SPEAKER_00: Hey, everybody, we have got a packed Thursday show for you today. It's a short week. So we

SPEAKER_01: have to give you like a double link through. All right. Yes, the Obi Wan 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

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, what this means for streaming and the episode itself. Very satisfying for me.

SPEAKER_04: Very satisfying conversation. And again, there's still lots of other content coming up. We're

SPEAKER_05: going to do a quick news hit on the FDA taking action against Juul. And then I've got an interview with a series C healthcare CEO, they say it can't be done. But he's trying to disrupt drug prices.

SPEAKER_08: Yes, this is AJ from Capital RX laser focused on transparency and prescription drug pricing, like the Mark Cuban company, which will 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 Juul, which did the wrong thing for a decade. Definitely. We're really it's really interesting,

SPEAKER_04: 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.

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SPEAKER_17: 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 slash streaming

SPEAKER_18: and does a couple of other projects. Where else can people find you, Lon Harris?

SPEAKER_19: Oh, there's the, I do a podcast with Hal Rudnick where we talk about streaming shows every week.

SPEAKER_21: That's called Binge Boys. It's on Spotify, iTunes, wherever you get your, wherever you get your podcasts in. Binge Boys. I'm Binge Boys. That's right. And I write for Honest Trailers on Screen Junkies. That's the big YouTube Honest Trailer show. You can find that at Honest Trailers or go to Fandom 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 Halo series.

SPEAKER_23: I didn't get to finish it. Again, we are drowning in streaming. I really liked it. I really liked that. You finished it?

SPEAKER_26: Yeah. My Lord. You know what? That's it. I'm going to, I'm a new thing for my team members.

SPEAKER_30: No more weekends. No. We're now going to have everybody do time blocking for streaming. I want to

SPEAKER_33: see how much of people are streaming. There's a lot of streaming going on. Can you imagine the hours

SPEAKER_05: of streaming we're all doing? 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

SPEAKER_39: simple. You blow stuff up. But I thought it was surprisingly good. I think a lot of us were expecting a little more action. I didn't, a lot of the fans were annoyed that it doesn't follow the plot of the

SPEAKER_21: 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. Actually, I want more Spartans running around shooting aliens, you know? I think you know

SPEAKER_05: 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 then episode six and episode nine are basically the video game. And you're like, yes. Yeah, I want the shooty

SPEAKER_43: shooty. That's probably where I'm left with the positive feeling because yeah. Less, less talk, talk. Less feelings. Let's get into Obi-Wan here. This is the, and of course,

SPEAKER_48: this is going to be filled with, uh, spoilers. You can just look at your podcast player on the show notes and, and go ahead. If you're on youtube.com slash this weekend, if you look in the summary, you hit that down carrot, you can open up the summary, the description of the video, and we put timestamp scenes, go to the next timestamp. There you go. So if you're that one

SPEAKER_09: guy on Twitter, who's like, don't talk about Star Wars, because I don't like it. We solved it for you.

SPEAKER_17: 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, uh, 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,

SPEAKER_57: so you have to open up the tweet basically. Yeah. That's so I just saw that today.

SPEAKER_17: So good for engagement. I think that's how you break the algorithm is if people open up your tweet,

SPEAKER_59: you know, they're more likely to like it and engage. I think you get more engagement. Anyway, episode six happened. Uh, the finale, the finale.

SPEAKER_21: That's it. I think it feels like, uh, Ewan is on the internet this week saying he wants to do more, maybe a season two, but this felt very like a final note to me.

SPEAKER_66: Yeah. I don't want to felt that way. This felt like you could, this is like a cherry on top, just chef's kiss.

SPEAKER_21: This, this seem seamlessly moves you into a new hope. We've got, we've got everything in place. He's, he's found Qui-Gon there. They're going through the Canyon to his new cave home where Luke will find him. Uh, it just seems like, I don't, what more is there to do? This leads it on just a

SPEAKER_25: perfect, like grace note. Which you could also be 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,

SPEAKER_21: 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, uh, O'Shea Jackson, Jr. as Roken, Kumail Nanjiani as, uh, Kaja. 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.

SPEAKER_69: Mm-hmm. Jimmy Smith's Balogana. Mm-hmm. Uh, so it's pretty awesome. All these figures are now like in play because they've created the immediate, like the proto-rebellion- The guy in the black suit,

SPEAKER_39: Darth, um, Vader. That, that, that, that, like, I love that. That was just to take a, that moment where they had him refer to him as Darth, which is kind of a, kind of a retcon thing,

SPEAKER_21: because when Lucas wrote A New Hope and has Obi-Wan Kenobi refer to Darth Vader as just Darth, he didn't know that the standard would be all Sith Lords have, uh, Darth and then their name,

SPEAKER_77: like Darth Sidious, Darth Plagueis, Darth, you know, like- Right, right. That it's a title,

SPEAKER_21: not a name. So, Alec Guinness probably, the actor didn't realize Darth was a title, thought it was just his name, and so he refers to him, like, well, hello, Darth. And so having Ewan McGregor do that here makes it a bit that he's doing. Instead of, he doesn't know that his first name

SPEAKER_00: isn't Darth. That's actually delightful, especially because it was such a, kind of, sweetly awkward delivery, like, he's like- Right. Darth. Darth. Darth. Darth.

SPEAKER_85: I guess that's your new name now and- Now it's, now it's a dig. Right. It's a dig, yes. You're just dark. Like- Right.

SPEAKER_90: You're just another generic Sith. You're just another generic Sith.

SPEAKER_39: I killed Anakin Skywalker, I'm Darth Vader now. He's like, well, hello, Darth, you know, like, it's, it's almost a joke at his expense now. Which I like, because it re-,

SPEAKER_96: Now it recreates that moment in A New Hope. It's like, oh, he knows what he's saying.

