How to Save America: Mark Cuban and Tucker Carlson Debate | All-In Summit 2025

The session opens with a highlight-reel introduction: a lifelong would-be entrepreneur, a love of competition, the Dallas Mavericks' first NBA title and the sale of the team. The hosts joke that leaving a reality show and cashing out of the Mavericks looks like preparation for a presidential run, and the reply is a flat no. The early banter is about appearance. Asked which GLP drug or "off-the-menu items" explain how good the guest looks, the answer given is none, only working out and "watching what I eat."

Asked what hurt more in the past year, Kamala Harris losing or the Luka trade (rendered "Luca" in the transcript), the answer is the trade, "It's not even close," along with a denial of any role in it. The account given is that, when the sale was negotiated, the presumption was that the seller would keep running basketball operations. The parties tried to write this into the contract, but the NBA's position was that "the governor is the governor" and makes all final decisions. During the run to the Finals, the speaker chose not to interject constantly, and calls that choice a mistake. Internally, "the person who traded Luca didn't want me there," and "they won. I lost." The segment closes with a declaration of continued loyalty ("I'm still hardcore MAVs, MFFL") and an admission that there have been "plenty" of losses, which the speaker tries to minimize.

Yeah, I fucked up.

The health care discussion begins with the origin of Cost Plus Drugs. The founding story starts with a cold email from a Dr. Alex Oshmaianski (as spelled in the transcript), who wanted to build a compounding pharmacy that makes drugs to order. It arrived around the time a "farmer bro" was headed to jail after raising the price of a generic drug the transcript renders as "Deriprim." Looking into how that was possible, the speaker says, made it clear "that no one knew what the price of any medication was and there was zero transparency."

The business model described is simple. A user enters a medication name and the site shows the company's actual cost, then a fixed 15% markup, plus $5 for shipping and $5 for pharmacist review on mail orders, with local pickup as another option. The central claim is that the company was the first to publish this, and that "even to this day, three and a half years later, nobody else publishes their price list for medications."

The speaker frames this as a matter of trust and offers a formula for it. By that reasoning, full transparency combined with a modest 15% margin makes for a trustworthy model. The evidence offered is anecdotal: emails from customers who expected to pay $900, $1,000, $1,500 or $2,000 and found a price of $21. Pressed on how a gap that large can exist, the explanation is structural. Insurers and the pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) that either own them or are owned by them control the financial flow of the health care industry, which is "completely opaque by design," so "they get to charge what they want." Patients who don't know to check alternative prices are "just walking in... hoping you can afford it."

Trust equals transparency divided by self-interest.

The exchange is openly self-promotional, and the participants joke about it. The URL is repeated several times, someone quips "The segment brought to you by," and the speaker says, "I'm not a salesperson at all." The cash price, the speaker adds, can be cheaper than a co-pay even under Medicare Advantage or Medicare Part D, especially where co-insurance applies.

Several specific PBM practices are named. One is the creation of medication tiers, including "specialty generics" in Medicare and Medicare Advantage. These are described as ordinary pills, with a drug rendered "a matinib" and a long list of multiple sclerosis drugs as examples, which carry co-insurance or very high co-pays because of the specialty label. The speaker says Cost Plus does none of this, and that a large share of its customers are on Medicare Advantage or Part D.

The limits of the model are acknowledged. The company cannot get access to the biggest brand drugs, with "the eloquists of the world" given as the example. The explanation offered involves formularies, the lists that large PBMs use to decide which drugs more than 180 million people can access. According to the speaker, PBMs have "literally told the brand manufacturers" that dealing with Cost Plus Drugs would cost them formulary placement, not only for the drugs involved but "for their entire portfolio." One participant remarks that this sounds like an antitrust case, and the reply is "Yes, it is." The claim is presented without documentation in the conversation.

Asked whether PBMs should be eliminated and whether that would bring competition, the speaker says competition doesn't matter to the company because its markup would stay at 15%, and it is "so AI-driven" that it runs with 70 employees while manufacturing drugs. The alternative proposed is to separate formularies from PBMs, since, as the speaker puts it, PBMs mainly "auction off access to those formularies." The speaker does not call for deleting all PBMs and points instead to "pass-through PBMs."

Further examples of PBM restrictions follow. According to the speaker, an employer that wanted to work with Lilly or Novo Nordisk (transcribed "Novo Norse") on a wellness program to identify who is best suited for GLP-1s is not allowed to, for contractual reasons. Claims data from people using Zepbound or other GLP-1s, which could show manufacturers what is working, also cannot go to them, though PBMs will charge for access to it.