The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Why People Are Losing Faith in Healthcare

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

David Ricks, Chair and CEO of Eli Lilly, joins Scott to discuss the rise of GLP-1 drugs, the future of obesity treatment, and why America's healthcare system is facing a crisis of trust. They explore healthcare costs, addiction, unregulated peptides, pharmaceutical innovation, and the role AI could play in the next generation of drug discovery. Want to listen to this and other episodes ad-free? You can, if you subscribe at profgmedia.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cheating on your partner is a huge breach of trust. All of the pain and the guilt and the reality of what was happening hit me just like a tidal wave all at once. Why do people cheat? And why does it make us so mad even when we're not the ones it's happening to? That's this week on Explain It to Me. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Megan Rapino here. This week is our last.

regular episode of a Touchmore before I kick off a limited series. A Touchmore, The Beautiful Game, a special series for the World Cup featuring in-depth interviews with some of soccer's biggest stars. But for this week, we are closing out The Arrow with a special compilation episode featuring our absolute favorite moments and themes from our last 90 episodes of A Touchmore. Check out the latest episode of A Touchmore wherever you get your podcast and on YouTube. Episode 399. 399 is the world's most famous and most photographed.

grizzly bearer. In 1999, the Sopranos premiered. So I got my boss, a tie and a dildo for Christmas. And if he doesn't like the tie, you can go fuck himself. That's an actual joke from the series, The Sopranos, little media history, keeping you up on the greatest nostalgia of what is arguably the second greatest TV show behind Breaking Bad. Enough already. Go, go, go, go. Welcome to the 399th episode of the Prop G-Pod. What's happening? In today's episode, we speak with David Ricks, chair and CEO of Eli Lilly and company. So each year, I do a predictions deck. It's our most sought-after content. And I pick a technology of the year. In the last two years, I've only had one technology repeat. That's right. And it's not AI. What technology do I believe is going to

have a more profound impact on the world than AI, GLP-1s. I just, I think there's technology, every time new data on the technology or, you know, evidence on the technology comes out, it's, oh, it, you know, it makes you want to eat more kale or it makes you nicer to your pets. I mean, this thing is just, wow. The way I describe it as scaffolding on our instincts, our instincts haven't caught up with the institutional production of things that we traditionally were in short supply, and that we develop cravings and even addictions. for and GLP-1s are essentially scaffolding on our instincts. Anyways, I'm a big GLP-1 fan, so I'm excited about that.

Anyways, with that, I hope you enjoy our conversation with Dave Ricks. Dave, let's bust right into it. Eli Lilly is the first healthcare company to reach a trillion-dollar valuation, and it's also turning 150. Talk to us about Eli Lilly. Yeah, sure. Well, this is an important year, as you said, we turn 150. it's a long time ago, founded by a colonel from the Civil War, who was a pharmacist.

It was the fifth company founded, the first four failed. I think that's an interesting lesson in entrepreneurship. But he saw atrocities during the war, mostly the off-battlefield deaths from infections and terrible medical care, and he wanted to do something about it. So we created a company that would do something new for the first time. we would list the ingredients of every medicine on the bottle, which was a novel idea at the time. And then he signed every bottle himself.

And that's like the signature of the company. That's the brand of the company now was his signature. So the idea was quality and like transparency, and his first hire was a scientist. So it was kind of the first iteration of a modern pharma company a long, long time ago, before the FDA existed, et cetera. Along the way, you know, we reinvented ourselves many, many times. That's sort of how the business works.

every product we make goes off patent and goes to zero. So we have to keep inventing things to stay relevant. And there's been a lot of big inventions through history, including today, as you mentioned, with GLP1 therapies, which are making the company famous again. We talk a lot about GLP ones, and I've said over and over that I think it's going to be a more transformative technology than AI.

