This Week in Startups - Obi-Wan finale + Healthcare’s hidden money pit with Capital RX CEO AJ Loiacono | E1491

Episode Date: June 23, 2022

Today we bring on Lon Harris to discuss the Obi-Wan Kenobi finale (2:23), then we do a quick hit on the FDA taking action against Juul (42:14). Finally, Molly chats with AJ Loiacono from Capital RX, who is laser-focused on increasing transparency in prescription drug pricing (55:26). (0:00) Jason and Molly intro today’s show (2:23) Lon Harris joins to recap the Obi-Wan Kenobi finale (10:45) BairesDev - Go to https://www.baires.dev/twist and get $10k off when you sign your first contract (11:58) Favorite scenes from the Obi-Wan finale (27:21) Thorne - Personalized, scientific wellness. Go to https://Thorne.com/u/TWIST (28:35) Thoughts on the Obi-Wan series and finale, will they make live-action clone wars? (34:50) AdQuick - Visit https://adquick.com/twist and mention TWIST to get $1000 off your first campaign. (36:07) Discussing the franchise value of Star Wars (39:56) Jason’s previous Obi-Wan prediction (42:14) FDA is banning the sale of Juuls in the US (other e-cigarettes will still be available though) (54:05) Toss to Molly’s interview with AJ Loiacono (55:26) AJ Loiacono, CEO of Capital RX, who is laser-focused on increasing transparency in prescription drug pricing (1:40:14) Outro: coming up later this week

Hey, everybody. We have got a packed Thursday show for you today. It's a short week, so we have to give you like a double link through. All right. Yes, the OB-1 series finale is tremendous, and we're going to talk about it all. You can skip ahead if you haven't seen the finale yet and go to the other great content in the episode. But Lon Harris is back with us to discuss. Yeah, what this means for streaming and the episode itself. Very satisfying for me. Very satisfying conversation. And again, there's still lots of other content coming up. We're going to do a quick news hit on the FD. taking action against Jewel. And then I've got an interview with a Series C health care CEO. They say it can't be done, but he's trying to disrupt drug prices. Yes, this is AJ from Capital RX, laser focused on transparency and prescription drug pricing, likely more Cuban company, which we'll also have on the show at some point.

And just, you know, great to see founders doing the right thing, especially with this news of Jewel, which did the wrong thing for a decade. Definitely. It's really interesting because we have that news. and then a CEO who quite specifically is saying, I'm not taking the dirty money. That's the money we're never going to take. It's going to be a great show.

All right, stick with us. This week in Startups is brought to you by Buy Race Dev. Hiring a team of experienced developers doesn't need to be hard, slow, expensive, or risky. Go to buyrace.com. Dev slash twist and schedule a 20-minute chat to get a development team you'll love and get $10,000 off when you sign your first contract. Thorne.

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AdQuick makes it easy to plan, buy, and measure all in one place. Visit adquick.com slash twist and mention Twist to get $1,000 off your first campaign. All right, everybody. Everybody's favorite day of the week is here. It's Thursday. Thursday is when we have Lon Harris on. He's L-O-N-S on Twitter. He does Inside.com

says streaming and does a couple of other projects. Where else can people find you, Lon Harris? Oh, there's the, I do a podcast with Hal Rudnick where we talk about streaming shows every week. That's called binge boys. It's on Spotify, iTunes, wherever you get your, wherever you get your podcast in. Bing, boys.

I'm binge boys. That's right. And I write for honest trailers on Screen Junkies. That's the big YouTube, Honest Trailers show. You can find that in Honest Trailers. Or go to Fandem Entertainment. And that's where we do the weekly honest trailer commentaries where I give my thoughts and opinions and review of whatever we did the honest trailer on. That week, it was the Halo series we did this week.

The Showtime Paramount Plus. I didn't get to finish it. I really liked it. I really liked that. Yeah. My lord. You know what? That's it.

I'm going to, I'm a new thing for my team members. No more weekends. No. We're now going to have everybody do time blocking for streaming. I want to see how much you people are streaming. There's a lot of streaming going on. Can you imagine the hours of streaming world?

Two and a half months, I think, to finish the Halo series. But it was, I liked it. I mean, I'm like a child when it comes to entertainment. My needs are very simple. Blow stuff up. But I thought it was surprisingly good. I think a lot of us were expecting a little more action. A lot of the fans were annoyed that it doesn't follow the plot of the games.

I don't mind that so much. But it felt it felt like a lot of brooding, a lot of, it was pretty ponderous. I want more Spartans running around shooting aliens, you know? I think you know what? You're totally right because it took me two and a half months to finish it. And the first few months was episodes one through five, which I was like, Ugh.

It's kind of a slot, man. And episode nine are basically the video game. And you're like, oh, yes. Yeah, I want the shooty, shooting. To the positive feeling because, yeah. Let's talk, talk. Less feelings. Let's get into Obi-Wan here.

This is the, and of course, this is going to be filled with spoilers. You can just look at your podcast player on the show notes and go ahead. if you're on YouTube.com slash this weekend. If you look on the summary, you hit that down carry, you can open up the summary, the description of the video, and we put timestamp. So you can just go to the next timestamp. There you go.

So if you're that one guy on Twitter who's like, don't talk about Star Wars because I don't like it, we solved it for you. I don't know if you saw the new device, Molly, but people want to talk about the weekly show. So what they do now is they say, Obi-Wan spoilers below, and then they do a dot, a dot, a dot,

each with a new line. And then after about 10 dots down, so you have to open up the tweet, basically. Yeah, that's super smart. I just saw that today. Also, good for engagement. I think that's how you break the algorithm is if people open up your tweet, you know, they're more likely to like it and engage.

I think you get more engagement. Anyway, episode six happened. The finale. The finale. That's it. I think it feels like a, Ewan is on the internet this week saying he wants to do more, maybe it's season two, but this felt very like a final note to me. I don't want to

felt that way this felt like you could this is like a cherry on top just chef's kiss this seems seamlessly moves you into a new hope

we've got we've got everything in place he's he's found quagon they're going through the canyon to his new cave home where Luke will find him it just seems like I don't what more is there to do

this leads it on just a perfect like grace note which you could also be seen said for Rogue One, which seamlessly literally frame by frame, that's true. To it. So, well, and we know we're going to get, we have Andor coming up, which is 24 episodes,

two seasons, and it's the whole formation of the Rebel Alliance. So my bet would be some of the characters that we've met, O'Shea Jackson Jr. as Roken, Kumail Nanjiani, as, Khadja. I feel like a lot of these faces might come up again because we're going to see. the path get integrated into the Rebel Alliance. Jimmy Smith's Balogana. All these figures are now in play because they've created

the immediate, like the proto-rebellion. Darth, um, that, that, that, that, that, like, I love that. That was just to take a great, that moment where they had him refer to him as Darth. Just kind of a, kind of a retcon thing. Because when Lucas wrote a new hope

and has Obi-Wan, Kadoby refer to Darth Vader as just Darth. He didn't know that the standard would be all Sith lords have Darth and then their name, like Darth Sidious, Darth, Darth, you know, like... Right, right. That it's a title, not a name. So, Aligh Guinness, probably, the actor didn't realize Darth was a title, thought it was just his name. And so he refers to him and before like, well, hello, Doth. And so having you and McGregor do that here makes it a bit that he's doing instead of. He doesn't know that his first name isn't That's actually delightful, especially because it was such a kind of sweetly awkward delivery.

Like, he's like, right. Okay. Darth. Darth. Darth. Now it's a dig. Now it's like, yeah. You're just dark.

Right. You're just another generic Sith. I killed Anakin Skywalker. I'm Darth Vader now. He's like, well, hello, Darth, you know. Like it's almost a joke at his expense now. Which I like is it re. Now it recreates that moment in a new hope.

It's like, oh, he knows what he says. I'm watching so many YouTube videos of, like, you know, people's reaction to this show and everything. And I got an Alec Guinness on his yacht talking about Star Wars in like 87 or something. It's a great video. And he's like, I just kept turning the pages. It was great. I mean, the dialogue was, it need work. I mean, it was not.

But, and somebody writes in the comments, like, did you know he had like points in this? And then somebody, you know, they're jumping off at links to another video where somebody says, you had three points of the gross and started says, well, not that much. And it was clear Alec Guinness had made points on the gross of this thing and become, made many, many, many millions of dollars for a part he did not want to do, basically. What was, you know, and he said he plunged up the dialogue. At that point in his career, I mean, you know, we're talking about a Shakespearean actor, like one of the world's most, you know, like regaled, celebrated actors.

And this was a point in Hollywood where it was more common for that. that to happen. Like, you'd be celebrated in your own country, but if you wanted a paycheck, you could go, you know, like, even in once upon a time in Hollywood where Decaprio goes to Italy to make some schlock for a few years, like, that was more common in those days. It wasn't as much of an international film business. So, yeah, for Guinness, this was like, oh, I'll go to America and make this schlocky genre thing, and then I'll come back and we'll do, you know, leer. All right. Let's get right into it. All right. So a little recap, you got our two-stor storylines converging.

Riva is horribly wounded after being, we think, once again, stabbed with a lightsaber, but too angry to die, as one review put it. Arise on Tatooine to try to find Luke. Vader, meanwhile, is chasing Obi-1 in the path, and Kenobi, Obi-1 leaves the ship so that the path can escape, and Vader will chase him, and then they land on this sort of like nearby planet, which to me was reminiscent of the little canyon that Luke walks through to sort of explore his dark side questions. On Dagaba.

On Dagaba? Like I thought I had a similar look to that sort of Dagaba dark forest that Luke walks through. But anyway, they have a super cool lightsaber fight. Obi-Wan regains all of his Jedi powers through the course of it. There's, of course, that, you know, in the awesome TV arc thing, a moment when everyone seems beaten and then the good guys fight back. And then you see actually, which is kind of lovely, oh, in Peru, like, as Peru in particular, just be like a badass.

