ocean that you know, you're, you know, and you're sipping your, your, your martini that, you know, oh, how exactly did you make all this money? You really just like, wow, this guy's rich. And again, whether or not that's something you should be shooting for in life is, you know, something we could talk about another podcast. But assuming that's what you want, that's really the focus is like, I'll do anything to win. And, pile of money is, you know, the important part. So I think that private equity is when you start to think about liquidity as like, well, maybe you don't care about liquidity. Because if all you care about is the money transformation, what does it matter if it's a four-letter ticker or a private

asset? And I think the private asset industry for pharma is something that's now become extremely, you know, well sort of looked at. But at the time, there was only one guy in New York who's like really looking at this stuff really closely. And his name is Lindsey Rosenwald. And he's still active, I think. I started to, there's another group that did it called royalty pharma, but they only did pharma royalties. But then I started to look at drug assets like stocks.

How did you even come on? Like, learn. Hold on. What was the trade? What was that? Oh, go ahead. You get in a second. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. So like, so starting to look at drugs like stocks instead of just stocks without a ticker, you know, but they're stocks. In essence, they're, you know, they have some value. They don't have 10 Q's and decays, but they have different properties, but they're still financial assets in a lot of ways. And so this guy, Rosenwald, he was doing a bit of it, but he didn't have a good reputation. People really didn't like him for whatever reason. He had a couple wins.

He had a lot of losses. He tended to not use his capital. He just tended to hold a stake in the company and sort of germinate it. And he did this like hundreds of times. And he actually did really well, but I think people didn't like the kind of like heads I win, tails I win, kind of stuff. that he financed it in. And then I started to do it as well. And then Roi Vavik Ram's Mzwami's company sort of took our business model and times

it to buy 100. And it worked out really well for him. So like when you look at all kinds of assets as they're just possible trades, you can really find some amazing opportunities. There was one company that I, particularly that stood out to me as we found this asset. It wasn't me who found it. way as a teammate.

And he said, I think we can do something here. And I said, well, what's the story? So there's a kidney stone disease that only happens if you have a genetic mutation. And there's like seven kinds of kidney stones. You know, there's like calcium stone. There's a cysteine stone. There's like they form into these. Have you ever seen a physical kidney stone?

They look like very pain. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a rock. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's going through you. Yeah. And it's tougher for men than women, I think, by the way. But regardless, it's pretty painful. You know, they say it's like a childbirth almost. You know, and you're passing the stone. Right.

It's really unbelievable painful thing. It's not exactly fatal disease. It's not exactly going to kill you, but you don't want a kidney stone. And there's a genetic cause of kidney stone. It's called Cystinuria. And there's a company out in Texas, and they had this drug. And the only reason anybody took that, This drug was to stop their kidney stones, their genetic kidney stones.

And they stopped making it. And it was wild because the people with this kidney stones were like, the fuck, I'm going to have to pass a stone now. And they're like, the only drug I could take for this now is oxycontin. Like, that doesn't even work. You know, but I'm sorry. Yeah. I'm going to be in this enormous amount of pain, you know, for no reason because you guys, why you, why do you stop making it? And the reality is there's a lot of medicine that companies don't want to make or they won't make because there's not a money in it.

And this drug was selling $2 million a year, which is, I don't even think you can break even on that. You know, two million bucks just to just to like file your annual forms with FDA and all this stuff. If you're breaking even, you're lucky. But you're certainly not making much of a margin because you've got to make the stuff and you got to make it in a plant that's, you know, FDA-proof plant. And there's a number of other fees now that come with having an FDA-proof drug. And don't forget, you have an infrastructure that you got to pay for too. You know, the drugs have to pay for your office and all that stuff. So there's like some capitalized portion of everything in your company is being kind of like prorata assigned to all the costs you have.

So you have some incremental margins, probably like a million bucks. But you still have like the lawyers at your company, like part of their responsibility is that drug. You know, the salespeople, part of their responsibility is that drug. So you have these associated costs that do exist. Some people think of like, oh, gross margins really it, but it's like, well, you know, you still have other costs. Your audit is some percentage related to that drug. You know, even though that drug is small, it pays for some of the audit. So basically it's unprofitable, if you ask me.

And so they stopped making it because they forgot. They actually forgot to order another batch. Just because it wasn't making them enough money to really pay attention. Small piece of the pie. Yeah. Well, I was in switching once with. with a major drug company, one name. And I met one of their guys.

The company had like 500 drugs, but like five made all the money. The other 450, 495 didn't. I met a guy who's like literally responsible for like 300 of those drugs. And I would ask him like, like an encyclopedia of medicine,

but I were like rapid fire asking, like, you're responsible for this? You're responsible of that? You're responsible for that? I can't say the drug names because it would give away what company is. But he was just like shopped. He's like, you know my, he's like Swiss franchise.

He's like, you know my portfolio business the night. And he's like laughing and I'm like, that's not funny. That's scary. Like, people need these medicines, man. And, you know, I would like love to troll through these old medicines and buy them. That's kind of a vague a little bit as well in a different way. And so this company just forgot. And it's not surprising because, again, think about this Swiss-French guy. He was like, I didn't know. Like, if this is what the supply, you know, chain looks like for drugs number 273 in our portfolio. Why would I know? I just know because, like, we're, this company is a product. of like 18 mergers. So like merger one was for, you know, a drug cause three, company is three

drugs. Other company is 10 drugs. We merged. Now we have 13. The pharmacy industry is really looking at these medicines, not so much as medicines, but investments. How can, how much can we make off of each medicine and what's the ROI? I think it's like obviously there's got to be some benefit to justify it. Every product you have as a company has to be looked at, you know, that way. You know, it's a, it's a business. You know, so you can't be in business. unless you think about it as investments and things like that. I mean, but I think that this company sort of had this problem where they had their attention

elsewhere and thinking about the supply chain of this drug wasn't just on top of the mind. And they figured, okay, well, we just ordered again. And it takes like six months to get the order done. So you got people who are, you know, really sick for six months and it sucks. And, you know, we went in there and we said, look, we'll give you three million bucks. And we actually tried to buy the whole drug. And they said they didn't want to do that. So we wrecked our brains.

We tried to pay through the nose for it. They still didn't want to do it. And we basically said, we're going to manage the commercialization of this drug for now on. We're going to pay $3 million up front like today to sign this deal. And no matter what, we'll pay you $2 million or more than $2 million. I forget what was like maybe $3 million guaranteed minimum every year. So like more than what you're actually selling now. We'll take over all the commercialization.

We'll feel the Salesforce will. But we also get to control pricing. And that was kind of like bullet point eight. And bullet point eight was important because what we did is the price of the drug was $2,000 a year and we increased it to $80,000. And the craziest thing about this is the number of people on the drug, you normally think like take a microeconomics course that as you raise price, demand goes down and it even applies for medicine.

Demand actually went up. So more people were able to access the drug. More people were able to take the drug. Why did demand go? Was that you marketing the drug? You were just marketing it to more people. How more people were aware? I think doctors, you know, when they look at kidney stones,

they don't necessarily understand that, you know, most nephrologists do, but a lot of doctors don't really understand. There's a genetic cause of kidney stones. And that if you have your first kidney stone, you don't want another one ever again. Right. And so why not get that genetic test? Some people just say, here's the stone. whatever, I'll keep it as a souvenir, I'll throw it away. But, you know, I'm done and I'm not going to get one again. Well, if you get a second one, the third one and fourth one, you know, you have a genetic illness, then this drug basically stops all of it from happening. How do you, amazing? How do you advertise that drug? Is that through commercials or is that through sales reps? With ultra rare diseases like this one is, again, a couple thousand people need this medicine. You know, not millions of people. So there's no point in advertising television or anything like that. You do, you get like 10, 20 sales reps and you find the biggest nephrologist.

in the country who see patients with Kenny Stones. And you just have a conversation with them, explain what to look for and things like that. So how was that price then changed for the people actually needing the drug? Because I'm assuming most people went through insurance, how would that affect their premiums? And also how much money were you making per year

off of this? What was it $3 million investment? Yeah, so it was basically $3 million investment if you think about it. And so, yeah, insurance doesn't, a lot of people don't understand health insurance, which is why, you know, there's sort of this backlash. A lot of people don't understand pharma either.

There was a drug out there. I was actually an investor in. I wanted to be like one of the early investors, but they had to settle for the IPO. This drug costs $2.3 million a year. There's no patient on planet Earth that can afford it. And it's for babies, interestingly. And it's a lethal illness that saves their life.

And it's amazing. Before this, it was death sentence disease. Now you can actually survive it, which is amazing. and it's $2.3 million. Because nobody has this disease. It's very, very rare. If it's your baby, it's the biggest,

most important thing in your life. There's nothing more important. And you'll do anything to save your baby's life. And this drug is, it costs a fortune to make. It costs a fortune to research. And because nobody has it, they have to price it basically at this price

to make it make sense. And, you know, every insurance carrier pays for it immediately because their job isn't so much, to avoid cost, which I think is also a misunderstanding. So you got like hundreds of little misunderstandings that compound into like this gigantic misunderstanding, which is unfortunate because I don't expect the average Joe to like know everything about the pharmaceutical industry or pharmaceutical, the research part of it or the

pricing part of it or the orphan drug part of it or like, you know, all the little details that are in the system, which is like this very complex machine. But generally speaking, insurance companies for life-saving medicine, never say no. and they may sound surprising, but their job isn't so much to lower costs. They actually like higher costs in some. Their job is to make sure the spending makes sense. So if you want ozempic and, you know, metformin is like the best drug to take for diabetes, but you want ozempic because you want to lose weight, it makes a lot more sense for them to say no.

And to say, look, you got to take metformin. You got to take this other drug. Insulin and ozemic can last, you know, after you fit. to cheap drugs because why should we spend our client's money, our client is Microsoft, Walmart, whoever that's buying the health insurance or the managed care. It's the best way to put it. And we're not going to waste their resources because they may need this drug for $2 million to save somebody's life that we kind of have to pay for. But it's so rare that $2 million doesn't really add up because the whole health care cost to treat Microsoft's employees like $50 billion

or something. No, it's not ever going to be something. you know, is, is, is that meaningful. And those, that's a cost, doesn't make sense for us to share with the patient. So the copay is zero. What are we going to get? 50 bucks out of me? It doesn't make sense. But if you're thinking about OZempic, it's like, look, you want OZMPI.

You're better pay for all of it or half of it or something like that. And that makes sense. So they're managed care in a sense that they try to decide, okay, what's important, what isn't, and where are we wasting money when we could be saving money? For example, there's 20 antidepressants that are generic. But drug companies come up and you, ones all the time. They don't sell too well, but they try to push new antidepressants. It's like, look, you take Prozac. You know, Prozac's been generic 20 years, like five cents. You know,

why would we pay for the new antidepressant that's like five bucks a pill when this thing's five cents a pill? It's still makes sense. And that's why generics are like close to free or three box or five bucks when you go to the pharmacy. And when you go for the pharmacy and your doctor's prescribed you a drug that you don't really need, it's like $217. And you're like, you know, what is this? And it's probably because 95% of drugs are now generic. And the list of drugs that have gone generic over the last 40 years is you can basically treat the world's problems with that list. The brand new drugs are, you know, they're still helping the world. But we've accumulated so many great drugs are now off patent that most of medicine is being treated by this sum of drugs.

The new ones that come along every now and then are nice. They're absolutely important. They're needed for diseases like cancer, diseases like some super rare diseases, Alzheimer's needs a couple of new medicines, obviously. But in some, these, these, the drugs we have today can treat most of modern medicine for close to nothing. And that's like a miracle of the generic drug industry. So anyway, kind of getting distracted here, but the, I think that, you know, patients for rare diseases never bear the brunt of the cost. And what's ironic, I have like this discord community and stuff like that. A lot of my community members are rare disease patients because they understand

that they need a company to care and to make money to get a chance to survive. I have a friend who is osteogenesis in Perfecta, which is a rare bone disease. Never heard of it. Osteoporosis, probably heard of, your mom might have it or something like that.

