Nir Eyal

Placebo pills that people know are placebos, and you'll see in the five-star reviews, effusive praise about providing fast-acting relief.

Now, these people aren't lying.

It's just the placebo effect is incredibly effective.

The second interesting finding is that the placebo effect is getting stronger.

Why would the placebo effect get stronger?

By the way, this is a big problem.

Every pharmaceutical company needs to test its treatment against a placebo-controlled group in a double-blind placebo study.

The patient doesn't know if they're taking a placebo.

The administrator doesn't know if they're giving a placebo.

And this is a big problem because if you have a new drug, you have to demonstrate that it's more efficacious than the placebo.

And so if a placebo effect keeps getting stronger and stronger as it has over the past 50 years, this presents a serious challenge to pharmaceutical companies.

Well, why is the placebo effect getting stronger?

The placebo effect is getting stronger because more people are hearing that the placebo effect works.

And so they anticipate it to work.

And so it does.

Yeah, it's an incredible success.

And who knows?

A company is not built on one product.

But the fact that a company like Liquid Death

could so upend the orthodoxy of the water bottling industry that when it first came out, everybody thought it was a joke.