No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - Republicans screw Trump MORE after disaster debate

Episode Date: September 15, 2024

Trump and Republicans shoot themselves in the foot in the aftermath of the debate. Brian interviews Mark Cuban about Trump’s debate disaster, Elon Musk’s use of Twitter to spread disinformation, and what he’s doing with CostPlus Drugs to bring drug prices down.Order Shameless: https://www.harpercollins.com/pages/shamelessShop merch: https://briantylercohen.com/shopYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/briantylercohenTwitter: https://twitter.com/briantylercohenFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/briantylercohenInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/briantylercohenPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/briantylercohenNewsletter: https://www.briantylercohen.com/sign-upWritten by Brian Tyler CohenProduced by Sam GraberRecorded in Los Angeles, CASee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today we're going to talk about Trump and Republicans shooting themselves in the foot in the aftermath of the debate, and I interview Mark Cuban about Trump's debate disaster, Elon Musk's use of Twitter to spread disinformation, and what he's doing with cost plus drugs to bring drug prices down. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie. So the debate clearly was a disaster for Trump, but what Trump and Republicans decided to do in the aftermath of the debate was arguably just as destructive. Look, when Biden lost,

one on the left was saying that he won. No one. No one acting in good faith, anyway. But Trump loses, and you take a look at the conspiracy theories that have just consumed the Republican Party and right-wing media. ABC literally had to issue a statement confirming that they didn't give the questions to Kamala Harris in advance because Republicans are so committed to the bit of claiming that they helped her cheat. Like, what questions are you going to give Kamala Harris in advance? It's a political debate. they're going to ask you about abortion and the economy and immigration. This isn't 11th grade physics. There's no surprises here. The first question was, when it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?

Wow, talk about a curveball. The fact that Trump supporters think that Donald Trump's inability to respond to basic questions about politics means that Kamala got the questions in advance just betrays how ill-prepared and ill-equipped he is for the job. If you can't guess that you're going to be asked about abortion at a presidential debate in 2024 without feeling like you were somehow duped by the moderators, you probably shouldn't be on that stage. Another conspiracy theory is that Kamala was being fed answers through an earpiece. Look, if Kamala was up there reciting the first 20 digits of pie, sure. But do you need an earpiece to say Trump's rallies are boring and then sit back and watch the guy next to you descend into an unhinged rage? Do you need an earpiece to know to say

Trump's dad handed him $400 million and then sit back and watch him melt down? Like, I've watched Hallmark movies that are less predictable than Donald Trump. I can assure you, Kamala Harris does not need an earpiece to know how to bait the simplest person in politics. And then, of course, my favorite is this idea that Kamala coming out and immediately challenging Trump

to a second debate was somehow a sign that she lost. There's a small problem with that theory. When Donald Trump beat Biden in the first debate, see how easy that is? What was the first thing he did? He challenged him to another debate because he won and it probably felt good and he wanted to do it again. Human nature hasn't changed in the last two months. Kamala Harris challenged Donald Trump to another one because she won and she wants to win again. Just like how Donald Trump beat Biden and then wanted to beat him again.

The cognitive dissonance at play on the right is so funny because it's not even like this is some precedent that was established 20 years ago. we're going by what Trump did in July. And look, it would be bad enough that Trump lost. I get it. It sucks. You want to spin it however you can. But for the right more broadly, by promoting these desperate and frankly embarrassing conspiracy theories, you actually just double down on the exact reason that Trump lost. The whole country watched Donald Trump claim that immigrants are eating pet dogs and cats,

that women are executing their babies after they're born. he embarrassed himself because we can all see that that stuff is crazy and untrue. And so how do Republicans respond to that by promoting even more insane conspiracy theories? All that does is showcase that the rot in the GOP isn't limited to Trump. They're telling the country, not only are we going to run defense for what Trump did, which is unto itself indefensible, but we're going to one-up him. We're going to say that there were secret earpieces, that questions were being handed off beforehand. They're showing us that the whole party is infected with this degree of delusion that Donald Trump suffers from.

And if that's their closing message, hey, far be it from me to get in their way. Next up is my interview with Mark Cuban. I'm joined today by Mark Cuban. Thank you so much for joining. Thanks for having me. So I want to start off with the debate because obviously that's the biggest piece of news that we're focused on right now. Do you think that Donald Trump made any inroads with those independent voters that he needs to be speaking to after the performance he hands, ended in at this debate.

Depends which way they lean, right? Because there's independent, but very few people are truly independent, right? If you were trying to be objective about it, no, he obviously did not. But if you were looking for certain things, then maybe, right? Because he was everything he is all the time, so you weren't surprised. Yeah. Well, in a way, if he is who he is, then presumably if you enjoyed that, you already are supporting him anyway.

Well, you would think so, right? friends in Texas, right, because it's Republican. And it's like, well, you know, I didn't see anything that would stop me from voting for him, right? So he didn't admit to too many crimes, right? He didn't admit to shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue. I mean, I guess when the bar is that low that like... Exactly right, right? But he is who he is. What do you think about the implications of being able to be baited so easily that all Kamala Harris needed to do was dangle a few things out there? If you crowd size, a few rallies, your dad gave you money. end, he would immediate, and she would hook him.