SPEAKER_95: I'm watching so many YouTube videos of, like, uh, you know, people's reaction to this show and

SPEAKER_18: everything. And, um, I got an Alec Guinness on his yacht talking about Star Wars in, like, 87 or something. It's a great video. Mm-hmm. And he's like, I just kept turning the pages. It was great. I mean, the dialogue was, it needed work. I mean, it was not pleasant. Um, but-

SPEAKER_100: He's like, let's be real. And somebody writes in the comments, like, did you know he had, like, points in this? And then somebody, you know, the jumping off, it links to another video where somebody says, you had three points of the gross? And Star Wars 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, or was, you know,

SPEAKER_77: Yeah. And he said he clenched up the dialogue. At that point in his career, I mean, you know, we're talking about a, a Shakespearean actor, like one of the world's most, you know, like,

SPEAKER_21: regaled, celebrated actors. And this was a point in Hollywood where it was more common for 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 DiCaprio 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

SPEAKER_77: international film business. So yeah, for Guinness, this was like, oh, I'll go to America and make this

SPEAKER_109: schlocky genre thing, and then I'll come back and we'll do, you know, Lear. All right. Yeah. Let's get right into it.

SPEAKER_04: All right. So a little recap, you got our, our two storylines converging. Reva is, uh, horribly

SPEAKER_05: wounded after being, we think once again, stabbed with a lightsaber, but too angry to die as one review, uh, put it arrives on Tatooine to try to find Luke. Vader. Meanwhile, is chasing Obi-Wan in the path and Kenobi, uh, Obi-Wan 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.

Jason Calacanis: Right. Yeah. On Dagobah. On Dagobah, like I thought it had a similar look to that sort of Dagobah dark forest that

SPEAKER_05: Luke walks through, but anyway, they have, uh, 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. Um, and then, and then you see actually, which is kind of lovely. Owen and Beru, like as Beru in particular, just be like a bad-ass. 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 rediscovers her own good side of the force. And everything is just wrapped up in a delightful, tidy, lovely little bow. And now

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SPEAKER_66: That's right. $10,000 off. Uh, long favorite scene in this episode. I think I can guess. Oh, wow. There are two really, there are two really poignant ones.

SPEAKER_21: I mean, the, I love the, the lightsaber fight is great. You, you actually predicted the helmet, uh, forehead scalp slash moment where he breaks open that, which is that recalls a moment from, I believe it's a star Wars rebels where Ahsoka does the same. Darth helmets, uh, Darth, uh, 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 Christensen's 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, that was really well done and cool. And then it was also, it was really delightful to see, uh, Qui-Gon show up again at the end. Uh, well, Liam Neeson,

SPEAKER_69: Neeson. For your generation, especially you're a little younger than me. I'm a, I mean, I was already, I'm sure for, for the prequel kids, it's very cool. I was already in college when

SPEAKER_39: Phantom Menace came out. So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's just nice how it ties it all together. Yes. Uh, with the old, with the old Joe. I, I really, I feel like in some way,

SPEAKER_21: this in 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, 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.

SPEAKER_133: Is the main point Molly. This is episode 3.5. Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_17: They created episode 3.5 because a lot happens between, uh, Anakin being defeated on Mustafar in Revenge of the Sith and, uh, Obi-Wan, um, you know, lowering his lightsaber to be turned, essentially opting in to 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,

SPEAKER_130: Obi-Wan. But now you understand why Obi-Wan did that. He had defeated Darth Vader on Mustafar, 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 in one. He cut off three

SPEAKER_26: 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. It lowers the lightsaber says, I'm not even trying 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 Qui-Gon when he goes to the desert is, there's a bigger purpose here. You can move on. Uh, and there's something about Jedi moving on to

SPEAKER_105: this, you know, force ghost. Well, we sort of see, it's a similar beat with Luke at the end of

SPEAKER_21: Last Jedi where, you know, some people read it as the, the, the amount of concentration he required to project himself to create from, uh, where he was meditating on, uh, octo, I believe. Uh, so you could read that as well. It's the energy he had to expand. That's what killed him or, but he does just sort of, he just disappears. He just becomes one with the force. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05: This is good. The, the noties are having a debate that I also wondered about, which is this question of why Reva would, cause it's not clear in episode five, whether she realizes that Luke is Vader's son.

SPEAKER_17: Oh no, she knows it. So she knows it. He says something about the kids. He said, I think I was, I rewatched that scene. He says in the recap,

SPEAKER_100: his kids, we have to go check on his kids. So she, that's when she, with that little device realized it's, it's Vader's kids. Right. I think she figures out.

SPEAKER_142: And so then she goes to answer the question of what people are asking, which is then why would

SPEAKER_05: she go kill Luke? It's to get revenge on Vader for having killed, slaughtered all the younglings.

SPEAKER_21: And, 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 we've already established that Reva loves to dangle information, Lord information over people. That would be her revenge. She would go tell

SPEAKER_24: Darth Vader, you had a son and I killed him. Or even better. I mean, she's walking back with

SPEAKER_47: what you think might be a dead Luke Skywalker, which obviously doesn't make any sense, unless they were going alternate universe with this episode. Yeah. We, we kind of know, I think so we know he's not dead, but he looks pretty dead. I mean,

SPEAKER_100: By that point, I think we've figured it out. Imagine she brings young Luke Skywalker's 10 year old body to Darth Vader. Right. Exactly. Here's your son. Yeah. I killed him just like you killed my friends.

SPEAKER_39: I mean, it's pretty dark. Just like she's delighted in being the one who gets to tell Obi-Wan Anakin is still alive and he's Darth Vader. She would, that would be part of her

SPEAKER_158: delicious revenge, would be telling him about himself. I have to say like both of these

SPEAKER_17: lightsaber battles now are, they're so amazing because the lightsaber battle that occurred in

SPEAKER_48: Revenge of the Sith was a great lightsaber battle. You know, on Mustafar, you thought like, Hey, this is peak Jedi. Sure. 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. Um, 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.

SPEAKER_160: Yeah, it's heartbreaking and kind of, you know, yeah.

SPEAKER_26: I thought a better ending would have been for Obi-Wan after she goes to see Luke, I'm sorry, Leia, to get back in the ship and Reva's in the ship.

SPEAKER_164: I thought that was gonna happen for sure. I was like waiting for it, like yay.