Like, we're going to fight for this kid and we're going to, you know, get our guns out. And so they have a fight. She almost kills Luke. Reva almost kills Luke with the lightsaber when he's knocked unconscious and doesn't. Rediscover her own good side of the force. And everything is just wrapped up in a delightful, tidy, lovely little bow. And now we're ready for new hope. All right, listen, great startup outcomes are almost always coming from, you guessed it, great developers.

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Lawn favorite scene in this episode, I think I could guess. Oh, wow. There are two really, they're two really poignant ones. I mean, I love the, the, the, The Leis-Saber Fight is great. You actually predicted the helmet, forehead scalp, slash moment, where he breaks open that element, which is that recalls a moment from, I believe it's Star Wars Rebels where Asoka does the same thing. Darth Helmits, Darth, Helmits, Darth Vader's helmet open and we get like a little strip

of Anakin's face. I love the way they did that in this, how we would go back from Hayden Christians' voice to James Earl Jones's voice box. And it was really that. Super cool. Both of them in one body kind of moment. I thought that was really well done and cool. And then it was also, it was really delightful to see Quigon show up again at the end.

Well, Liam Neeson. For your generation, especially, you're a little younger than me. I mean, I was already, I'm sure for the prequel kids, it's very cool. I was already in college when Phantom Menace came out. So it's just nice how it ties it all together with the old, with the old joke. I really, I feel like in some way, this and Mandalorian, I like both shows very much, but they're almost like opposite value propositions. Mandalorian is, it's this action show, it's episodic, it's like, we're going to open up this whole new little corner of the Star Wars world and just do a fun little adventure in it.

And then this was really like the fun of this show was tying all these threads together and making it feel like we're really bridging the gap between the prequels and the original trilogy. This is the main point, Molly. This is episode 3.5. Exactly, yeah. They created episode 3.5 because a lot happens between Anakin being defeated on Mustafa in Revenge of the Sith and Obi-Wan, you know, lowering his lightsaber to be turned, essentially opting into becoming a force ghost. You're, nobody understands what happens in that scene. It's like, oh, my God, he just disappeared. He's a ghost when Darth Vader strikes down old man, Obi-Wan.

But now you understand why Obi-Wan did that. He had defeated Darth Vader on Mustafa and on this new planet. He couldn't kill him both times. He had so much love for him, he could not kill Anakin. He walked away both times from absolutely trouncing him. And one, he cut off three of his legs. In this one, he slices his skull in half and his back. He got a shot in his back and could have killed him both times.

He couldn't kill his friend. And his friend was so filled with rage in the final instance, in a new hope. He lowers the lightsaber. He says, I'm not going to even try to kill you. You can kill me. I'm gone anyway. I'm moving on and we're going to have a bigger purpose here. And I guess that's what he learns from Quigon when he goes to the desert is.

There's a bigger purpose here. You can move on. And there's something about Jedi moving on to this, you know, force ghost. Well, we sort of see it's a similar beat with Luke at the end of Last Jedi, where, you know, some people read it as the amount of concentration he required to project himself to crate from, where he was meditating on Octo, I believe he was saying,

so you could read that as well it's the energy he had to expend. That's what killed him. Or, but he does just sort of, he just disappears. He just becomes one with the force. Yeah.

This is, go ahead, the, the Notties are having a debate that I also wondered about, which is this question of why Riva would,

because it's not clear in episode five whether she realizes that Luke is Vader's son. Oh no, she knows it. So she knows it. He says something about the kids. He said, I think I,

because I rewatched that scene, he says in the recap, his kids, we have to go check on his kids. So that's when she, with that little device, realize it's Vader's kids. Right.

I think she figures out Luke and Leah. And so then she goes to answer the question of what people are asking, which is then why would she go kill Luke? It's to get revenge on Vader. And I think the idea. Having slaughtered all the younglings. And I see people are commenting, but Vader doesn't know about Luke. It's like, well, she wants, she would tell it.

Like that we've already established that Riva loves to dangle information, lord information over people. That would be her revenge. And she would go tell Darth Vader, you had a son and I killed him. Or even better. I mean, she's walking back with what you think might be a dead Luke Skyworker, which obviously doesn't make any sense unless they were going alternate universe with this episode. Yeah, we kind of know.

I think by that day. But he looks pretty dead. By that point, I think we figured it out. Imagine she brings young Luke Skywalker's 10-year-old body to Darth Vader. Here's your son. I killed him, just like you killed my friends. I mean, it's pretty dark. She's delighted in being the one who gets to tell Obi-Wan, Anakin is still alive, and he's Darth Vader.

That would be part of her delicious revenge would be telling him about his stuff. I have to say, like, both of these lightsaber battles now are, they're so amazing because the lightsaber battle that occurred in Revenge of the Sith was a great, Light Sabre Battle, you know, on Mustafa, you thought, like, hey, this is Peak Jedi. And now you see something different. It's, that was Peak Jedi fighting each other. But now you have Peak Sith Lord and Peak, you know, Jedi fighting each other and, you know, all this fabric between them.

So I thought that was like choreographed amazingly. Reva's character arc, amazing. Turns out to be amazing to be a good, I thought it was a satisfying character arc. Because you have to have something else in there, I guess. It can't just all be. It's heartbreaking and kind of, you know, yeah. I thought a better ending would. have been for Obi-Wan after she goes to see Luke, I'm sorry, Leah, to get back in the ship,

and Reva's in the ship. I thought that was going to happen for sure. I was like waiting for it. Like, yay. He delivers her to complete her Jedi training to Dagaba. That would have been, for me, the most satisfying. That would have been- He goes to see Yoda and Yer says, too old, too old to complete the training. She is.

Or he then trains her and just her sitting there. What do you think? I was hoping for that. I was really hoping for that. You like that? I think they're only not putting that bow on it because it's probably still being decided what they're doing with her or they're going to take. I don't think she's gone for good.

Her becoming a Jedi would be next level. Completing a Jedi training would be incredible. I don't think a lot of these dangling threads that we've been left with are going to just be left dangling for too long. I think we're obviously seeing, you know, Quinlan. Oh, Quinlan was here? like all of these little things that we've set up, those who are those dead Jedi in amber that are being preserved?

We never got an answer there. All those things are being set up for a future show, a future movie. They're going to pick all these threats. I mean, I will say, I also thought, I thought that that was going to happen, that Riva was going to be in the ship. And I was like, you should take her and train her and whatever. And also I was like, you should do that for safety purposes because she now knows that Luke is here.

Like, I was like, I watched enough action movies that I had a moment of wondering, like, is Obi-1 just going to heartbreaking like now have to kill her because she knows this big secret? You know? It's not doing a very good job. To me, it would have been better security to bring her to be trained as a Jedi. Yeah, but then make sure she's like, okay, and

taken care of and say, they're just like, okay, peace out. I see you have a big owie. I think they let that I think they let that go for another time. Like, they can do a little flashback scene, which is like one of the things Star Wars is good at is not filling in all the gaps and let your imagination run wild. Like, what were the clone Wars like, you know? Oh, you fought with my father and the Clone Wars. We waited 20 years to find out

what the Clone Wars were like, right? Um, so there was a, another great scene. So, number one scene for me was the speech and the discussion. I'll pull up the copy of in a second between Anakin and Lou, because he says, yeah, I killed Vader. It's not your fault. I killed, I'm sorry, I killed Anakin. Yeah. And you're absolutely correct. The modulation of the voice, incredible scene, taken directly from rebels when Ashoka battles Darth Vader and cracks his skull open. So they, and then also the,

as we talked about in the penultimate episode, when he pulls down the ship, there's a video game scene where he pulls down a Star Destroyer. But I have to say, I got incredibly emotional. I don't want to admit this, but I got a very emotional. I'm not going to say I cried like Molly does.

But when he says, I'm sorry, Anakin for everything. And then he says, I am not your failure, Obi-Wi-Wi, you didn't kill Anakin's Skywalker, I did. That scene was incredibly moving to me. And I just thought, my God, they've written

dialogue that is actually not terrible for Star Wars now. Like this actual dialogue to me, Lon, I don't know if you noticed it, but they're really working on the dialogue to, you know, it's quippy, like, you know, the original Star Wars series had some good quips in it, but they're actually making more poignant dialogue. This has to be something they're consciously doing, right? there, I don't know if you noticed, some of these episodes had the name Stuart Beatty in the credit, like story by or written by. He's a, like a Hollywood screenwriter. He wrote collateral.

He wrote some of the pirates of the Caribbean films. He was the one who had originally written the original version of this, which was the movie. So this was originally going to be a movie. Then they were like, no, forget that. We're going to make a six-episode show out of it. That guy, Jose Amini, who you see in the credits. He was the guy who turned it into a six-episode show. And then from there, they rewrote it to make it less like the Mandalorian.

And that's the version that the final people who made this show worked on. Every time you see Stuart Beatty, it means there's elements in that episode that were from the original movie. And I think this scene was the climax of the original movie. And it probably got, it was probably the thing that got carried through this entire production. Like, okay, we know we want to do this big scene with Anakin and Obi-Wan facing off. And I feel like that dialogue was probably has been set for a really long time because it was really good. And I think the whole show maybe formed itself around that scene.

Because that's what that was the payoff moment. It was like the goodwill hunting. It's not your fault scene. Again, it fixes. And I'm not saying this needed to be fixed. But it fixes a moment in the original movie. Yes. Did you kill my father?

Where Obi-Wan, there's a way to watch it where it feels. almost like he's lying to Luke. He says, your father was killed by Darth Vader, and it's very misleading, if not an outright mistruth. But now it makes more sense because that's what Anakin says to him specifically. He says it himself. He says, I killed Anakin, not Darth Vader killed Anakin. Because that's what happens in a new hope when he first meets him.