It's crazy. Yeah. Those are the kind of guys you want to negotiate against because you can be in a negotiation for any type of business or any type of circumstances and just hit them with something that's going to piss them off or freak them out. And you have the edge, right? Because they're going to lose some of their confidence and they're going to lose some of their objectivity and they're going to lose some of their minds. So it's just, it's a huge edge. Well, that goes against the message that he's trying to convey, which is that you want him in the negotiating room against the tough partners. Can you talk in that dichotomy there? Sure.

Of course, right? I mean, it's not like Putin or Xi or any leader of a nation state didn't pay attention, right, and didn't notice what happened. And so, of course, now you might be more subtle in how you approach it. It could be like leaving something on a table in front of Trump, say Trump crowd sizes down 30%. You might not have to say a word, right? It could be someone saying something to one of the other people in the room, right? An assistant talking to an assistant. Boy, we're really sorry to hear that. Hear that. that Donald Trump's crowd sizes have fallen and then just sets everything off. It's just so easy. You know, that's a problem. Donald Trump also keeps talking about this idea that the way to handle the economy is by imposing tariffs. And he's been corrected about this numerous times, but one hallmark of who Donald Trump is is that he never backs down.

Right, of course. And so because he said it once, this is now his position and he's going to stay with his position forever. It's the Roy Cohn School of Management. Exactly right. Can you talk about what will actually happen if tariffs are imposed as a principle? Tariffs can encompass multiple things, right? So, you know, and he brought up in the debate, look, the Biden administration did not remove the Chinese tariffs that he already had in place.

And so it's not a bad thing to impose tariffs for when there's a strategic need. So if there's another country like China who is dumping particular products, whether it's washing machines, cars, or they're subsidizing the equivalent of dumping. right? So if that nation state is providing money to the manufacturing or the only manufacturing so they're competing unfairly, that's okay to impose tariffs on. What doesn't work are revenge tariffs and across the board tariffs. Those are a disaster because they affect every product. So if he would have said, and even common, if she would have said, look, tariffs aren't necessarily bad if they're strategic. And that's why we didn't remove the ones that are in place. But the idea of taxing everything and anything specifically because I don't like the people

or the country where it's originating is insane because that truly is the sales tax that Commonwealth is talking about. And not only is it a tax to be paid on that product that's being imported, but there's also an additional tax on the company because you have to deal with all the administration of filing the forms for the tariffs, We're hiring a broker, dealing with the record keeping. So all these things, particularly if you're a smaller company, right, becomes not just a tariff on the tax, on the buyer of the products, or a tax on the buyer of the products, but also a tax on the smaller company that's implementing it, or even a big company for that matter. We look at Donald Trump, how he handled the economy when he was president, how he did impose tariffs, how he basically dried up federal revenues to pay to make those farmers whole when that trade war. kind of went south. And so still you have a lot of people who look back at the Trump economy, kind of with rose-colored glasses. What do you say to people who say, oh, the economy was better

when Donald Trump was president? Look, we're always nostalgic, right? And the whole idea of being a conservative is to conserve what was already in the past, right? So it's not a surprise. And, you know, you're not going to just all of a sudden get someone to change their mind if their mind is said on that. But we, I mean, we can all give examples of scenarios where, you know, if you just wanted do apples to apples. The inflation rate for, I think it was, Obama was like 2.4% on average, and then it went up to 2.9% with Trump. It was either 1.4 to 1.9 or 2.42, whatever it is, it increased, right? And so it's not like everything was perfect. And you also had a situation where 2018 and 2019, he was asking for the Fed to reduce interest rates because he wanted

to pump up the economy. And he wanted more huge. quantitative easing. Well, let me just tell you, QE quantitative easing, as one of my friends says, is UBI for rich people, right? Because when you push down interest rates like that, the value of expensive assets just go up higher and more people can afford them. And so while you had an economy where folks like me with a lot of money truly benefited and there's an inflationary value to assets that we owned, the people who do the work, they didn't have this big beneficial gain. The tax rates didn't help them all that much. right. The prices, while they weren't high, no one was put in a better position to succeed.

When you look at the business community, I think there is kind of this overarching belief that Donald Trump is better for business. If for nothing else in the reason that he just says it a lot. No, that's it, right? But if you look at small business applications, for example, right now, they're the highest that they've ever been under the Biden administration. Can you talk about I guess the dichotomy between what Donald Trump is seeking to do and the purportedly pro-business ideas that he says he's putting forward with the fact that right now, using this democratic model is when we have the highest small business applications in modern American history. So business can mean a lot of different things, right? It's a solo entrepreneur who comes on

