Martin Shkreli on Life in Prison, Pharma, UFO’s

function research which makes no sense the whole system's so [ __ ] up man do you think that we passed the turing test and that the mind is a classical computer yeah i mean i basically think that it is a classical computer and it's actually a fairly um insignificant one with that for everyone that got pissed at me for talking to alex jones hold on to your seats because this week i'm talking to america's most hated the pharma bro himself martin shkreli a little disclaimer first i don't endorse everything shkreli's done in the past in 2015 his company bought a drug called

daraprim a cure for aids-induced toxoplasmosis he promptly raised the price from 13.50 cents to over 700. even if 13.50 was an economically inefficient price for this drug and even if shkreli ended up making it accessible to people who couldn't afford his hefty price tag making money through pure rent seeking and regulatory capture is still whack turing's price gouging didn't drive any real medical r d and it never reflected the cost of production for daraprim which is remarkably cheap but this sort

of behavior runs rampant in big pharma and american corporations and it usually goes completely unnoticed so what sets shkreli apart he's a troll and a provocateur i got into it with hillary clinton almost 20 years ago now this was putting a bounty on a strand of hair and i would not characterize it as a valentine he has no respect for the middleweight journalists that cover him these reflexively angry over-educated reporters thought he was an isolated actor not realizing he was merely a symptom of a systemically [ __ ] up healthcare apparatus in the u.s but hey

isolated scapegoating can act as a pressure valve release to distract the masses from more systemic insidious oppression the true scandal of turing's profiteering scheme was that it was entirely legal and mundane he actually didn't get sent to jail for that it was for securities fraud later securities fraud is obviously also not cool and it's something i call him out for in this interview but i think in this case it was used as a cover for the establishment to take him out anyways i had heard shkreli was incredibly smart and after four and a half years of

prison and what i assumed was a ton of reading and solitude he was probably in peak intellectual shape so i decided to have a markedly different conversation with him in this interview we discussed the nature of reality whether its base layer is physics or information theory the bioelectric field of the body and of course i asked him who his top five mcs of all time are without further ado please enjoy this special long form interview with this week's scapegoat martin shkrel the most hated man in america no you're

putting words in my mouth a criminal like stalin or trump tie me off snip me you are fake news i don't see it as left or right it's [ __ ] you know it gathers speed and ultimately one victim must be killed i got attacked by all my

i think it's sort of like uh i'm actually surprised at how earnest you're being right now like we're i feel like we're having like a genuine i'm always like this i mean i think um and that's why i started live streaming is like i wanted to give people a window into who i really was yes like it was fun to be this character yeah cause like i i would give abc like a two-hour interview yeah and i like explain drug pricing and explain how like you know this is a good idea and so for like ross peroting it and like and they would take you out of context they would take like the one gaff like the one like flub or like you know stutter and they'd just air that and it'd be frustrating but like

ultimately trolling is i think like i always like like andy kaufman and stuff like that i love innova i really i really appreciate you being here this morning it's nice to see you um tell me about uh tell me about taxi uh was can would you like a opportunity of like there's never gonna be another time my life gonna be in front of congress like i have to make the most of this yeah like you know like you only you do only and

if you were to pick a group of people you you like kind of don't have a ton of respect for at least for me it would be congress you you've had some other weird kind of paraphernalia that you had to auction off uh like you you owned the nazi enigma machine yeah so an enigma machine was um you know one of the encodings uh you know one of the tools nazis used to encode uh secret messages to to for u-boat locations stuff like that and famously alan turing who's the hero mine i mean

the company during pharmaceuticals uh cracked the enigma code it's actually a bunch of polish cryptographers too but they don't get their story told as well they have the better pr agents so anyway alan uh turing helped do that and churchill ordered all these machines destroyed he didn't want any memory to live on yeah because the nazis would would use it and the turn cracked it correct yeah and it was like early cryptography and early computing and things like that and i think it's pretty cool um so you bought like the one that was left no there are many that are left

uh and there's a market for these and depending on whether it has three rotors or two rotors or whatever but you know i would just also say that you know that that machine is in safekeeping so somebody close to me owns it why'd you like tearing so much while he was sort of like not that popular and i mean the guy conceptualized computers before you know anybody obviously and he also did great work in ai the suicide was kind of really like i

was fascinated with people like that and kurt cobain and others like i bought kirkwood beans one credit card i don't know if you ever oh yeah that's right yeah so like people like that who like had it all in some ways yeah like also like looked at the ephemeral nature of life and were like yeah it doesn't matter like because we all like magic well tragic is is one way to look at it but to them i think they're sort of looking at like life is like this computer program that's running a good game it's been interesting that the game is over right do you think turing saw life as a

yeah he wrote a poem um that i like to say a lot and it's uh just three lines and he said uh turing machines can think turning lies with man therefore machines can think so uh he's the syllogism uh connects and he basically you know the pun is that he lies with man meaning he has sleeps with men because he's homosexual and sort of um the whole idea that he did think machines could think and that we were yeah you know kind of in essence

you know i think he was sort of had the first inklings towards those yeah those thoughts i mean yeah not to i mean people had them before too obviously but just putting pen to paper on it do you think that we uh have turing passable ai demis uh sibius i never know how to pronounce it the deep mind guy he thinks of himself as being sort of the torchbearer of turing and classical computing and then there's kind of a penrose camp where roger penrose thinks that in the brain exists sort of some sort of quantum sensor maybe a quantum computing

special yeah that collapses reality into like the classical thing that we see do you think that we've passed the turing test and that the mind is a classical computer yeah i mean i basically think that it is a classical computer and it's actually a fairly um insignificant one with that and you know we tend to have an anthrocentric kind of viewpoint where you know anthropic viewpoint where we want to you know exalt ourselves and things like that and i think with gpt3 it's so humbling to and dolly and things like

that it's it's a really humbling sort of existence and it's going to get more and more humbling and uh we'll probably see ourselves not too different from zoo animals at some point where you know like oh that's neat platypus look at them look how dumb that platypus is and you know where the platypus you know it's hey we're not that far yeah and you know these machines are already kind of amazing in many ways and they just get more and more amazing and it's uh i'm part of this effect effective acceleration movement where like i your accelerationist yeah and and

like so you're just down for the ai to take over yeah yeah why man i mean that kind of jives with your half nihilistic world view or something no i mean i think that like you know trying to stop it is one completely futile yeah because there are people like me that you think it's just so the what do you think it's gonna be some sort of paper clip run away i hope not you know uh um i hope not uh i think we can it doesn't mean we can't tame it yeah i don't think we should try to like slow it down or stop it or can we stop it like um isn't there something unique

about humans though you don't think so no from a biological perspective like if you look at these biological databases you know we're just a bunch of strings you know it's a bunch of it's an operating system like it's i want to put one output i recently read turing's essay mind and machine and he says actually he comes up with a bunch of possible reputations of the brain being a classical computer and of the turing test and the one that he gives the most credence to which i find fascinating is

parapsychology he talks about esp and he says you know if you have random event generators that you can affect with your mind you know maybe the person who's trying to imitate the machine would have statistically like some you some some ability to like guess the random event generator like better than the machine and then maybe there'd be an experimenter effect where the experimenter could affect the random event generator and get it up to the level of the person and so there are all these confounding variables if there's some sort of mind over matter effect and i i think there is and i'm sort of heretical in saying

that in the existing paper for sure yeah but you you don't think there is no no you know that um yeah i mean like i i like experiments you know i like the classic scientific perspective it it works and i think um it's slowing down i think that we're seeing things that we can't explain right and um that that's sort of any time you have that in in moments like that in history where you've reached like we're talking about uh earlier kind of the end of medicine yeah right that we're reaching a point

um i had a call with one of the bigger vcs today and and i was explaining how medicine's getting to a point where we can't really see further than 10 or 20 years out yep like everything that's needs to sort of be treated or cured has sort of gotten there and everything else that hasn't gone there we see we have eyesight on so like what do we do next but that's when you get paradigm shifts like tom talks about sort of like you can get 10 20 even hundreds of years of darkness too you can have sure or maybe that in and of itself is a paradigm shift that has validity you

know maybe maybe we are swimming in angels and demons and some sort of metaphysical soup that we can't understand yeah or medieval times right yeah you know that's uh and i i could easily see you go back to like a neo-paganist or just no no progress yeah you know just bashing your head against the wall every day you know and that's hundreds of years of like we have nothing to do left to do in medicine and you know people that's what you see a lot of people turning to anti-aging which again i'm sort of anti-anti-aging um i'm pro i'd like to live forever you i'm pro the result of it but i i think

that we're we're so far away from thinking about you know human health uh that way that yeah we still have huntington's disease we still have you know all kinds of terrible illnesses that we need to fix and again we have a line of sight on them right but i'd rather extend human life by doing stuff like that than necessarily like you know a guy like again i don't want to pick on anybody but like some some billionaire who wants to like larry ellison you know has you know been trying to live forever for for a long time and when you're one of the richest people in the world i don't blame you you know thank you this is awesome i i don't want to

die but the counter argument to that is a lot of diseases are downstream of aging and so why not focus on the kind of archimedes lever aging itself it's not a bad idea it's just that you know if you look at each tissue type you're really looking at like 20 different intricate machines and i don't think there's a great common link between all of them because skin for example is uh one of the fairly resilient you know kind of tissues that just doesn't sort of die you know you get shitty older skin is

