Day 1608
Be Delusionally Optimistic
The placebo effect is usually discussed as a strange quirk of medicine. I think it contains a much bigger lesson about how to live.
I re-watched an old episode of Thinking Allowed recently featuring Michael Talbot, author of The Holographic Universe. The interview was recorded about six months before Talbot died in May 1992, which means this conversation about consciousness, synchronicity, belief, and reality has been sitting around for more than three decades. It holds up better than most things recorded last week.
One story Talbot told has been stuck in my head ever since.
It’s about a cancer patient known in the medical literature as Mr. Wright. He was dying of lymphoma, and he had become convinced that an experimental drug called Krebiozen could save him. His physician, Dr. Philip West, had little reason to share the optimism. But the man was going to die soon anyway, so he figured: why not give him what he wants.
What happened next is the part nobody forgets. Wright’s tumors, in West’s own words, melted “like snowballs on a hot stove.” Within days he was up walking around the ward, and eventually he left the hospital. Then reports started appearing that Krebiozen didn’t actually work. Wright read them. His cancer came back.
West noticed the correlation and tried something you could never get past an ethics board today. He told Wright the reports were mistaken, that a newer, double-strength batch of Krebiozen had just arrived, and then he injected him with sterile water. Wright recovered again. Eventually the definitive negative reports came out. Wright read those too, deteriorated, and died shortly after.
It’s an old anecdote, not a controlled trial, and nobody should read it and conclude that positive thinking is a substitute for life saving surgery. There are ordinary explanations for parts of the story. Although I’ll be honest: I’d rather be wrong and get my desired outcome than right and dead. And I think being careful about the claim makes the underlying idea more interesting, not less. Because the placebo effect itself is not in dispute.
Modern research has documented placebo and nocebo effects in pain, Parkinson’s, migraine, anxiety, depression, gut disorders, immune and endocrine responses, physical performance, and plenty more. Your expectations don’t give you magical control over reality. But they’re not just thoughts floating harmlessly inside your skull, either. Sometimes they become biology.
Which makes me wonder how badly we underestimate what we believe about ourselves.
You Are Always Taking Something
We picture a placebo as a sugar pill. That’s too narrow.
Every morning you swallow beliefs. What people tell you about your career. What strangers say about the economy. Somebody’s prediction about your marriage, your health, your generation, your odds. Your industry is dying, raising kids is misery, you’ll never afford a house, you’re getting old, the country is doomed, AI is coming for your job, the food you’re eating is killing you and the food they’re eating is saving them. Scroll for ten minutes and you’ve ingested a hundred tiny verdicts about how the world works, and you absorb far more of it than you realize.
There’s a phrase I keep coming back to: schizo by a thousand voices. Shout out Mr. Long.
The internet gave us access to more human thought than any generation in history. That sounds unquestionably good until you remember that human thought includes fear, stupidity, sarcasm, resentment, trolling, advertising, insecurity, propaganda, half-truths, jokes stripped of context, and confidently stated opinions from people who have no idea what they’re talking about. Then we put all of it in our pockets.
I am pretty sure the great mental challenge of our time is deciding which information gets permission to enter your model of reality.
The Nocebo Is Real Too
The placebo effect has a darker twin.
Tell someone something will hurt and it often hurts more. Warn them about side effects and they become more likely to feel them. According to my clanker, a 2024 meta-analysis covering 130 studies and more than 8,000 participants found a meaningful nocebo effect across health outcomes, and another found that the stronger the negative expectation researchers planted, the stronger the nocebo that followed. I’m not going to share the study link because I didn’t read it, so sure take it with a grain of salt, but I’m going to trust the clanker on this one personally.
Now think about the sentences people repeat to themselves. I’m unlucky. I’m terrible with money. I’m awkward. I’m not a writer. People don’t like me. I could never do that.
Those feel like objective descriptions. What if they’re also instructions for your subconscious?
If you believe you’re socially awkward, you enter the room differently. You hesitate, you make less eye contact, you read an ambiguous expression as rejection. The other person senses your discomfort and pulls back, and their pulling back confirms exactly what you walked in believing. Congratulations. You just manufactured evidence for your own worldview.
None of that requires anything supernatural.
I Have Done This to Myself in the Other Direction
At some point I started telling myself: I am a writer.
That was slightly ridiculous. Nobody descended from the heavens and bestowed the title upon me. There wasn’t a ceremony. I didn’t submit an application to the International Bureau of Writers. I just started writing, then I kept writing, and eventually people paid me to write. The belief showed up before most of the evidence did.
Same thing happened with Bitcoin. I wanted to work in the industry. I had no perfectly mapped career path that made the outcome inevitable. I simply became convinced I would find my way in somehow, and eventually I did.
You can describe all of that without invoking manifestation, quantum mechanics, or anything remotely mystical. Belief changed behavior. Behavior changed probability. Probability eventually produced outcomes.