Also, another little nitpicky thing when Luke Skywalker doesn't know what a lightsaber is. And when he's given the lightsaber by Obi-Wan and a new one. hope he's, you know, like it's a fantastical device. He looks directly down the scope of it. Well, he's getting. He's trying to figure out what it is. And they're like, well, wait a second. Lou Skywarker's never seen a lightsaber.

So Riva's coming in having a lightsaber battle. They specifically, when he's leaving that bedroom to go run in the desert away from Riva, he's halfway out the window when she walks in. Right. He never sees the lightsaber. Yeah. The only time she used the Ford. I was like they did that quite carefully that.

And then he's knocked out. he's running above her. She uses the force to loosen the rocks underneath him as he's running. But you wouldn't necessarily see that if you were running. And like rocks fell. You might just assume those rocks fell. He does not know what the force is. He doesn't know what a license.

They shot around it. It was clever. It was clever and it was specific enough to be noticeable. You were like, okay, he would. And if he saw anything, it would be like a thing with a hood like a Tuscan Raider, which is what they told him was happening. Yeah, that's a good observation. We're on the move.

Yeah. That's also for Eagle-Eyed fans, the toy that Obi-1 brings with the T-16 Sky Hopper mini-model, that's in Luke's bedroom in a New Hope, that toy. So they're doing that purpose related to like, this is a bit of the set. This is how he got that bit of the set. When he cracks his lightsaber in through the broken helmet, I think this is like, for me, this is as powerful of a scene as Revenge of the Sith when he says, you are the chosen one.

And when Darth Vader says, you've already saved me. to Luke Skywalker. Like, these are the three scenes. And he says, Anakin and the distorted Anakin's gone. I am what remains. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Anakin for all of it. And then he says, I'm not your failure.

And then he says, my friend is truly dead. Goodbye, Darth. Yeah. I mean, just unbelievable. The Darth is. There's a second scene, I thought, was incredibly powerful too. That also got me a little bit emotional, if I'm being honest. It's, and I think this is my second favorite scene from the episode, which is,

Obi-Wan comes back to say goodbye and bring the toy. Right. Lola. Lola, bring Lola back. Lola the droid, yeah. And, you know, Princess Leia, who is clearly wise beyond her years and has this force, as we've discussed, superpower that is more around communication and influence and whatever. Princess Leia Organa, you are wise, discerning, kind-hearted.

These are the qualities that came from your mother. which are also passionate and fearless, forthright. These are the gifts from your father. Both are exceptional, were exceptional people who bore an exceptional daughter. I mean,

the fact that he speaks so kindly about Anakin and preserves Anken's forthrightness and fearless and passion, he still sees so much good in Anakin, which now makes so much sense for Obi-Wan. Now I start to think about this, when I think about Star Wars now, what this has done for me as,

Oh, it's the story of the Skywalker family. That's what Lucas always says. To me, it's the story of Obi-1. It really is. Like, him having to deal with this situation, to me, as an equally, the lens through which he had to witness this. Him as the witness is, to me, like, a very important part of Star Wars. I don't know how you feel about it, Lon.

The theme of separating Anakin and Vader and, like, coming to that understanding, runs through the whole episode. It's really handled well. I mean, I think you could read that as why he, can now see Quigon. Like, Quigon was the one who was like, Anakin's the chosen one. We have to train the boy. He's, he's the future. He's going to bring balance. And you could sense that Obi-Wan maybe has been holding onto a little anger about that for all this time. Like, well, you were wrong, old man. He ended up destroying everything. And now that he's made his peace with

Anakin has truly gone. You know, Anakin's been replaced by this other guy. Now he's ready to make his peace with Quigon, Jin, and re-enounter his old. master. I thought that was like a nice... It did seem like he was ready to move on. Or he was able to move on. Quiguan says it specifically like, I've been here the whole time. It was you. You're now ready to see me. What a year for Liam Neeson also popped up in Atlanta. He's showing up in all the big shows that scared. Oh, there was a great episode of Atlanta where Liam Deeson does a surprise caveat. Yeah, I mean, I knew the Liam Nelson thing they would just hold to the end. I thought when he was buried in rubble, they would do it. Yeah, they teased it throughout.

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To get started and take 10% off your first order, head to thorn.com slash you slash twist that's t h o r n e dot com slash you slash t wist to save that 10% and let them know you came from this week in startups or here mollie any other observations on the episode or things you loved or hated or i mean i thought it was lovely i thought it was like the perfect wrap up to this little special movie and i i'm with the i'm actually on the side of the people who say I don't, even though it was lovely and you would want to see more, I don't think we need a season two. I thought that was just like a perfect arc to connect the series and go into New Hope and they should leave us wanting more.

Yeah, I mean, I would be fine. I think there's more, if you wanted to bring Obi-Wan back in some way, I think you could come up with, there's obviously ways to tie him in with the Mandelor story that they're also telling. You know, I don't know. There is a very. This storyline needs to continue with Obi-Wan and young Leia and what's going on in Tatu. I feel like we've seen that now and I'm ready for other stuff in this pre-rebellion, early rebellion world. I would like, yes.

One other note, this question of how did Riva survive the second time she got hit with the lightsaber they haven't actually done, but we'll assume a back to tank or something. It's the first time there in the Mandalorian, they showed Grogu. at the Jedi Temple as a youngling, uh, being like, you know, saved and being like Reva was in the, in the Mandalorian series,

I believe. So there is a theory that he force healed Riva as they were leaving the Jedi temple because he can force heal and saved her that. Because they always like, how did she get saved? I could see Grogu coming out and there were injured Padawan or injured younglings that were and he just puts his hands on her. Also, to be fair, I sort of always,

this is really dark, but I was like, well, it probably cauterizes the wound. So if it's just a wound and it's not fatal, it's pretty cauterized, so you're not bleeding to death. Right. I think that we're, yeah, I mean, what we're seeing now is, I feel like Lucasfilm's overall strategy is starting to become clear. It's just clear out these time periods that you can then start to like seed and fertilize

with stories and then you can keep building on them over time. But like, they're just, they're just setting all of this foundation for further storytelling And all of this, I think, is death. All these characters are now in play in this world to cross over and other shows and make connections between all of them. My theory is completely different. I think that this is all a setup to do the entire Clone Wars as a 100 episode series. Yeah. I think it could literally be like a 10-year series because there's so much that occurs.

You have Anakin as a child. You have Anakin as an adult. and you just have the In Senate and you have the Clone Wars, which were incredible. And that could flash forward and even flash backwards. So this concept of just flashing back and forward like they did in the series, they didn't do it too much, but they did a bunch of flashbacks right to the younglings and the Jedi Academy.

They could basically take the Clone Wars animated series. It's a blueprint. That's probably what Ewan McGregor, and that's why Hayden and Ewan did this. They need to secure the bag. They need the bag. Neither of these individuals are, in a franchise.

Am I correct? Nobody's in Marvel. Nobody's got some huge payday. I mean, like, they're doing fine. But, yeah, like, Hayden Christensen could definitely use a big franchise role, for sure. That's true. He's not. He needs a hyleronic acid and maybe like a collagen.

Yeah, he's not working as much. Ewan is fine. But Ewan is fine, but I'm not worried. I'm not worried about you. Has he had a franchise? No, but I'm, okay. But that's by, it's by choice. Okay. Well, you know what? At some point you have to make the right choice, which is to secure the bag at all false.

He could be in a Marvel if you wanted to be or he could do it, D.C. if you wanted to. It hasn't happened, so he needs to secure the back. He's Obi-Wan. I know that, but he loves this role. He's hosted. I think they did this with the understanding if this went well and the audience reacted to it, that Kathleen Kennedy would give them the bag to do some really juicy project. I mean, my only, my only caveat is, I don't know if they would, I think Clone Wars, it's

is it's very episodic. It's very like, here's what's happening on this world. Here's what's happening on this world. Here's what's going on with Mandelor. Here's what's going on with these guys. And they're already doing like the bad bats have their own show. And, you know, Asoka's getting her own show. I don't know.

I almost don't know. I almost don't know what the fans want is. Let's recreate these moments you already know. The fans didn't see Clone Wars. Nobody's seen it though. At this point, I think a lot of people. Nobody wants his animation. I think it's, let's spin all of this stuff off.

We'll see who's right. Cat Bain showing. up in Mandalorian is the blueprint to me. It's like how many of these characters can we ping off and have them show up over here or over there, bring that. And it's just like what we see in Marvel where it's like, oh, let's bring Dr. Strange and Scarlet Witch together and give them a team up movie. And let's do Wolf of Hulk, a cousin who gets her own show. And I think it's going to be that thing where you could just keep expanding out forever. That'd be my guess.

Molly, any guess is here? No. I'm buying. You're in deep, man. I saw a guy pitch this week. But I do think, hold on, it's my turn. But I do think that it is clear that our future will only ever be made up of Star Wars and Marvel. So your prediction of a 100 episode live action Clone Wars makes sense from that perspective deeply.

Yes. Also, I'm loving bitchy, grand inquisitor and I want to see more of him. He is so snotty. Like his face when he has to sort of be quiet and not chase after the path. when he's just like, he's like, bad decision again, Darth. Right? Like, he's just a little. Talk back to Darth because he'll crush me.

Makes me laugh. That was actually a note of, the Inquisitor is like a very regal character in rebels where it's just like, oh, we lost another ship. I guess I'll have to murder these people. You know, he's just like a really sadistic evil, but also with like a great accent kind of character. Jason Isaac's in the TV show.

Is it? Yeah. I believe it is. It's pretty. pretty great. Okay, it's 2022, and digital ads are not what they used to be. Costs are increasing, attribution is less effective. We heard about that on the show, and targeting is more difficult.