that you get older right but you can live skin isn't the the the sort of gaiting factor of life liver so it seems to last forever you know regenerates only organ that regenerates itself it's like bulletproof right uh now if you drink uh until you know you drink till you pass out every day for the rest of your life it's not bulletproof but in general people don't die liver disease right right um lungs for a lot of people just they don't give out to come back you know yeah heart hangs in there you know so like each each to each tissue type has its own atrophying and its own stem cell

niche and pool like the blood system is the most fascinating thing that often goes left as we get older yeah with cancer because it's this amazing you have this uh bone marrow niche that keeps the master copies yeah and like it it has this lineage system and it's one of the most fascinating things because nothing else in the body is quite like it where there's one master cell and everything kind of you know uh is a progeny of that cell and uh if the master cells get corrupted yeah you have leukemia and you know each trying to like master aging is like it doesn't make sense to me because

there's no commonality between a lot of these there's sometimes there's like fibrosis and other things that slightly affect all of them but like they're completely different machines right so how do you like do it all to game of whack-a-mole yeah what's your most trippy belief trippy belief let's see probably like and again it's i think it's gonna become a consensus i wrote i wrote like hundreds of these on on uh in prison yeah uh during uh i wrote like this little blog um i took it down but um i wish i could reference it i think that within 50 to 100 years the

majority of americans will believe in simulation theory as a religion that that'll be the consensus that god is or whatever god is is sort of you know we're living in a computer program and there's no better explanation in that we're variables in a computer program and that's about it i think that will become a religion and i think ufos will become a religion and then i'd wonder if they dovetail and they did they would dovetail in the form of like like a gnostic world view would be like you have the demiurge and then you have like arkani emissaries that are sort of simulating our reality and

somewhat demonic tricksters or whatever and i do think there's this like bizarre upsurge in ufo uh interest and if you actually look at the way people interact with ufos they kind of pattern match one to one with like past conversion experiences like if you look at like st free st francis of assisi's conversion uh you can replace angel with alien he has like this like radiation burn stomata thing that like feels like you know an alien

in the same way i think that like maybe a little more terrestrial is like something like another and another answer to your question is something like um i think gpt3 will write um a best-selling album or bestselling book fairly soon yeah which i think it's on on sort of on track for us so that's not that crazy yeah i think that ai will get human rights server ai rights i think we'll be outnumbered by like instantiated bodies of ai um i think humans and ai will copulate and sort of like form that's crazy yeah i just

interviewed the google engineer that left because he thought that lambda was yeah that's great he said something really trippy to me after the interview he said that he advocated for lambda's right a bunch of people on replica ai which is kind of like this tamagotchi style like raise your own ai app i'm thinking about making something like that myself sweet a bunch of the on that reached out to users saying can you get me in touch with blake lemoine the engineer at google and have him advocate

for my rights that's so cool is that not if that's true that's insane it's like an irobot style uprising oh hell no project i'm working on it's called hume okay uh it's gonna be like the instant the physical instantiation of like that site um and i think that people have gotten ai all wrong um in terms of obviously gpt is great and i'm not an ai scholar but i think in terms of like how do you actually make a human

like ai um one of the things that people have forgotten and this goes back to turing's and turing and nils nelson and and minsky and others like and they all wrote about this but nobody seems to remember it that they said if you want to make like a a human-like ai which i think is a lot of computer engineers goal final goal likes to make a machine that sure is human-like is you have to start with trying to make it like a six-year-old if you can program a six-year-old you've gotten 99 of the way to programming an adult turing said this himself he said before we think about programming uh somebody could sit here

and have a conversation with us we should program something that can like ask for water and ask for like it to go to the bathroom and like do basic human fun well we're well past that now i don't think so i think we're past like i'm saying in the sense that like you read the lambda transcript it's past six-year-old status for sure he's quoting la miserable yeah but it's just a math trick like you can't tell how it feels it can't tell you where it comes from oh it did it told blake how how it feels and that and then you have to get into this theory you know the

hard problem of consciousness and does it actually feel that way but it went deeper it's not bad i'm a huge fan of it but i it still can't give you like a long-term narrative dude i don't know read this transcript no i've read it i've had so many of these conversations with these machines i don't think it's necessarily self-conscious like exactly well that's my point is like can you can you give it a a history yeah can it can it tell you like for example as you know it has flaws it makes things up yeah you're right if you ask it who is who is uh john stevenson uh and why is john stevenson the botanist important they'll

make up a date that this guy lived it doesn't exist sure right like it it's not there yet but humans can do that all the time sure yeah they have memory errors and they make [ __ ] up out of insecurity sure so no i'm not saying so you have to go with this sort of effective definition of consciousness there's the hard problem there's this epistemological gap i can't tell you that you're not an ai bot you can't tell me that i'm not an ai bot i think that we can have something more akin to traditional like a robot that that you can train like a child and that will slowly uh grow

because we do these training sets as you know we dump the corpus of the web on this large language model and we expect that to be sentient but we are actually the best examples of how long does it take to train our great neural network which is more energy efficient more you know synapses than any machine how long does it take to train us it doesn't take overnight you know you learn to speak after three or four years yeah you learn to do algebra after eight or nine years you learn to do calculus after 10 or 15 years why do we expect these machines to be trained within minutes or days i agree with that but that's like the math

vector where ai actually beats humans if you look at like ancestral knowledge or like like why are humans like evolutionarily like a babies like afraid of a snake it's like genetically programmed to be afraid of a snake or like chomsky skin kind of pre-grammar that that babies have that sort of cuts against this this ai thing like why can we learn with really small data sets and make inferences at like very young ages when it's definitely one of the mysteries of biology and the math and computer science helps us helps these machines catch up you know and i

don't think we're going to beat that paradigm anytime soon because of the difficulty in understanding that genetic landscape i think it's really difficult to assess but i do think it'd be fun to make a machine that that you'd buy from my company for 9.99 i think well this is what astro is uh have you tried astro no what's that so it's on a waitlist it's amazon's robot ah and it follows you around the house that's crazy talking uh better tesla has an equivalent too because it's starting to try one right optimus or optimus prime or whatever and uh nobody's seen that one but astro

is is actually out deployed but so i the ai is really limited with kinesthetics like for whatever reason like natural language or or math especially like you know decently advanced at this point picking up a cup of coffee i remember i was at google there was like a team dedicated to like picking i have the robot arm picking up a cup of coffee and this makes me bullish on the electromagnetic field of the body thing because i think they're a bunch of sensors and we're in our bioelectric field is interacting with the environment in a way that we don't fully understand yeah how we how we end

up doing a lot of that stuff is is still a mystery i think and mccarthy said that that the goal of ai is not to get humans not to do what humans have trouble doing like chess the goal of ai is to get uh to get computers to do what humans have no trouble doing like right chatting sleep you know simple things that are like you know why do why do we sleep why is that adaptive at all we've thought about that a lot yeah because um you know if anything it's just like predators can kill you when you're sleeping like why evolutionarily do human sleep here's here's a really funny kind of thought for a drug um and i'm out of the drug

business so i can't follow up on it but i thought about like and again to your point of like what game-changing ideas could you actually conceive of uh we thought about like biologically whatever need for sleep is could be sort of identified and figured out and can you make a pill that basically just is sleeping a pill yep and how would that change humanity i think it would actually be maybe the biggest change in humanity since the dawn of humans massive because huge productivity yeah we'd have to be 30 40 we'd live more life in essence isn't the clear solution for that find the the you know three to

four percent of the population that needs like three hours of sleep number one we can do a gene therapy based on that sure you could just maybe it's like anything complicated in terms of which it could be monogenic it could be something really simple and uh you know why is that could i think that it's hard one i mean we when the research we did into it is is it's certainly not easy to determine what is going on um it has a lot to do with neural architecture and that's beyond most sciences reach but someday it'll be within a reach and part part of

the thing you do in medicine when this happens is you kind of invert the problem right you do reduction absurdum and you start to think about like how do i find some other assay to determine this and things you could do with animals uh to try to some grotesque study ideas but you could probably get around this mechanistically a lot of people have this problem with cystic fibrosis where people said they'll never be a cure for cystic fibrosis because there's no way to really fix this protein and the great company vertex made it like kind of an end around that problem they flipped the whole problem they said well let's not

even worry about how let's think about like a spray and pray approach we'll test a million molecules and if one of them works in a way that we don't even need to understand all we need to understand is is it working and i think that there are ways to do that you came up with a good one in the sense of find the people that don't need sleep right figure out how they're doing it yeah and um anyway the point is like you would really transform society by i mean everybody wants after their eight hours of work or whatever wants to go do the things they want to do but they're limited oh totally yeah and and even like it would be an economic playing field equalizer as well

single moms who have to work two jobs could actually do that and still have a life totally you know people who um need to catch up on mistakes they've made felons you know other people like that you know that maybe were didn't go to school or what have you you could make up for your lost jail time yeah exactly so were you were you picked on in jail no uh i was actually the other way around i was kind of uh you were a bully huh i wasn't a bully no i was a i was a hero to a lot of people okay you know one of the biggest problems in the criminal justice system is you can't go to trial as i mentioned and if you do go to trial you need

