Tucker Carlson - Ep. 36 What happens when you give Hillary Clinton the finger? Ask Martin Shkreli. He did four and a half years in prison. That may be why Sam Bankman-Fried just asked his advice on doing time.
Martin Shkreli—jailed seven years for securities fraud despite no investor losses—defends his $5,000% Daraprim price hike as a political scapegoat, calling trials rigged with a 99.5% conviction rate. Banned from Twitter after Photoshopping Lauren Duca’s husband in satire, he mocks her later "free speech" hypocrisy while Hillary Clinton backed her censorship. Now advising Sam Bankman-Fried on prison survival, Shkreli dismisses "effective altruism" as fraud and frames his sentence as a temporary setback, vowing to rebuild his software empire—all while exposing the justice system’s show-trial nature. [Automatically generated summary]
So this was 2015-2016 that you became almost instantaneously famous when the Hillary campaign decided to use you as a prop for corporate greed.
And so our viewers who've forgotten you or can't recall why they hate you so much might have their memories jogged by the following montage of what it looks like when you're the most unpopular man in the world.
Here it is.
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The so-called most hated man in America is an even bigger jerk than we first thought.
That's what Martin Shkreli's critics are saying about these new secret memos that show he bragged about jacking pill prices for the sick.
So he could get filthy rich.
Whether he's committing securities fraud or trolling people on the internet, Shkreli doesn't think he has to answer to anybody.
The 32-year-old former hedge fund manager became an internet pariah, headlined as the most hated man in America.
So overpaid news anchors thought you made too much money.
You feel like, and I've never defended pharma in my life and I'm not going to now, but I feel like maybe there were facts omitted from that summation of your case.
I was defiant because I couldn't imagine this was happening.
I thought it was all a joke.
When is everybody going to come out and say, oh, just kidding?
Of course, that wasn't the case.
Every time I doubled down, the opposition, if you will, doubled down as well.
It got to this brinksmanship almost of me telling politicians like Hillary and so forth, you can't do anything about this.
It's a sovereign right of a business.
It's not sovereign, but it's very cherished right of a business to be able to choose its price for its product.
And this idea that you could interfere with that right is so anti-American, so against everything I learned in school and in business that it was just surreal that somebody thought they had that kind of power over a company.
Imagine her trying to tell Tim Cook, hey, your iPhone is too expensive.
It would not have been hard to resign, even stage a firing and tell my board, say, you guys can fire me to make this look good so our company can continue and be successful.
And usually that's the solution is off with their head of the CEO. The number two option is a PR campaign of laying low.
You know, you pay a big DC PR firm $300,000 and they just tell you to, you know, don't say a thing.
And that's, you know, this will blow over, the news cycle will change.
And I dug in because, you know, I really felt like a few different dynamics are at play.
The first is that CEOs are not allowed to have personalities anymore.
You know, and I think you see the handful that do, the Elons and, you know, others, you know, they get criticized routinely.
For their personalities.
And what corporate America and boards want to see is a CEO that's, you know, just completely, you know, impervious to attack.
I think that, you know, so when you have a personality that's defiant or something that you want to be, you know, a hill that you're willing to die on, for me, that hill is capitalism.
And it's our American way of life.
And it's this hill that no politician can tell us.
I think that I was a little naive that, you know, that what we learn in school, you know, that when we pledge allegiance and that we will learn about the First Amendment and all this stuff, that it's not connected.
That the courts are not connected to the media and they're not connected to politicians and there's not this web that really does exist.
And part of me feels like, is the web consequential or is it...
Set up ahead of time.
And sometimes it's both.
I think the prosecutor that went after me, for example, he may or may not have gotten an order from somebody, but he may have just felt like, well, this is a guy that I can make a career on.
So just to, not to belabor the point, but for those who don't remember, this is...
Part of the answer to the question, why were you so attacked and so hated?
Because you didn't bow at all.
So you were dragged before Congress to kowtow, but you didn't.
Instead, you did this.
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Well, he has been called the most hated man in America, and his latest actions will likely do nothing to change that reputation.
Forced to appear before a congressional committee on drug pricing, former pharmaceutical CEO Martin Screlly refused to answer any questions, repeatedly invoking his Fifth Amendment rights.
Here's part of a report from NBC's Ann Thompson.
Appearing to smirk.
Are you listening?
And often inattentive.
Yes.
Former Turing Pharmaceutical CEO Martin Scarelli lived up to his bad boy reputation appearing before Congress.
