So Martin Grelli, if you just Google most hated man in America, I think he comes up as number one. At least he did at the time when I first heard about him. He is known for or he's known and hated for,

being a kind of a price gouger with a drug. So what he did was He owned a pharmaceutical company that focused on,

like, small, like, less popular drugs that were, like, niche And he would and he bought them. So he bought this drug, this drug called Deraprim,

and he increased the price from, like, thirteen dollars to, like, five hundred dollar. I don't know what it was, but the percent was like. He increased it by five thousand percent.

And so people, and then immediately, the news picked us up was oh, man. And they started calling him the pharma bro because

first he did this. They were like, how dare you? But instead of apologizing and walking it back, he was like,

Fuck. Yeah. I did. I owned this. I could charge what I want, you know, like, and and, like, this is America. That's the price of this drug. And, Yeah. He doubled down. He doubled down, and he loves attention. And he's amazing

at getting attention.

A lot of the attention is hate. But he's amazing at getting it. But and he was only thirty three, thirty four when he did this. And this was basically he controlled two pharmaceutical companies that were each public

at north of a billion in market cap, I think. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I can't I can't from those that might that might be right, but he also had a hedge fund before that where he invested in biotech stocks. Yeah. Just like he had done big things. And so he was he's a very smart guy.

Now people think he's a crook. They thought so some people said he was a crook because he raised the price of the drug. That's not a crime. That's just something you don't like. Then he actually got indicted and went to jail for doing something that legal, which I think was, like, he basically

paid investors from one company with, like, the stock of his other company and then, like, didn't

wasn't clear or something like that. I don't know exactly what he went to jail for, but is there any way I've been to jail for two years? He went back to jail or his, like, like, he didn't get released early or something like that for threatening Hillary Clinton. He didn't really threaten her, but he, like, made, like, a, like, a stupid joke on Twitter. Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, so he he just got out last week. That's gotta the funny part of this. So he gets out.

And,

it's like, you know, I don't know. Who's, like, a famous person that, like, everybody wanted to be freed It's like, you know, free young thug or who? Like Martha Martha Stewart. Yeah. Free Martha, like, whatever. There was a group of people that were excited about his his arrival. Was excited too because I enjoy reality TV. I enjoy, you know, the drama. He's like our version of Kim he's he's our Kim k. He's he's That's exactly what he is. Exactly. So I wanted to see a plow. And so he comes back, and I just started thinking about

Shrelli in general. So I have a couple of ways we can go. We can go of things I find very interesting slash borderline admire about the way he does things. And then there's

what he has been up to in prison and what's interesting there. Where do you wanna go? I have both.

I like both of those. So what has he been up up to in prison. And and and the back story, you you actually need to mention this. The back story was he was an early user of your product, Blab. And I spoke to him a couple times on Blab And when the hustle first launched, we were in our first office. So this was in the first six months. We, one of our reporters was this young woman named Brena, who was you know, like, a pretty,

like, a good looking woman, and he

she deemed him for a story. And he was like, hey, just wanna, like, fly up here and we could, like, hang out. And, like, he was, like, asking her out. And,

so I had a I have a little interaction with them as well. So we, yeah, we had a app called Blab that was basically if you've seen clubhouse, it was clubhouse before clubhouse, and it had video on it, so it wasn't just audio.

And, it got

sort of popular except, you know, we tried using it. We tried getting podcasters to use it. We we got some kind of like marketers to use it for their kind of like promoting their stuff. Then we started getting some bigger brands. The NBA started using it. UFC started using it Oracle,

but none of them could hold a candle to our number one power user, Martin Schrelli.

Martin Shcarelli

came on the app and basically broke the app from day one. The first time he came on, instantly, the room filled up to like five thousand people.

And it was more people that we had ever had in one room before that hit our max limit. We were like, who is this guy? That's when I first Googled and found he's the most hated man in America. And,

he was famous enough to draw a ton of people in, but he was not famous enough to have other shit to do. Which was the perfect sweet spot, which as I said, he is the most lethal weapon in social media.