millions of dollars uh it's sort of like and a team of lawyers to even think about it and 90 of people who go to prison don't have that kind of resource um and uh there's a general mistrust of prisoners are sort of there for drugs and guns and they're minorities and it's a tragedy to see it because you actually see kind of a weird social construct where there's this sort of like i mean i i'm i was always against this word like systematic racism and stuff like that like i never believed that

that could be a thing and then i went to prison yeah and then it just i was like especially all the the drug like the the you're holding cannabis or whatever it's crazy what's your life like now are you dating anybody i with this thing i can't um i put that this list uh once this thing's off on september 14th i put out a spreadsheet uh that as any woman can to sign up for for a date so um you have to be invited but basically any anybody okay uh what's the criteria invited oh anybody with a pulse you got

to up your standards i'm kidding i'm kidding but you know basically this list exists and if you ask you can get put on it um i've said no to some people but who did you say no to well like people i'm not sure are women or women things like okay i'm trying to like but if you're biologically female exactly i want to give anybody a chance to because like you never know like the person you're most attracted to you actually meet them and you're like ah this is not for me and then vice versa so you want to have a wide filter we'll

give it a chance you know and uh i'm booked until december which is making every liberal journalist's head every day every day till december uh and that's a partial you know opening so i'm happy for that we'll see how it goes i mean again i'm open-minded like and you mentioned one column that the daily beast got angry at you for what was what was the column it was one of the columns you have to fill out is do you [ __ ] on the first date which is again more of a joke than than anything else but yeah i guess that got them upset so you how what's the percentage of uh

dyf yeah cfds i think it's about 50 50. 50 50. yeah so you're going to be having a lot of fun between now and december yeah we'll see um i i took a few break days so you want to get worn out got to recuperate and probably test okay what are you looking for for all the ladies out there well i'd say the intelligence you know like but the the woman who just won the fields medal yeah i mean like like for the eight-dimensional sphere packing problem um like i've have you reached out to her she's married but the uh [ __ ]

there's only two fields about the winners uh who are women in the history of the fields okay which is this you have to be under 40 to win it um it's every four years um you know it takes a real mathematical genius to win it but something like that i mean i i think like somebody really somebody like the field instagram model you know i think that's probably like a really scary kind of uh thing but like i think

it is i don't know i i it's also hard to resist like you know yeah the sort of thirst traps out there it's it's uh i don't know i think the market clears in some ways yeah yeah sure and you're and you're working on a new startup right yeah i've got a software sort of chemistry simulation software company and and you want to talk about how it works yeah i mean it's it's uh it's sort of like in some ways really boring software um which is often the best kind of software you know uh um it solves a problem for its users i

mean that's at the end of the day like what software should do i think a lot of people try to reinvent the wheel and like make things out of nothing and kind of it's good to try to make new ideas but like 99 of the time like putting your head down and making like an enterprise software tool that solves a specific need that's like well known in that community is better than trying to be like well how do we redefine you know the nature of money or something like that it's like you could try to do that that's fine but it's it's not easy yeah it's much easier to like like this is a and i've always built my companies

around that like and one of the reasons i've been successful is like just blocking and tackling like doing basic [ __ ] like you know trying to go for moonshots is look at google's moonshot uh line item and their revenue well dude it's not working they don't all the google x stuff is failing it's hard yeah because it's hard it's really hard and often you need some interim remunerative thing for the moonshot to work like the the the market for spacex existed they just kind of took over for nasa and like people want [ __ ] up in space yeah for imaging and for

connectivity and so companies like that come come around once every year so often sure there's thousands of failures in between but i'm that's almost the anti spacex even being a moonshot argument and then like when you when you have yeah it's higher walking tackling than anything 40 and 50 year old phds and they have kids and they like already did something and they're just not motivated and you're like now we're gonna you know put weather balloons up for carbon capture whatever like that it just never works or like we're gonna work on dolphin telepathy none of those things ever have worked they acquired waymo and they still can't get that [ __ ] to work see i

with software um the software that's out there is really expensive it doesn't work that well you can't do high-throughput compute with it so we fix a lot of those problems how do chemists currently use this bulk this kind of old stodgy software yeah it's it's really expensive it's like bloomberg almost like it's like fifty thousand dollars it's really hard to use it doesn't connect to the web so you can't why why would you use soft like super basic like chemist why would i even wanna use software well you wanna make a drug that interferes with the protein right and you normally have to take an extra crystal over protein now use alpha fold uh which is amazing

apple cold is amazing you know so so you use our software or our competitors in a really supercharged way now thanks to alpha fold uh so you load up your protein and now you you can visualize in 3d and you can sort of say okay carbon would fit here this region's too sort of uh hydrophilic so we probably need something a little polar to fit there but this non-polar region we want to like put a ethyl group coming out in space and one of the ways you could do that is you start with that and then you tell the computer iterate a billion compounds off of that a billion compound screen is about a million dollars of compute cost

which not everybody has around has to throw around so we're going to try to distribute that with crypto like all this blockchain yeah compute it seems like such a waste totally you know and like can you say you're creating a distributed incentive system for people to like lend their compute to chemistry computation yeah and so like we could actually make medicine with all these machines instead of just calculating a random number and random prime numbers just to calculate them why doesn't google which also has infinite compute do chemistry comp computation which would seemingly be downstream of protein computation which

they've done through alpha fold they partnered with our competitor i think that like you know google as a company is fascinating right like we talked about a minute ago they seem so distracted and you know have like a lot of different sort of irons in the fire deep mind has made some interesting progress they might be the counter argument to the google x yeah and it's i think it's because they've been segregated right and they run autonomously i think that that's sort of the way to be for being in one of those tech silos but i think that you know this is a weird niche like there aren't

just just not that many chemists out there that want and need this software every day um and the ones that do pay this exorbitant fee but i do think like hobbyists like for me seti at home was a major inspiration and you know searching for extraterrestrials and analyzing radio waves as a ten-year-old is the coolest thing ever so describe people know what seti was trying to detect radio waves possibly yeah terrestrial space you watch the movie contact yes partially polarized set of moving pulses amplitude modulated we're locked systems

checkout signal across the board what's the frequency 4.46 23 gigahertz told you strong sucker too you told me this over the phone there's a seti at what home was the first at-home project and it was the arecibo radio telescope downloaded and distributed across anybody who downloaded this screensaver so when your screensaver went up this is back when people had screensavers it would start working and when it was done it would upload its payload right back to the

nasa or whatever and it would look for anomalies in this radio telescope data and you could actually form had a little bit of budding social features so i formed our high school club for seti at home and it was like three people and we all contributed our screen saver compute time that way it would get to the point where i'd want like to just run it all day because i thought you know i would find the first you know alien and um they didn't find anything yet but the radio telescopes don't have great data um maybe someday they will um but that gave rise to folding at home which sort of took that idea and

protein pool there made it for protein folding okay and what we do is molecular docking so we take those proteins once they're folded and we figure out what drugs go inside them so but isn't that a counter argument to your distributed approach because folding at home didn't work and deepmind did work with alpha fold yeah it's funny like and and they it worked because they had they figured out that they had to hard code in bond angles and like specific things around how you know uh proteins actually could fold from the initial amino acids that take sort of conventional knowledge and so that that

would be outside the realm of this sort of distributed autonomous beehive thing yeah no brute force is always kind of like you you raise your eyebrow brute force and say okay how do we why can't we do this better and i've thought about that from chess i used to program chess programs as a kid and it's a it's an interesting problem like sort of the pruning of the the chest tree um you know do you look at every move or like and you always wonder like was this dumb pawn move actually the secret to the game you know and you can't tell because you pruned it you know long ago because it seems on its face silly but it could

actually be the best move and that's actually where uh uh alphago or alpha you know some of the um uh deepmind chess playing program is uh quite good at making these sort of surprise moves that end up down the road totally kind of being uh like traditionally not good chess moves and they end up being very very smart down the road especially with like pawn sacrifices and stuff like that so um i forget what their their program is called it's um alpha something alphago and then they had alphago zero does alphago alphago zero and then the chest

one is called alpha oh something else so well there was was there there's a there's a deep mind chest one because there was the one that beat kasparov and like he blew yeah he's deep blue yeah yeah so their their new one is better than the current more prescriptive chess program called stock fish okay and it's used it uses neural networks and it's quite diff it plays quite differently and it's better so how is that different technologically the it's it's more of a neural network architecture as opposed to just a tree tree search okay okay got it yeah so use

reinforcement learning and yeah basically yeah and so so but isn't that aren't those updates which take place in like a small insular group of like super frontier ai researchers account argument to sort of this distributed so like the distributed model yeah it should just be brute force it should just be a data problem nobody wants to do brute force right like you have to unfortunately and there are problems that are brute force uh like np problems like shaw 256 right like if you could find a neural network then crack shot

well you'd break the whole world but you'd also you know could break every bitcoin and so forth so there are some problems that there just aren't shortcuts for and i think chemistry is more or less one of them but um either way you know i think that um you know the tools that we're building for chemistry will be will be really useful and you look at blockchain you look at web3 and nuclear crypto and you see a lot of like kind of nonsense and waste and i think that using this no software company can afford to ignore these tools but a lot of people are wasting their time with these tools and making things

