The Ozempicization of the Economy

Americans love optimization... A generation turning to 'financial nihilism'... Longevity, prediction markets, and war... Despair is extremely profitable... Our Stansberry Research conference starts Monday...

Editor's note: Today, we bring you a special guest essay from Kyla Scanlon, one of the featured presenters at next week's annual Stansberry Research Conference & Alliance Meeting in Las Vegas...

This essay is different from our "usual" fare. Kyla has become one of the leading financial voices for millennials and Gen-Z, and this essay is a big-picture look at the U.S. economy from that view... and an exploration of what many companies are selling to young people...

That is, control – over things like health and appearance (using Ozempic or other weight-loss drugs, as an example) or financial security (through prediction markets) and the feeling of being in-the-know on the latest information and news (using social media).

Kyla gave us permission to republish this piece – originally published in her personal newsletter in March – for Digest readers today. It has been edited for length and some clarity.

Two quick things before we turn things over to her...

First, if you won't be with us in person at our conference next week, be sure to get a Livestream Pass to catch the presentations.

And second, we expect Dan Ferris back in his Friday Digest slot soon. As we mentioned earlier this week, he has been working on a special project. He'll be speaking at the conference next week, and we're eager for him to share what he's working on – and other market analyses – with Digest readers.

I (Kyla Scanlon) have to go on an elimination diet...

This is because my gut is eating itself and that apparently is also destroying my thyroid because I am not absorbing any nutrients.

In order to address this, I have to stop eating wheat, dairy, corn, egg, tomato, peanuts, coffee, soy, cacao, sugar and many other things (this is not like a juice cleanse or something fun, it's something I have to do to stop my body from attacking itself).

I have to write down what I do eat and how I am feeling and then evaluate from there as to what I can eat in the future.

If there was a quick fix – say an injection – I would try to take it. I don't KNOW what's happening to me, I just know that I got lots of vials of blood drawn and the miracle of modern science has informed me that some things are not going very well.

But, funnily enough, part of the problem is that I took shortcuts. I traveled 40 out of the 52 weeks last year (a lot for me) and some days, I would just subsist on granola bars and about 14 cups of coffee. I would also run and work a lot and sleep very little because I was totally and completely invincible. After all, I was an optimization machine.

And for a time, I sure was. But then, I wasn't.

Turns out, I wasn't really optimizing anything, I just was avoiding what I actually should have been doing like sleeping. What I needed was to stop adding things and start figuring out what was making me sick. That's the opposite of what we've been sold.

Welcome to the age of 'Ozempicization'...

Americans love optimization. So when things come along that promise to help us optimize even more, fast fixes with near immediate results, it's hard to say no. We've built entire identities around being efficient.

The desire for control is really intense right now, showing up in lots of corners of both the digital and physical world.

• I think it is functionally a response to financial nihilism, where people stop believing that the underlying economy is working for them and turn to gambling or some other seemingly quick fix instead to try and find stability.

• 80% of Gen Z and 75% of Millennials feel behind, according to a survey from Northwestern Mutual, and that drives them to speculation.

• Same with social media – if you're having trouble establishing connections in real life, the online world provides a form of that, but people are increasingly disturbed by our collective reliance on it, as we saw in the recent Google and Meta ruling.

Naturally, industries have formed to monetize this nihilism through promising solutions. But the solutions never arrive, because the nihilism, the giving up, must persist in order for these products to survive.

It's a version of Ivan Illich's Limits to Medicine, where he argues that the medical establishment itself produces illness by making people dependent on professional intervention rather than building health. That effect carries across all these optimization tools, creating dependency on the fix rather than addressing the cause.

The optimization economy can't deliver control, because the desperation is the market condition, and the pursuit of control through optimization is itself a loss of control.

Our tools are also heavily focused on the individual. As Raymond Williams wrote in his 1974 book Television: Technology and Cultural Form:

The earlier period of public technology, best exemplified by the railways and city lighting, was being replaced by a kind of technology for which no satisfactory name has yet been found: that which served an at once mobile and home-centred way of living: a form of mobile privatisation.

Williams was describing the shift from infrastructure that served everyone to technologies built around the mobile, private individual. The shift from railways to peptides is the shift from "we built this for everyone" to "you can buy this for yourself."

One example of an individual optimization tool that really works is Ozempic. Some people need to be on it for medical reasons and others are self-admittedly doing it for aesthetics.

To be clear, Ozempic is a wonderful technology that solves a very real problem for individuals, but it leaves the collective problem like the food system and healthcare access untouched.

It also marks a shift. The internal body is a thing we can really control, with time and resources. What we have is the Ozempic optimization of everything – Ozempicization, if you will. We have a suite of magic shots now in the form of peptides and everything else that address effort and discomfort and complexity.

Everything can be optimized. Everything can be controlled.

Bryan Johnson wants to live forever...

The body is always a site of control precisely because it's a system that still responds to input. Systems are hostile at the moment. The economy and institutions tend to mostly ignore the plight of the individual. But the body listens.