Shark Tank with just is the only person in the entire company, had a dream, and this is their American dream. Or it could be, you know, Apple and Nvidia and the biggest high market caps in the world, right? Donald Trump certainly has made it, made an effort to support those larger companies through lower corporate rates, through other types of opportunities that he's created for him, but he's done nothing, nothing for the small business person, right? You don't, you hear Kamala Harris talking about efficiency when it comes to starting a business. You hear Kamala Harris talking about raising the deduction from $5,000, which is a meaningless number these days and starting a business to 50,000, right? You hear her talking about child tax credits

with if you're starting a business and you can pay for child care for, you know, your children or child, that allows you the freedom to go start a business, right? So she's talked over and over again about the economic opportunities that she's trying to create for small and medium-sized business. And she's just used the term entrepreneurs and founders over and over again. You haven't heard that from Donald Trump at all, whether he was in office or since then. That's just not in his DNA. I asked a question on Twitter. Had he ever invested in a startup or a company that didn't involve any of his relatives? And nobody could give me an answer, right? I didn't know the answer and I didn't know what to expect because there could have been

20 companies he helped somebody, you know, friends of his son, friends of whoever. Nobody came up with a single company. And to me, that says volumes about who he is because I've kind of, to me, it's rewarding when I go out invest in startups, right? If I'm helping somebody else chase the American dream or reach the American dream, that's why I do Shark Tank, right, to help all these companies. It's a beautiful thing, right? That's what makes this country different than so many others. He doesn't think that way. And so he's not thinking in terms of smaller companies, startups, the Etsy companies, the eBay resellers, right? He could care less. And to me, that's a great failing. Well, you know, comma on the flip side said, okay, we had $5 million or whatever business

applications, we're going to 25 million, right? That's what drives the economy. Sixty-eight percent of jobs are from smaller companies. Is it not just tax cuts for the top one-half of one percent? Because you always have to ask, you know, what changes behavior? And changing tax, corporate taxes from 21, changing from 35 to 21, okay, you can expect some behavior to change. Changing from 21 to 15, but also putting constraints that it's only if you are not importing any products, that's ridiculous shit, right? Going from 21 to 28, that's not going to really change anybody's behavior. Yeah. How cataclysmic is it that we have business leaders, Fortune 500 business CEOs, for example, none of whom have come out in favor of Donald Trump?

I know it's insane. For a Republican nominee for president. This is the purportedly pro-business party for him to have no avowed support from any of these CEOs. So I'll say this, and it's a little bit off path from what you're getting to. Parties really don't matter right now in this election, right? I think we saw Donald Trump. just take over the Republican Party, right? Mitt Romney was the candidate before him. He's nothing like Mitt Romney. He just took it over and made in his, him.

We're seeing the same thing with Kamla, right? This is not about democratic ideas. This is about Kamala Harris's values and relating to the American people. The opportunity economy, that's what makes this so amazing. And I think that's why so many big business people have gravitated to support the VP, because they understand that,

Kamala, her values are what are going to make her different. Her values are what makes her stand apart from the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, for that matter. She wants to bring people together, and that's so different from what Donald Trump wants, and that's what companies need in order to be successful. When there's partisanship and division, it's hard to run a business. I gave a speech this morning, right, where it had a conversation, and one of the things they said is don't talk about the election because we have Republicans. Republicans that work here. I should say Trump supporters and Harris supporters. And she understands that and the CEOs understand that in order to be max optimally successful, you need an

united country. Just not only from a sales perspective, but just the culture of your organization. You don't want to have to worry about saying the wrong thing because we are so partisan. You want to be able to manage your business, you know, as a unified organization. And that's becoming more and more difficult. Can you speak for a moment, and then I want to move, change topics here, but speak for a moment on what the volatility that Trump would bring, how that kind of manifests itself in the business world? If he doesn't know what he's going to say next, how are businesses going to be able to anticipate or prepare for what comes next? It's critically important to have some sanity and some reliability in laws and in regulations. And I will say, I try to be as objective as

possible, right? Where Donald Trump is so, you know, when she talks about chaos, that's absolutely right. But, you know, Kamala has some work to do in terms of like Gary Gensler at the SEC and maybe Lena Kahn at the FTC. But the good news is I think she recognizes that, right? She recognized, and she has said this out loud, that she is for bright line regulations as opposed to regulation via litigation. And I create that contrast because we have no idea where Donald Trump is going. And Kamala Harris has recognized there are frailties and imperfections in the current government. And she's going to do the work to make it so that this is not only great for business, but for the people who work for those businesses and have their own lives

are trying to live. So the flip side of these CEOs and businesses that we've been talking about is the Silicon Valley billionaires. And a lot of them are going more and more, not not only toward Trump, but outspokenly toward Trump. So what's driving this move to the right? Is it just money? Is it just tax rate? No. Is it something a little bit more insidious?

It's something, I don't know if it's insidious, but it's, yeah, it probably is. First, let me say, there's a lot who are switching back. They just won't say it because I'm having those conversations, right? Because I think Joe Biden's administrator made a mistake where he would not even talk to people in Silicon Valley, would even have a conversation. Kamala is the exact opposite, right? If it's not her, it's people in her camp. that are talking to these folks who felt like if I can't talk to the administration at all,

you know, how can I make sure that we're aligned? Well, Kamala is having those conversations. And I can tell you, I've talked to multiple people who were on those lists of people who supported Trump, who ain't supporting Trump no more. But back to answer your question. I think they believe they can manipulate them. I think they understand that he's so transactional and so devoid of core values that anything that they want, they can manipulate him to get. Now, it's a corollary to the old adult in the room with Trump thing, but the bad news is we saw what happened to the adults who walked into the room.