He has since been surpassed by Donald Trump and Elon Musk,

as the most lethal weapon in social media. But before that, it was Martin Screlli. And the reason I say that is because,

he creates a ton of content. So he would go on Blab every day from about five PM till two in the morning.

He would be on that whole time

and he was the master at creating nightly entertainment. Like, you know, Jimmy Fallon,

Jay Leno,

You guys can't touch this guy in terms of nightly entertainment because he has no producers, no script, no nothing. He would hop on, and somehow or another, he would cause enough ruckus that this room would have thousands of people in it all night long watching it. They were hooked to it. And we would see this in our data. Like, people wanted us to kick them off because, again, He's a bad guy for raising the price of this drug. And, like, he said this thing, that wasn't cool. But this guy was driving in hundreds of thousands of new users to us every single month. So I was like, I'm not trying to kick this guy off. Like, this guy is like, you know, he's where the actions at. This was, two thousand seventeen, two thousand eighteen canceled. Culture. Wasn't a thing yet? Yeah. And I was like, dude, I'm a startup. I'm gonna do what it takes to get off the ground. Like, yeah, the Bitcoin used the silk road to, like, get off the ground. And, like, you know, YouTube started as a dating site in Facebook, you know, before this, he did face mask comparing, like, which girl's hotter? Like, okay. Not everything starts with, like, the most, like, clean-cut

You know, I think Airbnb started by, like, faking and scraping, you know, cranks list sites and, you know, emailing them as fake people saying, I'd love to book your thing. Can you just list on Airbnb? Like, dude, people do what they have to do to get your project started. Started.

And so we at Shrelli, and I used to watch it at first, what I noticed was Every who came in came in to throw stones

at this evil man who raised the price of this drug.

But he did not sit there and apologize a whimper. He, like, fought back, he would give his side of the argument. He would invite you up for a debate. And that's when you saw

how

how strongly held opinions could be with no logical backing with no real rationale behind it. The argument was so hollow. And this was not just like average people,

people who were, like, very successful business people would come on trying to, like, kind of,

stand on their high, you know, be on their high horse, you know, telling him what he should do, and then he would, like, dismantle their argument.

Journalists from CNN and other places would come on, he would dismantle them.

And he's doing a combination of, like, a, making fun of them. B, hitting on them, and, c, breaking down their logical arguments, all at the same time. I've never seen anything like it. And I just thought, wow, this guy is very entertaining.

I don't agree with everything he's saying, but I think he's very entertaining.

It's the the data doesn't lie. He is very entertaining. He he's And I think Later on later on in some of the blabs, he would have, like, these, like, cute women in the background. And they, like, clearly I just met him on blab and he was just like, hey, I'll fly you up. You wanna hang up. This will start happening Every started off hating him. So after about three weeks, he developed an army of believers of people who were there's a guy who became

Yeah. The creeps. And so this guy came on, he his name was Young Shrelli.

And when Martin was tired or had to go eat, young Shrelli would go hold court, and he would just be like an extreme knock off version of Martin. And he would just hold court defending him until Martin came back to defend himself. And then all these women started joining, and they loved him. And they were just hanging out there all the time. And they were like, when they're not, like, cam girls or model, they were like actual models, fashion models, cam girls, only fans, people, whoever. And they would get on, and they would just be like, you know, Martin is like, I don't know. I would date you. And they would just get on. They were so the room was always filled with, like, his posse. It was like, you go to, like, you know, where,

a mob lord is at, and he's got his goons. And he had his goons, dude, and his army was just growing. But within a couple months, the number of people who loved him outweighed the number of people who hated him. And it was, like, the most surprising thing that it was, like, watching a cult form in real time. It was fascinating.