SPEAKER_17: He delivers her to complete her Jedi training. Yes. To Dagobah. That would have been, for me, the most satisfying. That would have been. He goes to, goes to see Yoda and Yoda says, too old, too old to complete the training. She is. Or he then trains her and just her sitting there.

SPEAKER_130: What do you think? You like mine?

SPEAKER_04: I was hoping for that. I was really hoping for that.

SPEAKER_39: You like that? I think, I think they're only not putting that bow on it because they're, it's probably still being decided what they're doing with her or they're gonna pick,

SPEAKER_171: I, I, I don't think she's gone for, for good.

SPEAKER_172: Her becoming a Jedi would be next level. I would be really.

SPEAKER_21: I think those dangling threads that we've been left with are gonna just be left dangling for, 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 when we never got an answer there.

SPEAKER_24: All those things are being set up for a future show, a future movie. They're gonna pick all these threads.

SPEAKER_05: I mean, I will say, I also thought, I thought that that was gonna happen, that Reva was gonna 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-Wan just gonna heartbreakingly now have to kill her because she knows this

SPEAKER_178: big secret, you know? It's not doing a very good job.

SPEAKER_179: To me, it would have been better security to bring her to be trained as a Jedi.

SPEAKER_180: Yeah, but then make sure she's like, okay, and taken care of and say, just like, okay, peace out.

SPEAKER_181: I see you have a big owie.

SPEAKER_17: 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

SPEAKER_48: 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 in the Clone Wars. We waited 20 years to find out what the Clone Wars were like, right? So there was another great scene. So number one scene for me was the speech and the discussion. I'll pull up the copy of it in a second between Anakin and Luke, because he says, 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, um, and cracks his skull open. So they, 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 it pulls down a star destroyer. Um, but I have to say, I got incredibly emotional.

SPEAKER_18: I don't want to, uh, admit this. But I got a very emotional. I'm not gonna 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-Wan. You didn't kill Anakin Skywalker. I did. That scene was incredibly moving to me.

SPEAKER_17: 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 in line. 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

SPEAKER_26: making more poignant dialogue. This has to be something they're consciously doing, right?

SPEAKER_21: There, uh, I don't know if you noticed some of these episodes had the name Stuart Beatty, uh, 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, Hossein 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, I, I feel like that dialogue was probably has been set for a really long time. Cause it was really good. And I think the whole show may be formed itself around that scene.

SPEAKER_05: Cause that's what that, that was the payoff moment. Yeah.

SPEAKER_196: It was like the goodwill hunting. It's not your fault scene. Again, it, it, it fixes.

SPEAKER_21: And I'm not saying this needed to be fixed, but it, it fixes a moment in the original movie. Yes. Did you kill my father? Where Obi-Wan it, it, you, 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.

SPEAKER_69: But now it makes more sense because that's what Anakin says to him specifically. Anakin says it himself. He says, I killed Anakin, not Darth Vader killed Anakin.

SPEAKER_17: Cause 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 in A New Hope, he's, you know, like it's a fantastical device.

SPEAKER_200: He looks directly down the scope of it, yeah.

SPEAKER_17: Well, he's getting, he's trying to figure out what it is. And they're like, well, wait a second, Luke Skywalker's never seen a lightsaber. So Reva's coming in having a lightsaber battle. They specifically, when he's leaving that bedroom to go run in the desert away from Reva, he's halfway out the window when she walks in. Right. He never sees the lightsaber. He never sees it. Yeah, I noticed that too.

SPEAKER_202: I was like, they did that quite carefully that, and then he's knocked out.

SPEAKER_204: He's running above her. She uses the force to loosen the rocks underneath him as he's running.

SPEAKER_21: But he wouldn't, you wouldn't necessarily see that if you were running. No. And like rocks fell. You might just assume. No, he assumed he tripped.

SPEAKER_207: He does not know what the force is.

SPEAKER_21: He doesn't know what a lightsaber is.

SPEAKER_05: They shot around it. It was clever. And it was, 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 Tusken Raider, which is what they told him was happening. Oh, yeah, that's a good observation. We're on the move.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. That's also, uh, for eagle-eyed fans, the toy that Obi-Wan brings him, the T-16 Skyhopper mini model, that's in Luke's bedroom in A New Hope, that toy.

SPEAKER_212: So they're doing that purposefully to like, this is a bit of the set. This is how he got that bit of the set.

SPEAKER_158: 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,

SPEAKER_48: 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, you know, he says, I'm not your failure. Mm-hmm. And then he says, my friend is truly dead. Goodbye, Darth. Yeah. I mean, just unbelievable.

SPEAKER_217: The Darth Vegas, yeah.

SPEAKER_48: There's a second scene I thought was incredibly powerful too, that also got me a little bit emotional, if I'm being honest. Um, it's, uh, and I think this is my second favorite scene from the episode, which is, um, Obi-Wan comes back to say goodbye and bring, um, the toy. Um, right. What's 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, um, superpower that is more around communication. And, 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. We're exceptional people who bore an exceptional daughter.

SPEAKER_221: I mean, oh, the, the fact that he speaks so kindly about Anakin. Yeah. And preserves Anakin's forthrightness and fearless and passion. He, he still sees so much good in Anakin, which now makes so much sense for Obi-Wan.

SPEAKER_26: Now I start to think about this. When I think about Star Wars now, what this has done for me is, oh, it's the story of the Skywalker family. That's what Lucas always says. To me, it's the story of Obi-Wan. It really is. Like he, him having to deal with this situation to me is 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.

SPEAKER_222: I don't know how you feel about it, Lon.

SPEAKER_21: The theme of, the theme of separating Anakin and, and Vader and like coming to that understanding runs through the whole episode. It's, it's, it's really handled well. I mean, I think you could read that as why he can now see Qui-Gon. Like Qui-Gon was the one who was like, Anakin's the chosen one. We have to train the boy. He 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 is truly gone. You know, Anakin's been replaced by this other guy.

SPEAKER_81: Now he's ready to make his peace with Qui-Gon Jinn and re, re-encounter his old master.

SPEAKER_00: I thought that was like, it did seem like he was ready to move on. Like, or he was able to move on.