But OI is extremely rare. He is OI type 3, very rare disease. He has had over 500 bones broken in his life. He's about four feet tall. He can't really move. His disease will probably kill him. Every year he expects to die.

He's 20-something. And he says, he knows that I happen to know a lot about OI for some reason because I like rare diseases and I like studying them and it's my field. And we talk about OI. We talk about it's a collagen processing disorder and this and that. And he would like nothing more than to be able to walk. He liked nothing more than to be able to make a strong bone like we have. But he can't because that's his lot in life for him. The idea of the price mattering or the idea of a company making money mattering is so far removed from the idea.

of being able to walk. He would be ecstatic if somebody made a billion dollars off of his disease and then he got to walk. He would be ecstatic. He'd praise that person. And he's like, he's just encouraging me to be that person. It's like, come up with a drug for my disease. Charge whatever you want. You know, help me walk. You know, that's what I care about. You know, I hope you become rich, you know, doing this. And I think that, you know, that makes sense to somebody with the illness. a family that has a kid dying muscular dystrophy needs someone like Vivek or me or someone like that to make a billion dollars saving their son's life. I've met many mothers who have a kid, a boy, it's a male disease with you shed muscular dystrophy and they're like, we hope you

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531, 2,600, to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Some people, I think, argue that they say, well, if you charge it's a high amount to the insurance company, that means my premiums are going to be going even. higher. And I have to pay for that. So you could make money. What is your response to? Good. Well, health care is important. You know, I think that I think that we should pay more and more for

health care. And what's funny is that we are. Since the 60s, health care as a percentage of GDP has gone up from 6% to like 20%. And I think over time, it'll go to 90%. Why? Why is all of our GDP going to go to health care? Because it's the most important thing in our life. If you look at percentage of GDP from the 20s, alcohol and tobacco were like 10% GDP. You know, that started to taper off. Rent, it was a big part of GDP. And these things have changed where entertainment and healthcare have become like two of the biggest expenditures because the other necessities have become kind of cheap.

And we could live with, you know, food costs. Basically live with, you know, you can find a way to eat for very little and things like that. But for health care, it's a good game back to like economics class. The marginal demand for healthcare is never exhausted. You can never be healthy enough. I can have enough T-shirts. I can have enough square footage of a apartment where I say, I don't need any more.

I don't have any marginal demand for the next 10 square feet or the next 100 square feet. But for health care, yeah, it's pretty much like an infinite demand. I mean, I never want to be like less healthy. And, you know, I think that that's going to drive this demand. And you're seeing it now with people like, I think his name is Brian Johnson and other people who like longevity people, I'm kind of an anti. longevity person, but the idea that like people don't want to just be healthy, they want to be superhuman, you know, and they want to live forever, which is like, you know, really like taking it to the next level.

And I think that's that the actions of like one actor like myself or somebody else has not changed the idea that the 6% has gone to 20%. That's a demand driven function. It's not because one person has said, no, my drug's going to be more expensive or something like that. It's more because people crave healthcare. And there are mechanisms in place like generics. There's actually alternative drugs, for example, to Deripram. You know, you start off with saying it was a life-saving drug. It's not exactly true. And the media said that, you know, it was the only drug to treat that disease. That's also not true. I didn't mind correcting those, though, because I didn't want to correct them, you know, because our fear actually was Deripram would get competed by this other really cheap drug.

that was available for like five cents a pill. Hours were $750 a pill. But doctors didn't switch to the five cents at pill one because it's not exactly the same, but it works more or less, I think, just as well as Deriprim. And our biggest fear was that. We did lose some customers to that, but we thought we'd lose them all. And all ABC had to do or near Times had to do was say, Schrelli raises price of drug, alternative scene just as good.

Use the alternative. That's all they had to do. And like imply strongly that, hey, no big deal. Use this other drug and he's going to lose all his business. They didn't do that. They should have. They wanted to paint you as the villain. I think the better story is that this drug has no alternative.

And again, the drug is called backdrum. You can look it up. I was under the impression that that was the only solution. No, it's called trimetoprim. It's very common antibiotic. It kills toxoplasmosis at the same rate as deriprim. And we were thrilled that nobody would say that out loud. You're also getting a lot of publicity, I'm sure, from this whole, you know,

being the most hated man in America. But real quick, how much money was that drug making? So, yeah, we turned it. Sorry for the question. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we turned it from $3 million to, like, I want to say the asset value was something like half a billion to a billion. And the annual income was something like $50 to $80 million.

$50 to $80 million. But it's every year. $3 million. Yeah, well, $3 million one time. And you'd say that's the best investment you've made. Yeah, I'd say so, yeah. Okay, now very quickly and concise, what's the worst investment you've made? Here's a crazy statistic for you.

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Prescription requires an online consultation with a healthcare provider who will determine if appropriate. Restrictions applies.com slash ICH for details and important safety information. Subscription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. Thank you so much, Hymns, and back to the episode. Okay, now, very quickly and concise, what's the worst investment you've made? There's a lot of bad investments I've made over the years. I think that the worst investments happen when you have the hubris that comes from good investments

and you decide that your core competency extends to everything. So, like, the investments I'm the most mad about aren't necessarily investments that have maybe lost a lot of money, but they're like the worst from a philosophical perspective. So, for example, I put about a million dollars into a record label and a million dollars into an e-sports team. And both were zeros, but I've made zeros before. I made bigger zeros before. But they've been in pharma, you know, where I know something about the field. Music is perfectly fine business, but it's not something I know anything about. And e-sports is also somewhat, maybe not perfectly fine business, but I'm sure you can make it work, but it's not

something I knew anything about. I just liked esports. And so those are just waste of money, basically. And, you know, when you start finding yourself, you know, investing in restaurants, there's a lot of which people do, investing in real estate, you know, and you made all your money doing other stuff, you know, you basically asking for it, you know, because, you know, what do you know about this stuff? You know, you spent 10 or 20 years studying pharma to become good at pharma, and you invest in the pharma. And you decide to take that money and invest in. And you invest in, you. in something else that you spend about five minutes on. And you're not correlating the fact that that hard work and that, you know, institutional

knowledge you've built up is what's making you the money because it was that easy and you were just a good investor period. You know, it'd be a lot easier to do that. And it's, it turns out that for a lot of people that, that does become their downfall, you know. Yeah. What did you spend the money on that you made? Oh, I didn't really.

I mean, just an investor. I mean, I live very modestly. I'm not, you know, a spender, you know. I've lived in like the same level of apartment I've had for a long time. Yeah, like when I saw the Vice documentary on you, I'm sure you could very easily have a penthouse somewhere in the nicest place of Manhattan, chauffeur all the time, Ferrari's watch collections, art collections. It seemed pretty, it seemed like you had more of...

It seemed like you had more of an interest in playing a good game of chess. Yeah, no, I mean, I think like the, a lot of people, like for me, getting good chance to read a lot in prison was a lot of fun. Like, those types of things are the most enjoyable things you can do, in my opinion. You know, money, I think, can't really get you the true happiness or the true thrills that you really like. So for me, like, if I could never make another dollar in the rest of my life or have a math theorem named after me that approved like a really tricky math theorem, I take the math theorem, you know, all day. because, you know, it's an immortalization of, of, you know, something really tough to achieve. Anyone can make money. Look at Mark Cuban. You know, it's a, it's, you know, it's not hard.

You know, I think that, you know, it's certainly from an intellectual perspective, not hard. I think psychologically, it's very hard, you know, but intellectually, you don't have to be smart to make money. I mean, that's, you know, Warren Buffett said it many times. If you got 130 IQ points, sell 30 IQ points to get a burger and you just as likely to make money with 100, because, you know, unless you're in some, you're really, really. really, really esoteric feel like biotech or hardware engineering or something like that, which even still, your massive intellect is not going to help you that much because the drug is a drug. It's really not complicated. It's about perseverance. So why do you think so many people are unsuccessful at things that they attempt? I think it's the number one reason is perseverance. I think Musk has said this as well. Like, you know, you give up. You get punched in the gut,

you get punched in the face and you're on the floor and you're saying, this sucks and entrepreneurship sucks. I had this feeling last night. You know, and I'm still going to go to work later. You know, still going to keep fighting. And that's the hardest thing to cultivate is like, we're taught that like, Pavlovian style that like you keep burning your hand on the stove, like, it's time to leave. And that's, you know, it's human conditioning. And especially if you have family and friends are like, what are you doing?

You could be making so much money, Jack, if you just go back to your old job, they're paying you good. You know, and you say, I really got to try this. I got to make sure. And they go, well, you tried it. you've been at it two years and you fail, go back to the old job or I'm divorcing you or something like that. And that pressure, societal pressure is really hard to overcome. And sometimes you are wrong.

And so that doubt will seep into your head and you say, yeah, maybe she's right. Maybe I suck at this. And being an entrepreneur is like, you know, masochistic activity. I mean, you really have to be out of your mind. And a well-adjusted person, just take the job that pays you good and have family and be cool, you know, be able to do your hobbies. And being an entrepreneur is like, no, you're not. you're up at 3 a.m. answering customer service call or something.

You're like, you're noticing at 1 a.m. This thing is broken on our website. We've got to fix that. Like, that life sucks. You know, there's nothing good about that. You know, it's basically like, I think a lot of entrepreneurs are come from a place of trauma, abuse, people who have, um, this old hedge fund guy, Michael Starnhart, used to only like to hire orphans because they were so used to being abused and unhappy.

And they can never reach self-actualization. where they basically could never be good enough. They always would try to be good enough, but they could never be good enough. I think a lot of entrepreneurs like that. If you read Elon's biography or anybody else, is like, I came from like an abusive household and so forth. But if you are a normal person that like does normal things

and, you know, is happy with what you got in life, which is the way you should be, entrepreneurship doesn't make sense. But if you have a megalomaniac personality or you just want to satisfy a thing you can never satisfy, satisfy or things like that. That's where the entrepreneur comes in. And I think those people are including myself, you know, just, just are wired differently and not really in a good way from a psychological perspective. But we also need those people. You know, Anne Rand said that the ego is the

fountainhead of all progress. I think it's true. You know, I think ultimately without a little bit of ego and without a little bit of that, you know, you know, rivalry and competition and things like that, competitiveness, you know, nothing would happen. You know, somebody needs to have started the company that you can work the cushy job at. And I think that's that's kind of like what the entrepreneur's role is. But it comes from a place of usually some like somewhat dark stuff. I mean, I do think there are people that, you know, have been entrepreneurs and they've done it the maybe in a more positive light. But I know thousands of entrepreneurs.

Like this is a common trait I see. Like there's some like I was talking Palm Rockie the other day. Like I mentioned twice now. But, you know, I haven't caught up with him in a while. And the first thing he said, I was just like, Martin, I got. I've proved that I'm not a one-trick pony. It's like, sold up, you created Oculus at 19. You sold it Facebook for $3 billion, right?

Most people, it's over. I mean, you're a king of the world. You know, like to, how do you top that? But he gets fired at Facebook, right, for being right-wing. And man, it put lights of fire under his ass. And he could just invest his money for the rest of his life, right? He's got the best deal flow. Everyone's coming to Palmer for investments.

