David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, and frankly, team Pharma, at least relative to its reputation. I think there are many players in the healthcare industry that have a fine reputation. They probably deserve a fine reputation, but it's weird to me what a terrible reputation Pharma has when they're the ones innovating and trying to massively affect the trajectory of humans. Yup. I think that's why a lot of scientists, including Lotte and many, if not most folks at Novo Nordisk, work there. Yup. All right, finally to wrap this section, listeners, this is all very, very complicated. Every time I was tempted to say, well, XYZ party or XYZ mechanism is stupid, which I probably did too much on this episode, I discovered a very rational argument for why that thing exists and why it isn't all that bad, which is a little bit maddening to research and also explains how the system in America ended up the way that it did today. To close value creation, value capture, there's an interesting thing that everyone should just noodle on and try to square the circle. People feel like drugs cost too much, and they don't understand how much they're going to cost, and they're upset because they can't get drugs that they want. They think they're being extorted in some way. This is patients, generally. Shareholders in pharma companies feel like they're actually not making that much money. If you look at the whole industry, their return on invested capital is maybe slightly better, but pretty much on par with other industries. Square that circle. It's pretty weird. All right, bear bull, David? We can be reasonably quick in this since I think we've hit a lot of these points along the way.…

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