How I Built This with Guy Raz - HIBT Lab! Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company: Mark Cuban

Episode Date: June 16, 2022

Serial entrepreneur Mark Cuban was one of the very first guests on How I Built This, way back in 2016. Mark has been founding and investing in startups for decades, but he’s never put his name on a company until now. This week on How I Built This Lab, Mark joins Guy to talk about what he’s been up to since he was last on the show. They discuss his interest in NFTs and how his latest business, the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, is looking to disrupt the pharmaceutical industry. Listen to Mark’s original How I Built This episode: https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-serial-entrepreneur-mark-cuban/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. This is the place where we experiment with ideas and stories you might not hear on our Monday episode. And it's a chance to find out what happened to some of the entrepreneurs I've interviewed on the show in the past, including today's guest, Mark Cuban. Mark was on the show back in 2016, and he told us the story of how he went from bartending in Dallas to building a media company to eventually owning the Dallas Mavericks. And if you haven't heard that episode of how I built this, please go and listen.

We'll put a link in the show notes. A couple of years ago, Mark got a cold pitch email from a radiologist who was trying to try and to shake up the prescription drug industry. The idea intrigued Mark so much that he joined forces with that radiologist to create his newest company. It's called the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company or MCCPDC, a mouthful, and there's a story behind the name, which Mark will explain. The company wants to upend the pharmaceutical industry by drastically reducing the cost of

prescription drugs. And so far, it's managed to sign up more than a third. quarter of a million customers who now have access to hundreds of generic drugs. Mark Cuban, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Guy. I'm excited to be here. All right, Mark, you were one of the very first guests we featured on the show back in 2016. And we had a great conversation about your life story and, you know, growing up to Pittsburgh and reading this book. Like, what was the book called? Like, How to Be a Millionaire at 30? How to retire by the age of 35.

Yeah, by age of 35. And you could have done that. But of course, you didn't. Yep. You're still doing Shark Tank. Yep. You're still, you still own the Mavericks. Yep. But let's talk a little bit about some of the things that you've been up to over the last couple years and including during the pandemic. You have gotten really interested in NFTs.

Yes. You've got one startup that you've co-founded called Lazy, which is a way to show your NFTs. First of all, explain your interest around NFTs because it's. it's controversial, right? I mean, some people don't understand the appeal or the value. Sure. What is it about NFTs that you think is not just interesting, but potentially valuable? So there's a back story there. You know, I'm a tech guy and I always have been. And so over the years, I've paid attention to and dabbled in and invested in cryptocurrencies at various levels. And about, golly, it's December of 2020, January of 2021 now. You know, I was hearing about NFTs and I decided to learn some more about them. And so I went to a site, I think it was rarable.com, and then another one, mintable.

Dot app. And I decided to mint some NFTs. I just wanted to go through the process to learn. And I was, as I was doing it, it's a very simple process where I was filling in the form. And one of the questions that asked was, what would I like the royalties to be? And I was like, wait, what? royalties. You know, I can create this digital asset and if it's resold time and time again, I'll continue to get paid. That as a business person and tech guy lit a fuse for me. And I was like,

okay, this is different. This isn't just, okay, a digital version of baseball cards. Let's just buy and sell them. What enables this to happen? And as I dug into it, I realized it was something called a smart contract and that the underpinning of all NFTs are these things on Ethereum. or Ethereum-compatible blockchains called smart contracts. Right. And smart contracts really are just a programming language that are probably the equivalent of HTML or JavaScript for creating a website. Only these run on a decentralized distributed basis on top of a blockchain.

That got me excited. And that really led me to dig in further with NFTs. And so I started creating them and selling them and learning more about them. And really, long story short, the thing about it, the thing about it, NFTs is they're just like any other collectible. They just happen to be digital. But they're easier to collect because they are digital. So if I'm collecting my favorite Willie Starchel baseball card, because I'm a Pittsburgh kid and he was my favorite player along with Roberto Clemente, and I have their baseball cards, I have to store them so they don't deteriorate, I have to get

them graded, I have to ship them if I want to sell them. There's just a lot of hassle factors involved in collecting physical goods. But if I have the same picture, if you will, and I turn it into a non-fungible token, which records it on the blockchain forever. So there's a recorded history of it, then that allows it to be a collectible and makes it easier to sell.