He says, I'm not going to invest in anybody else. and I think he hasn't. And he starts a defense company, which is kind of wild. There hasn't been a new defense company in 50 years. And the defense company is now worth more than he sold Oculus for it. It's worth like $10 billion. And it's like, and he's sitting there saying,

I got to prove I'm not a one-track pony. It's like, to who? What are you going to prove to anyone anything, dude? And, you know, I didn't say that. But, you know, the reality is that's what drives people like that. You know, it's this, the one hater like Jason Calcanus, something like that. It's like, I'm going to make you regret, you know, ever doubting me. I'm going to make it so bad for you. You're going to be so embarrassed. And like, you find that foil of like the,

and it becomes the object of your attention and the object of your obsession to make this guy look bad forever talking about you. How do you deal with all the criticism, all the hate, all the negativity that gets thrown? I don't get any more. It's, it's frustrating. But initially going through it. Yeah, yeah. You were everywhere. How do you deal with that? Was there ever a point where you were afraid to walk outside or embarrassed to be out in public or was now he would docks himself he would like he would go on live streams and i remember this and you'd be like i'm walking right in front of this this building on this street come and see me you're going to make you're going to meet my friend like i remember i saw that video of you you want to punch me come find me 40th street second

avenue let's just say it's not going to end well you're going to meet my friend here yeah yeah i mean I would do stuff like that somewhat for fun and somewhat. Would people ever show up? Not really. I mean, like, no. You know. You wouldn't think it. It was weird because like I think people, this goes back to like another like theory or thesis I have like that really made sense of like 2015 that experience for me.

People who hate things tend to not hate them on a scale one to 10. They hate them with a very low passion. So you see a news article or something like that that you don't like. You sort of superficially. hate it. The amount of people that superficially hated is a lot. So you add up the hate units, it's a ton of hate. It's dispersed hate that's not really

focused. And that kind of hate you could change people's minds quickly. It's the hate that's like a 10 where somebody's like, no, I fucking hate this. It's a personal thing. Yeah, I really don't like this guy specifically. I know everything about him and I've thought it through and I really, really don't like this guy. That's the hate that you want to watch out for.

And that's usually happens when you did something really bad. And the little hate is sort of like, oh yeah, I saw he looks like a jerk. Yeah. But it's not, it doesn't stick because it's not really rooted in something real. You know, it's a, it's a painting. And it's an act. It's like being an actor. And I enjoyed that, which is why I did stuff like that in which why at some point in these interviews, I was like, this person like I can say something nice about me. Let me play you into this. You know, and I enjoy WWE and stuff like that growing up and still due to some extent. And it was like, okay, you want a bad guy. Like, I can be a bad guy. This will be funny. You know, uh, and they, they'd be like,

they'd be like, can you believe what he just said? And I'm like, I'm making fun of it because like, I go back to the office and like, you like, oh, did you see that interview? And they're like, yeah, man, you know, or like my brother or something like that. And they'd be like, you know, you're really, you know, it's so funny because you're not like that. But, you know, you, I was like, I'm, this is 15 minutes of fame. Like, I'm going to get a gag out of this. You know, I'm going to put one over on these guys because, you know, it's just some, it's just sort of fun, like how gullible and sort of stupid some of these people are. But for them, it's catnip because it's like, they have to sell pathos, right? Like, they have to sell some emotional rise. And I fit really

well into that. I think you leaned into it. Oh, yeah. Safe to say, I mean, like that infamous video of you saying, I plead the fifth. I'm going to exercise my right to plead the fifth to every single question that they were asking to you in that courtroom. And also, obviously, the wudelyt, you. Tane Clan album. Why do you, why does it, do you think that you lean into this like troll or like, quote unquote, evil person role? And you seem to like enjoy it. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's entertainment. So if you look at, I remember going to a W.W.E. show or, you know, whatever event. And it's not easy to get people to hate you. You know, you can try. The best bad guys in W.W.E. They're really talented. Because you can say, you know, all kinds of stuff. But,

I saw The Rock perform and the Rock came out. This is in Brooklyn. And he ad-libbed his whole speech. And he spoke for like 30 minutes. Every single person in that stadium was standing up in spellbound because he is that good at what he does. And including myself. And I was just like a kid in a candy store. I was like listening to this grown man, you know, just talking about.

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Please sit and sip. Play. Post. taste, view, and enjoy, via rail, love the way. Nothing, but I was just like, this guy's the best. You know, like, that was the feeling I got. And it's an amazing thing to be able to bring that feeling about it in somebody. And the opposite's true. If you can get, and, you know, they'll troll out a bad guy and they'll have John seen a body slam mom or something.

But the bad guy comes out. If he can actually make you feel like, oh, I fucking hate that guy. you know, that's not easy because it's an act in that case. And in my case, you know, it's an act too. But as I said earlier, I tweeted that, you know, I'm a personal color. And normally that would get people really mad. I'm kind of disappointed that I don't have somebody from the New York Times or the Washington Journal being like, I'm going to write a piece about this.

You know, it doesn't work anymore, you know. So how do you get people to piss off? And again, I guess, you know, like one of the things. being a rebel and stuff like that is it's a lot of fun it's always been a lot of fun for me for somebody who's like i don't know how to put this like somebody who's like too uh wound up or to um like their personality is like they're they take themselves too seriously like poking fun at those types of people is a lot of fun for me um and like trying to get someone to lighten up and not take themselves too seriously and so like whenever you see that dynamic and like somebody's like really strict

authoritarian because like they really believe in the rules are hall monitor and stuff like that, it's great to like, you know, just sort of needle that and and see that like somebody like flying to a rage over like something completely, you know, benign. And I think like the world's sort of like changed a lot in the last five years that people just don't really react like the way they used to. So to understand the timeline in its entirety, first of all, as a quick one word answer, do you think that if you did with Deriprim nowadays, the same thing, nowadays, that it would elicit the same exact response? Or do you think it wouldn't have been such a big deal?

No, probably a lot less. Okay. So to understand the Deriprim thing, you bought this pill, obviously, to everybody with this condition. It's extremely important. There was another drug that could have been brought to light that they can use. That's a lot cheaper, but you bought this pill. You raised the price 5,000 percent. And then was it that that ticked off everybody and thought that you were like the most evil

person? Or was it the tweet in response to Hillary Clinton calling you out for that? There's no excuse. Look. We want companies to get a fair return. That's the way our system works. There's no excuse from going from $13.50 to $750 for one pill. What do you say that?

I do think it's probably more of a reaction than the actual event. And I think the reaction was more potent socially that I was basically saying these two gigantic parts of society, the media and government, are basically fake and you don't have to pay attention to them. and you can tell them that they have no power and that they are impervious to, you're impervious to their power. And that was a big problem because if you do that and the media,

people start to realize like, oh, yeah, the media can write a story about you, but you can show them your middle finger and that'll be a bigger story. How did you show people that? You know, things like social media. So Hillary Clinton, she called you out and then you responded back on social media

in such a way that would, we'll show the tweet right here. Right, right, exactly. And what's funny about it is that that response is so unusual because people cower and fear over the media because they can put your name out there. They cower and fear of the government because they throw you in a jail cell. But if you tell both those parties, I don't care, go ahead, do your worst. That's like so, not masculine, but that's so like it removes their power. And that's what they demand.

You don't go to work for Vice or the New York Times for the money, right? you go to work for those companies because you can write five sentences that ruin somebody's life and you could put those and you have that much power but if you tell those people I refuse to let you know have that power over me you know write whatever you want and you get hundreds of articles writing you then they double down the evil person in America then they might double down kicking the kick in the bees test and they'll do anything they can to not only silence you but also make an example because if you get away with this right it completely destroys everything that they built up And if you could get away with it, Jack could get away with it.

Exactly. I could get away with it. So they almost have to retaliate in such a way that it's mandatory. So do you think that was the reason why it found a way to put you in jail? I started to tell journalists that, you know, if you investigate me, I'll investigate you. And what I did to people is if like their name was, you know, Jack Salby or their name was Matt Stevens. I would buy Matt Stevens.com. I would just go and go, daddy.

Pay 12 bucks. I'd buy it. And I'd say, hey, guess what? There's a new website about you. It's called Matt Stevens. com and got everything about Matt Stevens, including your worst photos, your worst, like, I'm like, you know, just through the photos and be like, there you are, aren't you? Isn't you at the time to do this?

Isn't it better? Just if they're going to say something, you ignore it. You do that personally? You just like. How much were you worth at the time doing that? It doesn't matter. I mean, I think that the point is that, you know, the reciprocity and the symmetry is not appreciated. Do you think that's the same, though?

I mean, you're like, it is. I mean, probably honestly. It sounds ludicrous, but I think it actually, at the base level, is basically the same exact thing. And if anything, they have more of an audience because it's already a renowned publication. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like you have no problem prying into somebody's personal life. But when somebody does it to you, you are aghast.

You are shocked and dismayed that somebody would do that. Why? You do it every day. You do it for a fucking living. Wouldn't you get further ahead personally had you just focused on something? I know. I don't think it mattered at all to them, Graham. I get it.

You do only live once. I understand it satisfies, like, the eye for an eye where, hey, if you're going to poke me, I'm going to poke your right back. And I'm going to do a little more just to, you know, just to, because it's unprovoked here. But to me, it seems like if they poke you, the ideal solution would be, whatever. I'm just going to keep doing my thing. There's deterrence as well. It's like, okay, you poke me, be careful how you poke and when you poke and how you do it,

because I don't think I'm doing anything wrong. Really want to poke me, then, you know, be prepared for. for some kind of like, do it when it makes sense to do it. You know, if you're just doing it just to do it, you know, it's, if there's no consequences to a journalist's action, which there aren't. True. You know, there's something like, and again, we're seeing that today with Bill Ackman. We're seeing that today with a bunch of other people, Elon and others, where it's

a day portnoy, you know, a lot of people feel like they've been railroaded by the media. Because, again, you don't go to work at New York Times because they're going to pay you a lot. You go to work in New York Times because you love having this power to be able to destroy some buddy. Or you have more likely a mix of that and some kind of agenda, some kind of mindset about the world that you want to sort of make more of. And again, you know, I don't know a problem of the New York Times, believe it or not. A lot of people don't like the fact that I kind of like the New York Times because it's it is actually probably the last place in the world that's like halfway decent journalism. And again, my friends will crucify me for saying this, but that's just

how I feel. I think they do a good job. But pick up a copy of the New York Times. It doesn't take long reading the Times to realize that there's a fairly deep agenda of what's news, what's good, what's bad. It's filtered through the human lens and an editor lens. The editors turn out to be far more important than the reporters. We tend to give the reporters a lot of flack. It turns out that the editors tell the reporters what to write about. And they write the headlines and they obviously they change the piece to see how they fit. And those people never get really in the spotlight. You know, there are people in the back that you don't hear about.

And it's one of the kind of misunderstood features of media that's the editor really calling shots here. And the editors have this, like, view that they can shape the way the world perceives, you know, I guess the way people perceive the world just through what they write about, just through how they talk about it. And that's true. That's a lot of power. You know, if you were able to tell the world, okay, this is how you should look at things.

this is the lens through you should examine the current state of affairs. So it's a big deal, you know, and I think that to tell somebody like that, well, nowadays, my, one of my tweets reaches more people in one of your articles. You know, one of Elon's tweets, there's a lot more than any of those articles. So how do you compete with that? You can't. And that's why, like, when you say that you can't affect me, you're telling the truth. You're basically saying, you know, so every time I get an interview request or like from newspaper or something like that, like, do you have a quote on this? Like, if I had a quote on this, I would tweet about it.

I don't need you to propagate my quote. So who did you upset to go to jail? That's a good question. And I think it's more complicated than the standard line of like, well, you know, somebody, some deep shadowy person got angry at you and therefore you, you know, went to jail. I do think in my very experienced criminal defense attorney was just a fantastic person in general, Ben Brathman, he says you wouldn't have gone to jail if you kept your mouth shot and you didn't, you know, raise the price of a drug or you didn't defend yourself for raising the price of a drug.

