On the Club Random Podcast with Bill Maher, neuroscientist and Stanford professor Andrew Huberman made some direct public comments about retatrutide, the GLP treatment he described as poised to become one of the most consequential pharma in recent history.
Huberman introduced retatrutide while discussing the class of GLP treatments, positioning it as fundamentally different from widely known options like Ozempic and Mounjaro.
“The big one that’s coming, this is going to be a trillion-dollar d**g,” he said. “It has huge implications for the sorts of things you and I think about, especially the interaction between politics and health. It’s retatrutide.”
He went on to explain the mechanism behind the medication, noting that it targets multiple metabolic pathways at once. “It’s a GLP-3, meaning it hits the GLP receptor, GIP, and glucagon,” Huberman said, adding that clinical data suggests the treatment can lead to significant weight reduction while preserving muscle mass. “It can cause up to a third of loss in body weight and some degree of muscle sparing. People should still exercise.”
Huberman also pointed out that Eli Lilly and Company holds the patent for the d**g and stated that it has already cleared a major development milestone. According to him, the medication “went through phase three very successfully.”
Drawing on what he described as firsthand awareness of its growing use in Los Angeles, Huberman claimed the d**g is already circulating among certain public-facing professionals.
“There are a lot of people, mostly people that get in front of cameras, taking retatrutide because it works so spectacularly well,” he said. He further alleged that some users are obtaining it at significantly lower doses and costs through compounding pharmacies, describing scenarios where it is used “at a fifth of the prescribed dose or the recommended dose from these trials and at a tenth of the price.”
Huberman framed Eli Lilly’s opposition to compounding pharmacies producing the medication as primarily financial rather than safety-driven.
“Eli Lilly does not want compounding pharmacies selling retatrutide. Why? Because it’s far cheaper,” he said. “Lilly invested hundreds of millions of dollars. They stand to make trillions of dollars. It makes every bit of sense why they would try and shut down the retatrutide compound.”