I intend to use the advice of my counsel, not yours.
So just so you know, when a corrupt moron like Elijah Cummings speaks to you, serf, he's speaking not as your peer but as the feudal lord and you have to pay attention or at least pretend to pay attention.
You know, when you try to challenge authority and, you know, that authority expects your subservience, it's a really huge insult because, you know, if Congress doesn't have power, then who does?
And it's really dangerous to sort of like cross that line.
And I was willing to cross it for a few reasons.
The first was...
I was a huge fan of The Chappelle Show, and Chappelle had a skit of what if black people were treated like white people, and he was a drug dealer in the skit, and he goes down to Congress.
And Congress is asking him questions, and he's reading this very defiant, it's hilarious skit.
And I said, this is my one chance in life to be able to reenact this skit.
And my lawyers felt the same way.
They remembered the Godfather scene, I think it's Godfather II, where lawyers come down to Congress and they try to defend.
Michael Corleone.
And so my lawyers, we were all interested in this as an entertainment thing more than anything else.
We already told Congress we're not going to answer any questions.
And in fact, in Congress's own handbook, it is defined as unethical to make a witness come to Congress to only invoke the fifth.
In fact, you're not supposed to bring somebody to do that.
But they bent the rules in this case because it's a great media stunt.
You know, I think that's a foregone conclusion, right?
I mean, at some point, you know, when you have a 99.5% conviction rate, you know, the idea of the burden is on the state to prove the charges.
What burden?
You know, the burden's on the defendant.
And when you have the media indicting you every day, and a media that will refuse to sort of say, well, here's why he thinks he's innocent.
And one of my greatest triumphs, and it sounds very strange, is actually being found not guilty of five out of eight charges, because it's almost impossible.
So the price went up for a short period of time before generics entered the market.
And the free market kind of, if you believe there was a problem, which I don't, the free market fixed the problem.
Lots of medicines are much more expensive than Daraprim.
And I think that's, you asked about misunderstandings earlier.
That's one of the biggest misunderstandings is that people said, well, if you raise something 5,000%, isn't it unaffordable now?
And the answer is, of course not.
It depends on the beginning price.
If something's one cent and you raise it up, 50X, you know, it's still affordable, depending on what the product is.
And so there are drugs in the drug system that are millions of dollars.
And what folks don't understand is for rare diseases, we talk about cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, there are not many people with these diseases.
And in fact, cystic fibrosis makes toxoplasmosis, which is the daraprim disease, seem extremely common.
You know, toxoplasmosis is exquisitely rare.
So you cannot afford to keep a company in business making Daraprim unless you raise the price.
Well, what's really funny is I had a friend named Brent Saunders who ran Allergan.
And he was an investor in my fund.
He was kind of a big shot in pharma.
And he had Botox.
You know, as his flagship product.
And he raised the price of Botox like 9.9% every year, just to avoid a double-digit distinction.
And the price increase on Botox costs the healthcare system hundreds of millions of dollars.
And the same thing at AbbVie for Humira or Johnson& Johnson or Pfizer or Merck.
Their price increases while they're smaller on a percentage basis.
They cost the healthcare system billions of dollars.
And nobody talks about them.
I had to raise the price of a minuscule, tiny medicine that nobody takes.
And nobody mentioned that in the media.
But to keep that medicine on the shelves, because I've done this before where a medicine that sells very little, less than a million dollars, a couple million dollars, the big pharma guys don't want to make that medicine.
They want to get rid of it.
And the only way that that medicine can stay reliably on the shelves is if it merits making.
So one thing I didn't know about you until we had dinner last night was that you worked while you were in high school, at Hunter College High School, probably the top public high school in New York City.
And part of the reason he was right is I was sort of enjoying like...
You know, if you're a cat playing with a mouse or something like that, in this case, I think both of us thought we were cats playing with mice, me and the media and the media and me, I sort of felt like, why take this seriously?
If they're not going to engage on my terms...
Why not just flip everybody off, call them names, disregard them?
Well, you know, I had a fund from like three or four companies ago.
And in the hedge fund business, it's, to be frank, it's kind of an awful business.
And it's a business that almost like, I think half of all top hedge funds have basically been closed down for legal reasons.
Many hedge fund managers have gone to prison.
It's a dangerous job.
Because you are the symbolism of wealth.
You are literally not making any product.
You are taking information and manpower and converting some pile of money into a bigger pile of money.
And it's really, if there's anything in life that symbolizes greed and excess, and I don't necessarily believe this, but from the outside perspective, hedge funds are it.