It makes sense that "biohacker" Bryan Johnson and his multimillion-dollar experiment to become 18 years old again have captured the public consciousness. Bryan has something everyone wants – total control over outcomes.

The appeal of his "Don't Die" philosophy is the control – controlling your nutrients, your supplements, your longevity. And for the viewer, that's the appeal – the body is something to control, in the era where everything feels uncontrollable.

This pattern happens a lot. Personally, when I was in college and my dad was very sick, I developed an extreme eating disorder to try and regain control. The control over the body is the first refuge when everything external becomes unmanageable.

This is also seen in wellness culture, "Make America Healthy Again," the peptides, the cosmetic surgeries and enhancements. It's serving an individual purpose of wanting to be healthier or stronger, but it also serves an economic purpose, another vector of control.

It's revealing that Silicon Valley's word of the moment is "agency" as it dresses up that desire for control.

Optimization is the process, control is the desire, and agency is the branding. It's not clear what agency means in startup land (similar to other words often used, like taste) but it does hint at someone who will force the universe to bend to their will, one way or another.

Cluely is a company that embraced this wholeheartedly, the final boss of the hustler economy. Their original ethos was cheating... as a desktop and mobile AI app designed to provide real-time answers and notes via an invisible screen overlay during virtual meetings – and exams and interviews. They have since pivoted into AI notetaking, and they have raised millions and millions of dollars.

For them, 'scamming' was being 'agentic'...

This is indeed the "hottest commodity in Silicon Valley" as Sam Kriss wrote in his piece "Child's Play" for Harper's Magazine:

The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It's called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things.

And they are just doing things, driven by (understandable) fears of the permanent underclass and becoming useless in the age of AI. Apparently, the way that you avoid both of those is by "constantly chasing attention online."

What Bryan Johnson does is highly agentic and highly online. He is always self-experimenting with supplements and psychedelics, with a very strict regime of diet and exercise. It's perhaps the most control (agency?) that anyone has ever had over their body.

He is in fact trying to get so much control that he is essentially playing a version of God.

People have to ask themselves:

• Do I believe in his assertion that we can live forever?

• Do I believe that his body is a proof of concept?

• Do I believe the content that he continuously generates sells the believability of the project well enough?

It quickly turns into a belief market, with Bryan Johnson as an asset. Same thing with Cluely – the investment was based on belief, a belief in control and a belief in agency. But once the body (or the mind, in the sense of agency) becomes an optimizable surface, the self becomes an asset class driven mostly by narrative, and once that happens, you're already inside the logic of belief markets.

'Take back control' – or just lose your money faster...

Prediction markets and crypto run on the same logic – bets on narrative rather than fundamentals, agency through participation. Belief markets promise an exit from limits, physical or financial. They monetize the fear of being left behind, in forms of (1) dying while others don't, (2) not cheating when others are, and (3) being poor while others aren't.

They all mark a shift that has been happening.

• Old capitalism valued productive capacity, the ability to make things.

• Financial capitalism valued cash flow rights, claims on future earnings.

• What we might call belief capitalism values narrative adhesion, the ability to keep enough people inside a story long enough that the story stays load-bearing.

Belief markets require the appearance of accessibility to stay alive. The product sold is "you could be this too."

Brian Armstrong of Coinbase operates in a similar mindset to Bryan Johnson. He is also into longevity and biohacking (and prediction markets) and says that getting old should be optional in the future.

And that mindset carries over into his product. The pitch for Coinbase prediction markets is quite literally "take back control." Kalshi's, a prediction market competitor, is "make your grandkids proud."

Control your future, with us, your friendly neighborhood gambling apps...

The founder of Novig, yet another prediction market app, said that only 20% of their users make money, and touted it as much higher than the rest of the industry. That doesn't sound like much control. That doesn't sound like much of a future.

Everyone is chasing after the gold. Everyone is trying to strike rich, easily and quickly, to "get in on the next big thing and hope for the best," as Bloomberg's Allison Schrager writes.

The general lack of rules combined with the inability to take back control despite it being promised is the extraction part of a belief market. It's the gap between what participation promises (free yourself) and what it delivers (enormous losses and even less freedom than before).

Every solution to "systemic failure" that promises control gets packaged as a product that re-enrolls you into something deeper than what you were escaping.

When spectacle replaces seriousness...

We tend to seek control in every facet of our lives, including information consumption.

Amanda Mull wrote a brilliant article about "monitoring the situation" – people (clearly, like me) who get glued to their screens trying to piece things together. And there is a lot to sort through: war, a government partially shut down, erratic fiscal policy, a weak labor market, high prices, etc.

It's soothing to go to places like Twitter and read the algorithm-curated feeds and to feel like you're... informed. As Mull searingly writes:

If you can dial in your feeds' algorithms just right, maybe you can bear a type of witness so complete it feels like participation, or maybe even control. After all, there's decent evidence that the people launching the bombs are monitoring some of the same feeds you are.

We monitor the situation because monitoring feels like participation, and then the government exploits that by replacing the situation with spectacle.