SPEAKER_81: Yeah, that's Qui-Gon says it specifically. Like I've been here the whole time. It was you. You're now ready to, to see me.

SPEAKER_21: What a year for Liam Neeson also popped up in Atlanta. He's showing up in all the big shows. He's in Atlanta. I haven't, I haven't.

SPEAKER_81: Oh, there was a great episode of Atlanta where Liam Neeson does a surprise cameo.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 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. Um, yeah.

SPEAKER_48: They, they teased it throughout.

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Chamath Palihapitiya: All right, Molly, any other observations on the episode or things you loved or hated or? I mean, I thought it was lovely.

SPEAKER_09: I thought it was like the perfect wrap up to this little special movie.

SPEAKER_05: 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.

SPEAKER_238: 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.

SPEAKER_69: Yeah. I mean, I, I would be fine.

SPEAKER_21: 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 Mandalore story that they're also telling.

SPEAKER_39: Uh, you know, I, I, I, I don't know.

SPEAKER_77: I don't think this storyline needs to continue with Obi-Wan and young Leia and is it, you know, what's going on in Tatooine? I feel like we've, we've seen that now and I'm ready for other stuff in this pre rebellion, early rebellion world.

SPEAKER_48: I would like, yeah. So, uh, one other note, they, 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, um, they're in the Mandalorian. They showed Grogu at the Jedi temple as a youngling, uh, being like, uh, you know, saved and being like Riva was in the, in the Mandalorian series, I believe.

SPEAKER_17: So there is a theory that he force healed Riva as they were leaving the Jedi temple, because he can force heal and save her that because there was like, how did she get saved?

SPEAKER_100: I could see Grogu coming out and there were injured Padawan or injured younglings everywhere. And he just puts his hands on her.

SPEAKER_82: Also to be fair, I sort of always, this is really dark, but I was like, well,

SPEAKER_04: it probably cauterizes the wound. So if it's just a wound and it's not fatal, I think that we're, yeah.

SPEAKER_77: I mean, we're, we're, what we're seeing now is. I feel like Lucas films, 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

SPEAKER_21: 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 that all these characters are now, I have a theory play in this world to cross over and other shows and make connections between all of them.

SPEAKER_17: My theory is completely different.

SPEAKER_48: I think that this is all a setup to do the entire Clone Wars as a hundred episode series. 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 incentive, and you have the Clone Wars, which were incredible. So, 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 in 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.

SPEAKER_17: They need to secure the bag. They need the bag. Neither of these individuals are in a franchise. Am I correct?

SPEAKER_134: Nobody's in Marvel. Nobody's got some huge payday. I mean, like they're, they're, they're doing fine.

SPEAKER_21: But yeah, like Hayden Christensen could definitely use a big franchise role for sure. That's true.

SPEAKER_169: He needs a hyaluronic acid and maybe like a collagen. Yeah, he's not working as much. Ewan is fine. Ewan's fine, but I'm not worried about Ewan. Has he had a franchise?

SPEAKER_259: No, but I, I feel like that's, but that's by, that's by choice. Okay, well, you know what?

SPEAKER_188: At some point you have to make the right choice, which is to secure the bag.

SPEAKER_227: He could be in a Marvel if he wanted to be, or he could do a DC if he wanted to. I don't know.

SPEAKER_261: It hasn't happened. So he needs to secure the bag. He's Obi-Wan.

SPEAKER_26: I know that, but he, 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.

SPEAKER_39: I mean, my only, my only caveat is, I don't know if they would, I think Clone Wars itself is, it's very episodic. It's very like, here's what's happening in this world.

SPEAKER_70: Here's what's happening in this world.

SPEAKER_21: Here's what's going on with Mandalore. Here's what's going on with these guys. And they are already doing like the bad bats have their own show. Yes. You know, Ahsoka is getting her own show.

SPEAKER_70: I don't know. Almost. I don't know. I almost don't know if what the fans want is. Let's recreate these moments. You already know. The fans didn't see Clone Wars.

SPEAKER_268: Nobody's seen it though. At this point. I think a lot of people think anymore. I think it's the worst.

SPEAKER_271: I think it's, let's spin all of this stuff off. Okay, we'll see. We'll see who's right.

SPEAKER_21: Like, Cad Bane 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 Doctor Strange and Scarlet Witch together and give them a team up movie. And let's do, we'll give 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.

SPEAKER_274: Molly, any guesses here? No.

SPEAKER_142: I'm buying. You're in deep, man. You're in deep.

SPEAKER_276: I saw a guy pitch this week.

Jason Calacanis: 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.

SPEAKER_04: So your prediction of a hundred episode live action Clone Wars makes sense from that perspective deeply. Yes. All right. Also, I'm loving bitchy Grand Inquisitor and I want to see more of him. Well, he is so snotty. He is so snotty.

SPEAKER_07: 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.

SPEAKER_46: Talk back to Darth because he'll crush me.

SPEAKER_284: Makes me laugh.

SPEAKER_18: That was actually a noticeable noticeable. The Inquisitor is like a very regal character in Rebels where it's 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.

SPEAKER_287: Jason Isaacson, the TV show.

SPEAKER_48: 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.

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SPEAKER_48: 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 could 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 any ones that are not correct to go back into the archive and retcon that

SPEAKER_26: and just delete them. No, but, uh, I believe they're going to do clone wars in some fashion.

SPEAKER_48: Then I believe, and I watched a video on the, 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. Um, so here's what happens. The, uh, the villain was supposedly going to be, uh, Darth Maul. And Darth Maul had an apprentice. And then Leia is running the galactic Senate and trying 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 Maul who wants to reconstitute. And then she uses her power to extinguish this and bring the Jedi back. Luke becomes the, you know, runs his Jedi order with, uh, Leia 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 Wars. But it's Princess Leia who is the featured character in that series. But, of course, they didn't go with his story.

SPEAKER_295: Does that drive with what you've read? That that would be the theme of that series?