It's not hard to sort of point a finger at hedge funds and say, there's some fraud here or there's some transaction that I didn't like that wasn't disclosed properly.
And this is why hedge funds are like half compliance departments these days.
But they don't even care about the return anymore.
They care about the compliance because it's such a dangerous business.
So they found some irregularities in my old hedge funds.
None of my investors ever lost a dime.
In fact, they made quite a bit.
In fact, one of my investors said he made about 30%, 40% a year.
Investing in my hedge fund.
It was the second best hedge fund he ever invested in his life.
And he'd been a hedge fund investor for 20 years.
And he invested with Soros and some of the best hedge funds ever.
And while the government normally never pursues a case like that, they pursue cases where somebody opens their pockets and says, look, I gave this guy a million bucks.
I think that if you are a bad guy in the newspaper, that for whatever reason, AGs or the Department of Justice says, the people want to see this guy go down.
And we've got a whole big book of laws that we can apply.
And my calculation was 300 months or something like that plus.
You know, the judges pared that down to sort of say, okay, that's probably not what he deserves, but they would have been well within their right to do so.
I think they should have—there's a term that they use called prosecutorial discretion.
And they said the weight of the government is so heavy, and that burden of proof that we learn in school that, oh, it's the government's burden, it's not a burden.
You know, it's a very easy thing to prosecute somebody.
It's 99.5% conviction.
So for them to put their finger on the scale and say, you're done and you're removed from society, it's very easy.
I happened to draw the best judge in that courtroom.
And it was like just a blessing, a lucky draw of a judge that happened to be very sympathetic and known for short sentences.
But as you start to look around, what the prison population is shifting towards is more political crime, more white collar crime, more things that aren't really crimes.
It was about if I can get a sample of her hair, I can determine through DNA analysis, one of my expertises, that she may or may not be a lizard person, which is a completely, you know, it's a joke, obviously.
You know, she's a human being.
But, you know...
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Well, there's some debate, but I mean, but it was a joke.
That person who does a lot of takedowns, that was their shtick.
They write these big takedown pieces of, this person's awful.
Well, I feel bad for that person, actually.
I'm Catholic.
And I look at that person and say, This is a sad existence.
And that person actually ended up, over the years, becoming depressed and suicidal and said, I don't want to live like this, tearing people down for a living.
Really?
Yeah, it was fascinating to see.
My girlfriend, who's the reporter who covered my case, sent me in documents that… This guy was literally on Twitter saying, I'm suicidal.
I want to take my own life.
And I look back and I said, those things aren't an accident.
I mean, if you spend your life digging up dirt on people, trying to ruin their lives, and, you know, it must be a miserable existence.
But if you're a real entrepreneur, jail is nothing.
You know, the ups and downs of your own company, you know, surviving and fighting and a customer wants to pull out or there's going to be a hit piece on you in Bloomberg or John is leaving to go to a competitor.
This stuff will make your stomach turn.
And jail is like a break from reality.
You know, it's a four years where you're just on the bench.
You know, I of course didn't know what was going to happen, but I talked to enough people who said, you know, it's the kind of place where if you want to fight, you'll find a fight.
And if you want to be cool, you'll be cool.
And I think the number one thing you don't want to be in prison is, I learned this on the spot, is you don't want to be an informant and you don't want to be a child sex offender.
Those are the two big kind of red flags.
And most of the negative attention kind of goes to those two people.
As somebody who went to trial, which almost nobody does because it's a foregone conclusion what the verdict is.
You're guilty.
I mean, there's nobody that's found innocent.
And again, my pride for the five charges that was found not guilty of means that the US government made a huge flagrant error that they accused me of five crimes that I didn't do.
And a jury of my peers determined that that was true.
And I take a huge amount of pride in that.
But anyway, You know, jail is not nearly as a violent place as you might imagine.
People just want to go home.
It's warehouses of human beings that, you know, by far and large, you know, probably have gotten over-sentenced for what they've done.
You know, I'm not saying that prison shouldn't exist.
It should.
It's necessary.
But, you know, it's fairly inhumane, you know, in my opinion.
And the idea that all these white-collar folks should get 20 years or 30 years or 40 years, I think it's wrong.
I did it with a smile on my face.
But it's not something that I think is really great or fair for a lot of folks.
But you have to, like I said, growing up in a bad neighborhood in New York, fighting for relevance and success on Wall Street, starting a company, having all the...
Successes and setbacks of that, it pales in comparison.