And as I learned with the royalties, if it's an NFT that I own the rights to and have created, I can keep on getting royalties each and every time it's sold. And to me, that was an exciting opportunity for any and every collector and create. So you're bullish on this. I mean, you believe that both as collectibles and as art, this is sort of the future. Yeah. Now, there's two pieces there. There's a lot of noise and it's hard to determine the signal. It's like if you walk into an art gallery or a store that sells any type of artwork at all, everybody's going to have their own opinion about what the value of any piece of artwork is going to be. And it's no different for NFTs. Some people speculate like they do in the physical art. world and collectables world and some people collect and you every person's got to make their own choice but

an nfts is just a digital version and when people say well you know i can't physically touch it i'm like well you know you could take a picture of a baseball card and put it on a piece of cardboard and sell it and you know replicate anything you want in the art world you know it's not about physically touching think think about you know the when you run out of storage on your phone you know how valuable all those digital pictures are. Right. Right. You know, people assign value to things that are digital and an NFT is no different. Mark, how do you, how do you compartmentalize all these things? I mean, you're, you're invested in so many companies. You are part of many companies. You are, obviously, the owner of the Mavericks. You've got executives, you know, and managers who run a lot of

these businesses. So how do you kind of divide your time and, you know, stay focused on all of these different things? Now I don't, I'm not really involved in day-to-day office. operations of anything. You know, one of my faults has been I trust to a fault. There's been times when I've been taken advantage of and I'm not happy about it, but, you know, I've managed for the most part to, even if it's the result of learning from a mistake, find good people, let them do their job. And that by trusting them and allowing them to do their job, I get to do what I like to do, which is learn everything I can related to technology and kind of, you know, speculate about where this can go, whether it's robotics, AI, personalized medicine, cryptocurrencies, whatever it may be,

they all have a lot of the same logic underpinning them. And for me, learning all that stuff and staying up to speed and getting ahead and coming up with new ideas, it's fun for me. Yeah. Now, you know, with who you are and your celebrity and your wealth, people treat you differently than they did when you were bartender, obviously. So how do you make sure that, you know, that you're exposed to ideas and you're you're you're there's pushback you know and that you're challenged yeah i call it questioning my whole card checking my whole card yeah you know because that's one of the beauties as as toxic as social media has become one of the great things about twitter is there's always somebody willing to challenge you yeah and so there's lots of times when i'll put things out there

expecting to be challenged and you know enjoy it i'll give you one example um we were talking about the impact of Section 230 on algorithmic enhancement of post on Facebook. This is the part of the law that essentially kind of recuses big social media companies from the responsibility of what people post. Correct. And that's the most succinct way I've ever heard it put. So good job, God. And so the question became, can you limit Facebook in this particular example,

ability to algorithmically promote things because when you're designing an algorithm or using AI and setting the goals of the AI that you've created, the neural networks you've created, you effectively are making an editorial choice to promote something. And, you know, my understanding of 230 and the First Amendment was that, you know, that disqualifies you from 230 protection. And these first amendment lawyers came on and just destroyed my, argument literally destroyed my argument where I posted a post saying look you're right I'm wrong and I took out my my post that ended up being wrong and I love those scenarios where I get to

take people on and check my whole card so to answer your question I don't mind putting myself in the mix to have people question me and I and I actually enjoy it because I want to know that I can check my whole card and be confident in my position. All right let's talk about another company that you that you got involved with in the past couple of years. It's called the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company. Yep. So MCCPDC for short. But I read that it started with a cold email from somebody from a radiologist named Alex, Alex Oshmiyanski.

