Inside the GLP-1 Gold Rush: Eli Lilly CEO on New Breakthroughs, Addiction & Mental Health, Pricing

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
GLP-1 drugs have become increasingly popular.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
Eli Lilly coming to save us here has had its market capitalization increase by about 860% since he became CEO, and the stock price is up a little bit more than 1000%.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:18)
No need for needles, Eli Lilly says it has a pill.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:21)
Eli Lilly's experimental pill appears to work as well as the injected drug.

**Dave Ricks** (0:26)
It's everyone's job to move the science. We should always be pushing forward.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:32)
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Eli Lilly, CEO Dave Ricks.

**Dave Ricks** (0:50)
Hi, David.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:52)
Good to see you. How are you?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:53)
Dave.

**Dave Ricks** (0:53)
All right.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:56)
You want to say thank you?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:57)
What's happening? I just want to...

**Dave Ricks** (0:58)
What's happening?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:59)
Dave?

**Dave Ricks** (1:00)
Yes?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:00)
I don't want to make it awkward. But we were sitting here three years ago on this pod, and Chamath was calling me a fat bastard. He wasn't wrong. I was 213 pounds. I'm a Schveld 172 right now. And it's because of what you've done.

**Dave Ricks** (1:18)
Thank you.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:19)
Can I give you a hug?

**Dave Ricks** (1:20)
You can, yeah.

**Friedberg** (1:20)
Bring it in here.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:22)
I appreciate it.

**Dave Ricks** (1:22)
Congratulations.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:23)
Also, Sacks lost 20 pounds, so together we've lost to Friedberg.

**David Sacks** (1:27)
Come on, Sacks.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:27)
Give him a hug.

**David Sacks** (1:29)
Nice.

**Dave Ricks** (1:30)
Nice.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:32)
How much money are you guys printing? My lord. What do you do with it? You have real barrels?

**David Sacks** (1:38)
What do you do with all of it? Can I please start?

**Dave Ricks** (1:40)
Yes, go ahead.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:41)
I got four more jokes. I'll get them in the end.

**David Sacks** (1:44)
I mean, you really have built one of the most incredible business in America, but you've done it because you took an enormous bet a long time ago. Yeah. Do you want to talk us through the journey and the process you had to go through and what you saw early on and how you made the bet on this class of drug? Yeah.

**Dave Ricks** (2:04)
Great. Thanks for having me here. I'm trying to up my cool factor. That's what they tell me in the Midwest I need to do.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:09)
Did you get a Tomas Ford suit as well? No.

**Dave Ricks** (2:12)
I'm actually disappointed in the ties. I don't know. That's not...

**Jason Calacanis** (2:17)
You and I are...

**Dave Ricks** (2:18)
Pharma guy wears ties.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:19)
Dave, Suits Supply does a great job. Just donate.

**Dave Ricks** (2:21)
Okay. Just donate. Okay. So yeah, GLP-1 drugs, we all know about it. It feels like an overnight success, but what happened? Drug development is hard and long and requires a fair amount of failure and discipline, a huge amount of capital. So actually in 2006, we launched the first GLP-1 drug. Nobody really knew the name of it. It was a twice a day injection for diabetes, but the cover of our annual report in 2007 had a lady on it. She said, there's a quote, it says, my diabetes is under control and I'm losing a little bit of weight. So that was 18 years ago. I mean, and since that time, we've been inventing new versions of that, solving various problems with that twice a day. We wanted to make it more convenient, needed to get the dose up and people tended to lose more weight when you got the dose up.
And then Terzepotide, which you asked how much money we're making, but in actually in Q2, we reported global sales, which surpassed Keytruda to becoming the best selling drug in the world. Actually the best selling drug in the world of all time. In Q2 this year.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (3:24)
How much did it make in Q2?

**Dave Ricks** (3:25)
We, $8.1 billion in revenue. And growing at 80%.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (3:32)
And how many people are on a GLP-1 globally now?

**Dave Ricks** (3:35)
I'd estimate around 20 million take prescription GLP-1s. Some unknown amount of people take non-prescription. But anyway, so-

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (3:44)
That would be compounding?

**Dave Ricks** (3:45)
Compounded or-

**David Sacks** (3:46)
Synthetic.

**Dave Ricks** (3:47)
Yeah, or just like not for human use. We can talk about all that. Yeah. So anyway, 2014 comes along. Four scientists at Lilly decided to combine GLP-1 with another peptide that your stomach produces when you eat that's appetite suppressing. They made the single molecule called terzepotide. That's what's Monjaro now. But that happened in 2014 2016, I was named as CEO and I got a call that fall. And one of our chief scientists called me and said, hey, we have to stop an early phase study for terzepotide. That's usually a bad call. So I'm like, oh, like this is the follow up to our second gen version of the GLP-1. He said, no, no, it's actually good news. We were running the study in Singapore with healthy male volunteers. You can imagine what a healthy male Singaporean looks like at baseline. Yeah, not Jay Cal. They're not overweight. And we had to stop the study because they were losing too much weight too quickly. They're basically not eating. So scientists like, actually, it's good news. We can tune the dose down. We can work with this. And from there, it was kind of just execution. We knew it was going to be huge.