SPEAKER_223: Yeah, I mean, I think, I think definitely, uh, you know, Leia having like more of a central role earlier on and, and those characters being more just generally central to it, I think was a,

SPEAKER_21: was a big, you know, thing that Luke, that Lucas had.

SPEAKER_24: I've never read, like, Duel of the Fates is the other one that they talk about where it was like

SPEAKER_39: the Colin Trevorrow version instead of the J.J. Abrams version, which is out there in the world and you can read, which is a very different direction.

SPEAKER_77: But it's still the, like, you know, Rey, Kylo Ren, Finn, First Order.

SPEAKER_18: If you just think about it on a money grab, the amount of money they made from the sequels,

SPEAKER_26: Force Awakens, yada yada, Last Jedi, to get a second swing at bat and make them again

SPEAKER_221: and get all that money again, just as a capitalist marauding.

SPEAKER_168: Why would you not? And that's what Disney is, which is, yeah. So see also not exactly advice, but kind of reminds me more and say, listen,

SPEAKER_17: which this isn't all because now that Marvel and DC are like, oh, yeah, by the way,

SPEAKER_47: 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.

SPEAKER_305: 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.

SPEAKER_24: You could obviously do that with Star Wars. There's a force power that allows you to rewrite

SPEAKER_39: the past. There's a portal that they find to an alternate reality. You know, it's Star Wars.

Chamath Palihapitiya: All right. Here's my prediction from the beginning of the show. I don't know what episode this was.

SPEAKER_122: One minute. We'll see on the other side. I think they haven't explained all the scars on Darth Vader when we take the helmet off in 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

SPEAKER_168: waiting for me to get there. He's like, come on. I was waiting for you to get there. You got and

SPEAKER_295: he hits him in the head. Here's what I think happens. I think Reva dies during this. I think

SPEAKER_122: it becomes like a three or four person battle where Obi-Wan or Darth Vader kills Reva. 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.

SPEAKER_289: And that's how that scar, because that scar is not coming up in the back of the tank. I looked for it.

SPEAKER_314: Yeah. He's got that, that it's almost like an indent in his. An indent in his head. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, look at this. Here it is. Oh, there it is. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_39: 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.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Nope. All right. There you have it, folks. There you go. 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.

SPEAKER_07: 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.

SPEAKER_322: I like how he changed it. It was probably there. I'll give it to you. Yeah. I mean, I think it's hard.

SPEAKER_325: It's a, it's a little hard to see with bits of the helmet sort of, sort of still there. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_18: All right. Listen, Lon, this has been great. Yeah. We'll finish up the, uh, we'll finish up the star, the star track and then we'll find

SPEAKER_328: another show, hopefully an entrepreneurial show or go to an entrepreneurial movie. That's the other thing I want to do.

SPEAKER_227: I think there's something, there's a bunch of stuff coming up. We can figure it out. All right.

SPEAKER_18: Everybody follow Lon's and go to inside.com slash streaming on his trailers, yada, yada, but follow him. He's good on Twitter.

SPEAKER_221: If you're, if you like a mixture of pop culture and, you know, far left, like dunking on people,

SPEAKER_331: it's sort of like the anti-Sax Twitter account.

SPEAKER_332: Yeah. That's how I see myself is the anti-Sax. It's sort of like the light in the dark, you know, it's, he's kind of, I think that's a good way to describe it.

SPEAKER_334: I love, I love your Twitter. You're great on Twitter. Twitter.com. Thanks. I agree.

SPEAKER_251: I appreciate that. See you next time. See you next time. Bye bye. All right. And other news, uh, we'll just do a quick transition here.

SPEAKER_18: You may have remembered Molly. Uh, I, I had a, once again, stepped in it, or I couldn't control my, couldn't control my honest opinion. Feelings. About something, 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, um, Juul 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.

SPEAKER_04: I was sorry. I was just basking in the, like, I don't know. Yeah. The genius of that trend. You're like, and now. Yeah. So the FDA is, uh, banning the sale of Juuls in the U S other e-cigarettes will, uh, flavored

Jason Calacanis: e-cigarettes will still be available, but apparently Juul 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 Juul anymore. They're protecting you from looking like a jerk on the street, at least with this one brand. But I, I mean, to the point that you made and the, and the,

SPEAKER_05: the, the full J Cal emotion. Yeah. It, you 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,

SPEAKER_04: to continuing to do so, even after you've been told not to do so, you know, to just. Yeah, they, they come for the children over and over.

SPEAKER_48: I think ju the, the way this went down too, was Juul was 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, uh, back in 2020. Um, 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 Juul and others had, which is this is a bridge off of to get you to stop smoking. You could believe that, uh, is a true statement. Like are Juuls safer than smoking a pack or two of cigarettes a day? I think without even, yeah, it's, it's, it seems that it would be without knowing the exact chemistry,

SPEAKER_344: but that seems plausible since one is burning and one is vaping. It does seem tar in it. It's burning tar. Yes.

SPEAKER_04: This is not that this is addictive in the nicotine sense. And there are complaints that there could be like chemicals in the actual Juul devices.

SPEAKER_00: But yeah, is it safer than cigarettes without question? So isn't getting kids hooked on nicotine? Like even earlier without question. Of course.

SPEAKER_18: Um, so, uh, I guess you could still get vapes, um, like blue Razz and let lychee or lechi.

SPEAKER_01: How do you pronounce lychee berry? Lychee or lychee, lychee, lychee, lychee. Lychee, lychee, lychee, lychee.