I mean, jail is, you know, you're sitting around and reading.
You know, it's not something where… How much did you read?
I read hundreds of books in prison.
Yeah, it was… Honestly, you know, there's a Twilight… The old show… Twilight Zone?
The Twilight Zone.
There's a skit called Time Enough Forever or something like that.
And the guy goes down to the basement in the library.
And when he comes up, there's a nuclear bomb.
And the whole world's dead but him.
He was the only guy in a fallout shelter.
And he's in the library and he says, this is the greatest thing ever because I can read for the rest of my life and no one will ever bother me.
And that's happened to him.
And so I think that there's a paradox of if you took your cell phone away and said, you can't have that.
And then you took all the other kind of BS that you have to do all day, whether it's meetings or should we go to this restaurant or that restaurant or can I get an Uber or this, you have none of that.
You wipe your slate clean and here's just a stack of books.
It's actually awesome.
There are bad parts of prison.
It's not fun being there.
But if you just kind of zoom in on that, there's a real big civil lining there.
You might read a business book to somehow get ahead in business, but to read a fiction book or a history book or something like that that's really good stuff, there's no time in that for modern society.
I mean, we look at TikTok for three seconds and the company's monetizing and studying how can we get them to four?
So the idea of you reading a book for just sitting there in a lazy chair reading a book for hours and hours, it doesn't compute with modern reality.
I looked around at guys who dropped out of college or dropped out of high school or sometimes middle school and were given a gun and said, go sell drugs.
And I said, you know, am I like one of these guys?
Does this make sense to me?
And I think that humility helped a lot, you know, to say, well, you know, we all kind of have this common denominator of, you know, we pissed somebody off and we did something wrong and we're in here.
And of course, I felt like I didn't do anything wrong.
I pled not guilty.
I went to trial.
I fought and fought and fought.
I appealed, appealed, appealed.
And I still believe, you know, I'm not guilty.
But, you know, I kind of just realized that, again, Some people get hit by cars.
Some people die of rare diseases.
I met some of the worst, sickest people in the world in pharma and tried to make medicine for them.
And raising prices on drugs is one way to afford the ability to do that.
A lot of people said, why don't you just go to Wall Street?
Well, I know a lot about that and it's not that easy.
There's another set of masters you have to kiss the ring to if you want to do that.
And a lot of that's about what school did you go to and all the check boxes that you have to check.
And I didn't check a lot of those boxes.
So I needed to do it the old-fashioned way, which is revenue and profits, which is a good way to run a business.
And the other guys get to raise money at any valuation, any amount of money, and that's sort of a lottery ticket.
I didn't want my company to be a lottery ticket.
I wanted it to be a substantive company that had products.
Costs and earnings.
So anyway, I think I'm very lucky.
I think a lot of people have this woe is me attitude at every wrong thing that happens to them.
And I think that life's tough.
You've got to fight.
And it's really just an attitude that I've had since I was a little kid.
If you're going to be a crybaby about every little bad thing that happens to you, then you're going to be a miserable person.
Silver lining every time, you can end up being actually a terribly happy person.
I think one of the things the media hated the most about me and the government is that they couldn't get me down.
No matter what they could do, throw at me, it was, okay, you know, life goes on, you know, I'll turn the page, you know, and I think that That bravery and that courage is something that, again, turned out to be a blessing that coming out of prison, I was inundated with messages and emails from some of the biggest business people in the country saying, we stand by you, we support you for being one of the few guys to not cave in the face of all that adversity.
He's a young entrepreneur who romanced the Clintons, romanced the world.
He is friends with Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton.
He was a big donor of Democrats.
And he was also a guy at a very young age who had a very big company.
And I know what that's like.
And he had a much bigger company, 10 times bigger than mine, but not 1,000 times bigger.
We're in the same universe.
And he was just kicking butt.
He was on the cover of Forbes and was all a lie.
And he actually didn't succeed at all, which is ironic.
He represented this group called Effective Altruism, which has sort of took Silicon Valley by storm.
And me and a few other people created a countergroup called Effective Accelerationism, where we kind of said, we're the diametrical opposite of you guys, and you guys are going to ruin our country if you keep sort of talking about what you're talking about.
And EA, Effective Altruism, has basically died with Sam.
You know, he was laid bare as a fraud, and I think that whole movement has been laid bare as a fraud.
The penitentiary is where- People get raped, killed, you know, where you have to become a white supremacist, where, you know, that kind of world is a very dark world.
But that's for people who get life sentences or things like that.