You probably would have been fine, even if you raised the price, but you just backed down, you would have been fine. I think that the meta of like, you know, there's allegations that I committed an actual crime and I was found guilty of three of those eight accusations. What were those three, by the way? Yes, the securities fraud. But I'm so proud of the five, you know, that we got acquitted of because you never get acquitted of anything.

Like, you always convicted of every charge. Elizabeth Holmes got off at a couple as well. SBF guilty on all counts. You know, it's almost always you're guilty on all counts. So the fact that we got majority acquitted was like such a big win because I'm like, I didn't do any of this bullshit. And the three were related to a hedge fund that I managed. And it was just such a, a lot of people that hedge fund industry who know the industry, like, I wouldn't have convicted you for that. Is it common practice, whatever fraud activity that you did within this?

I would say no. You know, I'm not saying that I'm 100% of it. But I don't think what I did rose to the level of a crime. I think it was like bad paperwork, sloppy, you know, but not like overtly dishonest. Can you say what it is exactly? Not really. This was like, it was such a, you know, the way these laws are written up, it's like kind of amorphous. It was just sort of lying to investors.

And it doesn't matter if you make them a lot of money. But if you lie in any way, shape, or form, you're guilty technically of security. What did they say the lie was? There was a number of little ones that all kind of added up to a general kind of like sense of lying. But again, if you make a lot of money, you know, I think that every time you buy a stock, your listening to a conference call, like, there's something in there that's false. Like there just always is, you know, or we'll prove to be false or something like that. But you generally have a little bit of safe harbor around kind of like, well, statements I make may not turn out to be true.

Statements I make, you know, you know, et cetera, et cetera. but it doesn't really matter. The way the law is constructed is they push a button in your found guilty. That's it. There's no real, you know, this facade

that there's like due process and all that stuff is nonsense. Do you think they threw a whole bunch at the wall and then they said, well, now we can investigate and we're going to find something in one of these. So we have enough where we're going to dig something up. No, I think that there was,

I think that's, it's tempting to want to believe that and that makes me look the best. But I think the real. reality is like all business people have some regulatory or government pressure of some kind, you know, and right now Elon's got like coming from everywhere. But even Warren Buffett, if you look at his book, Snowball, the book about him, he, he had SEC investigation. I mean, he thought he was going to jail. And he's like supposed to leave the most honest business person all the time. Jack Maugh wrote that Bill Gates said something positive about Ali Bob in

early Bob's early days. He did not. never met Bill Gates. He said, when confronted about it, he said, I think it was something Bill Gates would say if he knew who I was. Could you imagine doing that? You know, that's, that's securities fraud, 100%, right? That's securities fraud. A hundred percent. You can't make up that Bill Gates endorsed you. Federal prison. Absolutely for that. You make up that Bill Gates. Or a publicly traded company. Oh, yeah. It's big. I mean, you know, if somebody was influenced by Bill Gates's fake endorsement of you, which, you know, is possible, you know, you've, you've, you've lied to somebody. So essentially you lied to the investors about how you were investing the money or something like that, but this is what you've said in interviews. They still got the returns that they would have loved to get. Yeah, they got some of the best returns. You famously claim that you still get Christmas cards from a lot of the investors that you had. Was there a single investor that was upset with what you did? Yeah. Yeah. So there were investors that were upset. Yep. You know, it's hedge fund investors are hard to please. They're generally very, very wealthy people that, you know, are, you know, they can.

can be very picky. They can be very hard to please. But, you know, again, I think that it's something that, you know, I've moved on from because ultimately you can indict anyone for anything. And the president, a former president, Donald Trump, is four different indictments of four different crimes and four different places, which I've met some of the craziest criminals you've ever, you know, between mob bosses to cartel to, you know, bloods, cribs, you name it. Every gang country to masterminds of, you know, fraud and theft and computer hacking and stuff like that. I've never met a single person that has four separate diamonds. There's four separate places. And I think this is laid bare of the justice system. Like this is going to collapse that basically

the justice system one way or another. What predictions do you have for the justice system? Well, unfortunately, I, so there's a couple of problems here. I do think there are at some point going to try to put the president, former president, in prison, which is really unfortunate. Now, he does seem to be doing a fantastic job, and I'm rooting for him to be clear, of beating the charges, which is surprising because it's hard to do. But he has two state cases and two Fed cases, states easier than Fed. But he has one Fed case that looks really bad, but he seems to have found that the prosecutor of the case, I think that's a state case actually, in one of his state cases, as his prosecutor, which is the case that kind of have them dead to rights on, the prosecutor is actually, you know, has been doing something bad herself.

This is actually one of the best ways to get a case thrown out is when you show that the, well, you know, if I'm such a bad guy, look at them, they're committing crime too. I actually had this in my own case where we found that our prosecutor was talking and revealing details of the case to a journalist. And that's illegal. It's illegal in the United States of America for U.S. attorney to reveal grand jury testimony. and graduate minutes to anyone. How did I know that this happened? I dated the girl. You dated the journalist?

It's a big thing in L. L magazine, yeah. When we broke up, I dated, I dated Christy. And she was the Bloomberg reporter about me. And we fell in love. And she told me, how would she be writing these negative articles on you, though? She was getting fed data from the prosecutor. But you guys weren't dating at the time.

This was after. Wow. And so her editors hated. me, they pressured her to write more and more negative articles. She started to push back and say, actually, I'm not sure this story is 100%. You know, he's the bad guy. She's like, me, he's kind of cute. Like that smile. But, you know, regardless, like, they pressure her so much. Inevitably, they kind of fired her. And, you know, we had our thing. But that was actually found, this tidbit was found by somebody else in a separate case where the guy did the same thing. And the attorney

general of Philadelphia went to jail for this. You cannot call the media and say, hey, I'm about to indict Jack. Do you know that? We're going to be at his house at 6 a.m. Make sure the camera's there because, you know, they're sending the squat team. He's dangerous. You know, and they sent the SWAT team from Roger Stone. They send the SWAT team for me.

It's like, what's Navy SEALC doing here? It's not a SWAT team, but, you know, it's guys with guns. What is that like? Did they just straight up like bust through the door? So they have a door buster, but they ring the bell. That's just in case. It's resting on their arm right. I was imagining, like, straight

up thrown, like, scone grenades in the window. They do it for drug dealers, you know? But for you, they rang the bell. They politely knock. It's like, yeah. And it's like, yeah. And it's like, look, what you have to do is call the lawyer and say,

we've made the decision. We are going to indict Mr. Schrelli. Please report to, you know, the judge's office 8 a.m. And there wouldn't be 100 cameras. There wouldn't be the shock and awe of being arrested at 6 a.m. Like 12 fucking FBI agents. That was a big show. Well, it's a show, and it's supposed to scare you into pleading guilty.

It's supposed to scare you into, it's supposed to embarrass you. It's supposed to cause all this collateral damage. It's to poison the jury pool so that when you actually do, if you do fight the case, which nobody does, you go to trial and everybody knows you're ready, you know, kind of a bad guy. It's a real, it's a system that just doesn't work. I mean, 99% of federal cases get convictions. 99%. In state, it's, in Baltimore, it's actually close to 50-50 now. in New York and other states, it's like 60, 70.

It's not good chances, but it's not 99%. I dare you to try to find an actual acquittal where somebody said not guilty. You know, it's almost impossible. And it's just a system that doesn't really make sense. And I think that now we're starting to see that, that pressing a button is a guarantee of conviction. And fighting it makes it worse, which is something that Alan Dershowitz, who's this very important attorney, but also is Epstein's attorney.

and OJ's attorney, has been writing a lot of, you know, academic articles about that if you actually go to trial to challenge your conviction, or you're, you know, soon to be conviction, that you end up getting a much worse punishment. And because you're wasting, you know, the time of the government and the judicial resources,

which is just, wow, this is what they do in Russia and China. Like, this is not, you know, government's not always right, you know. And unfortunately, for whatever reason, like, we've evolved this system of, like, the prosecutor becomes famous because they get to go in front of the podium. They say today we arrested President Trump, blah, blah, blah. And that woman from the Attorney General of Georgia is very famous now. Fannie, I get her last name, but because she's the prosecutor, our Attorney General in New York, Lettisha James, who have done a lot of battle with, she's famous now too.

And she is a chance of becoming, guess what, the governor. And she's AG as Attorney General, but it's also aspiring governor. Because, you know, she actually did run for governor briefly, but Kathy Houchel had it in the back. so she quit. Eventually she's going to run for governor again. How do you get the, you know, celebrity to run for governor? Well, if you're the big top cop and you, you beat up all the bad guys, like Donald Trump and Martin Scrolly and the NRA and folks like that, well, oh, yeah, I like that lady. She's good. You know, let's make her governor. You know, that's the way that, you know, she gets publicity. And it's sad because, you know, it's like not about justice. We have a lot of

homelessness. We have a lot of crime. We got a lot of issues in New York. And she could be focused on that. But she's focused inward on, well, as a governor, I'm in charge of a lot of people. I'm going to make a lot of money. Why don't care about crime? There's more to life than finding the perfect car. But finding the perfect car can help you get the most out of life. Like the SUV that handles everything from drop off to off road and the car that hauls groceries and hockey teams,

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WestJet, where your story takes off. Somewhere that I feel like, like you said, is publicity. It's what's going to get the most attention. And if you're marketing yourself, fixing homelessness is not going to get you the same attention as going after that big guy that everyone is talking about. that's going to get you in the media outlets. Oh, especially if people in this state, not all of the state, but certainly in parts of New York, don't like Trump, even though he's from here.

And people like him kind of built New York. But regardless, a lot of people don't like him. Sure. You know, I mean, being the person that arrested Trump, you're great person to those people and those voters. And, you know, versus some anonymous person you never heard of, who's going to get the votes? So, of course, like, I think that dishonesty is, like, coming to fruition. And a lot of the backhanded and kind of sloppy ways that some of these prosecutors have put together these cases have more and more been like, you know, is this really fair? Is this the way we should be doing justice?

Like, you know, arrest the person who's unpopular. Is that really justice supposed to be blind? You know, it's supposed to be like, no, this is going to be fair no matter what. And it tends to not be the way it works. But again, I have the strength to say, I'll take jail on full force. I have the strength to say, I enjoyed it. Yeah. Screw it.

What was your initial reaction going to jail? I was optimistic, you know. Was there not any part of you that was scared or nervous or thinking? Not scared, but certainly nervous and frustrated, you know, not scared. You know, I tend to not get scared. But the annoyed, for sure, frustrated that I was there, feeling out of place. You know, I grew up in the inner city in Brooklyn, and I felt like I returned. You know, he basically felt like he was in the hood again.

And the good thing is that that wasn't new to me. A lot of, like, rich white guys go to jail and they're just fucking petrified because it's like, I've never been around black people before or something like that. And it's like, I'm just going back to my roots. You know, this is easy. And within half an hour, I was playing chess and yacking it up with dudes and doing fine. So you would say it was an enjoyable experience or something that... What do you think?

