Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
63 published records
01 / recommendation
“I have to give you a big thank you, because over the last couple of weeks since your recommendation, I have read the book Wool, which is the first in the series that is the Silo series on Apple TV+, because I'm more of a book guy than a TV guy.”
02 / recommendation
“I think that helped frame my understanding of how we got here in drug development better than really anything else I read, so thanks Alex for that too.”
03 / recommendation
“Two on some holiday travel flights, I think recommended by an Acquired listener, actually, I watched the Blackberry movie.”
04 / belief
“I think that the most illustrative stats on this are that the top decile of pharmaceuticals are what matters for the profits.”
05 / belief
“A couple other just fun things that I heard from people during research, which I think are just interesting problems to think about, the health system that was created over the last century was really designed to treat acute and infectious diseases.”
06 / observation
“The problem is GLP-1 only stays active in your body for about five minutes before your body completely metabolizes it and breaks it down.”
07 / commitment
“We will be here on earnings calls over and over and over again, telling you that no matter how many factories we build, we are supply constrained still.”
08 / belief
“Once Insulin starts rolling off the line later that summer under the brand name Insulin Leo, like Lion's Chemical Factory, they use the brand name, that would continue to be Nordisk's Insulin brand name for the next 60 years, I think.”
09 / belief
“Anyway, right around this same time, Novo begins phase three trials with their new, next generation, improved GLP-1 analogue, Semaglutide. which I think is pronounced Semaglutide.”
10 / commitment
“" What is so interesting about Medicare is that we will all end up on it one day, when we retire and we get off of our private insurance.”
11 / belief
“I think something like 6 million Americans took this thing, and a large portion of them ended up with major cardiovascular issues.”
12 / belief
“The fatty acids then make it so the GLP-1 can bind to another protein, which I believe is pronounced albumin, which is this really large protein that is very common in the bloodstream. It protects the GLP 1 molecule from the degradation by enzymes, and it protects it from being quickly cleared in the kidney, because that bound molecule is now too complex, too large to be filtered.”
13 / belief
“I think most of the time in pharma, there's none. But with Ozempic, I think there are two ways in which GLP-1s used for weight loss resemble consumer tech products.”
14 / belief
“One is something that my wife got me as a Christmas present, which is the Noxgear Tracer 2. This is, I think, a Columbus, Ohio company.”
15 / belief
“As much as I don't like leaving it there, I think we have beat this horse and we should do something fun like carve outs.”
16 / belief
“The history goes way back and is way more interesting than I think, just about anybody knows.”
17 / belief
“Let's start narrowly with Novo Nordisk itself. What do we think? Value creation versus value capture.”
18 / belief
“I think we can probably also say there's no branding, although Ozempic has become such a buzzword.”
19 / evaluation
“History has shown that the most effective medical interventions such as bariatric surgery, which is stomach stapling, effectively the gold standard in treating obesity, often go unused in favor of diet and exercise, which for many don't work.”
20 / uncertainty
“Yeah, this is the right window. I don't know how Brenham convinced both boards to do this, but he does.”
21 / commitment
“The legend has it that supposedly, August looks at them and replies, but you're not capable of that, to which Thorvald yells at him, we will show you.”
22 / belief
“With that, we have a bunch of people to thank who massively contributed to this episode. It's been fun doing more and more of this recently, so I think we'll keep doing it, too.”
23 / belief
“Everyone's Insulin has gotten more expensive, and they come under fire in the public eye, the Saxenda not being the blockbuster drug that expectations had trumpeted it up to be, plus this increasing pressure around Insulin, and I think a CEO change.”
24 / belief
“I had to dig a bit to figure out the exact economic splits. I believe that the final ratio was 62% Novo and 38% Nordisk.”
25 / belief
“For some numbers, which I think are interesting and just to illustrate, if Semaglutide becomes truly a mega blockbuster, an example of this is Humira by AbbVie, that generated $200 billion in lifetime sales since Humira was approved for 11 different indications across this whole spectrum of inflammatory and autoimmune disorders.”
26 / belief
“You're not getting it as your comp, but you're required to hold it, which I think is a similar idea to what Berkshire Hathaway has, of, hey, we should have sticks, not carrots.”
27 / belief
“I realized in those conversations, I need to give up on trying to pronounce things correctly.”
28 / commitment
“Later, we will talk about why margins are actually not the most interesting measure to look at, but it's worth knowing them, because we talk about them on every other episode.”
29 / belief
“Yup. I suspect it's probably both. I do think Danish culture plays into this too.”
30 / belief
“There are two good diagrams that I'd found in the research that we'll put on the acquired twitter account and the threads account to get access to these visuals that I think are pretty good illustrations of the way the dollars flow and the way the product flows.”
31 / belief
“I think science had just arrived at a place, where multiple parties could develop similar things side by side.”
32 / belief
“There are a few unexplored areas that I think are interesting to know about healthcare as a whole and about Novo Nordisk that I want to talk about here in playbook.”