SPEAKER_351: And strawberry banana. um i mean sounds like i might join the juice when i'm ordering those things um according to time shout out to uh the new owner of time ceo of salesforce companies like puff

SPEAKER_01: 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 jewel products

SPEAKER_00: huh spite yeah and they're saying this hmm yeah i mean i think this is i honestly i think this is

Jason Calacanis: less about you know it there's also i think an order this week about uh 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

SPEAKER_48: reformable here's the lesson for founders uh be a good actor always be on the side of the consumer you're serving uh and on the side of society you have to be able to tell that story i'll give some examples in a moment and um you know i think begging for forgiveness in certain verticals uh 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 you know and go to as i always talk

David Friedberg: about like you can you can go on a longer vacation or there's more options for people maybe who aren't

SPEAKER_48: rich to 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 three hotel rooms for 600 a night you 200 for three bedrooms 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

SPEAKER_26: your apartment and that's how you pay your rent or your mortgage like okay now you've got another constituent about you who's the constituent molly here that's going to bat for jewel 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 uh had lung cancer and for people who couldn't get off of these and i would have had a plan not to make fruity flag flavors and maximize profitability but i was a plan to say listen here is 100 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 moved 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 yeah then you would have all those people say you know

SPEAKER_365: 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

SPEAKER_26: get down to 0.5 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

SPEAKER_295: delightful than smoking a cigarette and but yeah this is not for kids um and instead they went the

SPEAKER_05: 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 you know it's safer and you could literally have created a safer but addictive product right like we all

Jason Calacanis: 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

SPEAKER_179: they literally jewel specifically followed the actual tobacco big tobacco playbook of get kids hooked

SPEAKER_04: and keep them as your customer forever and it's like yeah yeah i don't hear it here's what not to do

SPEAKER_48: i'm going to say don't make ads that look like this if you're watching youtube.com this weekend or

SPEAKER_02: shout out to our friends at spotify for having video and their player and itunes apple podcast you can search and there's a this week in startups videos everyone wants the video but it looks like a basic

SPEAKER_48: an ipad they copied the ipod ads um and you just basically have young people you know who look like

David Friedberg: they're going out to coachella with their cool vapes and the cool design and um you know and here's the

SPEAKER_18: new york times story that kind of puts the nail in their coffin from back in 2020 uh jewel bought ads appearing on cartoon network and other youth sites suit claims so this is a lawsuit i don't know um 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

SPEAKER_04: times story if you want just to show the headline there um if you are i mean nickelodeon 17 magazine the cartoon network and educational sites for middle school and high school students yeah so

SPEAKER_62: this is the question is like you know how thoughtful are you being about doing this you know um and you see some of the other ads in the new york times story where they're talking about this is the evolution um and they're showing like you know an old joystick from an atari 2600 or old brick cellular phone

SPEAKER_48: i mean i if you're going to you know make a product like this and you you're going to break some rules you just have to make sure you 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 like a smoking

SPEAKER_43: gun storytelling and the product market fit right i mean they were like our product market fit as teenagers full stop there's no evidence otherwise if you have a marketing department that's making ads

SPEAKER_48: 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 regulated 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 happens if somebody's room gets trashed they said oh well we have this insurance thing here oh what about safety and security 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 an 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 at airbnb so airbnb could actually say look we have a higher rating here do you 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 uh trail of you know san francisco cab in case something horrible happened they murdered a 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 the 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's trackable because 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 we didn't look at the license plate we don't know the license number boom so let's uh do a quick uh so anyway congratulations uh to uh society and to the people at jewel congratulations to society and to the people at jewel my same message to the people at tick tock yeah um 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

SPEAKER_62: history and i'm not going to use my previous catchphrase because it's inappropriate um 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

SPEAKER_289: you go to bed if you work at jeweler tick tock you're going to hear my voice when your head hits the pillow

SPEAKER_62: hear my voice hope the money was worth it and then you got to sleep you're going to be restless when

SPEAKER_26: you hear that voice all right and next up on the show we're going to talk a little bit about uh

SPEAKER_391: prescription drugs and how the united states is just getting absolutely ripped off molly tell us a

SPEAKER_05: little bit about the interview yeah i mean this is a great interview with a guy who is doing the opposite basically we get an incredible it's a it's aj loyacano who is the founder and ceo of a company

Jason Calacanis: called capital rx just closed 106 million dollar 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

SPEAKER_05: which capital rx and others are trying to fix that he's also just like a he's a copywriting machine

Jason Calacanis: 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

SPEAKER_04: and slightly infuriating interview i think you're really going to enjoy it and a lot of people have

SPEAKER_158: asked us well isn't mark cuban doing something similar we'll have the ceo of that company on yeah

SPEAKER_04: and we asked him about that and it turns out they're quite complimentary they're they're can be each other's customers can't wait i'm going to listen right now enjoy everybody enjoy all right i am

SPEAKER_05: joined by aj loyacano ceo of capital rx a pharmacy benefit manager that manages and negotiates

Jason Calacanis: prescription drug benefits on behalf of large organizations they just raised 106 million dollar series c led by b capital and the mission is to as i understand it increase 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 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

SPEAKER_398: there yeah people don't understand any of this so let's take a step back let's kind of compare it to

SPEAKER_400: something that we all understand um so let's start at the very beginning a pharmaceutical manufacturer begins to make a pallet of drugs and they spend an afternoon and there's let's just say a pallet sitting on a loading dock and pharmaceutical manufacturers these could be brand manufacturers like pfizer or merck or these are 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 amerisaurus bergen 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

SPEAKER_402: 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 is the next step in the supply chain is where we have

SPEAKER_400: 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 a dollar five and they'll sell it sell it to a dollar ten and then

SPEAKER_407: you think oh so i should get it for a dollar fifteen 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

SPEAKER_400: this last step in the supply chain has really been defined by 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 administrate your benefit plan i'll just take a little bit in the middle okay and it sounded

SPEAKER_407: reasonable like 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

SPEAKER_400: 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 ndc 11 drug codes with based upon different package size uh different strength and

SPEAKER_407: this is really really difficult for people to understand relative price so when you take all the

SPEAKER_400: 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 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 pbms and i'm like why are

SPEAKER_398: there no drug prices in this agreement and no one had a good answer for me well and i and to be honest i

SPEAKER_05: 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

SPEAKER_416: well that's a great point you know who do you think sits on top of what we call self-insured benefits is

SPEAKER_407: really what we call anyone that is either what we call over a thousand lives is a self-insured entity so

SPEAKER_400: 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

SPEAKER_407: what people kind of got caught up in was the concept of free and everybody kind of said i like free

SPEAKER_418: 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 so they got so then just to further clarify they got

Jason Calacanis: caught up in the idea of free because if you are the recipient aka an insured person that drug appears

