“Just So Grateful.” Artemis II Crew & Eli Lilly’s New GLP-1 Pill 4/30/26

23:49And to Joe's earlier question, you know, there are a billion people on the planet who could benefit from these medications. Will we ever reach a billion? I don't know. But right now we're reaching about 20 million. So there's a there's a big runway in front of us. And from a cost and a scalability perspective, using organic chemistry is a lot more efficient than what we have to do, creating auto injectors with peptides, et cetera, which just doesn't seem possible. No, I guess the reason I'm asking the question is people are you know people are already excited about reda for example and whether everyone's going to be on reda and therefore they're not going to be taking this pill that's i guess that's where i'm going with just the innovation so fast yeah choice is good and we're going to offer i mean red is our product right and we hope to introduce that next year by the way you know in a few weeks or a month's time we'll get our first big obesity readout and uh the sign so far is this is going to be really maybe as much as 50 percent better than terzepatide that could be incredible, but that's not for everybody, right?

24:46Not everyone needs to lose that much weight. People on Foundayo lose about 20 to 30 pounds. And when we survey consumers in the U.S. and Europe, actually, that's a lot of what people want to do is lose a bit of weight. Something like terzepatide is closer to 50 pounds. That's Zep bound. And Reda, if you think about it, could be 70 plus. So depending on your situation, you might choose a different option. We've got other options coming too, by the way, two others entered the phase three development in the last six months, a loralintide, which is a highly selective amylin agonist, which promises like GLP-1-like efficacy, but really with very different, much more benign side effect profile.

25:26That's an interesting product for some. And then also brinepetide, which is like a son of terzepatide. We're studying for many new medical uses like brain health and inflammation. So I think this story will continue to play out with different choices. But it's hard to think of something being occupying that place of for the masses, for the everyday routine, something like Foundaio. It really feels like a great fit for that segment. Really quick, I want to talk about M &A because you guys have been on quite a spree this year, doing bigger deals and doing more deals than we're used to seeing from you.

25:59So what else should we expect to see this year? And where do you feel like you still have holes that you need to fill? Well, we said as we were exiting last year, given the outlook for the company, which is getting a lot bigger quickly and producing a lot of cash flow, that we really would prefer to invest that cash flow in future growth. There's a limit to how quickly we can pace out our own organic growth. Probably the best dollar invested in healthcare in the last 10 years has been a dollar we gave to the Lilly Research Lab scientists. It's been incredible performance, but there's a limit to how many we can bring on board and how quickly we can efficiently scale.

26:35So we're going to supplement that with great teams and great assets from outside the company and open the aperture a bit on the kinds of deals we do. You may be surprised to learn in the last couple of years, Lily has done more business development deals than any company in pharma. But we tend to be very focused on early stage small things because those to us can produce the highest ROI. But we're opening up the Aperture to include select assets that are in the clinic that can add to our growth story and have teams around them, maybe a series of assets that can really help us grow in the future, like the Sintessa acquisition, which is modulating sleep and awakeness cycles.

27:11They have multiple assets, a great team there. We think that's a potentially large TAM opportunity and is the kind of thing you should expect to do more of in the coming years. We did like four deals in a month. That was a little unusual for us. So that's just lumpy in terms of how they've come in. But you can expect a continuous cadence of acquisitions like that. And ticking higher as you've been talking, David. Now, 914 bid. It's up about more than$60 this morning for Eli Lilly. We appreciate bringing all that to us and getting testimonials from people that are saying it not for just weight loss, that their health is like.

27:59I mean, that's important. Andrew asked about the pill and so forth. We just read out a study that's pretty interesting that showed we reduced cardiovascular events by 22 percent in people with diabetes, but also reduced all cause death by more than 50 percent. So I think people are really interested in those health benefits. and as well as the weight loss. So, yeah, it's an exciting time for chronic disease. We can really make a big difference here. It is amazing what, you know, even like sleep apnea. I mean, it's bizarre how many things. If you're overweight, it's like all bad things come from that.

28:34It seems like it all goes. Zep bound is indicated for sleep apnea. It's the only new medicine for that. And you wouldn't think of that. And half the people who take it, yeah, half the people who take it have no sleep apnea at the end of the study. It's incredible. Joint pain. We're a 150-year-old company. I have to mention that. We're going to celebrate our birthday next week. And we've never been in a stronger position and in a position to help more people than today. Well, we appreciate you coming on Squawk Box on earnings day most of the time. David, thanks. Yeah, absolutely. Great to be with you guys.