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But stripping away the mystical explanation doesn’t make the thing any less beautiful to me. A person who believes something is possible searches differently than a person who believes it’s impossible. They notice different opportunities, talk to different people, persist longer, interpret setbacks differently, and take another swing. The belief becomes a filter, and before long the filtered reality starts producing evidence that strengthens the filter.
Maybe Delusion Gets a Bad Rap
There are limits, obviously. If I convince myself I can breathe underwater, reality will issue a fairly aggressive correction. If I smoke cigarettes while repeating “these are making my lungs stronger,” I haven’t discovered a loophole in biology.
The useful version of optimism isn’t denying reality. It’s choosing the most constructive interpretation of reality that the available evidence permits.
If I’m drinking a beer with friends, I can think: I’m poisoning myself and tomorrow is going to suck. Or I can think: I’m going to enjoy this beer, loosen up, and laugh with people I love. The alcohol hasn’t changed. I have.
Same principle far beyond substances. Walk into a job interview believing you’re wasting their time and your body will advertise the belief before your mouth does. Walk in knowing you have something valuable to offer and you behave differently. There’s no guarantee you get the job. That part matters. Optimism doesn’t guarantee outcomes. It shifts the probability distribution.
The Holographic Part
Talbot’s larger argument was much stranger. The Holographic Universe explores the possibility that reality itself has holographic characteristics, drawing on the physicist David Bohm and the neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, and wondering whether the apparently separate pieces of the world might be expressions of some deeper interconnected whole.
Is the universe literally a hologram? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows for sure besides God. But there’s something beautiful in the metaphor: in a hologram, information about the whole is distributed throughout every part.
Something vaguely analogous seems true of a human life. How you think about yourself leaks into everything: your posture, your language, your work, your marriage, your friendships, the risks you take, the opportunities you notice. Other people start receiving signals generated by a belief they can’t even see. Which means changing the internal model can slowly change the external world. The universe does not owe you anything, but you are part of the universe, which means you can change it!
My Wife Has Been Going Down This Rabbit Hole
Recently my wife has been exploring synchronicities, paying closer attention to those strange little coincidences that normally dissolve into the background of a day. I love watching it. Maybe every synchronicity has a perfectly ordinary explanation. Maybe some don’t. I’m increasingly comfortable leaving certain questions unanswered.
What interests me more is what happens when you start paying attention. You suddenly notice how strange existence already is. I have a beautiful family. I get to write. I get to work on things I find interesting. I get to laugh. I get to build. I get another morning tomorrow, God willing. How bizarre that the human mind can receive all of that and still spend half the afternoon worrying because my golf round today didn’t go as plan and I was 10 strokes away from breaking 100. It’s a freaking game move on Conor! You had fun anyways playing at nice course in Ponte Vedra with your cousins and you’ll get another chance soon enough :)
Just remember, scarcity is easy to hallucinate & so is abundance. Maybe I should get more deliberate about which hallucination I choose.
Take the Good Placebo
So I’m running the experiment. I want to believe better things.
I am lucky beyond measure. I am a writer. I am capable. I am loved. I am handsome. I am successful. I have a beautiful family. I live an incredible life.
There are people who will read that list and cringe. Fine. I would rather risk being slightly delusional in the direction of gratitude than perfectly rational in the direction of misery.
Because the alternative placebo is being administered constantly, whether you consent or not. The world will happily tell you that you’re behind. The algorithm will serve you richer people, prettier people, more successful people, bigger houses, better vacations, smarter children, faster cars, larger portfolios. Thousands of carefully cropped lives to measure your own against. You can swallow that pill every morning if you’d like.
I don’t want it. Give me the other one.
Give me the belief that my life is an absurd gift. That there are opportunities I haven’t found yet. That the next person I meet might become a friend. That my best writing is still ahead of me. That failures are information rather than verdicts. That something wonderful could happen tomorrow.
Then let those beliefs change how I behave today.
Maybe that’s placebo. Maybe it’s just psychology, expectancy and conditioning doing their quiet work. Maybe something much stranger is running underneath reality than we currently understand. I don’t know. But I know which model of the world I’d rather inhabit.
Be delusionally optimistic. Reality will correct you when you’re wrong and you can adjust accordingly then go right back to being delusionally optimistic again.
P.S — I have one more thought on all of this which might make a better stand up routine, but before I hit an open mic I felt it was worth adding to this essay: it still amazes me that pharma isn’t allowed to advertise in most of the world, yet in the United States and New Zealand it is. And where it is allowed, the ads always must include fear (side effects). I can’t help wondering how different the outcomes might be if the framing leaned into positive expectancy instead.
Imagine a Viagra ad that skipped the ominous side effect voiceover and said: Side effects may include rip-roaring orgasms for your wife, the biggest you have looked in ages, improved muscle tone, healthier blood flow, and a sex drive you haven’t felt since your twenties. Warning: if your erection lasts longer than four hours, you may need to make love again.
I genuinely believe people would not only feel better about taking it, they might actually get better results and fewer perceived side effects.
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t — you’re right.” — Henry Ford
8/16/26
Conor Jay Chepenik