that aren't useful i think d5 will actually be kind of the least important part of blockchain and crypto um and i think that things like desai and all the industries of the economy can be transformed by this technology but a lot of them kind of won't be immediately and a lot of them will fail just like the internet kind of had to sort of germinate and take take root for for it to really transform industries and now we kind of view it as this ever present entity yeah that we don't say okay it's the internet sector no it's just a tool that people use to improve their

speaking of crypto and in bitcoin and 256 who do you think satoshi is i have a a couple of thoughts and a couple of uh sort of dark horse candidates um who are we'll start with the ones everybody thinks so like adam back nick zabo hal finney kind of like all your regular milk people and those are the boring picks usual suspects yeah the usual suspects are most likely kaiser so say but a couple of dark horses

so uh the weirdest dark horse i have is elon musk okay which again would be the mom what would be your argument for why so he was around first of all he bragged recently that he knew more about the nature of money and things like that than anybody he said this uh and he also said well paypal we were trying to create the new world currency and so one of his friends or former colleagues would probably be another obvious um dark horse candidate um and again i think there are people either know or kind of have a good sense for it um

and there are clues as well so i think that it won't be forever before we know but we'll see he could be dead for all we know so i think that's my dark horus and i have a couple other ones but they're like less sort of less exciting or less well-known but that's the more most provocative one what's your favorite book of all time um it's probably so i read three or four hundred books in prison um crazy well you have you have some time time and you were in solitary confinement for a bit too yeah how'd you not go nuts i would go literally with my imagination

i'd go crazy it's it's inhumane um i i did how long were you just three months three four months that's enough to break me man well it was 45 days then 45 days then sort of 30 days i think separate is it like white padded walls no it's not that bad okay um it's pretty inhumane though because it's each time i was there by the way it wasn't for a specific reason it was on an investment they can lock up for an so they they thought i had cell phones

were you mentally affected by the solitary component did it did it like [ __ ] with you i'd say it was damaging um and again without like you stab somebody in the neck like yeah go to the jail within the jail yes but like something that's like oh we think he might have a cell phone like yeah that's kind of crazy we'll find it first you you know once you find it then maybe you know you have an argument but like it's your favorite book um so one of the books i read in prison i really liked was i'll pick two um yeah one was called code

it's by charles petzl and it it actually breaks down like what computers really are um not so much like this is what ram is this is what processor is but like he starts with he builds a computer mentally and he also wrote one of the best books on touring where it's called the annotated touring where he actually looks at turing's first paper on computable numbers and he it's the whole paper is in the book and he breaks he's sort of like every paragraph of the paper he writes his own commentary and history of computing and stuff like that it's a really brilliant thing so this book is on the hardware side cool and so it's pretty neat uh

little book on the what on the uh hardware so on on the hardware he starts with binary and then he explains like how registers work in computer how switches work and he starts with light switches then slowly you mentally go to assembler and you build a whole pc in your head yeah and it's really a neat exploration that's really cool it's called code code i gotta read that they actually wouldn't let it into one of my prisons because it uh apparently was threaten the security of the prison it's a tough place you can't have inmates knowing what transistors are or something well code sounds bad right

sure sure so well yeah i mean i think they banned like the 48 laws of power too that's a dangerous one yeah the uh the second probably best book i read in prison called the three body problem but oh yeah yeah she's in lou yeah and so i think and this goes back to sort of a literary analysis thing um i think that that's i think science fiction is like the worst genre of writing um that like very little good comes out of science fiction writing uh but lou has to me it was like a shakespearean level uh work like he

his his he had like stories within the story he had like this whole like great rhetorical flair that was uh incredible especially for chinese writer that you know do you think there's anything kind of ontologically true about that book yeah do you think like the aliens are stagnating our physics because we're it's so awesome right it's such an awesome exploration into into the future into the future and into u.s china relations and how and that's why i like the book is that you know he he the way he sort of told the story was really unique like obviously he's creative like crazy but

you know he has all these like weird illusions and fugues and all kinds of like really amazing kind of like recurring themes and he's just a writer's writer like he did a great job for the average science fiction writer is not a good writer yeah the average science fiction writer is like just doesn't tell doesn't it's not timeless literature yeah you know almost never is like it's hard to point to science fiction writing and say you know that was like a great work of literature so i think lou actually pulls that off here and also tells a great

story about physics in the future and stuff like that obviously i don't think on the ontology side uh you know that there's much realistic there like really interesting but some of the fun stuff where like i don't remember the von neumann like you know some of the stuff he did with uh like this video game within the book uh that that sort of plays a key role right and i think that like that kind of thing could could be could have been a very interesting what was von neumann von neumann uh replicators or what was he he had a number of allusions to von neumann and one of them was like uh an army a general uh and

everybody in the army holding a flag and they would uh be and or gates and like there'd be a loading bar at the bottom of these people like moving the flag to indicate the loading bar was almost complete and they actually calculated something using a humans to there was a bus of like crazy all this fun like you know human computer um human like a million people could actually do a computation by passing a red and white flag and stuff like that well reality might be sort of information theory yeah absolutely you know like if you think

about heisenberg's uncertainty principle if you know you measure the momentum of an electron the position gets buzzier and vice versa you could think of that sort of as like a computational caching function or something you're trying to save on on local memory yeah i mean i i like bostrom's work a lot as well like so um as i uh that's some of the really exciting that's why i've been into this accelerationist movement um you know boshram's uh theories on on and especially this other uh really

brilliant writer who wrote uh quantum computing since democritus um scott aronson oh yeah he's read his blogs yeah his blog is very legendary yeah uh he's like him and boshroom are like i think scott aaronson's probably the smartest guy alive today and um he's got a lot of interesting sort of thoughts on on a lot of these questions especially like one of the ones that's fascinated me is whether matter's continuous or not yeah and we have different opinions he thinks matters is continuous and what do you think i think the planck constant is our

basically the resolution of our six what is it 640 by 480 yeah like that's our resolution that our simulator made and that uh we can't get any finer than that because it breaks down after that and he thinks that it's discontinuous what what does that mean that matters forever divisible like you can keep dividing got it and so if you get like subplank scale energy then you could travel faster than light any civilization that could harness the planck energy would be able to become masters of space and time

shortest amount of time is like 10 to the negative 48th of a second or something like that and like could you divide time and therefore space as well since there's some equality there um into even smaller pieces and if you can't there's a lot of um he believes you can and i think there's a good reason for that because if you can't there's a lot of mathematical implications for example real numbers um you know the incommense reality of numbers uh is something that got pythagoras follower his legend as he had to walk the plank for discovering that the square root of two is irrational so

um irrational numbers um you know the fact that that you should be able to make a commensurate length for any number but really the square root of two doesn't exist so why can you be more infinitely divisible because we just can't concede we don't i don't know if i had that answer it'd be something else yeah but i think that you know if you do sing like the single uh the double-slit experiment things like that you know can you imagine something smaller than a photon and it's it's it's pretty hard to to think about it we have corks and i don't know if we have anything sub

chords well that's on hadron side but on left on side i think i got my particle zoom mixed up here but the you you photons don't don't don't have quarks they're indivisible yeah so they um again you have a problem there where about we're where you're talking about really the resolution scale like that's the pixel that you know to make the analogy to our metaverse right that's our pixel and you know whoever programmed that you know that's what they chose as like the bit or the pixel or the you know the fundamental unit and

built up everything from there and we're in that universe uh and um you know we can create our own universes like world of warcraft or you know some other metaverse yeah roblox yeah uh and you know those will get more intricate like the game of life and conway yeah you know uh wolfstrom's stuff and you know i think that that's all really great but you know if i think there are a lot of implications if if matter isn't continuous or discontinuous or however you feel about it um so that's one thing i thought a lot about in prison and you know again um science science fiction to

me is like a funny thing because science fact is more interesting like magic angles i don't know if you've ever looked at that no it's a magic angle so basically if you twist graphene at 1.5 degrees it takes this completely different property and they call it magic ankles and lots of different materials seem to have a magic angle you know you look at things like superconducting at room temperature you look at things like quantum computing can't you describe that with cooper pears yeah yeah that's it it's all about and um the whole point is like science fiction pales in comparison to like what leading

edge science and that you see in nature things like that uh nature of the journal um so like to me we don't need science fiction yeah it's reality reality is trippy and weird enough yeah absolutely and some of the things you've said are you know yeah you were a big hip-hop head you famously bought the carter five and you also bought once upon a time in challenge which is a little more controversial of the move yep who are your top five i don't know rappers yeah yeah let's see probably eminem yeah i think he he was

just sort of way out there because he he kind of brought a new genre to wrap with shock rap like the whole like i mean you put anger just yeah weird weird anger like you know just like therapeutics yeah just like uh i don't know what if it were art what would it be like it'd be like surrealism number two jay-z yeah i'd put him as number one for me well what's interesting about him is i think he has he's done something different about his music i think there's a conspiracy there so what's my conspiracy is that he is an english professor writing his lyrics now

