I built a placebo company on purpose

The moment I knew I was going to do this, I was standing in a Whole Foods staring at a $48 bottle of something called Adaptogenic Calm Complex. The label had a watercolor leaf on it. The back promised, in carefully lawyered structure-function language, to "support a sense of balance." There was a little asterisk. The asterisk pointed to the FDA disclaimer in 6-point type that, when you actually read it, says: we are not claiming this does anything.

I bought the bottle. I am not above this. I took the pills for two weeks. I felt, I think, slightly calmer. Then I ran out and didn't reorder, and felt, I think, about the same.

What stuck with me wasn't the pills. It was the gap between what the label implied and what the label legally said. The brand was selling me belief, dressed up as biochemistry, with a disclaimer at the bottom quietly admitting the trick. The whole supplement aisle works this way. A $50 billion industry in the US runs on the open secret that most of what you're paying for is the story, the bottle, and the ritual of taking it.

I kept thinking: what if we just said that out loud?

So we built Mycebo. It is a bottle of inert capsules — microcrystalline cellulose, the same filler used in almost every pill on the market, with a vegan capsule shell around it. The label says "not medicine." The website says "this is a placebo." There is no active ingredient and no implied one. You name the bottle yourself — More Patience, Steady Mornings, whatever you want it to be for — and we print your words on the label larger than ours.

The hook is supposed to be the reveal. But the reveal isn't really the point. The point is that the belief, the ritual, and the daily practice were always doing the work. Every supplement that ever helped you was, at minimum, doing that. We're just removing the asterisk.

There's real research behind this. Open-label placebos — pills people know are placebos — have outperformed no-treatment controls in published trials for IBS, chronic low back pain, migraine, and more. I'll get into the specific studies in the next post. For now: the mechanism is real, it's documented, and it stops working the moment you decide it's stupid. Which is fair. It's a little stupid. It's also been quietly running the wellness industry for a hundred years.

So this blog. It's called Field Notes because that's what it is — notes from the build. I'm going to write here when something interesting happens: when a study changes my mind, when a customer (eventually) tells me a story I didn't expect, when I get a question I don't have a clean answer to, when I go down a rabbit hole on the history of sham surgery and come back with something worth sharing.

It will not be a content marketing operation. It will be one person, occasionally his collaborators, thinking in public about a strange little company.

If that sounds interesting, the next post is about the 2010 Harvard study that made me think any of this was possible.

— Anton