I think AI is the most over-hyped technology, and GLP ones are the most under-hyped. And right now, I think, arguably, Lily is the closest to an index fund or a pure play investment in GLP1s. My understanding is about two-thirds of your total sales come from a GLP-1-related product. Give us the overview or the pitch, if you will, about GLP-1s taking the aperture back about this technology, why it's such a big breakthrough, and where you think it's headed some of the things, some of the uses that people aren't talking about. Yeah. Well, I tend to agree with you. I think it's a pretty profound thing that

we could modify medically weight and obesity at a lot of scale. The drugs are unique in a few properties here, Scott. One is usually we get drugs that work on average, but they work for some people and not for others. That's sort of the more common pattern for medicine. But here, pretty much universally, products like Zepbound or our new one, Foundia, they work. People lose weight. Almost everybody who takes them loses weight. That's an interesting thing. And then, of course, people like to lose weight. That's another interesting thing. Most people, when you have a chronic disease and your doctor gives you a medication, you take it, you feel a little bit worse and you definitely feel a little poorer. But you don't feel any different. You're told that you're

mitigating some long-term thing. But with these drugs, of course, they change your chronic disease risk or they actually change the chronic disease if you have a comorbidity, but people also like being on them. I think that's a very different property than we're used to seeing. Those things all combined and the fact that obesity is kind of like a nodal health condition for more than 200 chronic diseases, I think gives us a shot if we can make enough and get them to people through the channels of health care, which we could talk about, which are deeply broken, then, you know, we can make a huge difference. in longevity, life expectancy, and suffering.

I have a thesis, and I might be overdoing it here, that the only way to address the deficit is to address obesity. That my understanding is 70% of America is overweight or obese. And if you look at health care costs in Japan at $5,500 per person versus the U.S. at 13.5, they have 4% obesity rate. We have a 40%. And that the industrial obesity complex, whether it's hospital systems, diabetes treatments, statins, kidney dialysis, hip, knee replacements,

that the only way to address the deficit would be Medicare, Medicaid, vastly reducing the health care costs of Americans. And I can't think of any one silver bullet, and I'll come back to cost because cost is a big issue around these drugs. But my sense is, and tell me if I'm drawing too large connection here, you can't really effectively address the deficit without going after health care, and there's no way to substantially increase or decrease health care costs without going after obesity. Do I have that wrong? I mean, I realize this is an ad for Lilly, but I genuinely believe that. There's probably a lot of ways to reduce

the deficit. We could talk about that, but I think you have to make a difference in entitlement programs. Of course, changing Social Security construct is super difficult and hard to imagine. Changing the costs of Medicare and Medicaid can't happen without changing the obesity rates. I think that's roughly right because of the downstream chronic diseases, which are now 80% of all health care costs. And the data we use is that about a third of all health care is obesity related, so $1.4 trillion a year. That's about the size of the Defense Department proposal that Trump just put in and nobody likes. So could you make it zero? I don't know. That'll take a lot of time. But we certainly should start mitigating it. And the medicines themselves are quite a bit cheaper than treating

the disease. I think that's been demonstrated. Before we get to cost, we know, talk about what potential applications of GLP-1 technology are in addition to reducing obesity. I mean, the obesity is sort of upstream of a lot of things. What are those things? We think about, you know, obvious, like first-order effects like your metabolic health, diabetes, your cardiovascular health, these are not new ideas using incritons. By the way, this is a FAMP1 is one of many words we're going to learn in a family of these proteins that your gut signals your body about being fed. We're going to exploit more of them, including double, triple, and quadruple acting ones. But anyway, that family of hormones, of course affects metabolic factors, like how you metabolize fat and how much sugar,

how you process sugar. The second thing is which is interesting is inflammation. So you could also say, in addition to obesity, America is in a inflammatory crisis. If we look at asthma, if we look at psoriasis, if you look at arthritis, I mean, these are chronic inflammatory conditions. And it turns out that obesity and inflammation are close travelers.