33 / belief
“I think how this GLP-1 super cycle is going to play out if it continues, and what's interesting about the Insulin history and the analog to that, it's looking like it's going to be this ever stacking waves of patentable innovation and product innovation happening here.”
34 / uncertainty
“I don't know if you looked into this at all, but their executives are not meaningfully incentivized by stock price performance.”
35 / belief
“I think pigs may have come later, but certainly it was both cows and pigs that Nordisk and then Novo were using.”
36 / belief
“One other downside that I think you didn't point to specifically, but you meant in saying there's some unknown downside to this, there are some early studies that are showing that you lose more lean muscle mass when you're on a GLP-1 than if you were just doing diet and exercise.”
37 / belief
“We should say around this time, I believe Eli Lilly was further along in terms of the volume that they had developed.”
38 / belief
“I know one of the scientists at the VA was a guy named John Eng, and I believe he was at the VA hospital in the Bronx.”
39 / belief
“Daniel Drucker, and I believe still to this day, was a researcher at the University of Toronto.”
40 / evaluation
“Again, I'm not sure at this point if the laws have changed and you can patent drugs in Denmark, but it doesn't matter, because it's clear that Denmark is not a very large country.”
41 / commitment
“Jenny and I will be there. I think we'll be there on opening night, January 26th.”
42 / belief
“I think, importantly, that research often supports what Novo Nordisk, the corporation, wants to go do, so it's nice to have a close relationship with researchers.”
43 / belief
“If anything, we think of this company as like, oh, it's the GLP-1 company, it's the weight loss drug company.”
44 / belief
“I think maybe also for the first time in continental Europe, at least, Insulin is extracted here in Denmark.”
45 / belief
“To be fair, I think a large amount of the early adopter GLP-1 weight loss market was already just using Victoza.”
46 / belief
“I think that's how she phrases it too, when she describes it as protecting the molecule.”
47 / belief
“Fen-phen was a combination of a drug with speed. One of the phens is speed, I believe.”
48 / belief
“Your own understanding gets better. I think that's basically what happened with the Novo Nordisk foundation.”
49 / belief
“In 1980, Genentech and Eli Lilly as their partner, changed everything with recombinant DNA and genetic engineering of drugs. I suspect many people don't know this.”
50 / evaluation
“If this is right after everything you just described with Nordisk scaling up production, compounding at 30% per year, and massively growing share, this is not a good use of Novo's precious dollars right now.”
51 / belief
“I think there are many players in the healthcare industry that have a fine reputation.”
52 / belief
“I think for the first time, and it's happened a little bit before, but for the biggest time in a while, Ozempic has actual brand power.”
53 / belief
“I think that's why a lot of scientists, including Lotte and many, if not most folks at Novo Nordisk, work there.”
54 / prediction
“I think in the world of healthcare, there is a ton of power for basically any company that we would study, because the returns over and over and over again keep going to these incumbents that keep getting bigger.”
55 / evaluation
“Switching costs with any drug are a big thing, because once you find something that works for you, you never change.”
56 / evaluation
“I think really on three sides on the R&D and research side, because that is incredibly capital intensive.”
57 / commitment
“I'm actually not sure there's a human who can hold all of it in their head, and we won't promise to make this comprehensive.”
58 / evaluation
“When healthcare companies earn too much money, you look at it and you're like, ooh, I don't know if I like that, which is so interesting.”
59 / evaluation
“In many ways, this entire old system that we created that consumes 18% of our GDP may actually not make sense in this new world of treating the things that are more likely to kill us now, which is chronic illnesses.”
60 / recommendation
“To fully understand Novo Nordisk, we need to go back to a simpler time before the Food and Drug Administration, before all this industry consolidation, healthcare oligopolies, and before there were treatments for everything we take for granted today, antibiotics, vaccines for polio, tetanus, measles, mumps, you name it, that is where we will start our story.”
61 / prediction
“We are going to recombinant DNA and genetic engineering capabilities, because it's clear the whole industry is moving this way for production reasons, if nothing else.”
62 / evaluation
“Years later, actually, the Nobel Committee would basically admit that they messed that up. It turns out that the answer to that is the key to the first chapter of our story today, because the actual nomination, I don't know if you knew this, Ben, for that prize was put forth by a previous Nobel Prize winner in physiology or medicine, the 1920 Nobel Prize winner from the Copenhagen, Denmark, an animal biologist named August Krogh, who also happens to be the founder of Novo Nordisk.”
63 / evaluation
“The first time I heard about Mounjaro was 18 months after I'd heard about Ozempic, and I was like, oh, it must be some kind of knockoff. It's my first time studying pharma. I was like, oh, it's probably something crappy that's trying to ride this same wave, but isn't actually the breakthrough molecule. The studies show, Mounjaro helps you lose more weight and has a very similar mechanism, plus another mechanism that together worked, but most people don't know that. Most people know, I read on the cover of the New York Times that Ozempic is a breakthrough, and I heard about it at the Oscars because a joke was made on stage.”