29:04Take care. Next up on Squawk Pod, we're going to space. Well, space explorers are coming to us. The Artemis 2 crew has landed on set. And mission specialist Jeremy Hansen gives us some tips for how to feel like an astronaut here on Earth. I've been really intentional with taking my kids on backpacking trips. And just getting off the grid and getting out there in nature, I think that is one way that people can experience a small part of what we did. We had some incredible views, but it felt a lot like camping. What makes an astronaut extraordinary? Pilot Victor Glover and Commander Reed Wiseman.

29:41Asking questions, but then listening. That has been a game changer for my trajectory. Just be curious about the world, about everything in it. And who's ready to go back? Mission specialist Christina Koch, the first woman to travel beyond low Earth orbit, and the first woman to orbit the moon. So which was it? You ready to go to Mars or you can't wait to get back? It's both. The tension is real. It's time to let our friends do that, though. We're ready to cheerlead for Artemis 3 and Artemis 4. We are taking off right after this.

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31:42Welcome back to Squawk Pod. You're watching Squawk Box on CNBC. I'm Joe Kernan, along with Andrew Ross Sorkin. One of the defining stories of the year and one of future generations that may read about it in school is NASA's Artemis II mission. The historic flight was a critical step in NASA's plan to return humans to the moon. Joining us right now, fresh off of a stop at the White House and the moon, is the Artemis II crew at our table, no less, Joe Kernan. Unbelievable. people. Reid Wiseman, Victor Clover, Christina Cook, and Jeremy Hansen, they're all here, and it is awesome. So it's been a couple weeks, but how do you feel now?

32:18I mean, you're sort of on the tour, but how do you feel? Do you go to sleep at night thinking about what it was like being up there at this point still? I do. Yes. Oh, absolutely. I think we've prioritized the last couple weeks being back, being with family, for sure, enjoying Earth, and just processing and internalizing what just happened. What's the biggest internalizing processing part for you? I'd say gratitude. All of the thoughts, the views, the camaraderie at the end of it, the trust the countries and the world had for us to go do the science, but also the poetry and the gratitude. Just so grateful.

32:58I've seen two takes, and I don't know which of you said it. One was that if we were headed for Mars, you guys were ready to go even though it could be six months. It signed me up. I saw someone else said that they couldn't help but think, and this makes me emotional, but looking down at the earth about their family and how distant their family was from them and that feeling, which I get when I fly over to Europe, I think. I look down at the ground and think they're so far away, and I feel the loss. So which was it? You ready to go to Mars or you can't wait to get back? It's both. That tension is real.

33:38It is real. It's real. Because you might be different. You do it, maybe. I'm not sure at this point. I want to go just out of curiosity. I think seeing what you describe as the eclipse of the moon and the sun, no human ever even contemplated seeing that in person. Do you feel close to God when that happens? I will tell you. I mean, everybody's different, I understand, but you must. There were several moments where the only appropriate response was, oh, my God. And it just was in the DNA. That was the only appropriate response for some of the things that we saw. And that was definitely one of those moments.

34:20What did your families think while you were up there before? What were the conversations like the night before? That's what I wanted. The night before launch? The night before launch. The night before launch. Or even maybe months before when you had to say, this is actually happening. We're doing this. One of the most amazing parts of this is the support that we have from our families. And I will tell you, I think the thing that they all took away was no one understands except for them. No one really understands. And the four of us, we also don't understand how it was to be a family member and watch the four of us leave the planet, watch us go around the moon.

34:53We did have email and we got two chances to talk to our families while we were up there. It was very special for us. one morning I woke up about four days into the mission and my daughter had commented on watching the moon rise the night before from college and she thought my dad and his friends are out there and I think that really hit her but we don't even know what they experienced but what we do know is the way they supported the way they showed up for us and we tried to show up for them and each other and each other and if you if you had a limb and I don't know if everyone remembers a limb but if you had a limb attached who would have gone?

35:25Jeremy. You would have gotten All of us. We all would have gone. Absolutely. You all would have gone. The moon was calling you. We were that close. You're looking down at it, and you're just like, all those rock walls. Did you see some potential landing sites? Yeah, all of it. You could pretty much. I wanted to go all over the place. I was like, I'd like to go check that out, and I would like to go check that out. But there was some work to look and actually scout some places. Weren't there? Well, the goal, I mean, there's some really ambitious plans right now for the future Artemis program to get to the south pole of the moon.

35:58We didn't have the best viewing site of the south pole. That's where we're going to go next. But in the future, we were scouting out areas that eventually will probably have identified some things that probably will go be explored because of what we saw. Okay, so can you see people really living on the moon for some period? Now that you've done this and seen this, are you like, okay, I get it. It's totally doable. We can have a whole operation rolling up there. We're going to be using it to put other spaceships from, you know, as a sort of like the JFK. It's going to be a place people will land and then keep going.

