Two 27-ish college friends from Wisconsin quit their software jobs and now sell a gray plastic cube called Brick for $60. It does nothing. That’s the product: tap your phone against it and your distracting apps lock until you physically walk back and tap again. Downloads went from about 14,000 last October to over 103,000 in January. Celebrities carry it. One influencer cut a double-digit daily screen habit down to four hours — by paying sixty dollars for the privilege of being told no by a paperweight.
Understand what’s being sold there. Not technology — the opposite of technology. The product is distance between you and the impulse, manufactured in China, margin healthy.
Nestlé announced it is re-engineering recipes because GLP-1 weight-loss drugs dull the taste buds — a 2025 study found perception of all five basic tastes depressed. More pepper, more spice, smaller portions, “GLP-1 friendly” labels, high-protein formats. The largest food company on earth is redesigning dinner around a drug whose entire job is to make you want less dinner.
Follow the money in a full circle: for decades, food scientists engineered products to overwhelm your appetite. Now pharma sells the appetite off-switch, and the food scientists are re-engineering around the off-switch. Both sides of the willpower war invoice the same customer.
And then the cautionary tail of the same distribution: the founder of Done Global — the telehealth startup that advertised instant ADHD assessments and prescribed stimulants in minutes to more than 100,000 patients while removing the standard medical questionnaires — was sentenced to six years in federal prison and fined $1 million. She had privately described the operation as a “drug business” she hoped would become a “unicorn.”
Same economy, criminal division. Where Brick sells friction and Nestlé sells accommodation, the pill mill sold frictionlessness itself — want it, click it, have it in minutes — and a federal judge just priced what that business model is actually worth.
Every economy eventually monetizes its scarcest resource. Ours has decided the scarce resource is impulse control — and it now trades in three markets: you can buy friction (a $60 brick), buy an off-switch (a GLP-1 prescription and the re-spiced dinner that follows it), or buy frictionlessness from someone who will eventually meet a judge. The through-line is that self-control has a price, and people are demonstrably willing to pay it.
Here is why this belongs in your evidence file and not just the family group chat. First, it validates the theme our consumer sleeve already leans on: pricing power lives wherever the customer’s impulses are engaged — premium experiences, GLP-1-adjacent healthcare (the drugmakers and the reformulators), and the subscription gadgets of the attention economy. It’s the same pattern we logged with the $18,000 sauerkraut consultations, the Vegas sky villas, and the pony-beer premiumization: whoever manages the appetite collects the margin.
Second — and this is the part I actually care about — the whole willpower economy is an argument for how we build portfolios. A written plan, an automatic contribution, a rebalancing rule, a short-Treasury sleeve that pays you to do nothing — these are Bricks for money. They are friction you buy on purpose, between your savings and your impulses, before the impulse shows up. The investor who needs willpower in the moment has already lost; the one who installed the system when things were calm never has to summon any. Two weeks ago the chip complex fell 11% in two days — the households that did nothing weren’t braver than everyone else, they had simply bricked the account.
Theme 1’s compounders sleeve owns the pricing-power side of this trade (staples that can re-spice a recipe and charge for it; healthcare riding the GLP-1 build-out). The dividend books own the discipline side: payout schedules are a commitment device for companies exactly the way automatic contributions are for households. And the “avoid” column is the frictionless division — anything sold to you in minutes, with the questionnaire removed, whether it’s a stimulant or a 14% “passive income” note.
Buy your own brick. Automate the 403(b)/401(k) increase now, while nothing is on fire. Put the rebalancing rule in writing. Keep 12–24 months of income needs in the short-Treasury sleeve so no market morning ever forces a decision. And when a product promises to remove all the friction between you and money — instant approval, one tap, yields that read like typos — remember which exhibit that business model belongs to.