They all turned on them, right? And I think a lot of Silicon Valley has that arrogance. And I, look, most very successful entrepreneurs have that arrogance to a certain extent, right? And they believe that they can manipulate them. And I think that's what's happening. And is that, I mean, you can draw a straight line from Peter Thiel to J.D. Vance to Donald Trump? And is that kind of, does that fit into the kind of what exactly what you're saying? Yeah, for sure. That is the influence that they're seeking. I mean, it's not like J.D. Vance,

I mean, if he's funded by the Peter Thiel's of the world and then get into the White House, it's not like Donald Trump has any long held principles, deeply held principles about 70 years old, right? And so if he does get elected and, you know, there's nothing that says he's not going to take, you know, a more accelerated path of cognitive decline. And so who's next in line. Right. And who, you know, who is that vice president beholden to? You know, maybe not overtly, but come on, I don't, whether it's me or you, if somebody invests in our business and gives us a start, you're going to have an obligation to them at some level. When you have this group of tech billionaires, the Elon Musks of the world, the Mark

Zuckerbergs, I mean, you got, you got your, you started off your career, you know, in tech. Well, I guess the question is, how did you get out? You know, like, is this like an escaping Amish situation? It's not a hotel, California, right? But like these guys, I mean, you know, you had Mark Zuckerberg, who I think was looking for any excuse to support Donald Trump and when we had the assassination. I don't know that he's really supported Donald Trump, right? I know he came out and said, you know, that when Donald Trump, unfortunately, was shot, it was tragic and he showed leadership and all that. And that's fine.

I think he was just trying to create balance so he could just get out completely. Yeah. That was my interpretation. Elon, on the other hands. On that is all in. Yeah. Elon's all in. I mean, that's why I like to fuck with Elon on Twitter, right?

Because, excuse my French. Oh, it's all good. This is YouTube, baby. Okay. So I think Elon, again, the same principle. Elon's one smart guy, right? And I know he believes, he hasn't told me, but I know he believes he's much smarter than Donald Trump. If you listen to the podcast they did together, right?

You can tell there's times, particularly as they talked about the environment and nuclear, right? and DEI, that I could just see Elon rolling his eyes at that time, right? I got to ask you this about Elon because this is what kind of blows my mind. If you are the CEO of an EV company and your audience, your consumer base is presumably people who buy EVs because they have some semblance of an understanding about climate change or whatever it is, Like, how does that make sense from a business perspective to then get to completely redpill yourself, to go all in to basically to not only abandon your core market, but then throw your weight behind a political party for whom climate change isn't even a real concern. Because having the power to manipulate the most powerful man in the world is far more valuable than any amount of EV sales from Tesla. just being able to be the puppet master.

Yeah. And he's already come out and said that he would work in Trump's administration. Yeah, and that's fine, right. Trying to increase efficiency. I've had the same conversations with the Harris campaign about, okay, what can we do to increase efficiency, to make it easier for businesses, et cetera, et cetera, right? So that's all fine and good.

There's no knock on Elon for that. But, you know, if you're the wealthiest person in the world and you have control, effective control, you're the puppet master of the president, the most powerful person in the world, oh my God, that's about as intoxicating. That is the definition of power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I mean, that's why, I mean, if I had the same goal, I wouldn't care about my EV sales, right? I wouldn't care about my Starlink sales. And I know no one else is launching rockets like me. Look, I give Elon as an entrepreneur, he is the entrepreneur of our generation. And maybe the entrepreneur for the next five, generations we don't know. But, but in terms of his quest for power, that's different from being

an entrepreneur. And you talk about insidious? Yes, right? You see it in Twitter. You see it in his comments. You see in his lack of responsibility. I mean, when you look at Twitter specifically, right, and if you don't want to go into a technical tangent, just let me know. No, no, keep going. Yeah, you're good. But the way Twitter's algorithms that he's published so far effectively work is whoever has the most reach allows you to reach the most people who in turn reach more people. It's like a tree, right?

A tree algorithm. And he knows that whatever he says and does reaches the maximum amount of people. And the people that he responds to, that amplifies what they do. And so everybody on Twitter's got that for you page to the left, right, that they see first. And if you just go and create a random burner account

to see what's fed to you, it's all leaning the way Elon wants. wants you to. Yeah. You know, he is a new surrogate to the Trump campaign, but I think he's pretty quickly embraced a lot of the ideals of the Trump campaign anyway. I mean, just recently, when Taylor Swift came out and endorsed Kamala Harris, Elon, apropos of nothing, came on the Twitter and wrote, fine, Taylor, you win, I will give you a child

and guard your cats with my life. So I guess Republicans are trying to beat the weird, the creepy allegations, the weird allegations, coming on to Twitter and volunteering to impregnate somebody. Yeah, but you got to look from Elon. Okay, I'll defend him a little bit there, right? So, yeah, it's kind of insane, right? But I sent Elon to text one time. I'm not friends. I don't want to suggest we're

friends, right? We just texted back and forth a few times, and he had just had a child. And I said, congrats on your 90th child. And his response was, Mars needs people, right? So that's just Elon's sense of humor, right? I have no problem throwing Elon under the bus, but I'll save it from when it's truly deserved. Okay. So switching gears

here a little bit. I do want to talk about cost Plus drugs. Good. First of all, what is it, and how are you able to accomplish what you're doing? So I got a cold email from a doctor, Alex Oshmiansky, right? He's a radiologist, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant person. And he wanted to do what's called a compounding pharmacy where it's a pharmacy that can manufacture drugs that are in short supply.