SPEAKER_407: 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

SPEAKER_400: 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

SPEAKER_407: 25 cents per script but you know i'm just going to take a little bit in between and the country ate up

SPEAKER_400: 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

SPEAKER_04: mckesson and amerisource bergen are eight and nine on the fortune 500 respectively oh all of these

SPEAKER_402: companies are top 20 so cigna top 20 cvs top 20 and united healthcare top 20 so he has never

SPEAKER_407: free never free is never free and then never underestimate what people can try and get away with so maybe they started out and they said it's 25 cents we'll take 35 we'll take 50 cents we'll take

SPEAKER_431: a dollar and suddenly they realized nothing could stop them because no one's looking literally not

SPEAKER_180: paying attention at all they're just like we get it for free at the end you can't see and then what

SPEAKER_400: 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

SPEAKER_402: patient at the point of sale even if you could sell it at a lower price i don't want you ever to

SPEAKER_400: 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

SPEAKER_402: early on i want to say retailers probably lost control of the supply chain in early 2000s and

SPEAKER_400: 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

SPEAKER_402: the insurance company is telling me to charge for a torvostatin 65 and they're probably saying i'd be

SPEAKER_407: willing to do this for 17 bucks but i can't say anything and so that 25 cents suddenly it grew to five dollars to ten dollars to twenty dollars and the optimization because i do want to make this clear

SPEAKER_400: 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 yeah 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

SPEAKER_407: look at things like mail order be like what if i made it mandatory mail so if you have a script

SPEAKER_400: that's over 30 days supply i'm going to say you must go through my mail order now what did they what did 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 adherence 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 through cigna because they have such huge mail and which includes specialty drugs high cost biologics and so what you're doing is you're forcing utilization to your 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

SPEAKER_05: gets worse and there we go we just but we went ahead and put up united health groups overall you know

Jason Calacanis: 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

SPEAKER_400: nothing but up now what's interesting if you were to layer in here on top of this chart like merck

SPEAKER_402: over the same time frame or you know pfizer yeah and and what you're gonna see is what grows faster

SPEAKER_407: is not necessarily the pharmaceutical manufacturer so as i said in the history of pharmacy benefits and

SPEAKER_400: 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 which is called specialty drugs these are the highest cost medication and then you look at pharma and you go well pharmaceutical 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

SPEAKER_407: thing happened is we call it the birth of what's known as a formulary and a formulary kind of maybe was

SPEAKER_400: born with the right intent which is i would like to select the appropriate medication my team has gone

SPEAKER_402: 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

SPEAKER_400: pause for a second and think about how implausible this is i 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

SPEAKER_451: respond to the same exact formula right zero zero especially considering how how few uh women are even tested with respect to you know like you can get into a whole women's health situation and

Jason Calacanis: me and your sister will be in a real rage about it oh exactly and so you know i think we would all agree

SPEAKER_454: precision medicine is a much better way to go and we'll eventually steer towards there but what i'm

SPEAKER_400: trying to ground us in is all the ways that you could take advantage of this system to become a

SPEAKER_407: control so what the pbm industry did is they created a formulary and it started out like hey i have a formulary and um to be on my formulary um you provide me rebate dollars and so what you're creating

SPEAKER_400: is kind of a pay to play economic 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 be like all right well you've got like eight percent 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

SPEAKER_407: states the pharmaceutical industry is the greatest gift anyone could ever receive economically it's an

SPEAKER_400: inelastic demand curve it does not matter what happens with 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

SPEAKER_402: 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

SPEAKER_400: the perfect market you never have to innovate i mean think about the advances we've made in things like construction to real estate to even the finance e-commerce is there's always been ebbs and flows and you have to have 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 pb industry is eating itself and you're seeing hyper consolidation and they're literally from 2000 up until last month you know there

SPEAKER_402: 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

SPEAKER_400: upon how you do the math utilization or gpo economics controls anywhere from 75 to 90 percent of the 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 percent 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

SPEAKER_407: 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

SPEAKER_400: 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 manufacturer 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 job door every year it's your

SPEAKER_402: job to say i need ten percent more yep well i could take ten percent less out of my earnings or i could raise my price ten percent 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 blamefully 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

SPEAKER_400: 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 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 six percent 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 percent 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

SPEAKER_402: the casino as the pbm those are great odds right and that is so important it i mean it's funny that

Jason Calacanis: you describe it as a casino because to be honest it sounds a lot to be fair i'm re-watching the sopranos with my son but it sounds a lot more like a mob shakedown 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

SPEAKER_400: has led to well i think it's led to a breaking point i 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

SPEAKER_420: and i have to be honest like i had never heard of this i mean none of this is stuff that i think

SPEAKER_416: people know or understand no and you know it's hiding in plain sight it's at your local pharmacy

SPEAKER_400: and it happens millions of times every day people filling prescriptions but they don't understand what

SPEAKER_402: caused these economics to become untenable and i think the impact on the consumer's brain so

SPEAKER_400: back to the spoiling point you're seeing state legislation lean in 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 in price is encumbered through spread pricing price changes every second of every day for every drug and 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'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

SPEAKER_407: routine is but the point of it is it certainly isn't changing every hour of every day for every

SPEAKER_400: drug 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

Jason Calacanis: starting to understand this gotcha well certainly you do and so it sounds like what you're also describing is a possibly a regulatory but also an awareness environment that creates room for competition enter

SPEAKER_400: capital or x correct so as i mentioned i you know 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 it just take the ndc 11 and put a price next to it the same way we price popsicles to lampshades and so what i saw over guys often say i was writing a 13 year uh 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

SPEAKER_411: helping with a procurement workflow right so i think what we wanted to be able to do was why don't we

SPEAKER_400: take a step back and get to the real problem here which is the person that administrates the benefit is all the control as i just said the pbm is in charge of the supply chain well 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 pricing let's not push around the pharmacist let's pass through a hundred percent of the value but let's do it and be super competitive you know 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

SPEAKER_411: of questions but i had to get a lot of this out because it's important to ground everybody to just how