And, I remember the CNN journalist came on, and she was like,

Martin, I, you know, I I know everybody kind of, you, you know, attacks you, blah blah. I don't wanna attack you. I just wanna ask you some questions. He's like, Well, you're on my show. Let's go. She's like, no. No. No. I want you to come on CNN. He's like, this better than CNN. He's like, you're on my show. You have questions. Let's go. This these are my terms. You can ask any question you want no holds barred right here right now. And if you're not prepared, come back and prepared, but you could do it right here, on my show. And she's like, I'm not gonna do that, Martin. I'm like, I can only do it there. He's like, and he's like, he's like, alright, fine. Come with me to my fundraiser gala tonight. I'll fly you out. He bought he goes a screen share. She buys her a flame ticket. And, like, he's like, what's your email address? I'm sending this to you. And she's like, I'm not going on a date with you Martin. And he's like, if we set it to date,

and then he's like, you know, he's just playing people perfectly. It's Didn't didn't they? Didn't she end up quitting? One of the one of the women who hollowed at him from Washington Post ended up quitting the job

at and So this is part of what's remarkable. When he goes to jail, this woman from Washpo or some place, is assigned to cover him, or cover the story

falls in love with him, breaks up, like, she has a family, she has a husband, kids, I think. Leaves them for Martin,

falls in love with Martin while he's in prison.

And then Martin breaks her heart, and she's heartbroken now. And, like, you know, whatever. She gave it all up. She gave up her career and her family for Martin and fell in love with him. This guy's got some cult leader shit to him. So anyways, and he did some crazy stuff when he was unblab. Like, he would he was so loyal to his army that he'd be like, I'm I got a date tonight, but don't worry. I'm leaving Blab on. So he would leave it on in the other room, and you could eavesdrop it over here his date, which is again? Oh my god. Prime time entertainment.

Right. Is it wrong? Yeah. Is it entertaining?

Yeah. It is. And so he this guy was phenomenal. Anyway, so I found this guy interesting. He would also do things. So, like, from a marketing perspective, I was observing, how is this guy staying relevant? Like, that drug shit was years ago. Like, what how is he staying relevant? He would just do stuff. So, like, wu tang had an album that they were selling, like, a one of one for their biggest fans. He bought it for two million dollars. And so now this guy that they didn't want so they would gotten a feud with him. He had this thing. And then on Blab, he would play, like, snippets, like, ten seconds of the album. And no one's ever heard it before besides him, but he would just, like, tease it, dangle it.

Like, the original NFT.

When, there was, like, some building for sale in Times Square, he tried to buy it for ten million dollars to, like, erect a statue of himself in Times Square. And again, it gets covered. So he was just news jacking constantly. He was just hijacking the news and putting his

Did he have money when he got arrested or, like, his

I I think he was actually, like, he they he showed a brokerage account that had seventy million dollars of it. Yeah. I think he had, like, somewhere between fifty and seventy five million dollars for our members, like, at the time. But then he, like, had a declared bankruptcy.

Yeah. And I think at one point, ironically, his that was defending him,

raised his price by five thousand percent and started charging him sixty thousand dollars per hour. Like, I don't know if this is real or not, but Martin came out the news. It's like, this is outrageous. And, like, people are like, dude, the irony, you know, pot counting the kettle black. It's like, course, this is just another article he wanted written about him. And, like, he's just a master of getting attention. He did so many things like this. I can't even count the number of things he did like this. And I was like, wow, this guy just knows how to stay in the cycle and I constantly, like, reinvent himself. Because then he would, like, Just when he pushes you away, he'd lure you back in. So, like, for example, on Saturday, Friday nights, he would hold, like, you know, his nightly blood thing where he's a thousands of people and it's like a roast session and he's saying outlandish shit and, like, you just feel yucky for being in there. And then Saturday morning, he would wake up at eight in the morning and he would do a live finance like session where he would teach you how to analyze stocks. And they were phenomenal.

And I watched a bunch of them. They're still on YouTube. You could go watch them. He is so He's very smart, and he was so thoughtful and patient as a teacher. He's a he's a fantastic teacher. And so, anyway, so that's, like, the backstory. So anyways, he gets out. He said they're, like, how is prison. Right? He he immediately he gets out. He immediately jumps on,

on Twitter spaces. Oh, by the way, actually, that's another funny story. When he had to go speak in front of Congress or the, I don't know. Yeah. Congress, I guess. He had to go testify.