And I said, well, you're thinking too small, right? You don't want to just do things that are on the shortage list, what else can we do? And it was right around the same time that the farmer bro, Martin Screlli, was going to jail. And I asked him the question, if this dude, right, can increase the price of this drug called Deriprim by 7,500% or whatever it was, right? This is not an efficient market. What's going on here? And he started explaining what he did, buying out the – I'm like, let me do a little homework.

So I did my homework, and it was very obvious, very quickly, that the reason health care generally and the pharmacy industry specifically is so out of whack is because there's no transparency, None. Like if you think if you get a prescription from the doctor, they say, well, what pharmacy do you use? No one discussed price, right? No one discussed affordability. No one discuss anything about whether or not you have to give up food or rent or daycare in order to afford your medications. And so I was like, okay, we can really have an impact here. Let's create this site. If the URL is available and it was, cost plus drugs.com. And what we're going to do differently is when you go to the site and you put in the name of the medication, We're going to show you our cost. And then we're going to show you we only market up 15%.

And for mail order, here's what you pay for shipping and handling and a pharmacy fee to look at and review it. And for local pickup through our team pharmacy network, same thing, right? We charge $12 so that the pharmacist gets paid. When you add that together, our prices were insanely lower than the incumbents. Presumably, in a capitalist economy, there would have been companies prior to cost plus that would have done that, and yet it was completely in the opposite direction. These people, the Martin Strelli's of the world,

were seeing how much they could squeeze out of people. And that's what it is. The entire healthcare industry is an arbitrage. Everybody looks to squeeze something here, something there, something here. And what's happened is it's fallen on just a few players to dominate the industry. It's like 85% or more of pharmacy prescriptions and something similar, not quite as much, in the health care side. And because, like, if you're running your business, right, and you're trying to buy health care

for your employees, whether you have 10, 50, 100, or a million, right? Your core competency as a CEO is not understanding health care, right? And so these big companies come in and say, we're the biggest, right? So-and-so does business with us. We'll do business with us, and they do. I come in and say, you're getting ripped off, right? Mr. Cohen, you're buying at a high price. You're paying too much for your health care.

Here's why. Here's the transparency. Ask your current vendors, your pharmacy vendors for transparent pricing, and they can't get it. And so now you're seeing a real switch. We've only been shipping two and a half years and we have millions of customers. And it's just insane because people want to be able to trust health care and to this point they have not been able to. Are the big players not doing anything to stop you? Oh yeah, they're trying, right? Like they're telling manufacturers not to work with us. How are you allowed, how are you able? I mean, I'm assuming they're not

vertically integrated, right? The manufacturers. They are. We're not. The drug manufacturers and the drug retailers? Oh, no, no, no, no. Those are not vertically integrated. So, So is anybody trying to stop you from reaching the drug manufacturers? Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, so there's things called pharmacy benefit managers, right? PBMs, yeah. Yeah, the PBMs. And the pharmacy benefit managers have relationships with companies and their insurers,

and the brokers that support them. They have relationships with the manufacturers. And what they're saying to the manufacturers are, do not do business with cost plus drugs. Or what? There's no, or what is, from a manufacturer's perspective, there's a thing called the formulary, right? So let's just say you're working for a huge company.

company that has a million employees, and you have a drug that is used for whatever. It doesn't matter, right? And you have a competitor in that space. They're going to say, if you deal with cost plus drugs, we are not going to put you on our formulary, which means your competitor has exclusive access to these millions and millions of lives. So are you sure you want to do business with cost plus drugs? Now, they don't put that in writing, and they're not allowed to say that. That's a restraint of trade, but that's exactly what they do say. And so how do you overcome that? So we go slowly but surely, like one manufacturer at a time.

We started with generics, and we've got like 72 skews from brands, and we'll keep on adding more. So if you go to costplusdrugs.com, put in the name of the medication, and if we don't carry it, then just make a request. There's a form there to request that when we do add it, you'll be notified. Because we went from 111 drugs when we started to 2,500 now. So we'll keep on growing. And this is happening in conjunction with the government also. so being able to negotiate lower drug prices. They've only got 10 drugs right now thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act.

But do you think that this, between you, between what we're seeing with the Inflation Reduction Act, that this is going to lead to some type of kind of overhaul of at least the drug market. I mean, I'm not so deluded. No, in healthcare too, right? So there's two pieces to that, right? There's the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, which really because it's been in place, the effort to create it was ongoing from like 2020 before we launched. So it's a response for the circumstances before we launched, right?