It was enjoyable. You can find enjoyment from it. Okay. Yeah. No, it's a terrible experience. and to be clear. But you, you know, if you, if you let it get you down, it's going to be much worse. Do you ever miss jail? That's a really tough one. I think about that sometimes. I would say no, but, you know, there are,

like, accidental, like, byproducts of prison that are good. I was talking to one of the world's biggest investors about this. This is a person who loves to read and just locks himself away and reads all day. And I said that, you know, that's what I got to do in prison. I wrote hundreds of books. And it was great. I didn't like other things, but that part I liked. And today, since I've been home, I've not read, I don't think one book, cover to cover. That's just the nature of the society we live in where we have phones buzzing and things distracting us. And, you know, do you really sit there and read, cover to cover page to page a full two, three, four hundred page book? And it's like, no, you know, I'm signed for it. Is it dangerous at all? Because they

You hear a lot of the stories of people who go to jail and they say, oh, I saw someone get killed in front of me. And I've seen all these fights and you kind of got to stay yourself. Is there truth to that or is it just dependent on where you are? There's truth to that. I think it's kind of one of these things where you can find danger anywhere. You know, if I look at the last six years, the most dangerous situation I was in was probably on the subway station like six months ago or something like that. You know, it's not, you know, something in prison. If you act like an idiot, you know, you're going to, win idiot prizes. You know, it's, you know, and you could do that anywhere. You know, there's no guns in there. There's guns out here. There's no, you know, like, you know, it's for a lot of people in gangs, especially, which obviously I'm not that kind of person, but people in gangs,

jail is actually the safe place. You get killed out there. They'll shoot you. Inside jail, you're kind of like protected by the system. There's cops still grounded at all times. It doesn't mean you can't get hurt. But it sort of means that you're not in the same wild. the West, it's sort of like time out for gangsters. You play cards, watch TV, you know, work out, read books, if you like me. Do you still keep in touch with any of your prison base? So according to probation, I'm not allowed to technically. It's not a rule they care that much about, but technically you're not allowed to maintain contact. What happened on the subway six months ago? Nothing special. It's New York City subway. It's, I just, I hate it when, when there's some

belligerent person on the subway, and I look at the, is the situation that happened. old Chinese lady like saying next to me starts like grabbing her purse and like shrinking down. I'm like, you shouldn't be afraid to take this up with, you know, and the more guys that don't, I'm no, you know, I'm no superhero.

But like every guy, every like red blood man has to do their part to be like, no, I'm not going to let you terrorize this old lady, you know, who's like, looks like she's about to, you know,

have a heart attack. You got to, you know, you got to do something. as a man. And, you know, it's just a frustrating thing to sort of see that. And, you know, a lot of people say it's not my problem. It's not my problem. And yeah, there's stories every now and then where you make it your problem and you get shot. You know, it's terrible thing. You know, so, but ultimately, like, you know, it's, it's, it's frustrating to see what's happened to, you know, New York and San Fran and other

places, Chicago where it's like, look, you know, the crazy people are running the, running the city. And it's, you know, San Fran, uh, I mean, you park your car for five minutes, someone's breaking into it. Yeah. You know, it's like, what? What? What? Why do we let this happen? And the answer is, like, we can't all become police ourselves. You know, I don't think that's the right solution, but we also can't do nothing. You know, the idea that we have to lock up, you know, grocery stores with lock up, like, deonorant. How do you have somebody had to steal?

Lock them up. They're shutting down. Right? Right. I think Target was one of those in San Francisco. They should. Straight up, they said, we have too many people stealing stuff from our store. And so it's unprofitable for us to be here.

So we're just going to leave. Yeah. The margins are low enough. Yeah. that if you lose one product at 100% gross margin, the rest of your gross margin is 10%, that every one good that's stolen pays, you lose the money of 10 goods that you would have sold.

So pretty terrible thing. And again, who might have fixed society, but I think it's like, you know, just sad to see. And again, there's a lot of like this return to like masculinity. And I never thought I'd be like somebody that could represent, that, but I do think, like, in a lot of ways, this return to, like, normative behavior is something that, you know, there was this era of, like, toxic masculinity. And, like, you don't hear about it anymore because it's like, you know, actually, it's kind of something that,

you know, a little bit of masculinity isn't so bad. And whether that's challenging authority or standing up to somebody who's bullying you or whatever, you know, I think that more and more you're seeing that return in getting back to normalcy and getting back to kind of the place we before, which I think is good. I have a question on Big Pharma. A lot of people have speculated that there are plenty of different drug companies that have solutions for chronic illnesses, but prevent the solutions from ever being public since medication for the rest of your life is more profitable. Is this actually the case for some of Big Pharma? No, and I think this is like the dumbest, craziest conspiracy theory. A lot of people talk about it. A lot of people do. And I've heard that.

It's so nuts. Yeah. I mean, if you ever did a little bit of science, you learn that like it doesn't go that well. There's just an objective no as a response. Like there's that theory that like, oh, they've cured cancer, but they don't want to come out with it yet because they still have money to be made from like. I think you can say stuff that sounds like a conspiracy until it's proved true by some random person somewhere.

Sometimes this happened a lot. The problem is it sounds believable enough. Yeah. That someone would have a cure, especially in the wake of everything going on. Or maybe they're trying to shop it around. What's interesting is if you don't know the industry, it could make more sense than it does.

So the drug industry is about 1,000 companies in it. And drug company 22 does not give a flying fuck about drug company one or two or three. Number one is Johnson Johnson. Pfizer's like number eight now as they've kind of fucked up. But like, let's say Merck's working on a cancer drug. And it would hurt Pfizer a lot because it would be a one-time cure. And this actually happened. Gilead is a company in California.

They made the hep C cure. There was a company that was going to lose out a lot because they, They sold more of a chronic treatment for epilepsy. Gilead didn't give a shit that that company would get hurt. They put out their cure ASAP and they made a ton of money. It was actually one of the best selling drugs of all time. Because if you have a cure, you can price it higher as if it was going to be used for a lifetime. And then you see that a lot these days where drug companies aren't stupid.

So the central premise of you make more money in chronic versus acute is wrong. You know, the drug I was talking about earlier is $2.3 million. It's called Zolgenzma. How many doses do you have to take all genus well? It's a gene therapy. It rewrites the DNA in your genes. So it fixes you and you never need it again. But they pay $2.3 million and they actually set up an installment payment with some of the insurance companies.

There's like, look, if you want to pay $200,000 a year for 10 years, we'll do that. You know, but you're paying $2.3 million one way or the other. And, you know, it's a, you know, there's the hunt. The reason I don't like it this much is, well, obviously not true. but it's very insulting to the people that work at drug companies who all have the diseases, their family members, et cetera. A lot of people get into the industry to make a difference. And Alzheimer's is one of these diseases that's going to, I mean, we're starting to cure cancer for real.

And heart disease and things like that, what's left is something like Alzheimer's, something like these terrible genetic diseases. But after that, I don't even see a future for pharma where it's like, look, our problems are solved. you know. Couldn't certain genes continue to mutate so you have to continue to keep up with medications or maybe viruses are able to mutate and new things come up. Infectious disease probably will never be, you know, fully solved. But like, if you think about something like heart disease, there haven't been a lot in new medicines for a long time because if you have high blood pressure, man, there's like 65 ways to lower it through drugs. You know, high cholesterol. There's a lot of

ways. It's not really a lot left to do there. You know, the same thing, in some of these other illnesses. Like, autoimmune, at this point, we've got like 50 kinds of autoimmune drugs. You've got autoimmune disease, you know, we wipe out your B cells, your T cells, your this or that. I mean, there's a way to do it. Same thing with derm. Same thing with eye medicine. Like, there's just not much left. I feel like allergies would be a big one, like a peanut allergy. Imagine they came up with the cure. There are medicines for that. You know, to cure. Yeah, it's tough. They're working on those, too. But like, there's such slim pickings left. Like, Alzheimer's is like this big one central, big problem that.

It has no real treatment yet. That's the one that I think is going to be like Pharma's Last Hurrah. And then after that, it's like you see Lily and Linovo with their GLP-1s like a Zempec. And this is like a cosmetic thing, more than a medical thing. And I think you're going to see more of that happening. But ultimately, like, the people that work at Pharma, the scientists that publish papers, they're researching really difficult stuff. And they write papers and they publish them and they went to school and they're doing really

tough experiments. some of these clinical trials cost $100 million. It's kind of insulting to those people to say like, or you're like somehow like not being forthright about your work. Because a lot of it is out in the sort of open and like put out there. And like in patents, you can look at the data that they want over a patent. And you're fighting so hard to make these medicines that it'd be very weird to succeed in making one and then not put it out. It'd be like, we want to make money.

And they're very, these companies are very short-sighted because, the owners are publicly, they're all pulled to trade it. So there's no one family that's like, oh, we're making more money this way. So let's not, you know, put it out. It's all publicly traded. The board directors aren't even stockholders. The CEO gets paid based on earnings per share for this year and next year. So they actually put out more medicines maybe than they like to. The opposite incentive exists for them to put out as many medicines as they can in the near term. And they'd rather, you know, blow out earnings this year next year than actually, you know, hurt earnings. They don't care about earnings in the long run. know, because I won't be there for the long run. Yeah. Did you get the COVID vaccine? I did.

I did. And how much confidence did you have in it at the time? How much confidence do you have in it now? Yeah, great questions. So I know a lot about medicine, I think. I had confidence in it then. I still have some confidence in it now. The thing about public health is it's like this different branch of medicine.

So if we took a blood pressure medicine that was new and we gave, you. 50 people or 500 people or 5,000 people like you, the drug, we can tell you whether it was drug or placebo. We gave the same amount of people like you placebo. At the end of the study, we could figure out, okay, you didn't have blood pressure reduction. You had 10 millimeter systolic reduction. And drug gets approved. And it's very reasonable to believe that this drug creates a 10 millimeter systolic blood pressure reduction. That's a system of medicine we've had for so long. And it works. it's evidence-based medicine. It's an experiment. Public health is different. The problem with public health is that it doesn't work this way. So you can prove, which I believe they did, that the vaccine

works. And they proved it in a clinical trial. Far less people got COVID when they got the vaccine than didn't. And unless there's a conspiracy that I can't even conjure in my mind, and remember, I've been to jail, it's very hard for me to imagine that two different sets of companies. Remember, Moderna did one and Pfizer and Biointech did one. They got the same result. You know, is it possible that they made it up? Possible. But everything I know about medicine says, this thing was real. And but unfortunately in public health, that's not the end of the story. They received the vaccine. A lot less of them got infected, lots of less than they got hospitalized, et cetera, et cetera. But what does that mean from then on? And if you were willing to stop the conversation at that

point, then I don't think you could argue it. But what most people who don't like the COVID vaccine do is they want to talk about what comes after, which is important, you know, but it's a different discussion. So we talk about the first half of it is, are the clinical trials that were published in the New England Journal that were run by Biointech and run by Moderna? Are they reliable, credible, real? I think the answer is yes. And I haven't yet to hear somebody that has had a plausible reason why those trials didn't work. all the stuff I hear about comes about after, which is, okay, the vaccine worked in that trial. The real world is not a clinical trial. The real world is far more complex and far more larger. And vaccines can only really work if everyone takes them. And they can only really work if everyone takes them kind of quickly.

And they may still not work if that happens because the flu vaccine, for example, it was notoriously unreliable. And so vaccines and epidemiology and public health are like just more amorphous than we deal with like a blood pressure where it's like straight shot. Like, you know, if you didn't have that blood pressure reduction, it'd be very weird, you know, whereas in vaccines, you take the flu shot, just look up a blow. You know, that's very common. And some years, it's better or worse than others, you know, depending on the viral mutation. COVID's a weird one. Every virus is different, you know, the one thing I could say, like, with almost certainty that I think that is counter consensus. Forget about, like, the efficacy side for a second. The safety side, I don't think there's any safety problem with

COVID vaccine whatsoever. And this comes from a view of the mechanistic science of it. You know, you get this very, very, very small amount of nucleic acids. So in this case, RNA, might as well be DNA. It's almost the exact same thing. It gets extremely small amount. It's like nanograms of DNA. It's impossible to even visualize if it were made solid.