And we have now done studies, including with our most powerful medicine, which we hope to launch next year, the triple-acting retatriatutide, that basically demonstrated that for knee pain, a common form of arthritis, it was the most powerful pain-reducing agent ever tested pharmacologically. And so that's quite interesting because you think of all the people we know in our lives who have pain, back pain, et cetera, and might also be overweight. That's a very interesting target. And then there's these kind of third level or, you know, two-step-away things that are hard to explain fully biologically today, but we know we're there. You know, we observe in trials,

addiction and kind of the consumption of like hedonic activity and substances, smoking, gambling, online shopping are mitigated. They're not eliminated, which is an interesting thing. but they're reduced. And that occurred spontaneously when Novo Nordic and Lily were doing studies and now we're actually studying it prospectively. I think, obviously,

if we could get rid of those kinds of people with the extreme form of those vices, that's going to be a good thing for society and health care costs. And then, you know, I think the final one is cancer, which is there's some publications recently that are observational. These are going to be very difficult studies

to kind of do prospectively in a double-blinded way because they will take very long time. But it also turns out being obese for several types of cancer really increases your risk, colorectal cancer, breast cancer in particular. And now they've looked backwards and said it turns out people who've been using GLP1 drugs for treating their diabetes for five or six years seem to have lower rates of cancer. So that's another extremely positive spillover effect. When I think a GLP1 technology, I think of something that not only makes you want to eat less, but makes you want less, if you will.

And you mentioned, I love the word hedonic, potentially the stuff I've read is that people on Ozempic and Wagovi consistently report drinking less alcohol, and that that might, in fact, be a bigger market than obesity, which shocked me. I guess we talk a lot about alcohol on the show, but talk a little bit about GLP-1's impact on just wanting less. specifically as it relates to alcohol and other addictions.

We've now studied this, again, observing their behavior, and it's true. They have fewer drinks. We've done a pilot study, like a phase two study it's called, with several hundred people with one of our pipeline medicines, and, yeah, reduced consumption daily of alcohol. Why is it doing this? I think, you know, alcohol is a very close chemical structure to glucose, to sugar. It is a sugar.

and probably for the same reason, these drugs signal your brain and turn off the desire for nutrients. They do the same for alcohol. And it doesn't, I think they'll worry that this is also like a joy kill switch on joy. And we could talk about that too. That's not actually what we observe in the data. I think most people have fewer drinks. They just find less pleasure in having one more, if I could put it that way. And so they don't. And at the end of the day, you know, we've learned also, you know, alcohol is not that great for you. So it might be nice to have a glass of wine, but do you need five? And it seems like these drugs curb the desire for the second and third glass. Yeah, that's a good thing. We're pursuing a medicine called Burnapitide in phase three right now, which will seek to get indicated for alcohol use disorder. Is that a bigger market than obesity? I doubt that. I don't know who said that. I think there are people who do want to

drink less, more likely this makes a big impact on the cost of treatment in our country and maybe even preventing more people from being alcoholics because hopefully we'll have so many people on the medicines for treating other chronic diseases or preventing chronic diseases. That's ahead of us, but that's something we could look forward to. I think it's hard to deny the upsides here. Let's talk a little bit about the downside. And the most obvious one is the cost. And also, So the business model, this feels more like a subscription than a treatment. There is a rebound or you can gain the weight back when you stop. These products cost $5 to $1,500 a month.

Is that bound? What I have here is about $1,100 a month. I think this is no longer true, but I read, I think, two years ago, that the greatest penetration of prescriptions for GLP ones was also the thinnest area in America, was the upper-e side, that it was getting, quite frankly, to a group of people that we're trying to lose that last 10, not address health concerns. And I recognize your for-profit company in a capitalist society,

your job is to increase shareholder value and not singularly address the health care crisis. Well, one, how do you guys think you, from a shareholder standpoint, and I'm not a shareholder or lily, but your shareholders want you to maintain pricing power? At the same time, it would appear that maybe some of the people they could most benefit from this drug or not getting access to it

because I do think there's an inverse correlation between household income and obesity. But it feels like there are contrarian forces here, and that is one, your job is to maintain pricing power. And two, it feels like there's absolutely an external benefit if we figure out a way to get this drug into the homes that need it the most, which, quite frankly, is probably lower-income homes.