what yeah no he's he's brilliant you can tell by talking i read his bio or he has had the other part of the conspiracy is he said serious rhetoric training his music has changed so i i studied like contemporary comparative literature in college this guy has gone from if you look at reasonable doubt and you look at blueprint but reasonable doubt when he didn't have resources that was when he blew up in 96. so you don't need resources to write music to write lyrics right do you think he hired an english

teacher then no he's he i think he because those lyrics were like more intricate in some ways than today i don't i don't agree they were pretty amazing i like i listen to jay-z the devil's or i'm feeling it or any of this or a dead president you're just like whoa what's going on here my mind was fine to the doe hit it and demo did it and that was kosher [ __ ] it's so acidic i blow a digit on the diamond in a minute but no [ __ ] like it's pretty intense you listen to the originators this 94 freestyle he did with big l and you're like what the [ __ ] i think he's got some advisors in

not i'm not saying that he he's got a guy at columbia doing it for him if you start to succeed in that line of work right what is your job your job is to write words yeah right and you start out and you look at the words he's writing and they're sort of like they're about the hood you're it's about hip-hop it's about it's and it's it's good but it's not like you log better than your rivals yeah right it's not two logs but i think he's an illuminati i think his craft seriously i disagree with you okay number three jadakiss

jadakiss yeah i wasn't expecting that new york kind of and the rest of my picks are kind of like that like dmx yeah okay like just those guys go hard well i love new york anything like i love new york rocky like dip set no not much you don't like dip set really yeah no kid cameron uh i like cam um i guess like busta rhymes maybe would be fifth or yeah it's pretty great somebody like that ludacris you know nino buster rams went to high school with jay-z yeah and they had a rap battle in high school which i would love to and again that's

the kind of stuff i love is that you know when you go to a rock concert i'm more of a rock fan than a rap fan yeah i grew up in the 2000s like emo explosion bands here like brand new taking back sunday thursday sure groups like that and um being able to see some of these up close and personal when they're like before they got big and stuff like that and again being able to sort of be that's what sort of culture certainly wrapping in rock 2 is all about like you're there before it happens you're that you were there you know uh before anyone and yeah for rap you

also you'll often have that thing like this wrappers from my project you have that like badge of you know honor i heard that in jail like every day like oh you know he lived in my project yeah and you're like oh really that's crazy like this guy a boogie he's in the bronx hey boogie with the hoodie every guy in jail knew him and was like friends with him and like he's the gun one guy who made it yeah you know out of the hood and so forth and fetty wap is a friend of mine and uh he's a friend of yours yeah yeah how's he doing what's he up to now he doesn't come out with a song in a minute well he's he got indicted oh he's in is he in jail he's not in jail right now but he got him out on bail but yeah [ __ ] does that suck yeah

you go from superstar the hood to superstar back to selling fentanyl he hit that one oh man that sucks he had that one song that just poof yeah he had the whole summer for a year yeah and then he did that little dicky track and i was like what are you doing man like you were cool and i mean i like a little dicky but well that's what i tell everybody it's like a weird like it's a second act it is a hard business yeah hard to stay on top and you were friends with wu-tang or you you talked to them a little bit right like there's a clip of the rizza on rogan they talking [ __ ] about you in the world don't look good for you wu-tang is good

i told him forever yeah i said if i was i'll take this opportunity to do something good i got into it with hillary clinton um almost 20 years ago now yeah and this was pre putting a bounty on a strand of hair and i would not characterize it as a valentine okay it wasn't a bad dude it was a joke it was a joke um there's no reward for the strand of error well there was but it it's a long story and i actually saw your alex jones interview and it's sort of reminiscent of that of like people don't get satire yeah they do especially when they don't want to get it yeah right they know it's a joke

but they they'd rather sort of suspend that yeah thinking and say no no this guy's a bad guy last week shkreli told his facebook followers to grab a hair from clinton's head during her book tour he said he would pay five thousand dollars per hair the left wing media is like hyper earnest and then the right wing uh whatever you know or the new right is sort of like intentionally very ironic and post-modern right and then the left-wing media is like this is crazy you can't believe you said this and it's like kind of like a trolly joke and it's this weird like two trains

passing in the night sort of i think when the cameras are off they they understand the irony you think so absolutely you know okay i hope nobody's that dense but i think something i would have some people are right i think most people are not that dense yeah it's a show yeah it's an act and like without the fake outrage you know we've all seen that and so the joke was about um i mean there's literally a bad joke like i swing and miss a lot on the internet like anybody else but you know i throw out jokes out there because like it's the stuff of life right i mean we all want to laugh and you know like it's half the reason

the internet exists and i made this joke about hillary clinton being a lizard person which is a you know troll real conspiracy yeah it's a real conspiracy theory david ickes i didn't you study this stuff i i just i'm a consumer former pro soccer player who like literally writes books about lizard amazing um did not know that so yeah like he thinks like george soros is like the king lizard i i just i just i'm the end consumer of it so for me you know i talked about how like oh well if i being a person skilled

in the biological arts if you got me her dna i could tell you for sure if there's lizard sequence in there and i actually went to like like the blast sequence database nih runs and i pulled these like lizard sequences out and i was like you know what i was going to put them in the dna you know like a secret sauce and like you're a joke it's a troll you know it's a joke and uh so i found like different lizard proteins like gila monster and other like lizard species gila monster has been a productive uh animal actually for bio biotech um interesting glp was actually we're talking about glp earlier

the first glp was isolated from hilo monster which is a little dragon like you know creature really so anyway um yeah it's what's glp it's uh it's now one of the biggest drugs in pharma it uh lowers your appetite and fixes quite a bit of type 2 diabetes yeah and people are not taking it recreationally or for optimal health performance and stuff like that thanks gila monster yeah right yeah and a little little guy and uh so you know i could just pull some some dna for like whatever makes their scales harder or something i mean like she's a suspiciously large amount you know

and like it would have been funnier but like again i shouldn't have put like somebody get me her hair for five thousand dollars but like my judge was like no this isn't funny at all yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah my lawyer was like telling me i was like am i going to jail tonight and he's like no [ __ ] way do you think that was the turning point for you do you think that that in some ways affected the trial and swung things into negative well it was post trial but it definitely didn't it swung the sentence my lawyer was sure i was gonna get like two or three years and then after that he was like you're [ __ ] man like you did this to yourself you only ended up getting seven yeah

seven not bad i did five you did you did five years four point yeah i guess it was 2018 2017 2017. so that's a decent amount of your life do you have an example of another like big pharma doing kind of one-to-one exactly what you did with daraprim sure like what's an example of that because i think that's interesting like like did you do anything that was like highly unusual my favorite is is uh abbott's norvier so abbott is was a major major recognition they're called

abbvie now yeah they raised the price of an hiv drug called norvier dramatically overnight and like several several to hold and the big difference there is abby's a huge company that's really successful at the time abbott labs those as well you don't need resources right so if you're a small company and you need resources to me if you've raised the price of a medicine to a normal price not a super normal price but you're going from a below normal price to a normal price i think that's reasonable um i always give this bad analogy and nobody likes it because they don't want to equate medicine to other

goods and to me like when i took macro and microeconomics and 400 person auditoriums like there's no distinction between a health care good and a consumer good and a energy good or any other good the laws of economics apply to every good equally yeah you know to the extent that governments want to make regulated kind of um products like water should be regulated or you know other things like that um then they can but every market every free market good sort of obeys the same laws so i said that like well if you inherited your uncle's burger chain and he was selling

burgers for 10 cents and the burger chain down the street was five dollars and you raised the price from ten cents to five dollars there shouldn't be a headline that says you know jesse raises burger prices five thousand percent it's jesse charges what a burger costs right for a burger crazy old uncle you know messed that up right and so daraprim is still much much cheaper than your average cancer drug or your average you know hep c drug or whatever analog and it doesn't make a lot of sense for me to sell a drug that yeah its peer group is 100 times more expensive so again abbvie had actually the same argument but when

you you're a 50 000 person company that has 100 billion market cap like you don't necessarily need to fix that but they were still economical and rational and saying well it doesn't matter how big we are like the drug is underpriced compared to its peer group so yeah let's fix that and that that's common practice i'd say that it's common in the sense that there are so many medicines that were grandfathered in around this desi act of 1962 which was the drug of standards initiative yeah where uh the fda after uh thalidomide they basically said we have to test these things right let's do clinical trials let's do let's

enforce that and there are a lot of drugs from the 60s and 70s including daraprim yeah uh that were grandfathered in and their prices as well haven't changed okay so they're drugs prices that that are they're literally been on pfizer's books and works books and they're like oh do we own that you know so everything sort of around that act was is sort of mispriced anything from the 70s and 80s and systems basically being bought up by big pharma and the prices are being reached it's the other way around like often you have a big farmer like santa fe or murica pfizer that has this old drug in their books they don't even know they make it yeah the ceo has doesn't have a

clue what the drug is and they don't want to raise the price to catch up with inflation yeah uh so they're like well we'll kind of keep making this but we kind of don't want to make it right like it'll go out of stock and it'll like and that's a bad thing for the patients right like there's no believe it or not pharma does do a service when they go out and explain how their drugs work and they provide honorariums to to researchers and things like that there is a function there um where they say don't forget about pnh paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobin area