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kind of outdoor advertising like those giant billboards and the painted murals that everybody loves. Well, with AdQuick, get robust datasets, fast execution, and accurate measurement across every KPI that's important to you. And AdQuick is a global player in the ad space. So here's a great offer. $1,000 off your first ad campaign at adquick.com slash twist. And mention Twist to get $1,000 off your first campaign. I am thinking about buying stonks now with the market correction. And I've been looking at Disney. I've always wanted to just start building a position in Disney. And this show, I don't,

like to give stock advice, but I just think if you can execute on this level so consistently, I just, I think that these characters, they're going to redo, I believe, this is another prediction from Jacob, prediction one, and I'm going to play my prediction on this series in a moment. I'll take my little mini victory lap here. We need to always, this is the job of the producers. You're judged based on your ability to find my previous predictions that are correct and feature them, and then anyone's that are not correct, you go back into the archive and reccom. and just delete them. No, but I believe

they're going to do Clone Wars in some fashion. Then, I believe, and I watched a video on what Lucas's actual plans were for the next three, and he gave them the stories for the sequels. Yes. They didn't use them. The leaking now has

that this, what happened in the sequels, which makes so much sense when you see Obi-Wan and how they treated Leia and made her the featured character. The person who was going to bring balance to the force was not Luke. The person who was going to bring balance to the force was Leia. Or by an interpretation, Leia, Luke, then Leia bring balance to the force because they're twins.

This makes much more sense. Twins, balance, you get it. So, here's what happens. The villain was supposedly going to be Darth Maul. And Darth Maul had an apprentice. And then Leia is running the Galactic Senate and try. to get rid of all the pockets of evil. So now it's kind of the reverse.

In the Star Wars series, the middle series, four, five, and six, they're trying to get rid of the rebels. She's trying to get rid of the evil empire, remnants of the empire kind of situation, including Darth Mal who wants to reconstitute it. And then she uses her power to extinguish this and bring the Jedi back. Luke becomes the, you know, runs his Jedi order with Leah becomes a Jedi, and they produce a whole new crop of Jedi. And we're back to where we were at the start of the clone war.

But it's Princess Leia who is the featured character in that series, but of course, they didn't go with his story. Does that drive with what you've read, that that would be the theme of that? Yeah, I mean, I think definitely, you know, Leia having like more of a central role earlier on. And those characters being more just generally central to it, I think was a big, you know, thing that Lucas had. I've never read like, Duel of the Fates is the other one that they talk about, it was like the Colin Trevereaux version instead of the JJ Abrams version which is out there in the world

and you can read which is a very different direction but it's still the like the story of those guys. Ray, Kylo Ren, Finn, first order. If you just think about it on a money grab, the amount of money they made from the sequels, Force Awakens Yada yada Last Jedi, to get

a second swing at bat and make them again and get all that money again just as a capitalist marauding Capitalist. Why would you not? And that's what Disney is, which is, yeah. So see, all the sudden, not exactly advice, but kind of reminds.

To get three more and say, listen, this is an all, because now that Marvel and DC are like, oh, yeah, by the way, you could do what, any, anything you want in your universe, you just call it like an alternate timeline. Yeah. You could just take the alternate timeline and say. That's not even, I mean, even Marvel didn't invent, like Star Trek Generations was just that. Like, you want to do a Picard Kirk team up movie?

Okay, there's a time. There's a time riff. Let's end with my. You could obviously, you could obviously do that. with Star Wars. There's a force power that allows you to rewrite the past. There's a portal that they find to an alternate reality. You know, it's Star Wars.

Here's my prediction from the beginning of the show. I don't know what episode. This was one minute. We'll see you on this side. I think they haven't explained all the scars on Darth Vader when we take the helmet off and return of the Jedi. You know how there's a big, deep scar on his head? Yeah. I'm going to make another crazy. Look at you. You've just been like waiting

for me to get there. He's like, come on. I was waiting for you to get there. And he hits him in the head. Here's what I think happens. I think Riva dies during this. I think it becomes like a three or four person battle where Obi-Wan or Darth Vader kills Riva. I mean, who knows? They both hate her. And then somehow Obi-Wan bests Darth Vader.

Darth Vader's besting him the whole time. And he cracks his, you know, beautiful helmet, which is perfect at this point and puts that scar on his head that eventually Luke Skywalker sees. And that's how that scar is not coming up in the back of the tank. I looked for it. Yeah, he's got that, it's almost like an indent in his. An indent in his head. Look at this, here it is.

Oh, there it is. Yeah, yeah, that's it. Yeah. You're right that the, we don't see a pronounced wound on the top of the scalp, which could definitely. Nope. All right, they have a fuck. And to be honest, you know, if you have seen rebels,

you saw possibly, uh, Ashoka did that too. I don't know if they redo that battle because it's so similar. I mean, to be fair, he did. crack his helmet open, but there wasn't a wound. Well, we didn't see the wound. It was kind of dark, but yeah. I like that. It was probably there.

I'll give it to you. It's a little hard to see with bits of the helmet sort of still there. Yeah. All right. Listen, long, this has been great. We'll finish up the star track and then we'll find another show. Hopefully an entrepreneurial show or go to an entrepreneurial movie. That's the other thing I want to do.

I think there's something. There's a bunch of stuff coming up. We can figure it out. All right. Everybody follow lawns and go to inside.com. streaming on his trailers, yada, yada. But follow him. He's good on Twitter. If you're, if you like a mixture of pop culture and, you know, far left, like, dunking on

people, it's sort of like the anti-Sax. Yeah, that's how I see myself as the answer. It's sort of like the light and the dark, you know? It's kind of. I think that's a good way to describe it. I love, I love your Twitter. You're great on Twitter. Twitter.com.

I agree. I appreciate that. See you next time. See you. Bye, bye. All right. And other news, we'll just do a quick transition. here. You may have remembered Molly. I had a, once again, stepped in it or I couldn't control my

couldn't control my honest opinion. Feelings. You know, it comes up once in a while where I just get a little too candid. I go full J-Cal. Well, remember I went full J-Cal with the CEO of Jewel when I was at a party socially and I told him, like, how do you sleep at night, yada, yada? Well, he's not sleeping well at night right now. Yeah, not at all. I was sorry, I was just basking in the like, I don't know, yeah. The genius of that trying to, you're like, and now. Yeah, so the FDA is banning the sale of Jules in the U.S. Other e-cigarettes will, flavored e-cigarettes will still be available, but apparently Jewel is just, I mean, honestly, I think probably has just been too much of a bad actor is what this ultimately comes down to. I mean, it's coming at a moment where like

so many other dangers are freely available to American children that it's kind of hilarious, but sure, we don't have Jewel anymore. They're protecting you from looking like a jerk on the street, at least with this one brand. But I mean, to the point that you made and the, and the the full J-Cal emotion, yeah, think about what you have to do to get yourself banned. And I think what you have to do is just constantly ignore every warning sign that you've ever gotten that this could happen and just

be a bad actor with respect to marketing your product to kids, to continuing to do so even after you've been told not to do so, you know, to just come for the children over and over. I think the way this went down too was Jules trying to get a path to be

they were looking for some path to make this like legally clear So they applied to sell these back in 2020. And back then, the FDA had banned mint and fruit-flavored vapes to try to cut down on teen vaping, only allowing tobacco and menthol-flavored products. So just keep it true to the pitch that Jule and others had, which is this is a bridge off of to get you to stop smoking. You could believe that is a true statement. Like, are jewels safer than smoking a pack or two of cigarettes a day? I think without even, yeah, it seems that it would be without knowing the exact chemistry,

but that seems plausible since one is burning and one is vaping. And one has tar in it. It's burning tar. Yes. This is not that. This is addictive in the nicotine sense. And there are complaints that there could be like chemicals in the actual jewel devices. But yeah, is it safer than cigarettes?

Without question. Is it getting kids hooked on nicotine like even earlier? Without question. Of course. So I guess you can still get vapes like blue raze and leachy or leachy. How do you pronounce leachy berry berry? Leachy. Leachy.

Leachy and strawberry banana. I mean, sounds like I might join the juice when I'm ordering those things. According to time, shout out to. to the new owner of time, CEO of Salesforce. Companies like Puff Bar avoided FDA regulations by using lab-made nicotine that some in the vaping industry argue

the FDA can't regulate. Interesting. Despite the ban, FDA said, quote, if they didn't see clinical information that suggests there is an immediate risk to using dual products. Huh.

Despite the ban, they're saying this. Hmm. Yeah. I think this is, honestly, I think this is less about, you know, there's also, I think, an order this week about demanding that cigarette makers reduce the amount of nicotine and cigarettes too. So there is like this coincides with a bit of a larger federal crackdown. But I have to be honest, I think this ban is about one company because they haven't banned vaping writ large. And there are these other companies that are making these like kid friendly flavors and all of that. I think this is really about saying, hey, Jewel, like you're not reformable. Here's the lesson. for founders. Be a good actor.

Always be on the side of the consumer you're serving. And on the side of society, you have to be able to tell that story. I'll give some examples in a moment. And, you know, I think begging for forgiveness in certain verticals, you know, as opposed to asking for permission is a mistake. And so here's the example. You know, if you're Airbnb and you get a bunch of people who can stay cheaper and go to, as I always talk about, like you can go. you can go on a longer vacation or there's more options for people maybe who aren't rich to go on vacations because they get a better deal and they couldn't afford the $200 a night hotel,

but they get a three bedroom for $200 a night. So instead of a family having free hotel rooms for $600 for $300 for $300,000, that family is going to, and those consumers are going to go to bat for you. And then if you're, I don't know, you're trying to make extra money and you got a, you know, ADU in your backyard, you got an extra bedroom and you want to stay at your friend's house and rent out your apartment and that's how you pay your rent or your rent or mortgage like, okay, now you've got another constituent. Who's the constituent, Molly, here?

