Martin Shkreli Reveals How He Made His First $100M

**Martin Shkreli** (0:00)
Yep, PubMed is the government database of all scholastic biomedical literature, so 36 million papers.
If you sit there long enough and you have the passion, you can become a billionaire. It's just a matter of sitting there and sifting and sifting and sifting, which most people don't have the patient's desire or willpower to do. But every single biomedical innovation is logged in on PubMed.

**Sam Parr** (0:30)
What's up, we just had a conversation with Martin Shkreli. If you don't know who he is, you can just Google his name, and you'll find that he is, quote unquote, the most hated man in America, or he is the Pharma Bro. And he's, you know, he touches kind of a bunch of different things. You know, the bingo card for My First Million. He's made hundreds of millions of dollars. He's super controversial, and some people love him, some people hate him. He went to prison for something that he did with his hedge fund, and he comes on here and he tells us a bunch of things. He tells us how he made his first million.
He gave his side of the story on why he bought that drug and raised the price and why, maybe it wasn't so evil as it was portrayed.
Why he hates sort of vanilla CEOs that just only speak in corporate speak and why he refuses to do that.
Why he thinks Mark Cuban is full of shit. He also unveils his new startup in the AI space for the first time ever. So pretty interesting conversation with Martin.
He's one thing, he's not boring. Some people love him, some people hate him. I think you see in this episode, you can see a couple of different sides of him. And so I'm curious to hear what you guys think. I would love for you to put in the comments whether you love this episode, you hated this episode or somewhere in between. And we always commit that on this pod, when we bring people on, we're not saying this is the best person ever or the worst. We just wanna have interesting conversations with interesting people. I wanna get into their mind and find out why they are the way they are, how they think, how they operate. And then you can decide for yourself whether this is somebody you're into or not. So that's this episode, Martin Shkreli. It's about a two hour interview and enjoy. Sam, where do you wanna start? We can either go more on the AI stuff or there's some interesting stuff in your kind of start of your career that I think is kind of fun. Like you worked with Jim Cramer, is that right? When you were 16 years old, you worked for Cramer, the guy who's always yelling on CNBC.
What was that like? What's Cramer like?

**Martin Shkreli** (2:22)
Cramer's great. You know, hedge funds were a different world back then. It was a very, very small asset class, maybe 50 billion, 100 billion totals.
You know, any private partnership is technically kind of a hedge fund, right? If you have outside investors and you're charging them one and 20 or two and 20 and you're shorting stocks and doing exotic stuff, you know, that's a hedge fund, whether you call it that or not. So Warren Buffett had a hedge fund. All the folks had a hedge fund. But at the time, the biggest hedge funds were Galleon Group, SAC Capital, you know, a handful kind of like Tiger, Soros. You know, it was sort of the wild time for the hedge fund industry, kind of, you know, very, very small industry, maybe 30 or 40 or 50 firms of any significance.
And that means like, you know, $100 million or more. And so Cramer is one of those firms. I got to work there, I was very lucky.

**Sam Parr** (3:14)
You were in high school at the time?

**Martin Shkreli** (3:18)
I was sort of in this like weird state of both being a high school dropout, a high school graduate and a high school, you know, continuing, you know, kind of education. It was very weird. I had, I went to this very special school called Hunter where I fulfilled all my degree requirements pretty early. So I was ready sort of graduated in the state's eyes, but I continued to sort of like go to the school and pick up credits and like go to college at the same time. So it was just a weird like mishmash of education and sort of hard to explain.

**Sam Parr** (3:51)
But were you kind of like, you're almost like a class clown of society now. Were you like that in high school or were you just like a straight lace kid at that time?