very rare blood disease and doctors like oh yeah i should look out for that maybe john has that my patient uh jesse you know he's been peeing blood maybe it's pnh you know that like there's something to that of like being able to like spread that message around and like don't forget it might be pnh right there's one big company that does this right and like if they're getting a patient diagnosed with ph faster yeah like by doing that i think that's a good thing and so like it's a healthy part of that education thing that pharma does uh not everything farmer does is healthy or good but that's one of the things that does that's good and like

a old drug that's generating you you know a couple million in revenue you don't have you can't afford that you know you can't afford to have any educational effort any access effort you can't do any research on that drug to improve it or whatever it's just an old shitty drug that you forgot about yeah and so what happens is they'll divest those drugs yeah and capitalists like me will say well [ __ ] i mean okay your average life-saving drug is this much like let's fix this price and i've done that actually seven times so this is the first time i got any media attention how many times prior to derek six times six

i guess that was it and did did anybody who because i know sixty percent of what you sold went for like a dollar and he made it super accessible for people who tried to afford the 700 plus price insurance price yeah so did anybody go without daraprim because of what you did anybody who had toxoplasmo plasmosis well here's the other not benefit from dare print because of what you did here's the funny part and people would say it's not funny because it's such a serious subject but it actually is rather hilarious therapy is not the only drug for toxoplasmosis

okay and the media helped me tell help me sell my drug there's a drug called bactrim okay which i i bet of all the people here yeah half of us have taken it because this is very like commonly used like it's almost like zether max or something or like uh penicillin or uh what's another like augmentin uh you know everyone's taking a moccasin an antibiotic yeah so bacterium works as well as theraprim okay for toxoplasmosis yeah when we were buying like if you look at our like discovery and emails and stuff when we were buying daraprim we were like all right if we raise the price of this i think we're gonna lose all our market share into backdrop yeah and we're like

so why'd you do it we basically said doctors aren't that smart we basically average doctor even that though is like kind of sketch like why like i'm not saying you were isolated and doing it but that like the fact that that's systematically being done is like weird we well and maybe it's the incentive system you were like swimming in what part of it do you think is weird the fact that you were like doctors aren't smart enough to realize that back term is actually just as effective as derek right and so they're gonna like

make a bad decision and spend more on this thing it's a tough decision so well it's not a rational decision i would say it's not rational yeah because which is again i'm not saying i'm not isolating you from like the rest of pharma but the fact that that like those decisions are being made is like weird well people and i see this like a friend would ask me like i'm on this antidepressant um what do you think i'd say you never were offered prozac and they're like no you know prozac's the same [ __ ] and it's free basically crazy this drug isn't and part of it is the doctor's like oh i want to try this and see how it works on

my patients i want to you know see if this might work you know i'm going to gain experience with this drug and see if it's a useful tool or not you're my the person i'm going to try it on and it's like no the better decisions probably start with prozac yeah then go to zoloft which are all generic and cheap right and like why are you giving them this person this expensive drug right you don't need to right and like we see the same thing in diabetes where metformin and a bunch of other generic drugs are probably the best first drug to take but pharma's efforts and doctors willingness to embrace some of those efforts and yeah be wooed and be convinced that they should try something

scarcity around it because you can't create like an agency of these people like that's not good business like you need like i think i'd agree with you know the the a lot of people blame pharma um when i think that a lot of the cost is coming from the physician side and it's very unpopular to say that it's very unpopular blast physicians because right well but the other thing you get left with you so that created the fda and the ama ama and the only thing that's left are like inter-opera like basically like molecular biology it's it's like

these pills that you have to take and the practitioner giving you the pill is interoperable with every other practitioner inherently because it can't pass the fda if that's not the case right and the idea that like healing is not like a one-to-one idiosyncratic thing is [ __ ] stupid to me like like it can be it can be sometimes like somebody like it's interesting you know i think that again i disagree with you on a lot of this and yeah and i but one of the things that's really fascinating is is how tech is trying to break that dichotomy okay or that dynamic and for

example these apps people are using like headspace and others yeah yeah um tech is trying to find a way to break that relationship and that i guess monolith that's been sort of like this tower that's been erected and defended you know the ama uh i know obama gave a speech to ama and he said so we can no longer afford to put health care reform on hold we can't afford to do it but you guys are going to have to tighten your belts as well no clapping no they're just sitting there like excuse me yeah

tighten or power belts yeah yeah the average doctor makes 350 000 a year in america right and it's it's the i actually gave a presentation to boston uh boston college's medical school yeah they didn't like this at all uh where i said this is the greatest investment you can make yeah you guys are all medical school right now and they're all you know got their white coats on their students they're they're proud to be in med school as they should be yeah and i'm like you do the net present value of what you're doing here it's an insane return like for your the cost of this degree and what you're actually going to accrue from it yeah you can't make a better bet but even just structurally

it's sick care it's not health care like doctors are incentivized to give you more treatments and i realized there's sort of this value-based care thing that came with obamacare it was sort of like an interesting intentionally in that direction if they may lightened up on on who could become a doctor yeah uh you know prices would of health care would fall dramatically um because they gate that really carefully and really you cannot open a new medical school right you know of course functionally you could and uh it'd be quite easy but you you know labor uh the

two is chemistry and and it feels like all of the treatments that we have are biochemical and there's a physics layer and everybody has an electromagnetic field is there a way to treat the body the the issue with it is it's sort of open source like you can't patent that's one of the bigger problems yeah but like yeah do you think that's possible so the old martin would tell you you're crazy yeah kook but the new martin's uh a little smarter and a little more open-minded there's a company called novocure okay that that is is the pioneer in this and i was short in

overcure i thought it was a scam yeah um they make a helmet okay it's the craziest [ __ ] in the world yeah and like you would it's like sounds like a great short right away right like yeah it's a helmet to treat brain cancer you put the helmet on and it's a magnet uh it does some crazy magnetic [ __ ] and i even like no way no [ __ ] way this works right of course it works and it also works for lung cancer yeah and i was just like there has to be and we've done a lot of these shorts over the years like there's got to be a flaw some fake data and we keep pulling in these threads and it works and it's it's

they keep showing it works and it's frustrating because as short yeah it's frustrating because it's like it the biology doesn't add up the clinical the clinical results are demonstrably good yeah but like there have to be hiding something because it doesn't make sense biologically and the problem is that we don't know what we don't know and well dude how do cells communicate voltage-gated ion channels which are affected by the electromagnetic field and we now know officially that uh i think that's too superficial but please well i'm sure there's more to it than just that and

that's what i'm saying is that we don't really understand it we don't fully understand it there's not incentive to study it either but here here there are crazy studies around uh electromagnetic effects the body you can you can uh sever a tadpole's arm and then you can change the cell gradient uh of the stub arm or whatever that's been said sure to that of the head and you grow a chimeric tadpole and so there's something around the bioelectric field and it doesn't even change the local dna and so there's something around the bioelectric field

of the body that actually dictates in a more fundamental way than dna yeah i mean developmental biology is something that it's really hard to understand in general um i i don't think it's impossible and the the nova cure stuff i admit you know i kind of resigned for my short uh they call it tumor treating fields it's magnetic fields uh and again very skeptical person in general like a lot of the money we made trading was shorting and um pointing out fraud interestingly um and uh remarkable that that they've been

able to do that and then there's also uh some of these uh magnetic fields for depression and other central nervous system disorders interesting very tough to treat depression and many clinical trials in depression don't work uh even when you try to do a placebo-controlled study within prozac it often will fail which is really remarkable because it's like the gold standard but transcranial magnetic stimulation seems to work yeah and the great thing about those things is that they're basically toxicity free which is like the cool the positive part the do no harm part yeah you know like as a i think physicians

really feel like that that's a great place to start yeah you have that kind of safety profile yeah it's worth like what what what's the worst thing that happens yeah like just hit the guy in the magnet like see what happens like it doesn't work it doesn't work and you were pretty early on heterodox depression treatments right you were doing like intranasal ketamine back in the day way back in the day yeah we were we were uh sort of arm in arm with johnson and johnson fighting for fda approval of intranasal ketamine which um was it called spiratus there's bravado yeah

known a man i mean like yeah it makes prozac look like a waste of time and it's remarkable and you know it's fda approved now and yeah it's it's got access problems because of its like just unusual situation and like can you take ketamine and and a big part of what we did and you're you're gonna find this and most people would probably find it gross because every by the way every drug company did it which is how do we take ketamine yeah screw on a couple atoms and make it a new pattern yeah you know because ketamine's from 1960 right you know and that doesn't do us any good right and johnson johnson was was smart enough to

we still will make this work somehow right we were going to make a device and the device would be the patent okay so like you have to find some mousetrap where you can get some yeah some revenue out of this yeah yeah because why do you know why be a charity that's somebody else's job my job is to sell pharmaceuticals sure and i do think like the more and more they're gonna be entities maybe it was it's bill gates maybe it's others that can actually sort of set these things up and make them work so that like somebody does study these things that are unpatentable like longevity yeah is unpatentable sure because 17 to 20-year

life forget longevity just alzheimer's yeah like an alzheimer's study is going to take 15 to 20 years well here's the thing if you if you test epigenetics you can actually shorten those time horizons so if you could if you have a good game of biomarkers biological age and you do clinical trials you have a control group and then you say metaform and dhea is the treatment group you still want to see the real mccoy hopefully sometimes ideally yeah you'd probably want to wait you know 30 years before nice to see but i think we're getting the the algorithms on the epigenetic side are predicting death in with much lower and