That's going to bat for June. Yeah. The only constituents you would have would be doctors. This is how I would have played it. Yeah. I would have worked with doctors and worked with people who had lung cancer and for people who couldn't get off of these. And I would have had a plan not to make fruity flavor flavors and maximize profitability,

but I was a plan to say, listen, here's 100% of our focus. When you come to our website, when you look at our advertising, it's here's all the stories of people who were smoking two packs a day. They moved to the vape. Here's what their lungs look like. When they move to the vape, here's what their lungs look like now. And we hope that we have four products they can buy. Five units of nicotine, four units, three units, two units, one unit, a half a unit. They can go all the way down this nice curve. And here's the plan we give them. They work with their doctor. And boom. Then you would have all those people say, you know what, I was addicted to nicotine, and I went from a five to a four to a three.

I'm currently a two. I hope to get down to a point five. And they would have this high road where they could say, look, yes, of course people are going to steal them. And yes, we make one or two flavors that you can get that make it more delightful than smoking a cigarette. But yeah, this is not for kids. And instead they went the exact, because that, when vaping first arrived on the scene, I knew I had friends who were like, well, I'm, you know, I'm vaping now and I feel like an idiot, but it's better than smoking. and it's safer. And you could literally have created a safer but addictive product, right?

Like we all tolerate caffeine in our life. Like caffeine is an addictive substance. Sugar is an addictive substance. You could have been like, yes, nicotine on its own is addictive, but it's no worse than any other stimulant. And it's safer than smoking. And you could have ridden that into billions. And instead, they literally, Jewel specifically followed the actual big tobacco playbook

of get kids hooked and keep them as your customer forever. And it's like, yeah, yeah, I don't feel sorry to do. I'm going to say, don't make ads that look like this. If you're watching YouTube.com, such this weekend or shout out for our friends at Spotify for having video and their player and iTunes, Apple Podcasts you can search,

and there's a, this weekend search of videos if you want to watch the video. But it looks like a basic, an iPad. They copied the iPod ads, and you just basically have young people, you know, who look like they're going out Coach Coachella with their cool vaibs and the cool design. And,

you know, and here's the New York Times story that kind of puts the nail in their coffin from back in 2020. Jewel bought ads appearing on Cartoon Network and other use sites suit claims. So this is a lawsuit. I don't know exactly where it wound up. And who knows? This could be a case of just Jewel bought ads on an ad network and those ads

wound up on these places. But if you are advertising something, You can pull up the New York Times story if you want, just to show the headline there. If you are... I mean, Nickelodeon, 17 magazine, the Cartoon Network on Educational Sites for Middle School and high school students. Yeah. So this is the question is like, you know, how thoughtful are you being about doing this, you know? And you can see some of the other ads in the New York Times story where they're talking about this is the evolution.

And they're showing like, you know, an old joystick from an Atari, 20, 600 or old brick cellular phone. I mean, if you're going to, you know, make a product like this and you're going to break some rules, you just have to make sure you talk about storytelling with a lot of our founders Molly, you do a little talk on storytelling. Like the storytelling here was really bad. It was like a smoking gun storytelling. And the product market fit, right?

I mean, they were like, our product market fit is teenagers. Full stop. There's no evidence otherwise. If you have a marketing department that's making ads. directed at kids, you know, and, you know, everybody who works in government are parents and older people or they have grandkids. This is like another pragmatic thing you have to think about as an entrepreneur. Who's going to set the rules for you? If you don't regulate yourself, you will be regulating. That's just basic rules of the road. So either you regulate yourself

and you get ahead of it or, you know, you will be regulated. How did Airbnb regulate themselves, Molly? They put their own insurance in place. So when people said, well, what happened? What happens if somebody's room gets trashed. They said, oh, well, we have this insurance thing here. Oh, what about safety and security? They said, oh, we have a rating system. Anybody can rate anybody. Oh, how do you protect against a new person? Well, we give a warning. This person has never had anybody stay at their place. You know, and I think they have verified photos as well. So, there were all these things where you said, like, well, how do you know if a hotel is safe? Well, in Airbnb, you have, does any hotel let you post reviews if you're a verified customer on their

website, that doesn't exist in the world, but it exists that Airbnb. So Airbnb could actually say, look, we have a higher rating here. Are you allowed to rate New York City or, you know, San Francisco cab drivers? Do you even know who your cab driver was? No. Do you have minute by minute trail of, you know, a San Francisco cab in case something horrible happened, they murdered or attacked a customer? No, but does Uber Lyft have minute by minute of that? Yes. Yeah. And do you know the name of your driver? Does a driver know your name? Like, do you rate each other? That rating system gave a lot of high ground to Uber when people were talking about safety and security, as did the minute-by-minute GPS. So it was trackable. This is what would happen. People would take a cab,

and nobody would know what ever happened to that person. We don't know what cab they got in. We don't know whose car they got, and they got in a cab. We don't look at the license plate. We don't know the license number. Boom. So let's do a quick. So anyway, congratulations to society. and to the people I jewel. Congratulations to society and to the people at Jewel. My same message to the people at TikTok. You should be ashamed of yourselves. You should take a deep look in the mirror.

There are plenty of ways to make money in this world. You chose to sell your souls to be on the wrong side of history. And I'm not going to use my previous catchphrase because it's inappropriate. But my catchphrase for these people is now, I hope the money was worth it. I hope the money was worth it. every night when you go to bed, if you work at Jewel or TikTok, you're going to hear my voice. When your head hits the pillow, hear my voice. Hope the money was worth it.

And then you got to sleep, you're going to be restless when you hear that voice. All right. And next up on the show, we're going to talk a little bit about prescription drugs and how the United States is just getting absolutely ripped off. Molly, tell us a little bit about the interview. Yeah, I mean, this is a great interview with a guy who's, doing the opposite, basically. We get an incredible, it's a, it's a j. Loyocano, who is the founder and CEO of a company called Capital RX, just closed a $106 million series C from B Capital and general catalyst. And he gives us an incredible history of how drug prices in America got to the point

that they're at, which is, you know, costing people and pharmacies, billions and lining all kinds of pockets. And the ways in which Capital RX and others are, you. are trying to fix that. He's also just like a, he's a copywriting machine. He's like, when you have the perfect market, you never have to innovate.

You consolidate and points out that 80% of pharmacy benefit manager market share is controlled by three companies. And that's what Capital RX is trying to disrupt. It's really interesting. And it's just a very, very cogent and slightly infuriating interview. I think you're really going to enjoy it.

And a lot of people have asked us, well, isn't Mark Cuban doing something similar? We'll have the CEO of that company on. Yeah, and we asked them about that, and it turns out they're quite complimentary. They can be each other's customers. Can't wait. I'm going to listen right now. Enjoy everybody.

Enjoy. All right. I am joined by AJ Loyakino, CEO of Capital RX, a pharmacy benefit manager that manages and negotiates prescription drug benefits on behalf of large organizations. They just raised $106 million series C led by B Capital. And the mission is to, as I understand it, increased transparency in the prescription drug process and also improve patient outcomes, which I think we can all agree, sounds great. Thank you for doing this.

And welcome to the show, AJ. Thank you so much for having me, Molly. So tell me a little bit about how this works, like sort of high level. How do drugs get paid for? You know, where do pharmacy benefit managers sit? And what is the role there for people who don't understand any of this? So let's take a step back. Let's kind of compare it to something that we.

all understand. So let's start at the very beginning. A pharmaceutical manufacturer begins to make a palette of drugs. And they spend an afternoon and there's, let's just say, a palette sitting on a loading dock. And pharmaceutical manufacturers, these could be brand manufacturers like Pfizer or Merck, or these could be generic manufacturers like Teva. And what they do is they sell to the next step in the pharmacy supply chain. So they sell to what are known as wholesalers. These are companies that you may or may not know by names of McKesson, Cardinal, and Amerisorisburgan, and they buy the inventory from the manufacturers. And their role is the kind of last mile of logistics. So their supply chain logistics is to provide medication to hospital systems as well as pharmacies. And they sell to, as I

state pharmacies and hospital systems and they have a unit price and they sell through the supply chain. And at this point, it makes sense. We could be talking about cans of soda to sneakers at this point coming from a manufacturer selling to a retailer and there's a markup. But this is where everything starts to go haywire in the United States. The next step in the supply chain is where we have insurance. So you have this in the form. of carriers as well as what are known as PBMs, pharmacy benefit managers. And their job is to administrate a benefit on behalf of a payer. A payer could be anything from a municipality to a school system to an employer. It could be the federal government. And they're administrating this

pharmacy benefit. And you would think it would follow the same step. There's a price of a drug. there's some sort of reasonable markup that we see and you get a drug price. But what happens in this last step is unfortunately the way our system has matured over the last 25 years is all the drug prices in the United States magically disappear. So up to this point, everything has been, hey, if I make a pill for a dollar, I'll sell it for $1.5 and they'll sell it to $1.10. And then you think, oh, so I should, get it for $1.15, you know, some slight markup in the supply chain. But all the drug prices disappear. And so this is the problem is that there are no drug prices because this last

step in the supply chain has really been defined but what's called spread pricing. So the administrators that, you know, these are carriers and PBMs, what they did is they said, rather than charge you a fee to administer your benefit plan. I'll just take a little bit in the middle. And it sounded reasonable, like, oh, okay. But what happened is they realized that they had a right to steal effectively because there was no limit to what you could charge. How would you ever know? There's no reference. There's no price point for a consumer other than if you could shop around. It's very difficult. There's over 130,000, what we call NBC11 drug codes with based upon different package size, different strength.

And this is really, really difficult for people to understand relative price. So when you take all the pricing away and you leave someone in that last step in the supply chain, I'm administrating a benefit, I can suddenly create any price. And this is where everything goes sideways. And I never understood it because I come from farm. pharmaceutical manufacturing. It's where I started my career off for the first eight years of my career. And then I moved over to the payer side. And I thought everything would behave the same way as I described. You make a drug. There's a markup and you sell down the supply chain and everyone has

a price. And I would read these contracts with the carriers and the PVMs. And I'm like, why are there no drug prices in this agreement? And no one had a good answer for me. And to be honest, I still don't totally understand how they ended up abstracting out pricing and introducing this idea of spread. What did they like? Yeah. What, who would allow that? That's not how buying and selling works.