Oshmiansky. Oshmiansky. Tell me, is that what happened? Yes, absolutely. Believe it or not, I've probably invested over $100 million into people I've never met my entire life from cold email. or cold calls or whatever it may be and done really well with those investments. And so Dr. Alex emailed me and he was a radiologist, you know, a mathematician, just one of the smartest humans I've ever met. And we started going back and forth about the ills of the

drug and pharmaceutical industry. And he was working on starting a compounding pharmacy that would allow him to sell drugs for less, but would be in that particular case, more different. to scale. And this is four years ago, give or take, right around the, you know, when there's still discussions going on about the farmer bro. You're talking about Martin. Greley. Yeah. And I was like, if this guy can raise prices 750 percent, why can't we cut prices? You know, this market forces go both ways. And so we started digging in further and we decided to create our own company, the cost plus drugs company, and go through the process of getting all the documentation we needed developing relationships with manufacturers and distributors and the like

and all the state regulatory agencies and federal regulatory agencies. And that took us, you know, close to four years with the goal of being the low-cost provider of any and all drugs that were able to sell, period, end of story. And on July 19th, we launched costplusdrugs.com. And right now we're selling, well, we're about to add about 60 more. So we'll go up to about 175 drugs where we're fairly positive. We are the low-cost provider, cheaper than you would pay for your co-pay with insurance. And by the end of the year, we'll be up to 2000. Mark, stick around for just a moment. We're going to take a quick break. And we're going to come back and talk more about this business and how you're disrupting the pharmaceutical industry. We'll be right back. You're listening to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. And my guest is Mark Cuban. So, Mark, all right, let's break this down a little bit. Because back when you were on the show in 2016, I asked you about, you know, your first business. You were helping people install software on their computers and you were building computers.

And I remember you, I asked you, like, how did you know how to do that? Because you didn't have a tech background. You said, you know, I just opened up manuals and taught myself how to do it. And, you know, at the time you said, let's actually, let's take a listen to what you said at the time. You know, one of my strengths has always been being able to put myself in the shoes of any type of business. You got a shoe store, okay, I understand how that works. You got a bank, I understand how that works. You've got an oil refinery. I'll figure out how that works. All right. So clearly, you have taken this approach to all the things that you've been involved with. Walk me through how you educated yourself around the pharmaceutical industry. It's a very complex industry. Yeah, no question.

If somebody cold emails you and says, hey, Mark, let's fix this. Let's disrupt it. That's great. But there's a lot. that you have to learn before you start. So where did you start? I started reading. I started reading every journal and every industry newsletter I signed up for and read. You name it. I got my hands on it and dug in whether it was some of the legalese, whether it was understanding how pharmacy benefit managers work, what's happening in the insulin industry, why prices were the way they were understanding the consolidation that took place and how that impacted pricing, you know, reading these things called, you know, MedPAC reports from governmental agencies that investigated pricing and issues there, you know, reading, you know, single payer reports,

everything that I can get my hands on over the last four plus years now regarding health care and pricing, I read. And that's what prepared me to be able to do this and make decisions on it. The basic understanding, I think, that most of us have is that the reason why drug prices are tend to be high, right? Non-generic drug prices tend to be high is because the pharmaceutical companies are spending so much on R&D and the approval process and it takes years and years of clinical trials and it costs millions and millions of dollars and they have to recover their costs. Is that, in your view, a false narrative? That's half true. And the reason why it's half true is that like any business, every drug

has a life cycle. There's the, you know, investigation, the research, the preparation, the trialing, then the marketing, and potentially selling. And then once you get a patent on it, you've got a 20-year life cycle. So there is a significant investment phase that goes into developing drugs. Not all drugs, though, because often a lot of that investigation and research process is taken up by the National Institute of Health. Government funded, basically. Yeah, basically government funded. And so we can go into a whole different discussion about how we license those drugs as a country to pharmaceutical companies. But that really isn't the biggest impediment to keeping drug prices low.

They're effectively the way that drug industry is now, the process that takes a drug once it's been manufactured, put aside all their R&D and the development of the trials. Once that drug manufacturer starts making a drug, the process it has to go through to get to the patients is ridiculous. It is stunted. It is manipulated by companies that have become vertically integrated incorporating insurance companies, health care providers, big pharmacy chains, and these things called pharmacy benefit managers. And they game the entire system as it applies to Medicare. and how pricing is done there by creating very significant retail prices, because the prices are set for Medicare as a percentage of that retail price. There are rebates that are paid from manufacturers to the PBMs that go into the pockets of the PBMs.

So there are so many games that are played to distort pricing. What we decided to do would just come in and not play the games. And so rather than working with insurance companies, which we don't do at this point in time. We are completely transparent. So if you go to costplusdrugs.com, put in the name of the drug, and if we carry it, we'll show you our cost.