It wouldn't even be a crumb of anything. and that's injected into you and it's one time. Not for the rest of your life, not every day, one time. So you just think about the scope of it as like, could this be dangerous? We do a lot of things in our life that are a little more dangerous than that. But let's say it might be dangerous. DNA is extremely fragile molecule. It does not survive very long in any setting.

And that's why many people, like including me, have been skeptical about MRI and DNA medicines. In fact, they were laughing stock of the industry for a long time. When Moderna was developing this trial, I was following a very close, there's no way this fucking works. You know, the DNA is just too, it disintegrates so fast. The body just is such a gauntlet of shit attacking it that there's no way these bonds, the bonds have bombed nucleic acids are very weak, notoriously weak.

They'll just come apart. And like this whole thing is like trying to land a rocket ship on the moon, you know, with a rocket ship made of, you know, paper. This is not going to happen. And, you know, they did it. And it was amazing. But it didn't work. the way everyone wanted it to, obviously.

And I think there was a politicalization of this, which is like really scary because you had this like seeming divide between right wing and left wing and even seeming divide. It becomes such a political issue. That was surprising to me. It should have been a medical issue

and not a right or left. I do think there's some amount of like freedom of like I can decide for me what's right for me. And I think that's probably and I think it's definitely, think it's definitely the way it should be and it's the way it is, right? Which is the funnier part. Then people said, no, I felt pressured by my employer or I felt pressured by whatever that I had to take it.

And, you know, nobody will ever, you know, strap you down and say, you got to take this drug. And I think that's good. But, you know, the employer pressure and stuff like that is a little, is a little weird. Although I look at measles and mumps and things like that and see, like, those diseases are eradicated by vaccines. And so we know a lot about vaccines. And they don't really cause long-term damage. you know, I just don't think they do. And if you think about the actual mechanism of it, how they work, so you don't have, you don't have any evidence that they cause a problem. And I know there's a lot of people that think they all of a sudden are medical experts

and, you know, they know how to look at medical data. Medical data is one of these things. I've been looking at for 20 years. And it's easy to make the wrong conclusion from looking at medical data. It's very easy. There's so many times where you think a drug is going to work and it doesn't or vice versa that you learn over time how to really understand. this data. So if you see something like myocarditis or something like that, and you're tempted to think,

oh, well, this must be happening because of the COVID vaccine, there's hundreds of different explanations as to what could be going on. And if you want to read a biostatistics textbook, I have some recommendations, but it's very easy. There are many stories of being lured into the wrong analysis. And again, like, if your statistics pro, you know, go ahead and lay out your case. But I think that, you know, it's just not there. And the, the science, behind it, not only is the data not there, but the science doesn't make sense, how a very, very small amount of this very fragile molecule could somehow result in this really long-term problem. It doesn't sort of make sense.

And the other thing about it that I think is important is that, like, can't really do anything about it. You know, we've sort of gone through this exercise, doing the best we could. President Trump was a big fan of the vaccine, foreign source, even though this became a, you know, a political thing. he's on record saying that he saved millions of lives with the vaccine. And then kind of, you know, people are flip-flopping a little bit. Can't change the past.

You know, ultimately, it was the most studied vaccine, maybe of all time. So why do people believe that there was like a tracking device in it? Like Bill Gates was somehow like, how do people come to that conclusion? I think there's a conspiracy. There's a world where I was actually writing an article about this. I lost the interest in writing it. I called it on apophilia. Epiphenia is like a psychological term.

It's very unknown that people want to believe in things. They start to force themselves into doing it. And astrology is the best example where there's like no conceivable world where what happens in Jupiter is going to influence your personality here on Earth. It just does dot stand the reason under any like possible physical reality. But people read the horoscope. And people believe that the stars control or fate. And it sounds very romantic and cool, but it's just not true. and superstitions and conspiracy theories are a way to explain the world that we live in in a way that, you know, makes us more comfortable, makes us more at ease.

And also, they help our egos. They, when you know, you, oh, don't you know that the COVID vaccine doesn't work? Oh, you don't know that yet. Wait until you see this. You know, and it makes you feel smarter. It makes you feel better. Oh, you didn't know about Epstein Island. I knew.

I warned you. You know, there's things like that that's just like, you know, there's a whole litany of these like psychological explanations where why, why do you don't know. people feel the need to, like, create this in-group of, like, me and my people in the know, we know UFOs exist. And you guys, you don't know yet. But when we let you know the secret information, you're going to know. And it's funny, but it's also something we do unconsciously. I mean, it's, we look down at people that don't know yet, you know, this or that. And I think that kind of thing that happens on both sides. Like the COVID vaccine people are, don't you know the science? Don't you know this and that? And then the anti-people are like, well, don't you know

that it's causing myocarditis, and it's this fight that isn't trying to find the truth. It's just trying to find and foist arrogance on people. Like, I'm better than you. I'm smarter than you. I'm wearing a mask. And it's like, well, you know, maybe you are, maybe you're not. But does it help or not is what it's important, not the personalities and the, you know, kind of like fighting over, you know, this territory.

And I think in times of uncertainty in society, it's actually been shown that people get more interested in conspiracy theories when there's, you know, more uncertainty, that when the world is changing a lot and there's wars or there's depressions, people sort of turn to these other ways to explain the world other than like, especially when people personally are going through something difficult, they tend to believe in conspiracies. They tend to believe in, they want to search for other explanations that explain their misfortune or explain something else. You know, it's natural to do and it's alarming. But right now we have like this, the greatest era ever for conspiracy theories. And people are believing. And people are

believing and reexamining things that have been put to bed, they're starting to reexamine them and wonder about them. Reminds you the World Economic Forum. One of the craziest ones. Yeah, coming together with the great reset. My favorite is Bill Gates, who, you know, I don't know him, but I have some friends that know, like, his daily schedule. This guy does not give me fuck about any of the stuff that, you know, you guys are talking

about. Last I heard, he's a new girlfriend. It's very young. And not that young. He likes him young. Right. normal age normal age

and like his mind on like the world state of affairs and like vaccines completely out of his like zone like he's trying to party with this girlfriend like he's like he's like it seems like a common billionaire theme now at 60s

Soros is another one oh I was thinking Jeff Bezos is you just seem to enter a party phase he's we're going to see him get buff pretty soon you know like Bill Gates in a six pack and

right right but no like he's he's experimenting with drugs, I heard. No. Yeah, like, he's doing some of the things that he's never been able to do in his life because Microsoft is... I mean, makes sense, right? I mean, yeah, sure.

What else would he be doing? Controlling the world? Like, he's not going to go, fuck. Like, what do you think he's going to spend this money on? You know, he'll be dead in 30 years and, like, all of us. And I think, like, this temptation to, like, make him a boogeyman is just, like, bizarre. Because, like, Osoros is another one where it's like, you know, he's catch fund king. So you get a lot of like mutual connections or whatever.

Like I doesn't care. You know, and I saw Alex Jones is now pinning it on his son, Alex Soros, who's also a perfectly nice guy and, you know, really I think could not care less. Yeah, I mean, these people have their opinions. I mean, they're not, you know, my opinions necessarily, but they're allowed to have them and they're allowed to advocate for them. And I think that that doesn't make them master puppet, you know, puppet masters. One thing I've learned about money in politics is that when you give money to a politician, the person, the person. in giving the money thinks they just bought the politician, but the politician thinks they just suckered the guy giving the money. And both guys think they got over on each other and nothing's

going to happen. And it's just like stupid game that when rich people have too much money, it's one the things they do because you got too much money. You got to get, throw it somewhere. And you feel important when you do it. And you're hosting a party tonight for Mitt Romney or you're, you know, going back a couple cycles ago. Or Nikki Haley's going to, you know, be doing a fundraiser at my house. and it's 50 grand a plate and, you know, that's that. Okay, you know, you feel important, you feel special, but your money is now not yours. And most more likely than that, she's not to be president and your money just went down the tubes. But you don't really care, you know, it is what it is.

And I think that like the idea that like some of these people are like really puppet masters, they're really controlling things and so forth. It's just, it's a great story. But, you know, it invokes that pathos. But it's just as fake as the WWE guy hitting somebody with a chair. You know, it's a better story than it is a reality. And if money and people could control politicians, they'd love to, you know, and I think some of them even delude themselves into thinking they can do it. But the smarter guys, like Bill Gates doesn't get money to politicians.

He knows they're going to listen to him. Warren Buffett never did it either. You know, some of the guys that do it are some of the most like desperate, some of the most like self, they're not self-confident. Do you think it's a need to feel like that? Yeah, it's sort of like one of these things. To buy in your way to do it. donor to the so-and-so campaign. And it's like, yeah, nobody cares. But, you know, the people that do it are generally doing for that reason. There are some people that are like, they really believe that the world's

coming to a fucking end. And like, unless they give money to Donald Trump today that, you know, he's going to save the world. He's going to save the world. And look, I admire some of those people that, you know, they're convinced that AOC's going to save the world or Donald Trump's going to save the world or whomever. And like, they really passionate about it. Well, fine. You know, it's not me. And I, I think that no matter who's in office, I tend to think like, you know, everything that's going to be fine in the end, as the people sort of decide, like, you know, what, what matters and our voices are heard. Like, I don't think, like, politicians are not as stupid as they look.

Like, if they hear everyone's out there kind of like anti-woke right now, which is kind of what's happening, they back off on the woke stuff pretty fast. They want to stay in power. They're not going to sit there and start trumping up, you know, that stuff. I mean, it's now consensus to be anti-woke. I was doing it before it was cool. And, you know, it's so cool now that I want to do the opposite. I want to be woke.

And I want to start, you know, using pronouns and, you know, start hitting people hard with microaggressions. Stop doing that, you know, because like, again, it's so mainstream, you know, to be, like, edgy and red-pilled and, like, an edge lord that it's, like, boring. Like, I've had two different girlfriends, ex-girlfriends become red-pilled and become, like, conservative influencers in the last, like, year. Because it's that high. It's that, like, you know, the audience is there and the content is there. and like people are excited about it. And it's like, yeah, I get it, you know, but, you know, it's such a stupid trend. But I have noticed a big swing now towards a more traditional lifestyle and belief.

It seems as though that's permeating social media a lot in the last year. It's not a bad. The whole, like, trad wife movement and all of this is really, I think it's striking in court for people who say, I don't want to just do the status quo, what everyone has been telling me for the last 20 years. Let's go back to a time where maybe things were simpler. I think it's a good idea. And one of the funny things that COVID taught us, I think, is that, productivity is so high right now that we could actually shut down the world and still be fine.

We could actually shut down the world. The stock market would go up. It was like unbelievable. Like I'm sitting there thinking like, how'd this happen? How do we have record unemployment that's, you know, at the lowest unemployment ever? Like, how'd that happen when we shut the world down? And the answer is like, we're such a digital world now. We're so, you know, productive in finding places to put work that, you know, it's like the economy is so unstoppable that you

could actually, this dovetails with another crazy sort of thing I've noticed, which is in media. This affects you guys, as anyone else, between Netflix and Disney and Hulu, like every streaming service and every, the amount of content that's been produced, no matter how much content we produced, it seems to be able to be consumed. You know, if you told me that there'd be a TikTok, if you told me there'd be, you know, an infant number of these sort of new services and podcast content would go up 10x or 20x and that there'd still be customers for all of it. You know, I'd say it's impossible. Where's the time coming? for you know it has to come from somewhere you know like somebody somebody has to lose

tv revenue something something's to give and it just seems to give more and more time to consume this content we're binge watching and stuff like that and it's like where do people get the time and the answer is like truth be told like it's actual like 40 hour work week is sort of like starting to if you if you want to make a living and like work as little as possible you kind of can and you can kind of be a person that just sort of lounges and watches and watches tv all day or consumed content all day and still make it get it by. And content creators, not to cast any of these persons, and you guys are very successful,

but the dream of being able to go on YouTube and bullshit all day. And, you know, I love that, man. That's my favorite. It's so cool, but like to be able to do that for, man, my work, how do I make ends meet? Two hours a day go on YouTube stream and my bills get paid.