Well, that's a great point. You know, who do you think sits on top of what we call self-insured benefits is really what we call anyone that is either what we call over a thousand lives is a self-insured entity. So these are large Fortune 500 companies, municipalities, state workers, etc. But also it's fully insured business. This is coming under carriers. And these are small group plans or individual life plans. And so what people kind of got caught up in was the concept of free. And it, Everybody kind of said, I like free, you know, but no one realized what the price was. You know, what was the price of free?

Well, wait, they're telling me it's free, right? It's free. So then just to further clarify, they got caught up in the idea of free because if you are the recipient, aka an insured person, that drug appears to be free or close to free to you. Yes. So what they did is imagine, let's just say in the old model, an old model, let's just say, before 1995, roughly. Before 1995, benefit administrators like PBMs would kind of say, hey, I'll charge you 25 cents per

script, flat fee to administrate your plan. And that's a reasonable amount of money. But then someone had the bright idea, be it marketing or sales, whatever. And they said, what if we went to the employers and the payers and the feds and we said, it's free? There's no more 25 cents per script, but, you know, I'm just going to take a little bit in between. And the country ate up this idea. I mean, the expansion of some of the fastest growing companies in the United States, if you were to literally go back in time and look from 2000 to 2007, some of the fastest growing companies in America are Express Scripts, which is now part of Cigna.

It's Caremark, which is now part of CBS. So these companies exploded Medco, another company, exploded in growth, which was purchased by Express Scripts, which was then in turn purchased by Cigna. In fact, the two you mentioned, we looked this up. McKesson and Amerisorsburg and are 8 and 9 on the Fortune 500 respectively. Oh, all of these companies are top 20. So Cigna, top 20, CVS, top 20, and United Healthcare top 20. Free is never free. Free is never free.

And then never underestimate what people. can try and get away with. So maybe they started out and they said, eh, it's 25 cents. We'll take 35. We'll take 50 cents. We'll take a dollar. And suddenly they realized nothing could stop them. Because no one's looking. Literally not paying attention at all. They're just like, we get it for free at the end. You can't see. And then what they started to do is to structure contracting so no one could see. So the first part of it is retail contracting. So what you do is you say, Mr. or Mrs. Pharmacist, you can never communicate price to the patient at the point of sale. Even if you could sell it at a lower price, I don't want you ever to say anything to my customer.

And the retailers sign these agreements because they want access to patients and they said, wow, these carriers are powerful. Let me sign this. And they lost control of the supply chain early on. I want to say retailers probably lost control of the supply chain in early 2000s. And basically, Basically, they signed these agreements so a patient could walk in and remember, the pharmacist can see, especially if they're the owner of the pharmacist or a store manager and they have some understanding of acquisition cost. They can get a sense of the buy and the sell side, which is I'm typing in the insurance and the insurance company is telling me to charge for a torvastatin $65. And they're probably saying, I'd be willing to do this for $17, but I can't say anything. And so that 25 cents, suddenly. made it grew to $5, to $10, to $20. And the optimization, because I do want to make this clear, there's nothing technically illegal about what they're doing. You know, what they're doing is they're publicly traded companies and their fiduciary

responsibilities to their shareholders, and they're trying to maximize value within the model that they've created. And so what's interesting is they suddenly said, hmm, I did this on retail. What else could I make more money on? And then you look at things like mail order. Be like, what if I made it mandatory mail? So if you have a script that's over 30 days supply, I'm going to say you must go through my mail order. Now, what did they?

I'm wondering about that. Yeah. What did I do in this magic trick? It sounds like, oh, well, you know, and, you know, think about it. It's under the guise of, I'm going to do what's right for you. You know, we want patient adherents to be higher. We want to do this. But what they're doing is they're creating the largest pharmacies in the United States.

So what's interesting is the largest pharmacies in America by volume aren't necessarily Walgreens or Rite Aid. It's United Healthcare and Express Scripts to Cigna because they have such huge male, which includes specialty drugs, high-cost biologics. And so what you're doing is you're forcing utilization to your own. own pharmacy, which gives you now another way to make money, which is on acquisition cost. Remember, the pharmacy has a markup because they're buying the inventory. But now I can make double spread. I can make spread on my inventory because I am the pharmacy and I can make spread

on my customer. But it doesn't end. You keep going with the game. It just gets worse. There we go. We went ahead and put up United Health Groups overall, you know, like historical stock chart. from the 90s, it looks like. Yes. And you see that right in this period you're talking to early 2000s, all of a sudden, everything starts trending great. Nothing but up. Now, what's interesting, if you were to layer in here on top of this chart, like Merck over

the same time frame or, you know, Pfizer. Yeah. And what you're going to see is what grows faster is not necessarily the pharmaceutical manufacturer. So as I said, in the history of pharmacy benefits and not to bore. people with this is it's important to remember what's happening is the PBM went from kind of in a not that significant member of a supply chain to the all-encompassing and all-powerful controller of the pharmaceutical supply chain. So you start with retail, you add into your

power through mail order, you expand through what just called specialty drugs. These are the highest-cost medication. And then you look at pharma and you go, well, pharmaceutical, man, manufacturers, brand manufacturers have all the money. I would like their money. Right. And so if you think about the optimization of the traditional PBM model, what's next on the menu is, how do I get to pharma's money? And a really interesting thing happened. We call it the birth of what's known as a formulary. And a formulary kind of maybe was born with the right intent, which is I would like to select the approach. appropriate medication. My team has gone through and we have done a survey and an analysis and collected

data from the FDA and other area. And we have basically stated that we have determined precisely the right medication for you. Now, I want to pause for a second and think about how implausible this is. I use this example all the time. My sister and I are very close in age. We're genetically similar, but we have very different medication needs as well as we respond very differently to medication. What are the odds that everyone in the country should respond to the same exact formula? Right. It's zero. It's zero.

Especially considering how few women are even tested with respect to, you know, like you can get into a whole women's health situation and me and your sister will be in a real rage about it. Oh, exactly. And so, you know, I think we would all agree precision medicine is a much better way to go and we'll eventually steer towards. there. But what I'm trying to ground us in is all the ways that you could take advantage of this system to become in control. So what the PBM industry did is they created a formulary. And it started out like, hey, I have a formulary. And to be on my formulary, you provide me rebate dollars. And so what you're creating is kind of a pay-to-play economics scenario. Because what if someone says, well, I don't really want to pay. Oh, well, then you're not on my formulary.

Now, when the PBMs were a bit more fragmented, that didn't mean as much. Someone would be like, all right, well, you've got like 8% market share. They've got 15% market share. Not that big of a deal. But I always like to point out, out of every industry in the United States, the pharmaceutical industry is the greatest gift anyone could ever receive economically. It's an inelastic demand curve. It does not matter what happens.

the stock market or interest rates, drug utilization has held rock steady for 30 years. No other industry could make this claim. In addition, drug prices for brand and specialty only appear to miraculously go up. And then you have what we call the compounding effect of proliferation of specialty. The average cost of drugs is going up due to the introduction of high cost therapies. And so I'm not here to debate what's right or wrong about our patent system or the price of drugs. What I am trying to have everybody understand for a second is when you have the perfect market, you never have to innovate. I mean, think about the advances we've made in things like construction to real estate, even the finance, e-commerce, there's always been ebbs and flows. And you've had the reset

button become more efficient, become more competitive. But what if you're in an industry, you never have to be competitive. In fact, it rewards you for being slothful. And the more focused you are on profit, the better. So you don't innovate, you consolidate. So simultaneously, if we're looking at the history of the PBM industry, what's going on is, well, the PBB industry is eating itself. And you're seeing hyper consolidation. And they're literally from 2000 up until last month, You know, there have been 30 plus mergers and acquisitions that have created jumbo entities. So you have literally three entities. You have Cigna Express Scripts.

You have United, which owns Optum. You have CVS, which owns the carcass of Caremark, which they took over. And what this is is you have three entities depending upon how you do the math, utilization or GPO economics controls anywhere from 75 to 90% of the process. purchasing power in the country. So this is important because if we go back to my formulary example, in early 2000s, pharma could kind of push back a little bit and be like, yeah, I don't know if I'm going to pay your fee. Well, now I knock on your door and I say, I control 30% of the patient utilization in the country. And if you don't pay me to be on my formulary, you're probably going to

be fired. Yeah. There's no pushback. Nice little pharma business you got here. Well, and this is interesting, is roughly around, by my estimate, 2010, pharma had basically ceded control of the supply chain. That for decades, pharma had basically controlled the U.S. supply chain. And then by 2010, the liberation had happened, and the PBMs had finally basically taken control. And what this meant is there was nothing to. stop them from making more and more egregious asks. And people would often say what comes first,

the chicken or the egg, and in this equation, I want everybody to think. People say, well, drug inflation is running rampant. Well, if someone's knocking on your door, PBMs every year, asking for more money in the form of rebates and manufacture incentives, how do I pay for it? So you come to me each year and you say, let's say I'm a manufacturer and you're the PBM Molly. And you knock on my door every year. It's your job to say, I need 10% more. Yep. Well, I could take 10% less out of my earnings or I could raise my price 10%.

So a lot of arguments are circular in the sense that pharma will oftentimes point a blameful finger at the PBM industry. The PBM industry will point a blameful finger at pharma. But I want everyone to understand the history here because what you have is PBMs that are truly in control of the U.S. supply chain. They're in control of everyone from the manufacturer to the wholesaler to the pharmacies to the hospitals. Make no mistake. They're in charge. The second thing is we have a system that's based upon price opacity and price encumbrance. Price opacity, as I mentioned, is nobody can see and understand the buy and sell side. The true. and buy-sell side of the economics of a prescription. And the other part is this price encumbrance.

