Episode 899: Martin Shkreli On Becoming A Target, Running A Hedge Fund, Trial, Prison & Making A Comeback

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This kind of led to what I'll call the Al Capone effect around you, which is that the government didn't really care about Al Capone's taxes. They cared about him murdering and killing people. But because they couldn't find the law that he was breaking specifically, they got him on taxes. And so then what happened was, everybody hated you, and I want to understand, why do you think it was, why you? Like you pointed out, there were these other drugs selling for a million dollars. Like, was it the fact that you, why didn't they even know about you?
And then the second thing, of course, was like, how did they then get you? But yeah, the first question is, why did everyone just pick on you? Why were you hated?

**Martin Shkreli** (0:39)
I think I took the PR debacle and kind of ran with it sort of selfishly. In retrospect, I would have done it differently, I think. But the problem with that situation was that, if people are tarring and feathering you, and you just let them do it, they'll eventually stop.
But there is this instinct to fight back. And especially if you grew up in the streets of Brooklyn like me, you don't take punches, you fight back. And especially when, look, if some doctor is upset at me, it's one thing, but Hillary Clinton, in particular, was upset.
And my reaction to that was, well, wait a second, are you, you're basically, the way if our seats were switched, and somebody asked me about this, I would simply say, I cannot change the price of a company's product any more than I could tell Tim Cook to change the price of the iPhone. This is nothing to do with me. I cannot do anything about it. And of course, politicians would not want to say that, but I think that, you know, the implication from Hillary is that she was going to do something about it or could do something about it. And that shocked me. That's when it kind of became, like, you know, obvious to me that, like, you want to break, like, the holy sacrament of business. You want government to be able to control business. And obviously, there are regulated businesses out there. That's not a new idea. But the more government says, actually, the prices you charge for your product, whether, like, imagine Netflix or food or things like that, we're going to make sure that they have, like, a certain cap or certain minimum. And again, utilities are regulated for that reason. But again, prescriptions aren't. And so if the point is, we are going to regulate drugs from now on, the selling of drugs, which have never ever been regulated. Okay, say that. But if you're, you know, the implication was like, oh, this guy's doing something dirty or something like that. It's like, oh, this is not a regulated thing. I can set the price of my medicine to any price I want.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:34)
One penny is a generic for pennies.

**Martin Shkreli** (2:36)
There was a rival that was generic for pennies. There was no generic to our medicine, of course. It would come later. But, you know, so it was just this, like, you know, my refusal to apologize, my refusal to, like, you know, bow to people, my willingness to disrespect, say, Congress or presidential candidates was unusual. A lot of people would not do that for, for, you know, expectation that there would be some repercussion. You know, again, I'm going back to that naive aloof optimism. You know, when you're seeing the Pledge of Allegiance in school and the Star Spangled Banner, which we had to do both and where I grew up, you know, you sort of believe that, you know, oh, that can't happen. You know, we're in this free country. I have freedom of speech, etc.
But then you realize, getting to the second part of your question, like, there's no them in government. You know, there's actual people. So when people say, oh, they got you, you know, I hear this every day, it's actually, you know, it's specific people. And those people act in best interests. It's like reinforcement learning. Like, they have evolved, as we all have, policies that optimize them. And one of the best policies you could do as a prosecutor is get yourself in front of a podium saying you got the bad guy. And whatever you can do to do that, you do that. That's like the golden rule of a prosecutor. Now, to you and me, if we were prosecutors or policemen, our goal is to protect, I think, the community. But after a while, you start thinking, how can I do something for me? And that's a really terrible thing for a public servant to ever ask. And the public servant in question here specifically sought out cases that would elevate their profile. And they specifically, in fact, got profiles written about them. And they would exchange information on cases for those profiles.