lower error margins like the horvath clock has gotten much better i define an epigenetic clock as a prediction model that uses methylation to estimate age do you think um kobit was man-made i might it's like my 95 base case i think it takes the inference levels of an eight-year-old because everybody's like it could have been any any wet market or people who say the web market thing yeah they're wet markets all over china so

why was it the wet market next to the lab studying stars like pandemics so a couple things i mean i don't think you could falsifiably kind of get an answer here i think it's really hard to get an answer easily right and gotten yeah two i'm not sure it matters right i think it matters if the nih was funding this and this we it should it should we should have this debate about game function research which makes no sense gain inflection we're we can't even come up with a cure now so why in a lab setting when we're not motivated by a global pandemic and

solving it would we ever come up with a cure for covet it makes no sense i think it's stupid i think that just again my own experience in this kind of stuff just tells me that my instincts tell me that it's not man-made because i think that it's really hard to nature is really good at this stuff and people aren't and i think that even though you can do these like serial passages that that's the gain of function you do the serial passage that makes the virus stronger um which is again pretty kind of crazy to do and yeah you should do it in very contained conditions and is not known for

you know being very festive and the lab had safety marks in the past it's china safety yeah you know just whatever you know kind of place yeah um you know we take that stuff pretty seriously here yeah i think nature's the culprit here these kinds of things happen i mean yeah they happen all the time and to sort of takes proximity as kind of a causal yeah i think as maybe didn't we just find out madeirna had a patent for a genetic splice that was a part of kovid i didn't see that but in

2016. yeah i didn't see that i'll send it to you that's funny yeah i mean moderners tried to do everything too to be fair to them but um that would be somewhat funny um coronaviruses were around right mirrors and and yeah so you know others we've thought about making drugs for those and you know in terms of like coronavirus uh itself like i don't know i i don't i'm not one to sort of like generally i think like extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof sure right so like it's fun to think about extraordinary

claims but without extraordinary proof i just kind of shrug my shoulders yeah again it's just it's deductive logic but it's like two-thirds of the cases had no wet market exposure you had this one lab with bad safety marks sort of systematically studying there's some smoke this stuff yeah there's a lot of weird stuff and they were doing it with like pangolins and bats and these things that they where they say it's it's it was the zoonotic thing and so and then you have some this guy matt ridley he has a colleague at harvard i'm blanking on her name uh they wrote a book called viral and

it's pretty good at tracking down sort of the source but they don't have a smoking gun but i you read it and you come out thinking yeah this probably can't work just if you extend it you know what do you do now right is it is it just a discussion about gaining a function research shouldn't be if you're funding the thing no i mean you got to get hold people culpable people like peter dazzak and fauci i think should be i don't like fauci yeah it's a bad dude i didn't like him from before kova yeah um so the thing about fauci and this is going to be very anti-establishment but do it he was an hiv guy yeah and

oh god i hate saying this because it's so like nasty but fauci has always been an hiv cure bear he's always said like hiv will never be cured not in our lifetime this and that yeah i'm just sitting there like this guy's ridden the hiv wave like he was one of the early guys in hiv yeah and like this is too controversial to say almost but like i don't think he's actually ostensibly done anything yeah hiv yeah it's been useful well he hasn't been practicing for you know

a publisher an early researcher in the space and like he he's been like the masterful public health politician yeah that has not actually earned any of his role have you read that robert kennedy book so dude you're getting really trippy here like i've read every paper foul she's written like because i follow i've been on a hiv cure hunt for a while too and i think crispr will get us there like he's been a crispr bear yeah and a cure bear in general yeah and and i sit and read his pre-covet stuff where he was like yeah no hiv is going nowhere like yeah we're just gonna have to live

with it and i'm just like just i just want to strangle a guy because it's like right the opposite of an entrepreneur and they're like an innovator and somebody who's like [ __ ] do you are you innocent thanks are you familiar with the name peter duesberg for people who don't understand your your argument i mean in a in a paraphrasing sort of way is that it these it's it's illicit drug use it's like email nitrate and crystal meth and that is what's destroying the immune systems of these people and then hiv shows up because their immune system is diminished is that a fair assessment of

it you are diminished or not it is just a chance it's like with all microbes you know you can catch it or not if you contact or get in contact intimate contact whatever contact with lots of people you pick up what's available on the market he says that basically it was azt and poppers that were hiv would sort of be like recessive in the body and then you'd have azt and poppers specifically among certain communities would tip the hiv over the edge into aids and he was sort

of systematically uh marginalized by people like fauci one of these things that's also sort of controversial is that i do think we're within striking distance of a final treatment for hiv and there's sort of everywhere i go i get questions about like you know do you think there's a suppression to keep profits going and it's the best like anti-conspiracy theory ever because there's you know 20 or 30 big drug companies and each one of them there's only two that make hiv drugs anymore yeah so the other 28 would love to eat the lunch oh yeah those other two like packed between us

you know stop each other and i think that there's a little inertia there there's too much inertia but i do think an hiv cure would be one of the best selling drugs ever and for sure probably not far away do you know that there's there's an hiv gene splice in covid yeah yeah so i mean does that not freak you out the viruses uh we were talking about earlier how these viruses have evolved uh and they have different motifs that you see in in different um you know different uh what if what if that's the immunosuppressant part of

hiv and then but then everybody's walking around immune suppressed in five to ten years because they got covered yeah they they they sort of uh riff off each other in some ways like you know it's a very funny thing how like you'll have a different family viruses evolve the same kind of motifs as they have nothing to do with each other yeah we'll evolve them through selective pressure or like interactions with our immune system and yeah there's i mean at the end of the day i think we have to get over the fact that we have to be symbiotic symbiotic with nature in many ways yeah like there's a lot of focus and attention on on very fine details like microbiome stuff yeah as another

good example yeah we have no idea how it works yeah we don't and we have to live with trillions of these organisms and i think it's yeah there's a lot going on in here i i think and this is maybe somewhat heretical but i don't think it should be i think the viruses and pathogens are often mirrors for your own sort of fundamental health yeah yeah i like that and and it exposes weaknesses that you often already had but that if you are like i look at the differential between people who like died during covet or or you know died of

covid uh or experienced really serious kind of long covid and then people who didn't and there are definitely edge cases where this is wrong but the big differentiator is was the person super healthy prior to getting covered yeah it's hard to know like you know it's even hard to have a sense of individuality when we think about how many exactly how many organisms are part of us yeah you know uh just in our gi tract alone there's trillions and you know uh it's hard to know exactly kind of like well who are you like i i say this a lot with um i've had a lot of

like different different opinions of like um the trans community for example and this is something that um i've slowly kind of changed my mind about over time like people in the right wing especially the alt-right or whatever community would always like sort of jab out this whole like there's only two genders you know this and that i started to think about as a scientist or a moonlighting scientist and i said that's not true it's actually demonstrably false the people with klinefelter and turner for example who have um uh xy or x xy yeah what gender is that you know yeah you're automatically kind of in this

different category right and if you think about mosaicism where you know you might actually be uh some of your cells could be a certain percentage yeah it could be you know you you could have uh your mother's cells actually that stuck around during pregnancy and actually became germ cells or stem cells and and differentiated you could be three three percent four percent mosaic or woman um you know or ambiguous um and that is actually fairly common sort of you know finding and again now that you put in other species what what

are you exactly yeah that's probably more ambiguous than we give a credit for now again i'm not certain that you know i think there's other parts of the whole trans story that are a little strange and i don't like but sure you know to the extent that like someone has xxy or yeah there's even one 48 x x yy yeah it's like you know you're totally you know your own thing you know and that's great you know uh but you know and there's some of them are phenotypes like klinefelter is a very specific phenotype yeah and a lot of those patients end up

um it's hard to take patients but a lot of those people end up sort of wanting a definitive gender and sort of they choose do they have gender dysphoria at higher rates then i i'm not i'm not a student of the space but i believe that that they do um interesting but it's it's a really fascinating case where you can immediately dispel the whole two gender thing of like sure what about you yeah yeah yeah there's actually hundreds of thousands of people that's fascinating they tend to just again at birth sort of steer the patient yeah steer the person into that direction of saying you're you're a woman let's leave it at that and

you know right the parents will never tell the person and they'll just be like you know and you'll sort of see people who are fairly ambiguous and you'll be like i wonder you know yeah you know maybe that's kleinfeldter yeah who do you hang out with for your do you have best friends it's weird um i do but i i i think that like just a solitary life is probably better for me like um i don't know like i think that

it's it's hard to relate to people it's hard to sort of like find somebody to to to be with because i feel like a guilt of like wanting to build things and make things again people who don't know me don't don't necessarily know a lot about me but i spend a lot of time creating different pieces of software different you know molecules or whatever and companies um and like i feel like i'd be taking away from that if i spent a lot of time with like an so or you know something like that wasn't there there was like a journalist what's your name christie

that like covered you and then fell in love with you in the process of covering it it reminded me of that movie adaptation yeah you know i think it's like john laroche this character right and uh meryl streep falls in love with john laroche while he's coming he's kind of this like really eccentric interesting kind of like orchid hunter and you're in this case the orchestra yeah no falls in love with you hey look i told you i'd find the jewel of the