You have the ability to change the price at your sole discretion under a traditional PBM model to be anything you'd like. That is extraordinarily powerful and it equates to very big earnings. And so, you know, I want everyone to understand this is how we got here. You know what I mean? It shouldn't be a surprise. It took roughly 25, 30 years and there were different points. but what it left us with is a scenario where literally you can charge anything. So the way I want people to think about this is I often say is imagine the U.S. drug system is a casino and we deal in probability and odds. And if I'm the casino, if we look at the U.S. drug pricing system, our cash marketplace in the United

States is about 6%. These are the people that either aren't covered by insurance or are and they kind of hunt for a better price. But what does that mean? That means 94% of the time, a patient when they go to a pharmacy will accept any price I put in front of them. And if you own the casino as the PBM, those are great odds. And that is so important. I mean, it's funny that you describe it as a casino because to be honest, to be fair, I'm re-watching the Sopranos with my son, but it sounds a lot more like a mob shake down that maybe started as an attempt at efficiency, right? Like, we don't want to ascribe values to what people were doing. Everybody was trying to make more money and things,

we've seen things spiral out of control. So I guess let's fast forward to impact and then talk about solutions. What are the, I mean, I think we sort of understand what the impacts are of drug price inflation, but give us the kind of big picture of what the system has led to. Well, I think it's led to a breaking point. I think you're seeing the FTC announce its investigation of the PBM industry, which is the first time in my recollection that they've done this. And I have to be honest, like, I had never heard of this. I mean, none of this is stuff that I think people know or understand. No. And, you know, it's hiding in plain sight. It's at your local pharmacy and it happens millions of times every day people filling prescriptions. But they don't understand what caused these economics to become untenable and I think the impact on the consumer is great. So back to the spoiling point, you're seeing state legislation lean it.

You know, the state legislators are saying, wait a second, what's going on with these PBMs? Because the retailers are complaining. They're getting squeezed harder and harder by the PBMs. Hospital systems are complaining. Patients are complaining because you're seeing this price. change back to when price is encumbered through spread pricing, price changes every second of every day for every drug. And that's a complete lie. Drug pricing in the United States is incredibly stable. Brand drugs change about twice a year. You can set a clock to it. It's typically January and July.

And generic drugs typically deflate depending upon your purchase schedules, which could be monthly or quarterly depending upon your size and what your routine is. But the point of it is, it certainly isn't changing every hour of every day for every job. That's artificial price encumbrance. And so the impact, again, is patients are complaining. But for the first time, I think oversight groups, be it HHS, CMS, Department of Labor recently is announced they're enforcing the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which is a way to kind of measure profitability and reporting by PBMs as well as brokers and consultants that sell these services, which could be helpful. The FTC is leaning in. So what you're seeing is we hit this boiling point and everyone's complaining about drugs. And I think finally,

people are kind of recognizing there's not one person in the supply chain truly responsible for these multiple people. But the outsized kind of role in pharmacy is the PBM. And I think people are starting to understand this. Gotcha. Well, certainly you do. And so it's It sounds like what you're also describing as possibly a regulatory but also an awareness environment that creates room for competition. Enter capital or X. Correct. So as I mentioned, I started in pharmaceutical manufacturing. I moved over to the audit and procurement side. So this is reviewing contracts for large self-insured payers. These could be carriers, Fortune 500 companies, even government agencies. And what the one thing I realized is none of these people were truly getting what they

thought they were getting. And how could you? Again, you have a contract with no drug pricing in it. There are no drug prices. How could I ever kind of figure out what I'm supposed to get? Because it's so complex. You know, we have a very complex classification system of what's the definition of a brand, a generic, a single source, a multi-source, limited supply, DAW handling. And this is done almost to confuse people because everything in the United States has a list price called an NDC-11. And it would be very simple. Just take the NDC 11 and put a price next to it, the same way we priced popsicles to lampshades. And so what I saw over, I often say I was writing a 13-year thesis on where did the drug pricing go.

And I finally got to the point and I said, I'm never going to change the way drugs are priced or patients are serviced by auditing the books or helping with a procurement workflow. Right. So I think what we wanted to be able to do was why don't we take a step back and get to the real problem here, which is the person that administrates the benefit as all the control, as I just said, the PBM is in charge of the supply chain. Why don't we create a model that we want this to make sense? Let's create a transparent pricing model. Let's create a public ledger of pricing. Let's not push around the pharmacist.

Let's pass through 100% of the value, but let's do it and be super competitive. And this is where we started to develop the technology at my organization to compete with the big three. So let me pause. And I know you probably have a host of questions. But I had to get a lot of this out because it's important to ground everybody to just how we got here. Yeah. as you may have seen it go by in our live chat, people were saying,

I feel like 99% of Americans could benefit from knowing this information because nobody totally understands how pricing got this way. It's almost everybody's, you know, you blame big pharma. And it turns out that's a whole ecosystem that is working together and, you know, making trillions. What, how does it work? Like, how are you doing things differently?

How are you enabling that transparency? And if you could, give us a real world example, of sort of like what that might mean for, you know, my mom and insulin prices. Sure. So the first thing that we wanted to do was you have to kind of have the discipline. You have to have the discipline to what I call to never take the bad money. The bad money is spread pricing on drugs. Because the moment you make money on a marked up prescription, one, I don't think it's right.

Because if you think about it, you can't mark up a medical procedure in the United States. I don't know how the heck we got to marketing up drugs, but I always said you have to start with the discipline to never take the bad money. So you can't take spread on rebates, you can't take spread on mail or specialty, et cetera. So we decided to just charge a flat administrative fee. So this could be per member per month, flat administrative fee, or could be a flat per script fee. We let our clients choose. It really doesn't matter. But what we're trying to say is we're performing a very valuable function. When you administer, a plan, you're keeping track of who's eligible, you're setting up the plan design, you're doing

the clinical review, the clinical edits, drug utilization, drug to drug interaction, you're reimbursing the network on behalf of the payers, you're billing them, et cetera. You're doing hundreds of what I would say administrative tasks to maintain a benefit. The key is to just always remember that's what your job is, not to be the drug czar of marking up drug prices. And so what we wanted to do is to kind of create what we call our clearinghouse model. And this is this concept of a public ledger. Our office is located in New York City. I say all the time I walk by the most famous clearinghouse in the world, which is the New York Stock Exchange.

And it lets the buy and sell side freely communicate on price. Molly, you would like to buy $100 worth of IBM? I would like to sell you $100 of IBM. We are communicating freely on price. This does not exist in prescription benefits. And so we wanted to do this. And to do it, we also wanted to never be in a position where we manipulate or set price. So we chose for our pricing benchmark.

We use NADAC, National Average Drug Acquisition cost. You're like, what is this NADAC thing? It comes from the federal government. The federal government uses it in Medicaid reimbursement in 40 plus states. And we like this because CMS controls it. The federal government, they set it. They update it every week. And what it's doing is I'm saying, I have nothing to do with price.

I'm giving a benchmark for our retail pharmacies. So we go out in contract with all the major national network of pharmacies, the independence, the PSAOs. And basically we say, we would like you to either sell the drug at NADAC plus your dispensing fee. Or if you could do a better job, feel free to do it. Now, this is where trust comes in. There hasn't been trust in the pharmacy. supply chain in 30 years because if I'm a pharmacy and I normally give savings to a traditional PBM, they're going to keep the money. It's never going to make it to the patient or plan or a

disproportionate part. And so pharmacies are very hesitant to offer a better price. So we decided to do something very unique, which is we don't set price. We give you the ability the pharmacy better than benchmark, NADAC, if you would like to set a better price, please do. And the patient will always receive it. And the way that we prove that is all of our customers get the same price. Now, that seems like a pretty, you know, that seems normal, right? Shouldn't everyone get the same price? Popsicles and lampshades. Yeah. Exactly. Well, think about it. You walk into a pharmacy and you go to the OTC counter and you pick up a bottle of Tylenol. Does it matter if you're insured or uninsured? Does it matter if you work for the biggest employer or the smallest? It's the same price, correct?

and it will be the same price for months on end until the manufacturer says, I'm going to increase or decrease price based upon supply and demand. Real market forces. That's not how prescriptions work. Right. You know, so you go 50 feet back to the register to the prescription counter and the price changes every second of every day. It's like spinning a roulette wheel.

Am I today's winner or loser? Which, be fair, is not unlike the stock market, but shouldn't. Shouldn't be that way. No, but at least with the stock market, you can see the buy and sell side. Right. True. Neither one can see the true price. And even if the pharmacy is willing to communicate a better price, contractually, they can't.

Right. You know, they've completely much. So the difference is you're saying, these are the prices, A, one big innovation. Here's how much it costs. B, we will not require you to charge a higher price if a lower price is available. And then C, the consumer will in fact know what the price is. Agreed. And what's interesting is because we use NADAC pricing, there's no massive price swing.

So I often say if someone's filling a tour of a statin, let's just say in Washington state or in Florida or in New Hampshire or in Arizona, it's the same price until the price has changed by CMS. Or to be fair to the retailer, they can say, hey, I've got $4 generics on Walmart or an Maldortons. I have $0.00 am oxacillin. I have specials on things. That's awesome. Let that value get to this. the end patient in the plan. And so to do this, we had to reimagine how claims are processed in patient service. So we had to write our own technology from the ground up. And this is very important because, as I mentioned earlier, when you have the perfect market, there's no need for innovation. And to be clear, my competitors scaled with people. And they never really invested in technology. Their technology is 20 or 30 years old, depending upon which software platform is. And you'd be like,

well, the software that important, I said, yes. Think about any major operational system. I mean, imagine going to someone like Walmart or Amazon and saying you have no software for your supply chain logistics and operations. They would be like, I can't even do my job. There was no investment in workflow management and workflow automation. Because think about it, the highest cost against drugs are the people and how cheaply you could administrate a plan. And I always say there are two lines in healthcare. There's your top line, which is gross margin. And I will say this very clearly.