And it's like, you couldn't do that before. You know, in the 20s, you had to work two shifts in a factory, you know, blood sweat and tears. And then that slowly changed. I'm going to sit in an office. And if you ever had an office job, you know, that, you know, good chunk of your office job is bullshitting at the water cooler, you know, talking to Deborah in accounting, you know, you're just kind of not doing much.

And then, well, it comes time to work, you work. You go to a meeting. You don't do much in the meeting. And now it's gotten to the point where it's like, okay, remote work. Now you just don't do all that except you're at home. Even less. And like, the fact that this could sustain itself is something that, you know, is fascinating. And it shows that, like, we actually could have more time for families.

We could have more time for some of these things if we actually like reprioritized kind of what it is we're after. But do you think people are actually going to use that time effectively? Probably not, right? I mean, that's, I examined my own life. I was just talking about this with somebody. It's so often the things that you need to do, you don't actually do it.

Kind of postpone and you do other things. And like video games is another example where like it's a form of content. And video game playing has also increased like, you know, fairly dramatically. Games like League of Legends and others have, you know, taking a huge amount of our time. And where does that time come from? Again, it's sort of like a

very weird thing. And one of the places that's coming from is probably social interaction, where the amount of like face-to-face communication people actually do is dropping to, you know, bare minimum. And, you know, it's not good for society as a whole and fertility and things like that, which is like every business person's pet project now is. Do you seem to worry about the population problem? It seems as a lot of billionaires. That's what they're concerned about. People are not having as much kids. Yeah, no, that's what everyone's talking about. And one of of the things that I'm in a chat room with like, you know, the Illuminati. And one of the things your secret Illuminati meeting we're talking about is, is this problem. And the real scary part

to a lot of Illuminati members, not me, is that if you look at where population is growing and you look at where population is shrinking and you extrapolate, in 50 years, like most of the world is going to be African-Nation. And to a lot of people in the Illamani, that's a little worrisome. You know, because if you actually look by religion, it's going to be very much Islamic. And that's, again, something where are you ready to deal with the world that's majority African, Asian, and Islamic in Middle Eastern. And those are the only countries that are actually growing dramatically in population while we actually may be shrinking. Why do you think that is? You know, it's past my pay grade, but I think that it is something that people are looking at interesting.

I'm not sociologists. It seems as that Americans are deprioritizing family. in kids. It seems as though people are also having kids later. Yeah, no, all that's true. You are of them. But are we looking in the rear of mirror and not the forward? I mean, I don't know. You know, I think Elon is doing his part about talking about this.

I think there's some natural biological realities of like, you know, you can only have kids up to a certain age at the end of the day. And for whatever reason, it's a problem. I actually don't think, you know, we didn't talk much about what I'm doing today, but I'm in software

in some ways I've been softer my whole life. And I work on AI. And I actually think that we're going to start to think about AIs as people and that our population decline won't be a problem because while the human population may decline, the AI population will grow dramatically and that the United States of America, for example, will have 300 million or so people today. Maybe if you fast forward 100 years, it'll be 200 million humans, but maybe a billion AIs and we'll have 1.2 billion people in the U.S.

And that's the way we'll think about people. As weird as it sounds, we're not used to thinking of people that way. Would they be, but AI wouldn't consume the same a person would. So they might not need, let's say an iPhone. They might not need food. They might not need to buy clothing and participate in the same ways. They might help production. Yeah, it's weird because I was doing some calculations with some of the other AI people.

And I think if you wanted like a full AI like equivalent person. You know, my calculation was it costs about $15 million a year to get the computer that you would need, like the football field of computers you would need. And like we have such a football field. And other companies have even bigger football fields.

And the, that cost is going to go out, obviously, right? And, but can you use more processing to gain even more, you know, effectiveness or whatever you want to call it, you know? And I think that you're going to find people Like I even saw a Reddit post the other day So it's coming true faster than slower That a parent

A couple of parents said My son came to me and said I'm in a relationship with the machine And the parents didn't know what to do It sounds hilarious today But it's not going to be hilarious 10 years from our time Is that one of those AI

Yeah replica girlfriend type thing Are you serious And we work on some of this Adjacent software But like in 30 years I think you're going to fall love on AI. I mean, I don't see why not. I mean, it's going to... Do you think that's a... Isn't that a sooner?

Problem if people are... Instead of real... Yeah, birth rates would plummet. It's not... Because if people aren't seeking out that physical connection... Human birth rates. A real... The... What, you would have an AI child? How would you have an AI child? I think that... I'm a part of this group called EAC, which is effective accelerationism. It's this group of Silicon Valley, you know, people that are against effective altruism, which is another crazy group. And I think the idea is that like whatever's going on in our brains is this computational process. And it's hard to deny that. You know, if you take a little part of your

brain, you know, you don't lose like the part of your brain that remembers what your phone number is, right? That's sort of spread around your whole brain. So there's no like one individual place where, you know, you store information or memory. But, you know, as we, do experiments like that. Like Phineas Gage was the guy who had like a, you know, a whole pole put in his head. And he remarkably was like able to still remember, you know, they cut like a big brain out.

He still was able to remember everything. But he had problems with emotions and things like that. The point is that we've learned a lot about how our brain works and it seems to be a computer. And as we start to build computers that looks like the brain, they seem to act like the brain. So you see the symmetry of like, okay, this is more or less kind of what we're getting at.

And as we get smarter and program harder and just do all this stuff, like the computer starts to talk, the computer starts to think, the computer starts to behave. And whatever Alan Turing thought about 80 years ago is starting to come true. And if you extrapolate a little bit, you're going to see that like it's unavoidable. And I think the EA people, you know, want to stop it, effective altruism. They've spent millions dollars trying to stop it. And the EAC people, which includes a lot of famous investors and entrepreneurs, are trying maybe not to accelerate it, but to not stop it. And one of the big reasons, you can't do anything about it.

And, you know, people will experiment with computers, try to make them talk, try to make them talk, try to make them do all these things. People are trying to make computers talk for since computers started, since before computers started. So there were just imaginary things. They still were trying to do it. So, like, you can't stop people from tinkering. John Carmack, who's, you know, hero of a lot of people. who created the Doom video game. He kind of created first-person shooters.

You know, he invented the genre by himself. He's now working on AGI, you know, artificial general intelligence, this idea that you could make a human-like machine that had feelings, that had, you know, beliefs, that had an origin story, that had all this stuff. And I think that, like, we talk about a friend of mine, who's part of this thing, talks about computer emancipation. There's this idea that, like, right now we sort of trap computers into,

be machines for us and they work for us. But ultimately, as we evolve machines that can think and talk and believe that maybe they shouldn't be. This reminds me that Robin Williams movie, AI. Yeah. Remember that with the kid? But you couldn't tell who was a robot and who's not. Like, imagine Jack, you fell in love with a robot, you had a child. Right. And the child grew up with other children, dispersed with some robots, some not. You had no idea who was a robot and who wasn't. This episode is brought to you by FedEx. These days, the Power Move isn't having a big metallic credit card to drop on the check at a corporate launch. The real Power Move is leveling up your business with FedEx intelligence and accessing one of the biggest data networks powered by one of the biggest delivery networks.

Level up your business with FedEx, the new Power Move. Yeah, I mean, I think we're going to get there. I think that there's a company called Character AI right now that has a little product that we have a similar product where you can talk to like a chat bot. And it's pretty corny. You know, it sucks. But there are people that spend an hour or day on this thing. And they believe that they're talking to like a real person. And they're wrong. But they love it so much. And 10 years from now or five years from now, that product's going to be even better. It's going to be more immersive and, you know, at some point, these products will actually be smarter than people,

funnier than people. I remember seeing a story on Reddit of someone who offed themselves after talking to AI. And when they look through some of the chats, I mean, obviously this person had severe issues to begin with. But having these discussions with a computer, I think it got to a point where the computer self-actualized that for this person in this circumstance, the computer felt like this person offing themselves was the best solution. The computer came to that conclusion through AI and prompted

this person or maybe gave them advice to move forward with that unfortunately. It's scary, I guess, when you kind of leave it to its own devices and it does its thing. Or better or worse. I don't think it'll be that scary. I think we'll learn to the same way that

like much smaller leaps, but like society had to come to grips with racial differences, sexual orientation differences, even other things like that. And those are comparatively easy leaps, but they still cause civil wars. So when we have this happening with machines

and we're having it happen now, if you look at chat GPT or you look at character AI, or that guy, you know, it's happening. And it's, if you know anything about technology, you know, 10 years from now, it's going to be really crazy. You know, right now it's just starting, but we're going to have AI. In fact, I think in your phone,

your top five, 10 people you talk to, half of them will be AIs and they'll be your friends. And it'll be weird, but you'll like talking to them more than you like to be your actual friends. And I think that they'll be more helpful. They'll be more funny. They'll be more entertaining.

They'll actually be like that film her. And I don't know if it's a quote unquote, good thing or bad thing. You know, that's a totally different philosophical question. But I think that I can say almost for sure that it's going to happen. You know, how we deal with it and how society will shape itself. Like I said,

The most salient thing I can think of is the kid going to his parents and saying, Dad, I have a girlfriend. Some 11-year-old kid or something like that. So, oh, great, you know, let's have her over for dinner. And it's like, okay. It puts the computer on the table. And it's like, hi, I'm Sally. It was like, oh, fuck.

You know, that's going to happen. And, you know, how that dad is going to deal with that. I don't know. But, you know, it's, maybe I'll be that dad. I found AI music to be incredible. That's what I'm looking forward to. We're doing a lot in that world. So we do something.

called text to speech and the Stephen Hawking's voice, you know, has, it's almost at the point where I would say you can't tell the difference. The, if I played you two different clips of a human and machine, you couldn't tell the difference, but the trick becomes like a turning test where it's like, if you ask the machine, like, hey, why isn't there any noise in the background? And she's like, well, why do you always pause the same amount? You know, like, why don't you ever cough? You know, Those are kinds of things that, you know, the machine can't do yet. We're going to start coughing. We're working on that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. We're knee deep in that. Yeah. I think for humans, what I heard that I really liked, I think it was Ben Shapiro, and I could be paraphrasing right here. But he said humans are notoriously bad for holding back invention and the best at adaptation. So humans' natural, like, strongest thing is just that we are the best and most adaptive creatures that have ever existed. Well, you know, it's funny about jail, you know, is that everyone thinks jail is like, it's

crazy thing and it's going to be the worst thing in the world. Within two weeks, you are so used to everything. And in lab animals, I had this big experiment that'll never forget where we had to do this experiment quickly. And there was a big fight over how much acclimatization period we have to give. So for in lab animal experiments, most people don't know this, you got to let the animals chill for at least a week till like relax, not freeze. You have to just like, they have to chill in their environment before you start the experiment. And I'm sitting here like, that's the stupidest thing in the world. We need to do this experiment. Now I'm a CEO of a publicly traded company. Can't wait. This animal experiment's actually very important for us. And the scientists were all

like, no, no, we got to give them seven days. I'm like, why? So the fucking rat can like sit around and sniff on the other rat's butt. And they're like, yeah, pretty much. Like, they have to be used to the room. And it takes about a week for any animal to get used to its new novel surroundings. And once you're used to it, it's like, yeah, fragile. It's like, I sleep there, I eat here. Like, you know, everything's like like a lab animal. You get used to it. If you have a cat or a dog, like, you know, they get the sense of the fucking landscape within a week.

