The Easy Button

On Tuesday at 10:30am, I sat in a chair at Quest Diagnostics while a phlebotomist named Maria filled vial number eleven. She'd been telling me about her pit mix who she had to put down that morning.

"Sorry for the trauma-dump," she said, switching to vial twelve.

I assured her, "He was a good boy."

I was there for Function Health, the $499 direct-to-consumer diagnostics startup that promises to decode your biology through 100+ biomarkers. Heart health, hormones, heavy metals, vitamins… the full stack of what's happening inside you, delivered in a slick dashboard.

Twenty-four vials total, each one a data point between me and whatever sense of control I was chasing.

Maria wiped her eyes and kept drawing blood. I stared at the accumulating tubes, my iron levels, my thyroid function, my metabolic panel, while this stranger grieved beside me.

RIP Pepperoni.

I will proudly tell anyone who asks that I was on GLP-1s before any of the Kardashians had even heard of Ozempic. Before the shortages and the celebrity whispers and the moral panic about who "deserves" these drugs.

Spring 2021. I'd always struggled with my weight. It was always a grinding, daily negotiation that consumed tremendous mental real estate. I exercised religiously and did 4 years of keto, explaining to every server that yes, I'm certain about the Brussels sprouts instead of the fries. I tracked macros like a day trader.

The constant mathematics of existence: this meal plus that workout minus tomorrow's dinner equals... what? Maintenance? Progress?

I heard about GLP-1s from Kevin Rose on an episode of Tim Ferris’ podcast. I found a startup offering prescriptions and one video consultation and $300 later, a pharmacy in Texas shipped me a month's supply.

The first injection was anticlimactic: a tiny needle in my abdomen; barely a pinch. But by day three, something fundamental had shifted. The shot was like pressing mute on a blaring TV. The first time I can remember in my adult life I wasn’t half-thinking about food.

I'd open the fridge and feel... nothing. No negotiation, no mental math, no internal committee debating whether I'd "earned" the leftovers. I ate what I wanted when I wanted it. Often, I would forget to eat at all. Not from restriction, but from indifference.

The weight came off—twenty pounds over two months—but that wasn't the revelation. The revelation was the freedom. From myself. From the calorie calculations. From the bandwidth-devouring dialogue between willpower and biology.

Steve Jobs wore the same outfit every day to save cognitive load for more important decisions. Mounjaro gave me that same gift via biochemical indifference. The mental processing power I'd been burning on appetite management suddenly freed up for more important things.

I wasn't changing my habits, I was deleting the need for them.

I didn't want to be healthier, I wanted to stop trying.

That realization, that I'd rather inject a peptide than negotiate with biology, I believe is the defining consumer insight of the decade.

Look at the market winners:

GLP1s: Appetite-suppression-as-a-service. Monthly subscription to metabolic silence.

Function Health: Your biology as a dashboard. 100+ biomarkers translated into actionable anxiety and purchasable peace of mind.

Hims and Roman: Confidence delivered monthly. Hair, hormones, boners, all managed through an app.

The old model asked you to change. The new model changes you. The consumer wants arrival without travel. Prescriptions without process.

We don't want to fix our bodies. We want to outsource them.

The numbers tell the story of an entire ecosystem restructuring around pharmaceutical convenience.

GLP-1 users reduce grocery spending by 6% within six months. Snack purchasing has dropped 9% in the US and restaurant visits have flattened. The compound effect across 15 million Americans on these drugs has Walmart and Nestlé reforecasting growth downward.

WeightWatchers, once valued at $6 billion, now trades under $1 billion today. They pivoted to prescribing GLP-1s themselves, but the damage was done. Why pay for accountability when you can pay for the absence of appetite?

Meanwhile, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk (the GLP-1 giants) are now among the ten most valuable companies on Earth. Lilly's market cap exceeds $700 billion. Bigger than Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and McDonalds—combined.

Entire industries built on willpower, discipline, and incremental progress are being compressed into pharmaceutical protocols. The gym membership, the meal plans, the diet blogs have all been replaced by a weekly injection and a monthly auto-refill.

The lesson for operators is stark: Consumers don't want more features, they want fewer decisions.

Here's the new playbook:

We're living through the birth of the outcome economy, a market built on selling results rather than processes; destinations rather than journeys.

The pattern is accelerating across every category: Sleep optimization through wearables and apps. Cognitive enhancement through nootropics and brain training. Social confidence through dating apps and conversation coaching. Even happiness itself, packaged as meditation subscriptions and mood-tracking platforms.

The infrastructure is already in place: Direct-to-consumer fulfillment, subscription billing, telehealth consultations, AI-powered personalization. The technical barriers to launching an "easy button" business have all but disappeared.

What hasn't disappeared is the underlying human need these products exploit: the desire to skip the work while keeping the results.

We've entered a friction war, and the battlefield is your daily decision-making load. Every choice you have to make, every habit you have to maintain, every problem you have to actively solve represents an opportunity for someone to step in and handle it for you.

For a monthly fee, of course.

We used to hustle, then we tried to optimize. Now we just press a button and let the protocol run. I'm not sure this represents a failure of human nature, it might just be its most honest expression: Given the choice between effort and outcome, outcome wins every time.

The companies that dominate the next decade won't be the ones building better habits, teaching discipline, or crafting transformation journeys. They will be the ones who understand a brutal truth about human nature:

Outcomes sell. Friction kills. Buttons win.

I'm still waiting for my Function results. It's only been a few days since Maria drew my blood, but I'm refreshing the app feverishly.

Another dashboard promising control, another subscription promising solutions.

The app will inevitably surface something. Low vitamin D or suboptimal iron. Function will serve up precision-targeted anxiety with precision-targeted solutions. Supplements, hormones, protocols, all a tap away through their partner e-pharmacy.

And I'll buy it. The full stack. Monthly subscription. Set and forgotten.

Just like I did with tirzepatide and just like millions are doing now with Ozempic. Just like we're all doing with every service that promises to delete a decision from our lives.

Find the friction, inject the solution, bill monthly. Whether it's appetite or anxiety, hormones or health markers, the model remains the same: we're not buying products anymore, we're buying the absence of problems.

The easy button isn't just a business model, it's the business model. The one that acknowledges we'd rather delegate our problems than solve them and outsource our agency than exercise it.

The companies building accordingly won’t just capture markets, they’ll capture our choices, our bandwidth, and our agency.

The fastest way to win is to make effort obsolete.

Up and to the right.