And it's a great response for that. But what's missing and what would reduce prices even more than the IRA is full transparency. And so if every contract that has to do with health care, whether it's a state contract, a federal contract, you know, your company, right, for your employees, if all those contracts with any health care-related business were published and completely transparent, the price of medications in this country would drop at least 30 to 40%. Extend that, and one of my companies is trying to do this, extend that to health care, not just pharmacy, and the price of health care in this country across the board drops 30 to 40%. You mentioned PBMs.

Isn't the job of PBMs to do effectively what you are doing? That's a stave job, right? They present themselves as being there to negotiate lower drug prices, but they're effectively, but isn't what's happening is that the companies, are inflating prices so that the PBMs can come in and bring the prices down to where they would have been if they weren't just artificially inflated anyway. And then they scrape some off the top. A lot.

Yeah. They get paid. You're doing your homework. Yeah. A hundred percent, right? And so they manipulate. I mean, there's a whole tranche of people in the health care industry who exist only to frame themselves, to position themselves as if they're helping you, but just to get

paid, just to take money. They're not even, they don't offer anything. Yeah. You know, so I've given many speech to companies, right? And I ask the question all the time because they do contracts with PBMs. I always ask the question, what is the one thing that a PBMs, the biggest PBMs do for you that's unique and you can't get anywhere else? And I've yet to see anybody raise their hand. Yeah.

Not once. There's nothing unique. But what they do is you talked about what's called spread pricing, right? So they negotiate a lower price and then they get rebates off of those prices, but they don't fully pass on the rebates. And they keep a part of that rebate. that's the spread that they keep. But as part of that spread that they don't keep, they pay it in the form,

they aggregate that in the form of a rebate that they pay up front. So if my company buys $10 million worth of drugs over the course of the year, and on top of that, they have a discount which allows them to make $500,000, they may pay me $2 million of that and scrape off $500,000 to a million themselves, right? But they'll tell me,

passing the whole thing on. Right. Right. Because they create all these subsidies in Switzerland, in Japan, and wherever, just to be able to misprice things to corporations. What's your pitch to people who may not have heard of cost plus drugs who, you know, if you want to tell them anything about it? Sure. Thank you. No matter what medication you prescribe to, even if you have insurance, you probably have a co-pay. Go to costplusdrugs.com, put in the name of the medication. And there's a chance that even if you're insured, we're cheaper than your co-pay or your co-insurance. If you're not insured and you have to pay cash,

we're definitely, definitely going to be cheaper than anybody else out there. The other thing I said is very, very important. One of the things that the PBMs do is, let's just say you have a prescription for eloquist, right? And you want to go to your local independent pharmacist because you've been dealing with them,

your entire life maybe, or your family has. And they, and your company pays whatever price for it, the PBM will not reimburse the independent pharmacist for the full amount of what they paid their wholesaler for that drug. So they may have paid $540 for that eloquist. Your company may be paying the PBM $600, but the PBM's only reimbursinging $500. So the pharmacist is losing on every brand prescription that's sent by your company and most companies to that independent pharmacist, which is forcing those independent pharmacists to go out of business. It's striking to me that when people say, what would you do if you had a billion dollars?

And when you don't have a billion dollars, most people say that they would help people. And when you do have a billion dollars, what we're seeing is that most people don't seek to... Well, you'd be surprised. It's just that most people don't take credit. Right, right. Or, I mean, I'm being reductive. But, you know, we do see the Elons of the world who have used their capital right now and their voice to, you know, to platform disinformation and whatnot. It's awful. And kudos to you for using the... the platform that you have to solve one of, you know, the most pervasive and...

I'm trying. I'm not there yet, but I'm trying. Yeah. I do want to go back to politics for just a moment. Sure. You know, one issue that we heard at the debate was Donald Trump, airing this piece of disinformation that immigrants, that Haitian immigrants are eating pet dogs and cats. We don't have to talk about that. It's obvious that's nonsense. But the practical consequence of that is now we... We know that Haitian immigrants are keeping their kids home from school, that there's,

that their homes and property is being attacked as the result of that. And this is predictable, right? Like we've seen when Donald Trump issues his clarion call to his supporters. January 6th it happened with COVID and the Kung flu. That's what he was saying. Then there was a spike in violence against. Islamophobia, right, the whole nine yards. So can you speak on just your reaction to that as we see, you know, someone like

Donald Trump use his platform not to do any semblance of good, but rather to kind of vilify people so that he can help himself politically. Yeah, that's the Roy Cohn School of Management, right? You demonize and demonize and demonize and give credit to nobody else. And that is the antithesis of good leadership. That's the antithesis of good character. That's the antithesis of being ethical. That's who Donald Trump is.