And then we will show you our markup, which is 15%. Then we charge $3 for handling through our pharmacy partner, TruePill, and $5 for shipping. And that's it. And so all the complications that are introduced by these pharmacy benefit managers and the big companies that they are part of, we eliminate. And that allows us to sell our drugs almost always for less than the co-pay that you have

for your insurance. And the irony of that is that because they're not, because of that, we're making those insurance companies a little bit more money because the insurers, the patients, are not using their insurance to buy the drugs from us. If, in fact, right, if in fact the reason why, or the primary reason why so many prescription drugs are so expensive is because of essentially all the kind of the middlemen, right? All of the people involved in distribution and marketing and sales and so on. Why haven't there been attempts to disrupt it in the past? I mean, I would imagine. There have been. They have been.

But typically what happens, those companies get bought. And so somebody, an entrepreneur like myself, comes in and says, wow, this is an opportunity to disrupt. Let me create a company that disrupts. And so they take one of a couple paths. One, they start building the company and it gets bought and that entrepreneur makes a lot of money and that person's happy. Yeah. Or two, they play the game where they'll work with the pharmacy benefit managers as is and they'll go out there and they'll find the lowest cost available.

So there's companies and I don't want to go into naming them because they're doing the best they can where they'll say, okay, if you go to this Walmart down the street, you can buy this drug for $62. And if you go to Walmart across town, it's $48. dollars. But the craziness of it all is that it's the same drug, priced at different prices, even within the same retail chain, but different based off of the discount card and the location. And what we said was that's ridiculous because that means the patients can't have any confidence in what they're going to pay next for their drug. And so the other delta and why this is more

difficult than it sounds is A, because it's expensive. And B, we're able to keep it low because I don't need to make money. I just need to make enough to keep this thing investing and being able to manufacture and grow. And so we're a primary benefit corporation as opposed to a typical subchapter S or. Right. And we should we should explain what that means a public benefit corporation is a for profit but operates with nonprofit principles basically. Correct. So that allows us to make some money that, you know, the market up 15% and invested in a, you know, we're doing a manufacturing facility in Dallas so we can push our prices even lower. Yeah. So walk me through how you do this. I mean, because I think you sell 200 drugs, generic drugs. Presumably, you have some manufacturer that's making them for you. And then you make them available to your customers. But essentially, the margins on this, right, are not, I mean, you're not talking about a company or a business model that can make, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Correct.

Because if it was looking like, let's just say we get up to over the next three years, 3,000 or 5,000 drugs, including brand names, if it looked like I was making $100 million a year, I would either invest that in creating a new, you know, manufacturing existing drugs that I can get a license to or I would lower my prices some more. So really the reason why this doesn't happen more often is because essentially what you're saying is in order for it to work, you have to be a rich guy like you who doesn't really care if it makes a whole lot And you also have to have a platform. I've never put my name on a company until now. And the reason I did that was because I do have a platform and it would be a lot easier for people to associate it with me.

And two, in 30 years from now, you know, or let's say 50 years from now after I'm gone, you know, that the goal of the company will still, you know, carry on that this is a cost plus drugs company. And, you know, people see my name attached. They'll ask why or they'll know. because I've talked about it for decades that this is meant to be the low-cost provider for every drug we sell. You're working with a third-party fulfillment center, I think called TruePill. True-Pill, right. What's in it for them? I mean, why wouldn't they just kind of take your model and do it on their own?

Well, it's hard to run two different businesses, right? It's hard to be someone who is a fulfillment center or pharmacy in their case that fulfills for mail order and also know how to sell at retail. and to develop all their relationships and do manufacturing and invest that money. You know, it's expensive just to do what they're doing, letting alone doing what we're doing in addition. You know, it's interesting because we often hear about Europe, right? And the same drugs manufactured by the same pharmaceutical companies, many of them, U.S.-based companies, are just much, much cheaper there.

Is that primarily because they don't have the same kind of PBM structure and insurance cost structure? Yeah, there's just different laws and regulations. And plus the companies that are doing the selling over there, you know, every sale is on the margin profitable because they've covered their cost in the United States. And so they do everything they can to keep their pricing high and their margins high here. And that makes it easier to sell, which means there's less there's less friction in selling to all those other countries. You know, it's interesting because you think about like air travel, right? And so adjusted for inflation, air travel is much, much cheaper today than it was 30, 40 years ago, right? It was. It was not something that everybody could do all the time. And consumer electronics, the cost of consumer electronics today adjusted for inflation much lower today than it was 40 years ago. Yep. In part because so much of it comes from overseas.