Talk a little bit about those opposing forces in your view more holistically about it. Yeah, I don't see them as opposing. So just ground in facts, it is true, I think, the list price of the highest price form of Zepaunar Mondraos 1086, so $1,086. That's the list price. Almost nobody pays that. Actually, pretty much nobody pays that. We have lowered and Lilly launched this program called Lily Direct almost two years ago, which basically the healthcare system without going down a rabbit hole unless you want to, you know, is this system. where the biggest actors get the lowest price and the individuals pay them most. It's a totally regressive pricing model. And typically the individuals who have to go outside the system to buy themselves have the lowest quality insurance for a reason. It's because their job is not supporting high quality insurance or they're not, don't

have a job at all. So to address that, we created this direct model where we just said consumers can buy from the company, skip the health care system normal channels, these pharmacy benefit managers and retail pharmacy, and we'll offer you the same price we offer the biggest players. So that price has been falling because those big players negotiate with us. So now it's $399 kind of maximum for Zepbound. It's come down 60% since we launched. And Foundeo, the oral one we just launched, starts at $159 and goes up to $3.49.

So the prices are falling kind of markedly. And I suspect that will continue due to competition and due to capacity. When we launched these drugs, you may have read we ran out. There were shortages. It wasn't that we stopped shipping. There was just more demand than supply. We've invested a lot to fix that, about $50 billion in new factories in the U.S., some of which are online, some which will continue to come online in the next couple of years. We shouldn't have a supply problem anymore, so that will allow prices to fall.

And then, you know, the other thing in this conflict narrative, which is generally true for pharma, which is broadly criticized for high price, prices. But typically for like a, I don't know, breakthrough cancer medication or something for a severe condition, you know, prices are pretty inelastic. People have to buy it. And so there is this sort of conflict that that sets up. It's interesting in this category, we observe something pretty different, that prices are pretty elastic, that the more we lower the price, the more users we get. And it's not one-to-one. We tend to have done a little bit better by lowering the price. So that's the path we're on, and that's what we want to do. Of course, the alignment in the other decision makers in health care isn't perfect. You know, like, let's just take state Medicaid. You raise

this point. The largest obese population of the total population is in Mississippi. 78, 79 percent of adults are obese, and they also have the highest Medicaid enrollment, and they're one of the poorest states in the country. But we just managed to cut a deal them to provide our products in their Medicaid program. I think that's going to have a profound impact on this health status of Mississippi. And yes, we lowered the price. And they found money in the state budget. And they bought into a business case that said, okay, within a couple of years, we should start to see a return on this, lower hospital costs, et cetera. We need to get through that. And I think because of the history of the industry, which is more, I would say,

extractive on pricing, as you're pointing out. I think there's a trust gap with some of these players. We've got work to do, no doubt. One big group that's going to turn on July 1st that I think is a seminal date here is the Medicare population. So starting July 1st for $50 out of pocket a month, every senior in America can buy our medicine for $50 a month. That's going to change accessibility for 70 million people very quickly. That'll be interesting to watch as well. and make a big difference. But we're not done. We've got to keep working this. But I actually think there's a lot more alignment than what you portrayed in your question, especially with this category. And we're happy to be the one that, you know, makes enough to supply that market.

And if the price comes down another 50 percent and we sell two and a half times more, we're happy. Our job isn't to maximize price. It's to drive return. And here, there's a big volume opportunity. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. It's a shame when the best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong audience. Like, imagine running an ad for cataract surgery on Saturday morning cartoons or running a promo for this show on a video about Roblox or something. No offense to our Gen Alpha listeners, but that would be a waste of anyone's ad budget.

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slash ProfG. Betterhelp.com slash profg. Can you give us a brief explainer on the word I keep hearing and I don't understand the difference between it and a GLP1 or if one is one form of the other? You can't read anything without saying the word peptides. Everyone is talking about peptides. I'm curious, can you break it down as the CEO of one of the most important healthcare or pharma companies? what is the peptide market and what are the commercial applications and if and where is lily investing around quote unquote this new peptide craze there's a lot to unpack here well okay let's just start with the science what is a peptide a peptide is a chain of amino acids that occurs

you know in nature you can also synthetically make these chains if you have a longer chain we also call it a protein. The lexicon is interesting because the word peptide in our business is like, you know, the next word you might say is chemical. Like it's, it's a very generic term for something nature uses to signal and do its work. There's nothing special about that word. And it's been resurrected more recently because online marketing has made it sound like there's some extra special thing to using that word. And I find it fascinating. that now you see like Chinese peptides. Like that's a good thing.