He goes there And he just with a smug look kept saying, like, I I will take the fifth you know, I I choose to elect my my fifth amendment while rights to not speak. He just said that on loop for an hour. But he was just, but smiling. He was smugly smiling and just pissing them off, and he was drawing the whole time.

And then he gets as soon as he left their courtroom, he jumped on Blab from his phone on the train. And he goes,

alright, who wants to see my drawings? He shows his drawings of, like, dicks and stuff like that that he was drawing on his piece of paper. And he's live caught the the hearing was still going on, and he embedded it in one screen, and he was just talking mad shit about the Congress people in the other screen at the same time. Again, it was just, like, high level social media usage. So anyways, He got on Twitter spaces, and they were like, how was prison? He goes, oh, it was awesome. He's like, he he's talking about the prison system and, like, how unjust it is, how, you know, like, you know, ninety five percent of the people that were in there,

you had, like, traumatic childhood issues with parents and stuff like that. He's, like, I hustled out like, other people's lockers, you know, where I so I could store more books.

And,

and he's, like, he basically was like so what was his, like, summary stuff? So first, he's been blogging. Have you read his blog from prison? No. But what did he say about prison? He's he I mean, I bet you he was actually well respected there. Yeah. He's, like,

tell me some stories. Yeah. Exactly.

And so he, yeah, he was kind of like, you know, had his his crew there or whatever. He said he created,

a crypto study group.

So he what did he say? He goes,

he goes, when everybody else was working out in prison, I would read. Because brain gains are all that matters, not muscle gains, because he's like, real scrawny. Oh my god. He's like, I created a group called crypto thugs in prison, and it was just me teaching crypto to,

to the rest of my, like, my fellow, like, inmates or whatever.

And he had a bunch of, like, interesting stuff. So,

He had a bunch of predictions about crypto that were in there, a bunch of he read he basically spent his whole time studying about crypto and artificial intelligence

and like biohacking and stuff like that. So he's he's got this blog post with shit ton of predictions about the future.

I'll I'll read you a of his I'm on I'm on his it just it's martin squarely dot com. Right? Yeah. I think so.

So,

me read you some predictions on here. So two thousand twenty five, so about three years from now.

Self driving cars are the successor to mobile computing. They trend upwards, people spend eight hours a day in your car.

Teslaaineer's ten trillion dollar market cap must becomes the first trillionaire.

Two thousand twenty six, The AI generated maybe GPT four song gets created with zero human editing and direct participation and charts on billboard.

Two thousand third twenty thirty.

Virtual reality slash metaverse is ubiquitous, widely used. All you needed was a comfortable ergonomic optical interface, that's what was the limiting item. I think he's, wrong on that one. Twenty thirty vehicles,

self driving cars reach majority penetration in the US. Car accidents drop by more than fifty percent. And he says he just keeps going. He goes out to, like, twenty fifty. He's making predictions as to things, like, you know, twenty fifty. Life span for a newborn is now a hundred to a hundred twenty five. Ninety percent of non surgical medicine is automated.

Blah, blah, blah, like most contract laws automated on is automated on chain. And so he keeps going. Now right or wrong, you could disagree with all these, but he's just a very interesting thinker, a very interesting guy you follow. Right? And He does these book reviews that are, like, very hilarious where he's like, this book, three out of five,

you know, first three fourth giant waste of time. Last fourth, interesting about this topic. It's like, oh, good. Like, you saved me a bunch of time reading that book. Like, I kinda trust your opinion on these things.

And so, I don't know, his blog is worth worth a read.

We,

I I tweeted out, asked to get him on the pod, but I had no Twitter handle to tag. I didn't know who he was or, you know, which is kind of hidden. We maybe found the right one.

But we,

we should get them on. I feel like we're big enough that we can get them