I wonder if the same principle might apply to prescription drugs. I mean, is your kind of model is the idea that it will force the manufacturers and all the middlemen, you know, it will force the market to essentially follow your lead? Yeah, it's interesting. it's a great question. So there's two pieces there. One in terms of manufacturing and putting the actual physical production costs and getting that lower. And the answer is yes. I mentioned we're spending a lot of money on a plant here in Dallas and it's going to be driven by robotics so that we can go through and take any given pill and manufacture one year or two years worth of supply, switch it over to another pill and do the same thing over as a short period of time and

push the cost of the production of that pill down below what we buy it today. And since everything we sell is cost plus 15%, that by definition will force the pricing down. And then the second part is, as we grow and we compete, then they're going to have to respond to us. And my greatest fear is, you know, they're going to, they're going to be great lobbyists, you know, and try to, you know, push us out of business simply because of what we're doing to their business. And I think without question, it will have an impact. But right now, we're too small for them to care. Mark, hold tight for just a moment. We're going to take another quick break. We'll be back with more of Mark Cuban in just a moment. You're listening to How I Built This Lab. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. It's Guy Raz here with Mark Cuban. We're talking about his new drug company that is working to make drug prices much, much lower. Let's talk about manufacturing. So you're investing in an actual facility, a place.

plant that is going to make and manufacture drugs. Yep. How does it work? I mean, can this one plant, will it be able to make thousands of different drugs? No, we won't be able to, you know, it's not going to turn out a billion dollars worth of drugs each and every year, but it's a starting point for us. And once we're able to establish enough volume, we'll be able to build another one, then another one, you know, across the country.

So no, this one facility will not be able to cover all the bases and all the volume. but, you know, let me take a step back. Our challenge to scale is not dependent on us building our own manufacturing facilities. Part of the challenge is getting manufacturers to sell to us because they're afraid of the response they'll get from the insurance companies. So if, you know, they have the ability to scale and push their costs down the same way we do. But they're afraid because imagine this scenario, you're a PBM that's, part of a big insurance company. And you go to a branded manufacturer and you say, look, you know, if you sell to Cuban and his cost plus drugs, we're going to yank you off of all

these hospitals that we buy for and we're going to yank you from the formularies for that this insurance company that owns us approves. And so that's been our biggest hurdle. And when you hear all this talk about regulating prices of drugs by different politicians, they're, they're not. solving the problem. They're creating different problems. The reality is the solution is trying to make sure that all these manufacturers sell not just to us, but any qualified resellers slash distributors. If we're able to do that, then the door is open to competition besides just me. Because look, at the end of the day, if I'm the smallest player, because the big guys have come in and undercut my prices, I'm happy as a clam. And so are millions of

patients who are paying a fraction of what they were last year. And so, you know, it really comes down to not can we build multiple manufacturing plants, but can we get the manufacturers of brand-name drugs to work with us and not be fearful of these big behemoth, vertically integrated pharmaceutical companies precluding their drugs from being sold. So it's not the manufacturers that is the obstacle here. It's the insurance companies? More often than not, it's not the manufacturer. You'll hear the insulin industry show data that says their actual sales price has gone down over the years, not up, but every diabetic will tell you that dealing with buying insulin is expensive and impacts their lives. And every

now and then there are coupons that give them a month to feel okay or a couple months. But it's not the insulin manufacturers for the most part that are distorting everything. It's these vertically integrated companies. Not all are owned by insurance companies, but for the most part, they are. Are you guys selling insulin? No, not yet. No. We hope to, but again, it takes somebody being able to sell to us, and they're afraid to sell to us right now. And so right now, essentially, these vertically integrated companies are maybe not yet, but eventually they're going to start telling manufacturers they cannot sell to companies like you because you are not willing to work with insurance companies, right? It's not that we're not willing to work with insurance companies. We're

just not going to put ourselves at a position where we have to distort our prices. You know, our mission is very, very simple. If you go to costplusdrugs.com, you're not going to see bells and whistles. It's very simple. There's not going to be telehealth. There's not going to be big-name doctors, writing articles and blog posts and podcasts. Yeah. None of that at all.