I don't think that's a good thing. Mostly I call these unstudied medicines. That's sort of the best way to put it. Some are naturally occurring substances that people are, have identified and isolated and are selling as sort of quasi-medicine without clinical trials or safety data, certainly without an FDA approval. I think we have the FDA for a reason. And back to the origin story of Lilly, like, what's in it and what does it do?

That's sort of why we started the company 150 years ago. We don't know the answer to either those questions when you buy peptides online. So we're not a big fan of this kind of, you know, air quote peptide business. We're actually in the real peptide business. You know, terseppatide, the ingredient of Mangaro and Zeppine is a peptide. But we engineered it to do something very specific. We spent billions of dollars to study its safety and first animals and preclinical models, then humans, then we proved its efficacy, then we went to regulators around the world and got it approved.

So third parties agree with our data. And now we monitor safety very carefully. And if you have an adverse event, we report it publicly. We're transparent about that. So, you know, these people involved in this business, mostly buying, you know, unproven things and selling them to individuals online. they don't bear any of those responsibilities. I don't think it's a very good idea, to be honest. Now, some of them could turn out to do something.

A number of the popular ones claim to be like memetics of the human growth hormone. I'm not sure taking that chronically is a great idea, to be honest. Growth hormone is, you know, pro-tumor growth as well, so I'd be concerned about that. And then some of them also, you know, have some sort of magic elixir properties unproven and unpublished. But, you know, just stepping back maybe and just, I don't know if you want to get into this, but like, how do people feel about health care right now? I think it's sort of the COVID crisis and this phenomenon are sort of two sides of the same coin. People feel, I mean, health care is pretty much one of the worst consumer experiences we all have,

right? We go to somewhere, no one can tell you the price. You got to wait in line. You're treated pretty shabbily. And there's all this information asymmetry. so you don't feel informed to make decisions economically or for your own health. And there's something appealing to people with sort of either rejecting recommendations of authority or taking your own agency and going online and saying, I'm going to take control my own health. The problem here is people don't have biochemistry laboratories in their basement. They can't validate what they're reading online. They use these n-of-one anecdotes to say, oh, it helped me.

That's not science. That's not, I mean, we know there's problems with relying on that to make decisions. So we need oversight of this to protect consumers. At the same time, I think we have to recognize the current system does a pretty terrible job of meeting people's needs, at least in this feeling of like control, financial and kind of health control. And I think people are reacting to that. That's why there's this booming business. It appears at this, but I don't want to see you guys have gone all. in, but you've made a big bet on GLP once, and it appears like it's paid off dramatically.

You're the first company to cross a trillion dollars in market cap in your sector, worth more than, I think, are right around Walmart and Berkshire Hathaway. And I think even more impressively, you're worth more than Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Merck, you're worth more than all these companies combined. You must have made a big bet when a lot of people weren't making this bet, and it paid off. You're the first trillion dollar market cap. You're up fivefold in the last five years. Would you say, when you have that type of outperformance,

what is the barrier of entry there? What is kind of the secret sauce here? Has it been a massive bet in R&D around GLP ones? Has it been IP protection? You have better marketing, better brands. Is it better distribution? At the end of the day, you're responsible for outperforming the S&P as the CEO. to try and convince people to come to work for you and invest in your company because they'll get a greater return on their human and their financial capital.

In your mind, what is Lilly's competitive advantage as a culture as a company? And when you speak to shareholders and say, okay, it's up fivefold, but stick with us, there's more running room because we are great at X, Y, and Z. How do you differentiate from the rest of your competitors? These competitors, these companies you mentioned, they basically try to do the same thing we do. I think there's like three differences at Lilly that have allowed this bet to pay off. And people always ask me, like with Manjaro and Zepbound, when did you know this is going to be a big, big drug? My answer always surprised to people because it was like in 2018. So that's one thing, Scott, which is pattern recognition and sort of the, you know, Wall Street terms capital allocation.

Where do you place your bets? And I think we have a little different point of view than most companies about this. Now, all those names you're mentioning are buying up GOP1 and have agonists and trying to follow us into this mega market. Of course, we're, you know, trying to extend our lead, but we're spending a lot more time on other markets now. Why? Because by the time a medicine market is big, it's basically too late to invest. That's our point of view. Maybe we're wrong about that, but in this case, we were right.

