Eight months ago I posted something small on LinkedIn that I did not think much of at the time, and it has since turned into one of those posts that comes back with interest because the world has caught up to what I was quietly thinking. I had just done my routine thing of putting a chunk of money into US stocks which I do every few months, and on that particular day I thought I would try something new and ask an LLM for recommendations, which was a hypothesis I was about to abandon because the picks were bad. I remember MKTX and TRU and MRK in there and the honest part is I do not remember the rest because I closed the tab and went back to code, and when I came back I did the only thing that has ever reliably worked for me which is to ask what I would do with the money if I were not allowed to use any tool at all and had to think like a human being for fifteen minutes.

My LinkedIn Post

What came out of those fifteen minutes was a line I posted without much ceremony, which was that I had decided to put most of the new investment into GLP-1 related companies, and I said it the way you would mention a restaurant you wanted to try, and underneath that casual sentence was something I had been chewing on for at least a year. I had been reading the retatrutide literature, the actual trial data rather than the press releases that summarize it, and what I was reading did not feel like a small improvement on existing drugs because semaglutide and tirzepatide are already remarkable and you do not usually get a third step that is meaningfully larger than the second. The bet was small in the scheme of things but it was deliberate, and the conviction I was putting into the trade was the same conviction I had been carrying around about my own body and my own hopes for the next ten years, which made the bet less about money and more about putting my money where my body was.

I have not taken retatrutide yet because it is not approved, and the molecule has already helped me in a way that has nothing to do with my blood sugar, because it has clarified what I think the next decade of medicine is going to look like and I have arranged my reading and my small portfolio around that clarity which is a kind of help that does not require a prescription. The TRIUMPH-1 data came in a few weeks ago and it confirmed the bet, and I wrote about the science back in May, and the point of this post is not the science but the knowing, because the knowing arrived first and the data arrived second and that order matters to me more than it probably should.

What I want to say now is that retatrutide is going to help millions of people, and I do not mean that in the loose way that people mean it when they are pitching a stock, I mean it the way I mean it when I say that the air in Delhi is going to help millions of people once the city stops burning its fields. My friend has been avoiding mirrors for five years, and one morning she is going to look at one without flinching because a molecule did its work, and my uncle whose knees have hurt since his forties is going to take the stairs without thinking about which leg he leads with, and a teenager whose liver is inflamed from a decade of sugar is going to wake up at twenty with a clean scan and never know the difference between a body that was saved and a body that was always going to be fine. None of those people are going to credit a triple agonist in their private thoughts, and the molecules that do this for them do not care about the blame we have internalized about needing them, and that indifference is going to be the most compassionate thing that has happened to public health in my lifetime.

If you want to push back on any of this I am @troysk704.