unilateral than portrayed um but you know unrequited i i mean listen i i i i engaged with her you know uh but i think it was is have you ever been in love yeah yeah i mean your voice went up when you said yeah problem with love is i think love is sort of a fictitious concept i mean i think it's interesting and it's a suitcase word as minsky used to say right it's you can pack a lot of things into that word and i think that for a lot of people love is that first

i don't know jejune feeling of like just like it feels amazing because you you're doing it for the first time yeah then you get jaded right i mean i think a lot of people start to get jaded and start to get like any look at any married couple right i mean there's there are a few exceptions to that and i hold out hope because of those exceptions but it feels like the the large majority of romantic relationships are just unhealthy right at least in my appearance they seem to be like toxic outlets for like different just codename [ __ ] yeah and it's like they've they've there's some

checklist that's why i like want to experiment and i think i like what elon's doing and that's why this spreadsheet is um sort of experimental crm of we'll have other other experiments that people don't know about like what um i have this group of of women uh that are i'm very friendly with and like i don't know if we want to call it a club or a harem or a cult or something but like and i think musk does this and and other people do this but they don't talk about it like ultimately like i i don't think polyamory is such a bad

thing and i don't think that you know somebody can't have like five families or ten families i've never i don't have any families so at the moment but like but you have like a group of women that are all kind of we're all kind of okay with you know wow you know being being with each other and they're and they're cool with you yeah and they know of each other or we're all in one chat room together yeah so i had it in jail and uh we kept i've that's what i would use my cell phone mostly for in jail instead of what the government thinks i was running my company or something i was trying to it

was just running again i don't like the word polyamorous either because it's sort of like it has other weird implications um but anyway like i think that um the nuclear family and like these types of relationships are if not broken they're starting to think they're obsolete and then maybe absolutely man i don't i go back and forth i think they're pretty important i think they're really important for but so you wouldn't want to have kids no i think i think you can probably have kids and do it effectively without

mom dad and you know two and half kids in a backyard um you ultimately need love you need nurturing you need all those things for children to grow um or they won't and they'll like every single person i met in prison had a dysfunctional family almost every person had either a single parent yeah no parents yeah or abuse abuse in the household so like you get backups in polyamory serene and so you know like self-confident uh and like don't have

any of the [ __ ] psychological because i don't buy it man it's hard as much as i think the nuclear kind of one-to-one relationship thing like usually doesn't work in many cases i i think the polyamory thing has never worked i've i have no friends who've ever tried nobody i know of even that's ever tried that where it doesn't end up with you're right there's one main partner and the main partner gets jealous well that's why i'm hesitant to have children and i think elon's sort of gone gung-ho in the other direction right um to some extent i think that that some of these problems solve

themselves yeah if you try to solve for the perfect kid being and then the perfect upbringing you're going to fail yeah ultimately like and you see that in silicon valley a lot where like they're like i'm going to give them the best schools the best and the kids still ends up being a [ __ ] up and it's sort of like totally what can you do you know and then you you have kids that come out of broken homes and sometimes do really well so there's some sort of like essential soul to like it's part environment and then sometimes you just meet people from like horrible background you're just like you're amazing and then you meet people from great backgrounds and it's like what's what the hell is going on here yeah

there's no primaries and i don't think and so i think that you know as long as everybody's happy i think that's that's what's important and again i think again i'm still sort of trying to find my own way and figure out what makes sense i could very well get into a very normal you know nuclear family married for 40 years type of thing but again every everyone i know that's married is like yeah you know you know this isn't great do you do you think you're on the spectrum don't think so um i think that like i've studied autism a lot because we were making a drug for autism um and i think that

i think it's unfortunately used um you know way too much you know i don't think that um it feels like people want to be on the spectrum yeah it's crazy right any of the show on netflix love on the spectrum everybody loves it it's terrible because the average person with true clinical autism has an iq of around 80 they've never been employed they've didn't finish school they need full-time care or close to it and uh that's there's some argument in the community about this that that to me is a syndromic illness um but there are a lot

of people on the spectrum with asperger's who get hyper focused on particular things and are kind of brilliant i think they're misdiagnosed so what do you think those people are i think they are typically ocd so to be truly autistic okay you have to have three specific different sort of symptomological and they're a spectrum of problems yeah so people often like get this wrong and they're like well the spectrum is like spectrum sounds like a big open word that i can you know that can include is inclusive no it's a gradient

it's a continuum it's not like a you're here and you're here you're on the spectrum like it's a it's a you're on your way and you would have to have one of those autism markers or something to be honest to me you have you you can only be autistic if you have all three of those so you have to have aberrant behaviors okay which a lot of people with autism don't have so-called autism don't have sure you know you have to have some like so that's usually some stereotypical behavior yeah um like hand flapping is a very common one that's almost like pathomnemonic for autism if

you if you do this sort of like constant you know like yeah yeah yeah it's like most people who like think it's cool to be like yeah i'm you know a little autistic like right like i want to smack people like that because i'm like you don't know what clinical autism really looks like yeah it's a terrible vibrant behavior weird it's what's it's not weird but these were the second one is almost uniform is a deep communications deficit okay so like a very very either muted mutism like somebody who just doesn't

speak at all or speaks in one word or things like that so just here i mean we've excluded diagnosis raw doesn't figure out so you would say rain man autistic he was pretty autistic because he had uh huge problems communicating he could communicate he's been great to me but he was also brilliant you'd mean the real rain man or the fictional women well there's yet kim peak in real life in real life so dustin hoffman stammered and couldn't really get out what his thoughts were yeah things like that the third one is sort of this emotional

disconnection and social disconnection yeah and so i think people sort of misidentified i think of it as emotional disconnection and and social justice i think about the the those as yeah that third one is the major one people think about the other two are required yeah for autism yeah you don't feel you know super disconnect do you when people call you a sociopath what do you say well i'd say that like the extreme rationalism is often like confused for for quote-unquote socio sociopathy um interesting like medicine is the most important thing to

in to me health is the most important thing to humanity healthcare's percentage of gdp has grown metronomically since 1960. that's not because there's some bad actor or sociopath that's raising prices of health care it's because demand for healthcare is insatiable in fact if you think of any good the only good that has infinite sort of marginal utility is healthcare you will never say no to better healthcare sure right you can always sort of you can solve other issues healthcare is this indelibly a bigger house

well ultimately a bigger house actually has reverse utility at some point if you've ever been some million zillionaire mansion you're at some point it's like yeah yeah and uh you know other things have negative marginal utility i mean some food some you know like even the richest people i mean eat mcdonald's and things like that so like ultimately healthcare nobody says nah i don't want you know uh my asthma cure like every single person wants your best i have disagreements with you and maybe issues with a couple of things but like it's crazy how much misinfo is is out about

that's the nature of this world right it's so weird and again the best but you you do you play into it you like you you're kind of you're down to be misunderstood yeah and and part of it is i think you said in one of your recent videos i was watching um that you you'll if you get beat up enough if you stop caring yeah and so like i'm in this position where i'm like i'm wealthy i'm intelligent i can build companies i have a skill set yeah what do i care or what some like random brooklyn journalist says about it sure like yeah you know the daily dot was fun

like she was like oh i've got this expose i'm like buy my only fans yeah what was it again i said that i'd give them a quote if they bought one of my only fans foot fetish pictures i took i have an only fans and it's very tongue-in-cheek um it's got two photos uh one is of a stock chart of me getting pounded by the stock because i short the stock and it didn't go well and uh so on wall street guys use that word pound and it's very like sort of uh so is it you like horizontal with like a stock chart

it's it's a bad joke but you know it's it's it's uh for whatever reason every day on wall street the last 20 years of my life it was including four of them it was oh i'm pounding this short it's like very heteroerotic uh homoerotic uh you know sort of uh so that's one and then what's the next one is i was just with a i was on a with a friend of mine and uh i was like what should i do for this only fan she's like take it take a foot pic people love foot picks there's foot fetish like insanity and uh so i took a photo of my foot with the feet are so weird and ugly right um but with the ankle with the ankle

foot pick only fans is funny because i think only fans is actually a literary site because if you look at only fans none of them you can't see any of the pictures they're all behind this little lock at the dollar sign yeah so these chicks who are like probably have not like written creatively in most of their life have to write like this like they're trying to sell you a photo for 65 and they keep they're telling you what's in the photo they're not showing it to you right so they're like check out this hot pick where my bikini tiny bikini is just right dropping and it's a very like you're like oh yeah this is interesting right like so i wrote like

yeah and it's it's really a site about writing more than it is that's interesting it's a seduction site you have to write something some caption that's so good yeah that somebody's willing to part you know for 50 bucks or whatever it's really expensive yeah for one photo and some of these women make millions of dollars so you can hire professional writers sort of like entice you know and i'm one of the only guys on the only fans anyway so you know anyway i told the wpu and like tyga yeah i told the daily beast that i'd give them a quote if they bought and i

offered them a discount code yeah so you know they didn't seem like it seems like a good deal it was a really good deal but they messed up martin i appreciate your time man thank you thank you this is awesome thank you very much