I can guarantee you in 2018, nobody was talking about the obesity market. No one was even investing in it. really. It was considered a non-market. And the history of the weight loss drugs like Fenn Fenn and these earlier drugs, which were withdrawn, was not a good one. But we made the bet because we saw profound biology. So that's point number one is like, what is the science telling you? Two is, you know, are we working in areas that are very common? And here, like Lily is sort of at the time, and maybe now even so, cuts against the general thesis of the industry. which is to focus on price maximization and serving, you know, really difficult diseases,

but maybe diseases that only have a few patients. There was a big theme on that for the last 15 years in medicine for some good reasons, but I think we're more attracted to, you know, the millions and billions served idea. I think that's doing things that scale is hard, and that's what a lily is for. We're big company. We should go after those problems. The second thing is speed. So very early in my tenure, we undertook a series of programs to really change the clock speed of R&D.

One of the reasons why that capital, the first point, is true, is that everyone has patent lives. So a patent in the United States is 20 years long. When I began a CEO, it was taking us 11 years to go from invention to the market, which means it took more time to get to the market than the time you had on your patent in total, which was a kind of a nutty setup. The whole industry was a little bit better than Lilly at the time. Well, we've now chopped five years out of our cycle time, and the rest of the industry is about the same. So we can start an idea later and beat people to market, or we can start at the same time and beat them profoundly.

That gives you more time in market with patent protection. It gives you more time to exploit new uses of existing drugs and, of course, to give return to shareholders. But by the time those patents expire, basically, things go to zero. So like OZempec, in 2031 or 2032, their patent will expire in the U.S. And people will be able to buy this not for $300 a month, but for like $60 a month. That's what's going to happen because all the R&D costs no longer need to be amortized and it becomes a commodity business. So in our business, you have to outrun not only your own patents, but everyone else's. And when a breakthrough like Manjaro or Zepbound goes generic,

all these followers are going to find it hard to differentiate their drug against something much, much cheaper. So you have to keep raising that bar, and then at some point you can't raise it anymore. But anyway, speed is valuable. Making good choices, of course, is valuable. And then the final is just execution. You know, Lily's, I think, the only scaled drug company that's really never had a major merger. We have a very singular culture that starts with that origin story we talked about earlier. We're kind of based where no one else is. It's a little weird to some people on the coast that the most valuable biotech company in the world is in Indiana. That seems like something that shouldn't be true.

But our isolation kind of helps us. We don't have a lot of turnover. When we are lined up behind something, we can really execute well as a team. And we do have sort of a shared Midwest nice culture, but also a size of the company. we have less than 50,000 employees, where everyone at the leadership level anyway knows each other, and we can solve problems without having committee meetings.

And I think that's been a benefit to the company as well. So I always go into a podcast trying to figure out a way not to use the term AI, but I'm going to lose here. Jensen Huang has now turned as AI canon in terms of trying to become a $10 trillion company towards biotech and pharmaceutical research and this vision of a huge,

the great age of discovery is upon us because of AI. And the way I would describe your industry loosely is slow but steady incremental progress that over the, that in the short term is not that dramatic, but over the medium and the long term, just doesn't cure cancer, but makes it less likely to die from it. And it just every day a touch better.

And AI, or at least the proponents of AI, are holding out the promise of this acceleration of discovery. Do you think those promises are overhyped, underhyped, and speak to how Lilly is using AI in its development process? Yeah. Currently overhyped is the short answer. And here's why. So, you know, the LLMs that we all use, that's what we think of as AI, right, as the large

language models. There's other forms of AI. They're not as popular because they haven't created as much value. But that works for sort of consolidating human knowledge, right? because it read every word on the internet and can predict the next word really well, and then that helps people sort of get to the information faster and faster. Our scientists use it every day. We're big adopters of, you know, OpenAI and Anthropics products,

and it helps people search things and find connections and literature, et cetera. But the problem we have, the fundamental problem in drug discovery is the word discovery, is that we're not synthesizing existing knowledge. We have to create new knowledge. And probably humans have discovered, I don't know, 10 to 20 percent of all knowledge of the human body system, meaning our underlying data about biology of the human body is poor, which means you can create a model that tries to predict the other 80 percent with the 20 we know. It's terrible at predicting. Whereas with words on the Internet, like we know every word on the Internet, it's very good at predicting. those connections, to put it simply.