I've done it for 25 years. I'm never going to say we were best friends, but he is the most unethical. lax character, dishonest person I've ever done business with or worked with. Why does that matter, though? Like, people are going to look at that and say, I don't care, he's an asshole. And they do. But he's our asshole. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Character is destiny, right? You don't know. The one thing about the presidency of the United States, you don't know what's coming next. The past is no predictor of the future. You have no idea what the next problem is you have to deal with on a small or large basis. Like COVID, for that matter, right? And you want somebody who has character because that has empathy, that has a willingness to learn and understand. And you want somebody that is ethical when it comes to making difficult decisions.

I can't even imagine why people consider Donald Trump because of his lack of character and ethics. Because when that tough time comes to make a decision, he's only going to listen to himself. And we've seen how that works out. We saw it worked on the debate. Right. If he's not going to listen to anybody for a debate, right? And when he's trying to convince people to vote for him, when you have 40 or 44 cabinet members disavow him and say you shouldn't vote for him, when you have, you know, former Republican presidents and senators and current senators come out and saying don't vote for him. That is not a man of character. You know, they would have given him the benefit of the doubt if they believed in his ethics or his character or that he was honest. And that tells you all you need to know. You don't want somebody like that making, dealing with the uncertainty. And as bad as lack of ethics, lack of character, lack of honesty is the fact that he makes no effort to learn anything, this is one of the few human beings on the planet that get dumber in front of our face every single day. It's not like you can't think of one thing

where it says, I think, you know, that's really smart, right? Or that's really nuanced. Where he really understood that topic with some depth. Not one time. And that's what's so madness. and infuriating about the whole thing and I get, like I had a friend when he first ran, I said, how can you vote for this guy? I told him stories that I've, you know, the experience I've had with him. He goes, Mark, let me tell you something. I've been voting for politicians my entire life.

You know what they've ever done for me? Nothing. I don't want a politician anymore. And there's some people that get, just glom onto that so strongly, they don't care about anything else. But the flip side of that is, isn't he the worst manifestation of all of the things that they hate about politicians. Yeah, of course. He did nothing for, not only did he do nothing for the working class, for the regular class, but he got into office under the pretense of actually helping

those people. There was no infrastructure plan. There was no, there was no cheaper and more comprehensive health care plan. There was no job boom. I literally, in 2019, I was working on a plan of predecessor to Cost Plus, and I went and sat in the Oval Office with them, right, and tried to picture them. I talked to a variety of people around. and the HSSA, and it was, my plan still needed a lot of work for sure, but I tried to explain it to him, it's like anything else with Donald. It's just, he's not going to try to get into any details. But to your point, right, he's, he's the type of salesperson. So if you don't look at him as a politician, and you just look at him purely as a salesperson, you know,

he's the type of salesperson that will say anything to get the sale. We've all had to deal with them, right? And that's who he is. But he's a good salesperson. And he will connect to you at a visceral level and understand what your fears are and sell you on fixing those fears. And then he'll amplify those fears. You know, oh, your computer's going, like in technology, your computer's going to crash. You're going to get hacked. Hacking is the worst it's ever been by my software. Right? That's who he is. It has nothing to do with whether or not the software. works, but if I can get you to become afraid of Haitians, of black people, of Jews, whoever it is, trans people, gay people, people, whatever, right? Anybody, then I can sell you on the fact that

I'm your guy. Because when you're selling something that isn't discreet, right? It's more general, like cybersecurity, right? Or fear that, you know, your community is being taken over by these immigrants. That's the easiest sale in the world, and that's why so many people follow him, because if I tell you, you have more reason to be afraid, and then I give you reasons why you can be more afraid, and even if I don't tell the truth about how I'm going to fix it, if I lie my ass off, and you know I'm a liar, but hey, at least you're giving me a shot to fix it. Whereas Kamala is joy, she's hope, and I think, and I believe, and I hope that people are ready for the change, that they're tired of just being demon, of everybody around them being

demonized, right? And that the number of people who have been demonized speak to the people around them and get out and vote and say, look, it's time to change. I think so long as they can keep certain people afraid of other people, keep them distracted so that nobody's paying attention to what's happening at the top. Can you talk to the, speak on this idea that if you're appealing to rural white people who are lower class or working class this idea that the

group that they need to be afraid of most or the group that's taking from them is immigrants and so kind of creating class warfare or demographic warfare sure can you speak on that because that's a strategy that they rely on so and they do it well right and they do it well

unfortunately it's like the boogeyman right the boogeyman exists right it's like Why are scary movies so successful, right? Because if you don't, if your life doesn't really connect you or give you experience with things that are different, it's easy to be afraid of. But is there one pie?

And if somebody else is taking from that pie, it's, it's detrimental to you? No, of course not. It's not a zero-sum game. Right, that's what I'm getting at. Right, it's not a zero-sum game. And that's to Kamala's, you know, that's what Kamla is trying to explain, right? It's an opportunity economy where if we can grow the economy so that everybody benefits, there's nothing that can happen.

There's nothing that a Haitian can do or anybody can do for that matter that's going to stop an entrepreneur for being an entrepreneur, right? You can't stop me. I don't care who the fuck you are, right? If there's a good business, you come on Shark Tank and it's a great idea and a great opportunity and there's product, market fit, doesn't matter. Nothing else matters. We are going to kick ass, right?