Jason Calacanis: 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

SPEAKER_400: 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

SPEAKER_402: 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 marking up drugs but i always said you have to start with the discipline to never take

SPEAKER_407: the bad money so you can't take spread on rebates you can't take spread on mail or specialty etc so we

SPEAKER_400: 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 administrate 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 etc 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 i 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 a hundred dollars worth of ibm i would like to sell you a hundred dollars 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 and contract with all the major national network of pharmacies the independents 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 plant 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

SPEAKER_402: 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

SPEAKER_467: wheel am i today's winner or loser which is not unlike the stock market but shouldn't shouldn't be that

SPEAKER_411: way no but at least with the stock market you can see the buy and sell side true yeah 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 so you're saying so the difference is you're saying these are the prices a

Jason Calacanis: 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

SPEAKER_400: 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 stat and 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 is changed by cms or to be fair to the retailer they can say hey i've got four dollar generics i'm walmart or i'm albertson's i have zero dollar amoxicillin i

SPEAKER_402: have specials on things that's awesome you know let that value get to the end patient in the plan

SPEAKER_400: 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 and you know to be clear they just 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

SPEAKER_402: 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

SPEAKER_400: 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

SPEAKER_05: upon spread well 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

Jason Calacanis: 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 also introducing price transparency and maybe having hopefully it sounds like a downstream

SPEAKER_400: positive benefit on the industry oh well absolutely and so you know i always go to the metrics that matter so we're a customer first organization so some people would say well you're leveraging all this

SPEAKER_470: technology you know does that easier let me interject there who is the customer yeah the the customer that

SPEAKER_400: buys our services is an employer group typically 500 employees or more so when 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

SPEAKER_402: a risk taker or carrier to cover my risk i can pay for my own bills and so the employers they're also

SPEAKER_400: municipalities they're also union groups uh 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 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

Jason Calacanis: 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 you know 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 like competitive

SPEAKER_398: advantage forever no i hope everyone does you know i think the industry needs to think this way you

SPEAKER_407: 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

SPEAKER_400: 90s you know i 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

SPEAKER_402: and ameritrade said i'll do it for 59.95 and 1995 and 9.95 and then robin hood comes along and says i'll

SPEAKER_428: do it for zero yeah and then in my chase account they'll do it for zero because you're setting the

SPEAKER_400: 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

SPEAKER_05: u.s consumer yeah us too um and then talk to me about the sales pipeline how hard is it for

SPEAKER_400: 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

SPEAKER_402: a new plan and it's a real headache but if you were to speak to any of my customers we literally plow

SPEAKER_400: 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

SPEAKER_407: the carrier for accumulators and eligibility feeds but the whole point of it is it's a seamless

SPEAKER_400: process that's an ease 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 convince someone to

Jason Calacanis: move to someone like us and so we've been around 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

SPEAKER_479: oh no completely agree so but part of it is i often say there are no shortcuts in health care

SPEAKER_428: so if anyone says hey my sister is a big wig executive at this fortune 500 company and they're just going to move their business to us i i'm like i've never seen 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

SPEAKER_400: 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 a half years and what i often say is i

SPEAKER_428: 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 like how long have you been in business for and you're going to be like including this month right and you're gonna be like are you trying not to get the sale but i'm trying to be honest but my point

SPEAKER_400: is you start by selling 500 life cases to get to a thousand life cases to two thousand to four and eight 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 service 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

SPEAKER_402: talking to other people be it at conferences at just get togethers people knowing people in industry

SPEAKER_400: hr people are pretty tight and they'll just say oh my goodness i'm having the best experience with capital rx you should and you should speak to them and i think that goes back to that trust and

SPEAKER_472: strength of your brand and timing right timing matters you're you're doing this at this moment when

Jason Calacanis: 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 um about drug prices specifically around like mark cuban's new company cost plus pharmacy how how does this interact with that if at all or how could it and

SPEAKER_400: 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

SPEAKER_411: so i'll take anyone in our network remember my job is to administrate and find the best price in the

SPEAKER_402: best service so why wouldn't i want mark's company to give me inventory and price right right and the

SPEAKER_407: answer is yes you know what i mean and it's the same not just mark but anyone and i want to make

SPEAKER_400: this clear it's at retail we allow any pharmacy in our network as long as obviously they're uh in

SPEAKER_402: compliance and in good standing with the state i always want to make the point of that but i think

SPEAKER_407: 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

SPEAKER_400: 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

SPEAKER_05: the appropriate channel and then last question do you think you know when we look at seemingly

Jason Calacanis: 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 um i've personally never

SPEAKER_400: built a business plan or model around federal intervention or oversight so i genuinely always believe in innovation and competition driving a 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

SPEAKER_428: federal government for medicare medicaid 340b dod va take their pick they buy billions of dollars of drugs

SPEAKER_407: 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 you know and so if you look at the cob report from february of 2021

SPEAKER_402: 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

SPEAKER_400: for all of my billing uh it's the exact opposite there's a delta on net cost of up to a hundred and fifty percent 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

SPEAKER_472: a.j loiacono is ceo of capital rx thanks for fighting the good fight good luck thank you so

SPEAKER_05: much for having me molly good luck with the mob i know i'm watching a lot of sopranos

SPEAKER_521: i'm from jersey it's okay we'll be looking out for you

SPEAKER_07: what a great interview well done again molly wood thanks man and thanks a lot for coming on talking

Jason Calacanis: about streaming with us and tomorrow uh we'll have a great interview jason is going to be talking to

SPEAKER_04: praying for exits the anonymous uh bc satirical account that you know as with all satire is often

SPEAKER_01: quite on the nose yeah pretty pretty poignant stuff uh and then we'll have another uh okay boomer segment from producer rachel reporting live from the disastrous nft and we see it doesn't seem

SPEAKER_180: like such a disaster rachel's having a lot of fun here she's living her best life again she's living my

SPEAKER_43: best life again she's living your best life i'll see you tomorrow this weekend start i can't go you

SPEAKER_291: can't go we're busy show we're tied to this desk every day but rachel's out there she's like living our best life wow good job rachel see you tomorrow everybody bye