Throughout the war, the White House communicated entirely through AI-generated memes not unlike Fruit Love Island (a TikTok account where AI-generated fruit act out plotlines from the reality show Love Island), combining video game footage with bombing footage. A senior White House official said as much according to Politico:

We're over here just grinding away on banger memes, dude.

But just as individuals use various things to simulate control, institutions are increasingly using spectacle to simulate stability they can no longer guarantee. Spectacle is the solution, because seriousness requires accountability and accountability requires consequences and consequences require institutions that are willing to enforce them. That just doesn't seem to exist at the moment.

The Fed is in wait-and-see mode, doing the best it can given the circumstances. The government is half-shut down. Corruption is slithering through sewers and escaping from air vents. And diplomacy is being replaced by memes. Iran and the United States have been fighting this war via Twitter. M.B. Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, tweeted:

We are aware of what is happening in the paper oil market, including the firms hired to influence oil futures. We also see the broader jawboning campaign. But let's see if they can turn that into "actual fuel" at the pump – or maybe even print gas molecules!

It's a dig at the financialization of the United States and Trump's approach to managing the war (no war during market hours, big war on the weekends, endless showmanship). He's right – you can't meme your way through a war (although the markets don't seem to care about anything at the moment).

As Juliette Kayyem wrote in the Atlantic about the combination of the enormous security lines (supported by immigration agents) and the tragic Air Canada crash at New York's LaGuardia airport:

These twin crises are separate but related: They are both the result of an approach to governance that neglects the work of governing... The Trump administration has devoted this term to manufacturing fake threats and neglecting quite a few real ones, such as the steady erosion of departments and systems designed to protect people, including airline passengers.

Public safety is not a given – and Americans are learning that it is no longer something that they can take for granted.

The administration has focused on the fake. The great works – Baudrillard, DeBord, Postman – they all saw this coming. People see it coming now. But now, the real is here.

This is a war of economics, with 25% of the world's traded oil and almost half of the world's urea, a fertilizer that makes high yield agriculture feasible, at risk. Oil could go as high as $200 a barrel, leading to another inflationary spiral far worse than COVID. And for what? People are dying. So much is at stake, seemingly for the sake of... engagement?

What should people do in such a world other than to try and control what they can, to optimize, to be "agentic"? When uncertainty is the defining force and there is no clear path toward something different, of course people are going to seek out quick fixes and easy solutions. What else could they do?

What if the economy needs an elimination diet, too?...

It does feel like if Trump had an Ozempic for geopolitics, he would have injected it by now (things do not seem to be going well, at time of writing). But we don't have a peptide stack for the economy, at least not yet.

The understandable cultural response to this instability (which has persisted for many years) has been quick fixes that feel like optimization but are actually avoidance of fixing the larger problems.

• They address the symptom (I feel out of control)

• Without touching the cause (the economic ladders are broken)

The pain that drives people to prediction markets and to speculation is real. But the entire model depends on the absence of the thing it promises.

Raymond Williams wrote in 1961 that "every aspect of our personal life is radically affected by the quality of general life" and yet we insist on seeing it in completely personal terms – and all of this is a great case study of that.

What's being sold as personal control is not actually control. Control would go beyond the individual, to mean affordability and functional institutions and, to quote Kayyem, a government that actually governs. What's being sold instead is the feeling of individual control through the bet, the hack, the feed, the subscription – the optimization, in my case.

The reason we can't solve our problems is not lack of tools or information – it's that the dominant method (add, optimize, measure) is the wrong method for the problem (figure out what's poisoning you.)

Do the slow and boring work and don't assume invincibility. Perhaps the economy (like the body) requires more of an elimination diet approach. People are trying that, like Mamdani's chief savings officers in New York City. What can we cut to be more functional in a healthy way?

Williams also wrote that to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing. Despair right now is extremely convincing and extremely profitable.

Hope would be the opposite: something that doesn't need you to feel desperate in order to work.

New 52-week highs (as of 9/24/26): Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), iMGP DBi Managed Futures Strategy Fund (DBMF), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Illumina (ILMN), IQVIA (IQV), Meta Platforms (META), Cloudflare (NET), Okta (OKTA), Twist Bioscience (TWST), Invesco DB U.S. Dollar Index Bullish Fund (UUP), and Waters (WAT).

In today's mailbag, more thoughts on gas prices... and feedback on yesterday's Digest, which discussed planned increases in U.S. military spending – and the companies that our friend Joel Litman says are positioned to benefit... Do you have a comment or question? As always, e-mail us at feedback@stansberryresearch.com.

"To subscriber Dan, the prices now ARE comparable to 1973. 50 cents then is about $3.50 now. My mpg is almost twice what it was in 1973, so cost per mile for gas is substantially lower in constant dollars." – Subscriber Mark B.

"$1.5 trillion spent on defense/munitions on top of [at least] another $1.5 trillion we overspend the budget, therefore adding three more trillion to the debt for 2027." – Subscriber John M.

Thanks for reading,

Kyla Scanlon
Los Angeles, California
September 25, 2026