We've adopted these AI tools across the company for all the other reasons everybody else has, but fundamentally what scientists have to do is experiment. They have to create a hypothesis, they have to test it, and then they have to run experiments. You know, Manjaro or Zepbound,

which is appetized the ingredient, that was like the 700th version of a GLP, GIP-1 inhibitor. We actually had to make physically, test in thinking like petri dishes and rodents to determine the one that would be the best to take forward. It was actually the second one we took to humans. The first one failed.

That was the 200th or something that we had formulated. We went back and did 500 more before we got one that was better. Can we avoid those misses with AI? Not today. We don't even know what the rules of those systems are. We are working with NVIDIA to try to solve this problem. But what we need to do is build data sets that teach the AI, the rules of a particular system in biology so it can predict the answers. I think when we

have that, it will be very, very helpful at predicting the answers. And we have some working examples of that in drug discovery. We've actually made them public. We have a thing called Lilly Toon Lab, which I think is the leading kind of workbench for drug developers in the world because it's free to biotechs. All they have to do is let us use their data to train the models to work better. And these are in very discrete tasks that it takes to get a drug to market. So think of like the pre-clinical phase before you test in people. There might be like a thousand steps to go from an idea to a drug you're going to put in a person because that's a very dangerous thing to do if you don't know what you're looking at.

And maybe like 20 of those steps we've automated with AI or machine learning. So the task ahead of us is to like automate the other 980. and that's going to mean building out a lot of data that doesn't exist in the world and training models to predict what the most likely next outcome is of that system. There's just a lot to do there. So, you know, maybe five to seven years from now, we will skip a lot of laboratory experiments because we're confident in the models. We'll still have to do human experimentation, though.

I don't think anyone on Earth is ready, except maybe the peptide buyers online, to just sign up to say, okay, I'll be the first year. human to use a substance that's not been rigorously tested and looked at by third parties, not the company making it so I can really trust what they're saying. That's what clinical trials do. That's what the FDA and regulatory systems do. I'm not sure AI is going to speed that up anytime soon. So a lot of work to do. We're betting on it, but I think it's more of a 10-year arc, not a 2-year arc. We'll be right back. support for the show comes from HIMS.

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So we just have a few minutes here, and our remaining time I want to move to, I'm going to segue to some of the more human stuff. You're the CEO of usually the most important company in Indiana, maybe the most important company in the Midwest. And, you know, you're still a relatively young man. We have a lot of young men who listen to the podcast, not young women, but mostly young men.

What advice would you give to your 25-year-old self? Like, what do you think, you've done well, what could you have done better in terms of professionally, in terms of man, well, there's probably not a lot you could do better, but advice to your 25-year-old self. You know, the main thing I, we have a lot of new employees. We were hiring and growing. I have a 27-year-old son. And the main thing I say to people is to be open to more dramatic, like, surprises and say yes to them. I think one thing I did in my career that was kind of surprising to me anyway was things were presented to me and went home, talked to my wife, and we said,

let's do it. Like, we moved to China, and I ran Lily China for a while. She's a physician. She had to give up her career, but it was a great experience. You know, try, why am I even in the drug industry? I was like a Purdue engineering student and business major, and I went to work at IBM. And the only reason I arrived here was because that same girl was going through med school at Indiana University, so I needed a job.

in Indianapolis. So I joined this company. I knew nothing about really. And they said, hey, we like what you're doing. Stay on. And I did. I think a lot of young people just sort of over-programmed things in their head. And then they worry about what the outside world is saying about the next choice versus just being curious and going for it. And I think we're a little too programmed in our brains about how life actually works, which is like throwing yourself into things, committing, saying yes and seeing what you can learn and figure out. You know, that's one thing. I think the other is I've really benefited from being at a company a long time, obviously.