Not all of them are going to succeed. but the idea that that person is going to take away from you is insane, right? But I understand why it resonates with people because, look, I've been broke. I've been sleeping on the floor. I've been, you know, five guys in a three-bedroom apartment. And when you're in that circumstance, it sucks, right? And if somebody tells you, it's not your fault that it sucks. It's these or them or those, you know, it's better than it's.

admitting to yourself that, okay, you know, I've got it hard and that's just my life. Yeah. Right? When the upside, there's the American dream and, I don't know, the right rhyming word for, you know, American horror story, right? But if people believe their own, if there's a book I read in high school called Why Man Rebell. And I kept, I stole a copy from the library and ended up buying it, right? And what it says was when individual people's expectations for their own lives are high and they underperform those expectations, they fill the gap in somehow, right?

And if you can't fill the gap in with achievement, then it's got to be someone else's faults. And if someone else is telling you, you're right. That lack of achievement that you have, it's not just, that's just the way life is. It's not, okay, we'll try to help you, right? It's not, we'll give you the resources. So, hey, we'll pay for childcare. We'll give you a child care credit so you can go out and work.

So you don't have to work a second job, right? Or you can spend more time with your kids. And that creates a virtuous cycle for education, right? No, if it's like, no, it's not your fault. And what better messenger for it's not your fault than the guy who has refused to take accountability for anything in his entire life? He's the victim always, right? Which is also infuriating, right? I always find that so fascinating that this is a party, that the Republican,

party is predicated so aggressively on this idea that these are alphas, these are the tough men, these Donald Trump views himself as a strong man and yet he is wallowing in perpetual victimhood. Always, right? And again, it's just Donald Trump.

Donald Trump captured the Republican Party. The Republican Party does no longer exist other than a fundraising vehicle. Right. Right. And this is who he is. He is always the victim. It's the Roy cone you know school of management right it's never your fault it's the communist part that's that that is the most insane thing right so i had this conversation with a friend he is reinvigorating

the mccarthy playbook from 1954 or 55 all the while attacking communism as if he's protecting everybody from yes like you know are you or have you ever been a member of the communist party no in social media it's not even a question anymore and it's not even a blacklist it's a hate list you are Kamala Harris, you know, communist Harris, right? Right. You know, all the name-calling, all the hate, he doesn't even ask the question. He just says, you're like, so if I say something negative about him, I'm a communist, I'm a Marxist, all this other ridiculous nonsense that just makes me laugh. But that's what he does. It's the Roy Cohn playbook.

And, you know, it imploded on Roy Cohn. You know, he didn't win the McCarthy trials. He got, you know, do you have no shame? We are about to have our do you have no shame moment, led by Kamala Harris. And people will recognize that, yes, as a country, we do have shame. We are self-aware. We do care. We are empathetic.

And those are, go hand in hand with leadership. You can be strong. You can be bold. You can be decisive. You can fight, right? You can demand the best, right? And you can stand up against our greatest enemies alone or together. He can't.

I would have a lot of very upset people if we didn't end on Shark Tank. Sure. So best and worst day on Shark Tank. The best days are anytime I close the deal, right? Because when you agree to a deal, walking on that carpet and pitching a podcast, let's say, right? They're terrified, right? You know, they're prepared and it's their baby, but it's scary. And so you've got five people there, you know, just nailing them with question after question after question.

And when they get through that and it's a business I like And you walk up there and you give them a hug and shake their hand That's the best moment The worst moment is when I have to listen to Kevin Go on and on and on about royalties Just the same shit over and over again And by the way those episodes are much longer than we get Then the 22 minutes we get on TV

I mean each episode might be each deal might be 10 to 14 minutes On TV But in real time they can go The short ones are 30 minutes And the longest ones can go 90 minutes Wow. Why did you decide to leave? Family. You know, my kids now are 15, 18, and 21, and we shoot in June and September.

And so when they were younger, it could be like, wait until dad's done shooting Shark Tank. Now what this age is teenagers and a 21-year-old, they're like, no, dad, you're working on my schedule or you're not coming and we won't have time to see you. And so, yeah, I don't want to miss those years. I know that you've gotten this question a lot, but what's your biggest piece of advice to budding entrepreneurs? You just got to grind, right? So you've got to be curious. You have to always be learning. You have to be agile because shit changes all the time.

And you have to be able to sell because if you don't, if you're not the best salesperson for your product or service, your company, then something's wrong. You have to love it and believe in it so much like you do with this podcast, right? You have to just know that it is so important to you that you're willing to walk up and talk to anybody because you're helping them by telling them what you do. well thank you for being here thanks for being an inspiration for generations of people and thanks for the work you're doing with cost plus drugs as well again i'll put the link in the post description of this video mark mark hubin thank you for coming on there's a lot of fun thank you thanks again to mark that's it for this episode talk to you next week you've been listening to no lie with brian tyler cohen produced by sam graber music by

wellsy and interviews edited for youtube by nicholas nicotera if you want to support the show please subscribe on your preferred podcast app and leave a five-star rating and a review and as always you can find me at brian tyler cohen on all of my other channels or you can go to brian tylercoen.com to learn more