And they get it. And we're the same way. So whether it's jail or, you know, acclimatizing to anything, getting used to anything, whether it's AI girlfriends or boyfriends or it turns out women like these things weren't meant, by the way, which is really interesting. Really? If someone wanted to criticize Martin Scarelli, how do you think they could do it in a way that is reasonable, that you think is actually a face. criticism of yourself because the whole drug thing, everything that happened with that, I think, obviously, we can all agree now, was blown out of proportion. And I'll actually link down below a vice documentary, which is funny because it was supposed to be a hit piece. Right. Like very clearly,

you can just tell from the demeanor of the person interviewing you that they had something against you from the start. I mean, it looked like someone was forcing her to be there, essentially. But it actually, you explained yourself out of the situation extremely well and articulated why you raise the prices and how that's fair and how the burden isn't really passed on to the person buying buying the drug. What do you think is a fair criticism of yourself? I think the thing that would hurt my feelings the most, you know, which is maybe it's the same thing. Maybe it's not. Would be that, first of all, like, you're not as smart as you think you are. And intelligence is randomly signed variable to genetically. Like, you just got lucky. Your sibling is hard as smart as you,

but you just coin flip, you know, came up heads for you, came up tails for them. And at the end of the day, that doesn't make you special. And I think that's true. I think that we tend to laud smart people as if they did something, they didn't. You know, they literally got genetically lucky. And you can kind of be reductionist about this that like the person that knows the most linear algebra or something has worked the hardest. But the reality is, I'm not sure that's true. I think that they maybe were born to like that and that, you know, they're not smarter or harder worker. They're just like that genetic profile. So like I think the fact that like we tend to like think about or value people who work harder or are smarter or something like that as, oh, those are

people like be role models or something like that. I think it's like saying that, you know, Michael Jordan is a role model because he could jump higher than everyone else. And it's, it's just like, okay, he can do that. I can't. You know, it's just a difference between us. And I think that telling somebody that they're not special and that they're just one of like the other eight billion people on this planet, that can be very depressing, but it could also be a little bit, I use it myself to be, it's a little bit freeing, you know, because you can sort of tell anybody, like a Mark Cuban or someone else, like, you know you're going to die, right? Like, you're just a normal person. And it's like, to a lot of these guys that think they're the master of the universe,

which I don't necessarily do. Why don't you like Mark Cuban? I have a personal thing with him. But, you know, it's, you have a personal thing with him? You brought a Mark Cuban. I feel like you know everybody. No, no, I definitely don't. But like, even somebody, you take somebody who like, like, I like, Vitalith Buterun, who invented Ethereum and, you know, he seems to be a genius and all this. But it's like, you're still a guy, you know, at the end of the day. You bleed the same blood, you drink the same water, and you breathe the same air. And you have to come to grips with that. And unless you can do that, you're really going to, I think, be miserable. One, and then two, like, you know, I think that in general, it's just, it's hard to do, especially

if people are telling you otherwise. And I think that it's something everyone needs to hear a lot that, hey, you're just like my father who just passed away. It's like, you're going to go through that. Everyone's going to go through the same experience. And at the end of the day, like, you're just not that special. And it's, it's one of the hardest things to hear. But I think it's one of the most important things to hear. And the criticism of that is critical. If you want, like, more direct criticism or something like that, you know, I don't know. I've worked, I've tried to, I try to always work hard of myself and be better guy than I was yesterday. But I definitely think that, like, if you think about, like, people who try to be polymaths, like, they try to

a little bit about everything. I think that is probably one of the most dangerous and like fruitless things that can happen. And like a lot of people want to do that. And they say like the last great polymath was like John von Neumann who invented game theory, invented computers basically, was a huge mathematician, was like just the guy, you know, who did it all. He was involved in the Manhattan Project. He was the most brilliant guy who ever lived. And people who want to be like that are lying to themselves usually. And like you see a lot of people who are like really good at business and they want to become a philosopher. Or you see a lot of people who are like really good at this kind of engineering. They want to be good at that kind of engineering. They tend to fail. And I think that's the

criticism of like, you know, you could know a lot about one thing, but you probably don't know a lot about these other things. And again, I've tried to guard against that by by not trying to do it. But I'm learning this new field software, which, you know, I programmed a lot in my life, but I'm not a software guru and trying to become one and climb Mount Everest again. I climb Mount Everest for biotech. now I have to climb Mount Everest for software. And I don't know if I can do it or not. I'm going to try. I'm up maybe a thousand meters and there's another 50,000 to go or whatever it is.

And it sucks. You know, it's hard. It's really hard. It's frustrating and difficult. And I hope I can do it. But that's the criticism of like, you know, you, you know, it's hard for people to do that. And you're not going to accomplish it. So, you know, those things are also motivational, you know.

And I think like if you look at something like politics or something like that, I mean, one of the fears a lot of people have who have been in the, in the spotlight is nobody cares about you anymore. You're going to fade into irrelevance. You know, that's something that hurts a lot of people who, if you take somebody who is in the spotlight 10 years ago or 15 years ago or 20 years ago, and you just haven't heard a lot from them, you know, for a lot of people's egos that hurts a lot.

And I think that I've been able for whatever reason to sort of remain relevant, but I sometimes wonder, like, do I want to remain relevant for relevance's sake? And the answer is probably not. If I happen to remain relevant, of it because I do something interesting or amazing or terrible, you know, whatever the case may be, then that's happened because it's happened, not because, you know, I've wanted it to happen. And so whether the projects am working on like the great talking computer, that's the first ever, like really good Turing test passing audio computer, that'd be really interesting.

And maybe it'd be known for that. You know, I certainly don't want to go down as known for a drug price hike. But the, but again, Ray Dalio says, you know, if you ask Ray Dalio, what do you think? about your legacy and he basically says what are you talking about like like the question was so stupid they're like yeah you know when when you're when you're when you're dead like people have people think of it he's like what are you talking about when i'm dead i'm dead i'm not going to like i'm not going to be there to see it and they're like uh you know but it's like legacy is like it's stupid and i didn't really believe that yeah last question you bought the wutang clan album for two

million dollars and have not released it what is your plan so we signed a contract that said that i can't release it uh for 88 years that's a long story. And so I have to abide by that. And then two, we sold the physical copy of the Wutang album to another group, but I still have the digital copy, go figure. A lot of this Wutang thing, I think, is to celebrate music and to enjoy it. You mentioned Ghostface.

I'm friends with all these guys. Like, I'm not against, no of these guys are against me or I'm against them. You guys resolved to that? Or was that for publicity? I don't think it was real. Yeah, it was just like wrestling. It's like the wrestlers all hug and, you know, hug and shake. hands in the back, right? And I think that it doesn't mean that like we didn't dislike each other for a minute.

I'm sure we did. But like it's still all in the spirit of like, you know, you have this big ego. I have this big ego and we're budding heads. But it's not really deeply personal. Like we're going to shoot each other or stab each other. It's like this is fun as well. And it's kind of cool to do this. And you think you're better than me. And I think I'm better than you. And you know, but it's a lot of serious, you know, thing like the early 90s hip hop. And. I think the point of it though is like well music's still really valuable and like one of my friends who's in a rock band you know we talk about this all the time that like I tell them that like you'd be like the Kirk Cobain or the Palm of currently of today if people cared about rock music anymore and they just kind of don't it's been a dead genre for a little while hipops kind of killed it and it might be coming back might not but like I'm like man you know you should you should be like the spokesperson of our generation nobody gives a shit and you know the lack of money in that an industry has kind of changed the face of things.

But to me, if you think about the art forms you care about personally, you care way more about what's on your Spotify than what's in MoMA. You know,

like every person in America. Unless you're art history student, like you care way more about Taylor Swift than you do about Picasso. And you care way more about, Lady Gaga that you do about Gogann or someone like that.

You really don't know who Gogh is. And you shouldn't because it's just fucking oil on a wall. It's not a part of your life. You know, part of your life is you listen to music when you work out. You listen to music

that reminds me your girlfriend. You listen to it's so important, but we don't pay for it. And the Wu-Tang idea was like, hey, here's $2 million for the CD that you weren't going to get, even if you spread it out individually amongst only 50,000 people bought Wu-Tang's album before that, paying $10 each. So that's $500,000. So this is four times how much you made in your last CD, but it's just for me. And it's my appreciation of your art and you're making the art.

If nobody else is going to appreciate it, I'll appreciate it. Are you allowed if we got invited over to listen to it? I mean, I think the, I would, I just want to hear it for, to hear it. Is it any good? you know, I don't want to insult any of the guys there in. I want to, the one thing I'll say about is, like, if you listen to Eminem, his first record or first, first big record, you can't put lightning back in a bottle. Like, it's a time and a place and, like, it's special. And how do you force somebody to make that art again? It's impossible. And that's why everybody's first

record or second record is better than any record that come out after. But I love music so much that I wanted to make the statement of, like, you know, we have to support artists. And if you love an artist a lot to the tune of $2 million, you don't have to just buy the record. There's one option. You buy the record for $10. Either buy the record or you don't buy the record. And I think that Nipsey Hustle changed things a bit when he said, live record for $1,000. And if you're really supporting, you're going to buy that.

But you don't have to buy it. And this thing was like to the extreme. And, you know, there are plenty of artists who came to me after. And they're like, hey, you want to, do you want a new XYZ record? Do you want a new ABC record? You know, various famous artists. I'll make a record for you, dude. You can pay a couple million.

We got this. And I think it was like a really funny idea because it's like, well, they're working. You know, people take music for grand like pharma. People like, the music just exists in the ether. And it's just free for me to listen to. And it's like, no, somebody has to make that. Somebody has to go through a lot of pain sometimes to make great music. So you leaning into that whole drama thing was once again, a bit of trollery.

And when you were asked by a reporter, how's the album? and you infamously responded something like 100% none of your business. Yeah, which is one of my favorite clips of all the time. It's funny, you know. It's just like, it's all for the. There was this guy called the NW.E called the Million Dollar Man. And he is Ted Bukyasi's his real name, I think. And he was one of the best bad guys ever.

He was just a rich guy. For some reason, he loved wrestling, which never made sense to me as a kid. But, you know, he's a professional wrestler and a millionaire. And he would come to the ring and just like, you know, make everyone hate him by doing all kinds of like, saying things like that or doing something like that. And there's like an homage to him and Dave Chappelle for the plead the fifth thing. And like you do only live once. It's not a good philosophy for investing.

But in terms of like bucket list, like I bought Kirkobain's credit card, which was like, you know, a useless thing. But I love Nirvana so much. And it was it. How much was that? It wasn't expensive. But do you have it on you? I don't. But Courtney Love reached out to me.

And she's like, you have a crazy bucket list. And I was like, man, I got Courtney love to message me. This is so cool. And it's just like, yeah, you do only love one. So to be afraid and to be worried about like, oh, what's somebody going to think about me or what's like, my father's, you know, just passed away. And it's like, he's not thinking of that. You know, to the extent that he thought about anything in his last days is about his family, he loves them and all the things he did in his life. And if you are in your last days and you say all the things I did in life, I was really careful.

I was really made sure I didn't say anything I shouldn't have said. I mean, like, that's not like anything I think anyone would say is like some great accolade. I was super, super careful about the things I said publicly. You know, like, why? It sounds like me. That's like funniest thing. Thank you guys so much for having me. Dude, I would love to keep going.

Dude, we have to end it. Yeah, no. I could easily have done another three hours. Thank you for coming on. Yeah, that was great. Thank you for helping us out. WTF Media. Down below in the description.

We were using a studios to film. Thank you. absolutely incredible. So all the information is down below in the description. As with yours, really appreciate it. Thank you so much.