36:32We're going to have data centers up there. Does that all speak to you now? One of the reasons that it is easier to see it was an idea that is now more tangible is because we did that with low Earth orbit. We live in low Earth orbit. We live on the International Space Station. And so now going that close to the moon and seeing that, hey, there is a place down there that we could have infrastructure to keep us safe. I think, you know, Reid has mentioned it. If we had a lunar lander, we would go. And so we're a lot closer than it seemed before we launched. Yeah, the time is right. What about being just up there for for long periods of time when people talk about getting to Mars, for example?

37:09Do you say to yourself that's that feels insane or do you think, oh, that seems totally reasonable? And but not just for people going. I'm talking about this en masse, right? Because the conversations we're having at this table among some of the companies like SpaceX and others, this is about potentially thousands, tens of thousands of people doing this eventually. Yeah. You know, NASA's job in a lot of ways is to open markets. And we're doing that on every frontier that we find. As soon as we opened it in low Earth orbit, we're pushing to the lunar market. Eventually it'll be Mars. But there's nothing theoretically preventing us from doing any of that.

37:43And the time is right. Let's also think 100 years ago, if you wanted to go from London to Washington, D.C. or New York, think about what that I mean, you're risking your life to do that. You're probably taking your entire life savings, inventing a craft and doing it. And now we hop on an airplane and we just need to expand. We need to go farther. We need to go past the moon. We need to get to Mars. We need to go beyond Mars. And then you start to pull everything along with you. You slept at different times or slept at different times. Anyone sleep at all? We slept great. We were on one shift. We all slept.

38:14What I'm getting, when a smoke alarm went off? We were awake during that. We had both of them. Who was awake when the smoke, everybody was awake? We were all awake. We were studying. Okay, so you're sitting there. Wow, it's nice out there. A smoke alarm goes off, and what is the initial thought? Straight to our training. Bingo. 100%. I'd have to go straight to the laboratory. Yeah, we study for two primary emergencies. That smoke, fire, and a rapid cabin depress. And we had both of them on our mission. We had enunciations of them, which turned out to not be the case. You thought it was possible for a second?

38:55Absolutely. When that alarm goes off, vigilance. Has the food gotten any better? We didn't find out. What was the smoke? That wasn't really the smoke detector. Okay, both false. That was a real fire alarm. It was the emergency sound. It was the only time in the whole mission we had the full emergency sound. And when the, I'd be done. I'm done. No one for the popcorn. We don't know what it was. The vehicle takes a lot of battery spots, so it shuts down all the power inside and the ventilation down. And now I know what it feels like to be a baked potato inside of an oven. It was pretty interesting.

39:25The interesting thing I think about it, you guys undergo extraordinary amount of training to do this in advance. What would it take for this to work sort of en masse in the future? There are going to have to be people who do basically no training, right? Because some people are going to be going on vacation on the moon, maybe. I don't know. So how would that work, do you think? Honestly, most of our training is for those rare cases of unknown problems happening. So you get a couple of well-trained people. And other than that, it's fairly comfortable. Okay, back to the food. Because everybody always wants to know about the food.

40:01My daughter knew that you guys were coming up. Has the food gotten any better? Fantastic. Food's great. Fantastic. Highly salted, right? You need a lot of salt up there, apparently, to help with the taste. It's challenging because salt would float around the cabin. So we have actually, like, salt water that we can use to season the food. We have garlic paste. The space station has given us a chance to really flush out our food system. And so we took modifications of the food that we have on the space station. And then you get to pick out a few things. And as long as the packaging is safe for space, we can take things that are just at our local grocery store.

40:31Okay. And what does reentry feel like? I mean, when you feel, I mean, when we're watching the speed of it, I'm thinking to myself, look, what does that feel like inside that capsule? First, I want to set it up for you. We were watching the altitude click down six miles a second. About 39 times the speed of sound. Is that the scariest part of this whole situation? Is there a moment? How do you rank the different levels? I wouldn't say scary, but it definitely had my attention for three years. For three years. It was that 13 minutes and 36 seconds was quite a big focus for me for the whole time.

41:07You want some, I mean, we all remember the scary things about reentry with tiles and how hot it gets. I guess you're watching for everything at that point. Listening, feeling, smelling. You feel confident, though, because we've worked so hard on making sure that it can withstand that heat, I guess, coming down. Does it feel warmer? Like, you're very cognizant of that? Like, what's that feel like? Yeah, not right away, but you are looking at a flame right outside the window that in some cases was so bright it was like looking at an arc welder and it was white hot. And then when the parachute hit, and you felt that, right?

