Martin Shkreli: Big Pharma's Blind Spot, Betting Against Quantum & What Prison Taught Him

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

He's been called the most hated man in America because he jacked up the cost of a life-saving drug.

Martin Shkreli (0:05)

Raised the price of a life-saving drug 5,000%.

SPEAKER_3 (0:09)

He became the poster child for capitalistic greed.

SPEAKER_4 (0:11)

Martin Shkreli, seven years in prison.

Martin Shkreli (0:14)

We definitely planned on raising the price, that's for sure. You can be prosecuted for not maximizing profit, and you have to do everything in your power to make as much money as possible. And if I'm the enemy for you, good, I'm happy, man. I'm fulfilling some need in your life.

SPEAKER_3 (0:27)

Purchased the only copy of the legendary Wu-Tang Clan album with no immediate plans to play it.

SPEAKER_5 (0:32)

It's not a good record.

Martin Shkreli (0:33)

Ego is the fountainhead of all progress.

SPEAKER_1 (0:36)

Please welcome Martin Shkreli.

SPEAKER_4 (0:43)

Welcome, Martin. Thanks for coming out.

SPEAKER_5 (0:45)

Nice to meet you.

SPEAKER_6 (0:46)

You wore Brad's outfit today. Exactly.

SPEAKER_4 (0:48)

All right. Welcome, Martin. We got so many topics to go into with you, but I want to start with one.

You've basically taken down quantum computing. You said you think that this is a fraud, that people might be going to jail. So two part question. Number one, maybe you could give us your thesis on why this is a fraud or fugazi or fugizi, whatever it is.

SPEAKER_5 (1:17)

Disgraciad.

SPEAKER_4 (1:19)

And then two, your best advice for those CEOs, when they do go to jail, you've got a little experience. Oh, yeah. Best advice in terms of you don't seem to be the kind of guy who would thrive in prison. But from what I understand, Martin, you basically-

SPEAKER_5 (1:36)

You're like a shock collar.

SPEAKER_1 (1:37)

Hold on.

SPEAKER_4 (1:39)

You turned into Lex Luthor and you were running the yard, I understand. So break us through the quantum trade and best practices when you go to Scow.

Martin Shkreli (1:49)

Yes, I have to shout out my wife, Chelsea. So Chelsea, very few people know her, but she's, I think, a big deal in technology. She was one of the first people at OpenAI.

And her father, believe it or not, was one of the first people in NVIDIA. In my family, I was one of the first people in prison. So I thought I'd switch the gene pool, shift it over a little bit. But Chelsea studied at MIT and taught quantum computing with Scott Aaronson, the preeminent guy in quantum. And she got to teach me over many hours, penetrating my thick head what exactly quantum computing even is. And I think a lot of people sort of synonymize it with faster computing, which sounds great. That's really not what it is at all.

And I think the basic point of quantum computing is that there's one algorithm. In fact, the whole field was invented because of Peter Shor's thought experiment. Peter considered this idea that there are kinds of algorithms that you can run faster in different media. That was a revolutionary idea in computing. But it's not really a revolutionary idea for business because, and this is my thesis, of course, because there's one algorithm that runs faster in a quantum computer. And so if you ask somebody, which computer can sort a deck of cards? If anybody knows the famous algorithms book CLRS, the first five pages are about sorting algorithms like bubble sort and merge sort and things like that. And I asked quantum fans, well, which one can sort it faster? And they said, well, of course, the quantum computer. And I said, of course not. That's not the case. The modern quantum computers run at a clock speed of hundreds of hertz or thousands of hertz, not at the gigahertz that we're used to. They're single core. And they're single threaded when it comes to doing a job like a merge sort or something like that. So the only thing it's really good at, which indeed is a magic trick, is going from an exponential time algorithm, which is integer factorization or elliptic curve discrete log problem, which I want to mention a little later. Shout out to the ECDLP problem. The quantum computers can do those in polynomial time, which is remarkable. And to a nerd, that's the greatest, coolest magic trick ever. But to a business person, unless you were in the business of factoring numbers, there's not a whole lot to be excited about here. So the other algorithms that quantum could do are not much faster. So they'll never beat an NVIDIA machine. They'll never beat a million NVIDIA machines. And quantum doesn't have storage. There's no such thing as quantum RAM.