#118 Martin Shkreli on Drug Pricing, Being Hated/Rich and His GPT-4 Doctor

Big Picture Medicine

Martin Shkreli is an American Investor, Pharmaceutical Executive and Hedge Fund Manager who became the most hated man in America in 2015 when he obtained the drug Daraprim and increased its price from $13.50 a pill, to $750 overnight.

0:00 Intro

1:56 The Big Short

8:04 How to price a drug

20:01 Should we price drugs like iPhones

25:36 Pharma's dirty secret with R&D spend

34:12 Why are we not discovering more drugs? Eroom's Law

43:59 Marting's new AI Doctor — Dr Gupta

51:08 What's the FDA going to say?

53:26 Problems with GPT-4; hallucinations and sources

1:00:00 Mental health impact of being the most hated man in America

1:02:30 How rich are you?

1:08:00 Outro

Daraprim is used to treat or prevent parasitic diseases, commonly in patients with HIV or AIDS.

He defended the move by saying “If there was a company that was selling an Aston Martin at the price of a bicycle, and we buy that company and we ask to charge Toyota prices, I don't think that that should be a crime.”

Unrelated to the Daraprim scandal, in 2017 he was charged with securities fraud and sentenced to seven years in prison and fined a total of over $70M dollars.

Martin comes from humble beginnings, his parents are Albanian immigrants — but he quickly ascended the world and became a multimillionaire polymath. And despite having no formal training in Medical Sciences — he has a penchant for consuming medical literature from PubMed, and making novel insights.

We talk about how Martin does this, his philosophy around drug pricing — and whether we should think about pricing drugs in the same way we price iPhones, we talk about whether blowing more money into pharma research & development actually leads to more exciting drugs, Martin’s new AI doctor that he just launched and the mental health impact of being the world’s most hated man.

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