41:40Oh, yeah. Glorious. Glorious. Glorious. It's a very violent feeling and you love it. You're so happy for that violent feeling. People need to know about it. They need to warn them about it, you said. Future people need to know. You're going to feel like you're falling off a skyscraper backwards for how long? for 30 seconds? Yeah, you have those two stages of parachutes. These drogues come out, and there's two of them for a bit, but then they release. And between their release and the main, those big red-orange parachutes coming out, you do fall again. Okay, you remember what I said. Bill Paxton, he's great, he's gone now, but the consolation urine, right?

42:18Or urine. But what happened with the toilet? And what did that... How long was it out? Looking at me, did you think I... People break toilets all the time. I've been accused of that before. But it was only for number one, right? That was the only. So the toilet was fine, but the line we used to empty the liquid part of the toilet out was clogging up. And so. What would that mean? We had to create the constellation. Which would create the constellation you're on. But then you fixed that, too, though. Well, we adapted that. Okay. Secondary. There's a primary vent line, and that was clogged. So we couldn't use the urine part of our official toilet.

42:58But we have a secondary vent line, and that never clogged up. So we could use a backup system, which definitely was not as convenient, but it was workable for the length of mission we had. Okay, so who wants to go back? Oh, yeah. Everybody signed up. It's time to let our friends do that, though. We're ready to cheerlead for Artemis 3 and Artemis 4 and see people go back up, do some docking, test out those landers, and eventually walk out of the van. Okay, would you want to go the next time with your families? How do you think everyone would do everybody all together? No, I was thinking about this because you guys all talk about your families.

43:29And I think, oh, maybe everyone should go together. But then I've been in the car ride with all five of us. And sometimes it's complicated. I love it personally. Anyway. I love playing ice fire with my little eyes. We're heading out to the moon with my kids. Back with the alphabet game. If the alphabet game, you wouldn't get very far. Really boring. I think you might be surprised because, you know, the way you show up for one another when you're 250 ,000 miles from Earth, people just stand too. And a lot of grace. You might be surprised by your family. You should try it. It is. I won't go there.

44:03Where are you going to go? We've got a whole crowd. No, I was just going to say, I'm not going to ask you about Iran or anything. I know you've got to ask no questions. We don't need to talk about that. But all we wanted to talk about was your heroism and bravery and everything else and patriotism. And we thank you for that. I always ask, where do we find people like this? Because don't look here. I don't know. Can I go back to that, though? Because this is one thing I was thinking about with kids, actually, which is you guys clearly are brave, courageous. You have something that I wish I had.

44:36It's called the right stuff. And I hope my kids have. And people talk about grit. And how do you sort of create that? Do you have a sense of whatever you have? And do you think that you've figured out a way to bottle it up? for the rest of us? One thing that, you know, I've been really intentional with taking my kids on backpacking trips and just getting off the grid and getting out there in nature and, you know, not having the creature comforts at home. I just, I think that is one way that people can experience a small part of what we did. We had some incredible views, but it felt a lot like camping.

45:08about your childhoods? And look, you know, we joke, we have a hard time, you know, screwing in a light bulb. So I want to know, like, what was going on? You know, I like where you're going. And I think what I want to say, and I'm speaking to especially the young folks, old folks, it applies to us, too. But to the young folks, we didn't show up with the same stuff. We you know that term, the right stuff can make it seem like there's this kind of standard path. It's the paths are very different. The characteristics are very different. And NASA will train you the training to get there, learning to go out and backpack safely.

45:43But you can come from a lot of different places. But there is a path. And I will tell you one thing that I can look back in my past is you mentioned your kids listening, asking questions, but then listening. That has been a game changer for my trajectory. And be curious. Be curious. I think that's the biggest. You see this curiosity in kids. Just be curious about the world, about everything in it. You're always curious. That part we have in spades at this table. Reed, Victor, Christina and Jeremy, thank you on behalf of the American people, on behalf of humanity. Really, it's something. Thank you.

46:14Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having us. That's Squawk Pod for today. Thank you for listening. Squawk Box is hosted by Joe Kernan, Becky Quick, and Andrew Ross-Sorkin. You can tune in to CNBC every weekday morning at 6 a.m. Eastern to catch them live for three hours. To get the best bits of that broadcast right into your ears, follow Squawk Pod wherever you get your podcasts. We'll meet you right back here tomorrow. Have a great day. We are clear. Thanks, guys.

47:11We'll see you next time.