Our mission is very straightforward. We want to be the low-cost provider of every drug we sell. And with that definition, we can't work with an insurance company that, you know, that, is going to require rebates or anything like that. And that's part of what distorts pricing. Now, not all insurance companies do that. There are some that have come to us and said, we want to work with you, right? We're not, we don't own a pharmacy chain. We don't own hospitals. We don't own pharmacy benefit managers. So we want to work with you. So not all insurance companies are bad guys. Not even all PBMs are bad guys. There's just a few that really have the most power that initiate the

distortion in pricing. Mark, is this a business that you think you would go out and raise money for? I mean, you've got your own money, but you couldn't, even with your money, you couldn't finance a massive drug company. You know, I haven't so far. This is kind of like the one thing I've said, okay, sorry kids. You know, your inheritance is going to maybe reduced if it doesn't work just because it's that important to me. You know, you from me say, I'm the luckiest guy in the world financially and I've been incredibly blessed. I try not to take it for granted. And this is a chance to have Alex reach out to me

and to have him be as smart and as good at his job as he is. And another gentleman, Ryan Klein and the people they've hired, I might write the checks and I might be involved strategically, but they make it run day to day to day to day. And while it's a big check and it's a lot of them, the impact is so great that's worth more to me than the money. It sounds like this is the big swing for the fences that you are taking, right? That you, there's a problem that you were exposed to and you realized that you could have an impact.

Yep. And so you're putting money into this project. Do you think that people who have lots of money have responsibility to do things like that? I'm not going to judge for other people. Everybody's got to make their own sources. You know, like people will ask me, well, how come I'm not going to space and all? this and that. But you know, you can question the motives of the Elon's and the Jeff Bezos. But when I've read the stuff that they've written, you know, I kind of see their thought process that

if we screw up this planet, what's next? Things that seem so insane and so grandiose and so outrageous today, you know, 100 years from now, kids may be reading it in textbook or whatever, however they're reading or consuming information and being educated about how, you know, those guys or whoever help save the planet. There's just, I'm not going to judge because everybody's got their reasons. And sometimes there's things that we can't see, even if, you know, it looks more self-involved than maybe we can see. So you're putting money into a problem that needs to be addressed, right? Prescription drug prices.

Right. Presumably there are other issues that you're looking out at. I mean, what's something else that you might down the road, you know, put some real money behind? that may not make you money, but may actually help solve some problems or move the needle. You know, I think crypto plays a role in that too. There's these things called distributed autonomous organizations Dow. Yeah. Which I think can evolve to be the best of progressive goals of allowing workers to participate in all upside and capitalist goals where, you know, people who come up with great ideas using these Dow's can be well rewarded while also rewarding

all the people who participate. So I think that creates a new type of organization that can have a significant impact. I think they're better unions than unions in a lot of respects. I think artificial intelligence. Right now we've bifurcated into a world of those companies that are great at AI and everybody else. And if you look at the top 10 market cap companies in the United States, all but Berkshire Hathaway with Warren Buffett are companies that are amazing at AI.

And so, you know, I like to support entrepreneurs. And, you know, we started a foundation teaching high school kids and underserved areas how to start learning about AI. And so, you know, I think it's incumbent upon the United States of America to train more kids and more engineers and more data scientists, etc. To be great at artificial intelligence because it has such a global impact. and in turn has an impact on medicine and impact on so many other things outside of just generic business that will change the world. And so, you know, my hope is that we as a country can lead the way. And that's only going to happen if we invest a whole lot more than we're investing now in educating kids. That's Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Maverick serial entrepreneur and now founder of the Mark Cuban Cost Plus drug company.

Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me on. This is amazing. I really enjoyed it. Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at How I Built This, and mine is at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, I'm at guy.orgi. If you want to contact the team, our email address is hibt at ID.wondery.com.

This episode was produced by Chris Messini with Editing by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Neil Rouch. Our music was composed by Rumpteen Arablewe. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, Carrie Thompson, Catherine Seifer, Josh Lash, and Elaine Coates. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.