My company does not purchase drugs cheaper than the largest entities in the pharmacy supply chain. But there's another line that's equal or in greater importance, which is what is your cost? What is your net margin? And so this is your administrative cost. So we built our own technology platform, Judy. Judy short for adjudication, and she is the brains behind our organization because everything runs on Judy.

And we had this hypothesis, which is if we could create workflow automation and make our organization 70, 80% more efficient than my competitors, not only could I close the gap in their pricing advantage, I could beat them. I could offer cheaper prices. And more importantly, I would never be forced to take what I felt was the bad money,

the money based upon spread. Well, and this is a really important point because when you first talked about not taking the bad money, my investor brain went, hey, I hear you leaving money on the table. And so it sounds like what you're saying is that you've automated this process enough. You've introduced enough technology that your margins will make up for not taking the bad money. Like you believe that you'll be able to make the same amount of money by all. also introducing price transparency and maybe having, hopefully, it sounds like a downstream positive benefit on the industry.

Oh, well, absolutely. And so, you know, I always go to the metrics that matters. So we're a customer first organization. So some people would say, well, you're leveraging all this technology, you know, does that create? Let me interject there. Who is the customer? Yeah, the customer that buys our services is an employer group. Typically, 500 employees or more.

So in the United States, when you hit 500 employees or more, you become self-insured. That means you're taking on the risk. I don't need a risk taker or carrier to cover my risk. I can pay for my own bills. And so the employers, they're also municipalities. They're also union groups, hospitals, health systems. So anyone who has a benefit to be administrated, we can provide a solution for it. We can also power the back end for regional carriers and health.

health plans again so we can be that administrative platform. But the main buyer for you to think about is any large employer in the United States. We're providing this administrative service. Gotcha. Okay. So how do you hope that, or do you hope that the healthcare landscape will change overall? I'm imagining that this is a little bit like Robin Hood, which came along and offered free stock trading. And then all of a sudden, everybody had to do that. Like, do you believe that you will have that transformative and impact on the industry, do you even want to? Or is this your competitive advantage forever? No, I hope everyone does. You know, I think the industry needs to think this way. You know, and I use Robin Hood quite a bit. If you think about it, once upon a time to

make a stock trade in the 90s, you know, I believe the rule is you could keep 10% of the value of the trade. It almost sounds criminal. People used to charge hundreds of dollars for a stock train and then companies like e-trade and Ameritrade said I'll do it for 59.95 and 995. And then Robin Hood comes along and says, I'll do it for zero. And then in my Chase account, they'll do it for zero because you're setting the market for what the true administrative fee should be. And so I do believe exactly as you're saying is you're going to expose what the real price and value is to administrate a plan on behalf of a self-insured entity. And that will settle itself based upon the services and what the market can bear. So I completely agree with your example. I hope everybody gets here. It's our

advantage today, but I believe that others will understand the importance of this. And I hope many of them use our technology to get there. I would like nothing more than to liberate drug prices on behalf of the U.S. consumer. Yeah, us too. And then talk to me about the sales pipeline. How hard is it for your customers to switch? Yeah. Well, I would say, first of all, switching is very easy.

This is our calling card because we have a modern technology platform. So my competitors take months to set up a new plan and it's a real headache. But if you were to speak to any of my customers, we literally plow through this in hours to set up a new plan because we have a national, a natural language framework, which enables my people to very easily set up a new plan design and benefit and do the interoperability and the integration, not to bore you with the details, but we connect to a lot of different things, including the carrier for accumulators and eligibility feeds. But the whole point of it is it's a seamless process that's an eased,

very easy to do and to switch. And this helps quite a bit. But I think what you're trying to get to and part of the question is, how hard is it to keep? convince someone to move to someone like us. And so we've been around now. You've described like a pretty, you know, well-integrated mob operation. And sometimes those can be a little hard to disrupt without ending up in a barrel. Oh, yeah. No, completely agree.

So, but part of it is I often say there are no shortcuts in health care. So if anyone says, hey, my sister is a bigwig executive at this Fortune 500 company and they're just going to move their business to us. I'm like, I've never seen that. that because normally someone is going to say, well, wait a second, how many 200,000 life accounts do you have? And if you're new to the business, your answer is going to be zero and they're going to be like hit the road. So, you know, no one has a tolerance for risk when it comes to benefits. So what I say is there's no shortcuts in healthcare. So we've been at this for four and

half years. And what I often say is I never want to go back. I never want to go back and sell four years ago because it's miserable. Think about it, Molly. You're my customer and I'm trying to convince you and I say, hey, here's the reason why you should use capital RX. The first question is going to be like, well, how many other customers do you have? I'm going to be like including you? And you're going to be like, oh, that's very cute. And they're like, how long have you been in business for? And you're going to be like, including this month? Right. And you're going to be like, are you trying not to get the sale? But I'm trying to be honest. But my point is, you start by selling 500 life cases to get to a thousand life cases to 2,000 to 4 and 8 and 16. And I make this point all the time

because I want people to understand there are no shortcuts in healthcare. You build upon your trust score. So if I've been scored to serve as 10,000 life cases, yeah, I might be able to sell a 20,000 life case, but I'm not selling a 200,000 life case anytime soon. And this is what we had to build upon. And also, if you think about it, statistically speaking, as I stated earlier, depending upon your accounting for market control, the big three, you know, Cigna United and CVS, control 80% of the self-insured marketplace. So 80% of the time, I've got to displace a Fortune 20 company. And so that's never easy, but it gets easier each year. And part of it is because our performance and our track record. But it's also, I give a huge amount of thanks to my customers.

They're our best sellers. My best brand ambassadors, hands down, are my customers. I have more sales for my customers talking to other people, be it at conferences, at just get-togethers, people knowing people in industry, HR people are pretty tight. And they'll just say, oh, my goodness, I'm having the best experience with Capital RX, you should speak to them. And I think That goes back to that trust and strength of your brand. And timing, right? Timing matters. You're doing this at this moment when, as you described earlier, this conversation is really increasing.

I also want to ask you how this, how, if at all, because there's also been news about drug prices specifically around like Mark Cuban's new company cost plus pharmacy. How does this interact with that if at all or how could it? And is it part of this ecosystem of like, let's upend this. Yeah. So if you think about it, my competitors create walls. They only want to direct drug spend to their channels, especially when it comes to like delivery or home delivery, like Mark Cuban Cost Plus. We have the opposite model. So we're agnostic in our network. So I'll take anyone in our network. Remember, my job is to administrate and find the best price and the best service. So why wouldn't I want Mark's company to give me inventory and price? Right. Right. And the answer is yes. You know what I mean? And it's the same, not just Mark, but anyone. And I want to make this clear. It's at retail. We allow any pharmacy in our network as long as obviously they're in compliance and in good standing with the state. I always want to make the point of that. But I think the other part of it is I don't care if you have a mail channel. You know, I'm saying, give me a price list and I'll post it. And if people want to use your services because you're offering a lower price, fantastic. You know, that's the way the market should be. If I'm truly an administrator, what I want to do is help my client and their patients find the lowest price and bridge that and communicate to that

to them. So yes, the answer is, I applaud anyone like Mark and others that have mail and delivery services that have figured out ways through partnerships and direct contracting to provide lower drug prices to the U.S. public, I am all for it. Because remember, I don't make any money on fulfillment. This is what makes me very different in our organization from our competitors. We do not make money on the filling of a prescription or the spread pricing or the acquisition cost or the rebating or anything around that. So it makes it very easy for us to make partnerships and direct people to the appropriate channel. And then last question, do you think, you know, when we look at seemingly intractable problems like this, I'm a climate tech investor, so I,

you know, am acutely aware of this. Do you think that disruption and competition ultimately are going to have more impact than these sort of slow walk regulatory moves, or do they have to go hand in hand? I've personally never built a business plan or model around federal intervention or oversight. So I genuinely always believe in innovation and competition driving a market. market. I do believe it's important for the federal government to lean in and review many of these rules and practices that have kind of emerged over 20 years, not necessarily for myself and competition, but who's the largest payer in the country? It's the federal government. For Medicare, Medicaid, 340B, DOD, VA, take their pick. They buy billions of dollars of drugs. I would like my

federal government to, one, get a fair price because they're not. It's by their own omission, you know, omission. And so if you look at the COB report from February of 2021, it compares net drug prices across things like DOD, VA, Medicare, Medicaid, 340B. And it's not like really tight. Like, oh, well, we have, you know, the best price in the United States and that's what we've negotiated for all my billing. It's the exact opposite. There's a delta on net cost of up to 150%. So I often joke, if the federal government can't get it right, what chance does the average patient? And so I do believe that leaning in on a regulatory standpoint and reviewing things are healthy, but I do believe innovation is the only way and through fair competition. It's the only way the industry is

truly going to make a monumental leap in the private sector space. AJ Loyakano is CEO of Capital RX. Thanks for fighting the good fight. Good luck. Thank you so much for having me, Molly. Good luck with the mob. I know I'm watching a lot of Sopranos. I'm from Jersey. It's okay. We'll look it out for you. What a great interview. Well done again, Molly Wood. Thanks, man. And thanks, Alon, for coming on talking about streaming with us.

And tomorrow we'll have a great interview. Jason is going to be talking to praying for exits, It's the anonymous BC satirical account that, you know, as with all satire, is often quite on the nose. Yeah, pretty, pretty poignant stuff. And then we'll have another OK boomer segment from producer Rachel reporting live from the disastrous NFT. And we see it tomorrow. Doesn't seem like such a disaster. Rachel's having a lot of fun. Oh, she's living her best life again?

She's living my best life again. She's living your best life. I'll see you tomorrow. This week's start. I can't go. You can't go. We have this daily show. We're tied to this desk every day.

But Rachel's out there. She's like living our best life. Wow, way to go. Good job, Rachel. See you tomorrow, everybody. Bye.