I do worry that people jump too much, you know, that jump to the next job offer and for a little more pay without actually learning the industry they're working in that well. And maybe companies have changed too or investing less in people's growth and development, but I think you should try to look for a place that would do that for you because it's a complicated world. I know a lot about what we do, but that took probably 15 years to sort of get mastery over the different domains of what, you know, a drug company does. If I jumped from one to the next, I'd become an expert at something that someone's willing to pay me a lot for, but I never actually learn, like, how the whole industry works. Those are two mistakes I see people making, and I would avoid.

So you mentioned my understanding is you have three kids? Yeah, the daughter and two boys. You know, we talk a lot about young men. Advice specifically, if you can, about raising boys. Well, I don't know. You know, I think we can all be super self-critical of that. My boys are doing great. I feel like I gave it a lot.

I enjoyed the quiet times at home when they were little babies and my wife was working at the hospital all weekend. That happened a lot. So we had a dual career. family, but the times when we were actually like in the room together with the kids were limited because I worked the work week and my wife tend to work nights and weekends. We're like reacquaining ourselves as a couple at the end of all that. But I think, you know, those sort of like boring in a way, like uninteresting days where you're just going for a walk or throwing a

Nerf ball in the yard or whatever, that's how you really connect and kind of create a kind of a model for your boys in a way. I think there'll be great dads in that regard. All the things I've done at the workplace that were hard, you know, like difficult conflicts in people situations, nothing's harder than that at home to me because you care so much about the outcome. Care too much sometimes to be rational.

And, you know, I probably was less patient and too demanding at times of my boys, you know, expecting more, you know, growing up is a developmental process. Maybe for men, it doesn't end until their mid-20s anyway, where your brain's fully formed and you're kind of a rational executive function, kind of human being. Being more patient with that is something I'd tell myself if I had to go back.

That's just a process. Enjoy the process. And then, you know, there's no substitute for time. I think maybe related to the first point, but one thing we like to do is like enjoy the outdoors together. And that's a good pastime. for dads and boys because, like, the phones aren't there, and you're sort of in the woods. You know, we backpack and camp and so forth.

And you just have time to talk when you're walking along. And I think the world could use a little more of that. You know, it's one thing to go to the game and stand on the sidelines, you know, cheer on your kid. That's good to do. But are you connecting? I'm less sure. And I see a lot of people, at least where we live, spending a lot of time doing that versus, you know, participating in something you both enjoy together side by side.

I think men kind of connect side by side. That's, you know, how, you know, why I think, like people like to golf and fish and walk together. You know, you sort of have a chance to talk while doing something sort of with half your brain. And I think as a dad, that's a good mode to be in with your boys, too, especially when they're teenagers and being difficult and very critical of you. So quick lightning around, and then we will let you go because we're over here. It's a quick response first thing that comes to mind. Guilty pleasure. Guilty pleasure, good meal.

Last piece of media you binge watch that are something, last piece of media that had sort of an impact on you. This is also a guilty pleasure is like going to X and like looking at my feed, which is a lot of biotech this weekend because the cancer conference is going out, but there's some junk on there too, mostly related to politics. What do you think you'll look back on time in your life that you'll think of as the salad days? nicest time in your life.

I hope that's ahead of me, but right now it's pretty good. Our kids are out of the house and healthy and happy, and my wife stopped working. We have more time together. The person who's had the biggest impact on your life? My father, who passed away last year. With your father's passing, is it changed anything about the way your relationship with your sons or how you want to approach your life moving forward? Yeah, it has, actually.

Because I think when I think of the real memorable things we did where we had that one-on-one time after I left the house, those are some of the happiest times we had together and where we kind of reconnected as men. And I want to create more of those with my boys. Scheduled a trip to Europe with my oldest this summer. So that's a version of that. I just need to make time to do that. That's what life's about. David Ricks is chair and CEO of Eli Lillian Company.

He joined the company 30 years ago and has held roles in business development, marketing, country management, and drug development. My favorite thing about this company, Dave, is that it's not in Silicon Valley, it's not in New York, it's not in London, it's in Indianapolis. I think that's just such a great American story. Congratulations on your success. Thank you so much. Good to talk to you today.

This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Jenaer. Tammy Rieke is our social producer. Bianca Rosario Ramirez is our video editor. and Drew Burroughs is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the PropG Pod from PropG Media.