Podcast Recommendation: "How I Built This Lab With Guy Raz" Episode With Mark Cuban on His CostPlus Drug Co.

So, next up on my podcast recommendation (and incidentally, I should note that my recommendations are for specific podcast episodes, not necessarily all episodes within a given podcast, although you may also like subscribing to certain podcasts as the content tends to be similar to an episode I'm recommending) is one I only occasionally listen to if the topic sounds interesting. 

The podcast episode I am recommending today is one created by NPR called the "How I Built This Lab With Guy Raz" podcast (Guy Raz is the name of the host) in which he interviewed billionaire Mark Cuban. Mr. Cuban was on this particular podcast previously in one of its inaugural episodes, but the particular episode I enjoyed was a recent one from June 16, 2022 in which they interviewed Mark Cuban and asked him about how his new startup business known as the Mark Cuban CostPlus Drug Company and how that came to fruition and how that business is looking to disrupt the pharmaceutical and PBM industries.

In fact, I am likely to share several other podcasts about the Mark Cuban CostPlus Drug Company because it has potential to become a disruptive force to the PBM Kickback problem responsible for prescription drug price inflation in the U.S. (BTW, I wrote an article published on LinkedIn on the subject of the PBM Kickback problem which you can read at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-civica-insulin-announcement-may-disruptive-pbm-scheme-strumello/ so please feel free to read my article).

Anyway, the "HIBT" (the acronym for "How I Built This") podcast host Guy Raz acknowledged in the episode intro that Mr. Cuban had been founding and investing in different startups for decades, but he'd never put his name on a company until the CostPlus Drug Company came to be. That's an interesting story by itself, but he also shares some fascinating additional details about the actual business in this episode.

The link to the episode itself is found at https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-hibt-lab-mark-cuban-cost-plus-drug-company-mark-cuban/ 

 

 

 

For whatever reason, Wondery podcasts (or distributors like Apple Podcasts) doesn't technically enable sharing of podcasts they host, so in this case, I simply borrowed their episode image (it was a WebP image format which was a hassle to work with or download, so I converted it to a more usable PNG format), and if you click on the image (or the link), it will direct you to the page for the podcast itself.

Anyway, this  NPR "How I Built This" ("HIBT Lab") episode entitled "Mark Cuban CostPlus Drug Company: Mark Cuban How I Built This with Guy Raz" was one worth listening to. It provides some info. from Mark Cuban himself about this startup business, the man who pitched the idea to him Alex Oshmyansky and how he, as a multi-billionaire, doesn't aim to sell the company to "cash out" as so many pharma entrepreneurs do. That's an important point of differentiation and in my opinion, and combined with cost transparency makes MCCPDC a drug company I'm more willing to do business with if I'm paying out-of-pocket. In fact, I recently did so (although only because the cost of the drug itself was among the lowest I could find anywhere).