Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Michael. Peter. What do you know about this secret? Uh, all I know is that for two weeks now, I've been visualizing having a good opening zinger for this episode. All right, I am going to set the vibes by sending you a YouTube video. Ooh. And I want you to just watch the first 50 seconds of it. Okay. And this is a pure vibe setter. A year ago, my life had collapsed around me. I'd worked myself into exhaustion.
My father died suddenly and my relationships were in turmoil. Little did I know at the time, out of my greatest despair was to come the greatest gift. I've been given a glimpse of a great secret. You know, this secret gives you everything you want. What kind of a house do you want to live in? Do you want to be a millionaire? What kind of a business do you want to have? Do you want more success? What do you really want?
This is like, I guess, presumably the Australian woman who's talking. This is a woman who's like walking through the desert and she's like on a quest. And then she goes up into the attic of her house or something, some sort of like haunted castle. And then she opens a box, like a secret treasure box. And there's a book, like a tome inside that.
with a note that says, Mama, this will help. And then she opens what is fundamentally just like a fairly generic self-help book. That's right. But she's presenting it as this like, yeah, a secret of like how to live, I guess. And when she opens it, images of great philosophers and artists flash before her eyes. I just wanted to...
set the vibe because the secret is a book by Rhonda Byrne. It's released in 2006, but it's based on this documentary of the same name that she wrote and produced. The basic claim of this book is,
Is that it contains the secret to life. When it came out, it was a sensation. It sold, Michael, 30 million copies. Holy shit. That's almost 10 Freakonomics. And Rhonda Byrne herself, who was really just a nobody before this, suddenly everywhere. Talk shows, morning news segments, whole nine yards. Right.
She is an Australian woman, visually sort of like a yassified Paula Deen, Targaryen, platinum hair. And yeah, she has that Snapchat filter look where she just sort of looks almost blurry. Now, the story that is being told in that opening sequence is that Rhonda Byrne was going through a very tough time and then her daughter gave her a book called
titled The Science of Getting Rich. This is a 1910 book by Wallace D. Waddles, who is just an old-timey self-help guy, from what I could gather. And she claims that this sort of like put her on the path to understanding the secret. I don't want to get too far ahead of myself. We'll talk about the substance of the book briefly. But first, I want to talk about the experience of reading the book.
Because it does not feel like reading a book. It feels like reading a book-length, multi-level marketing Facebook post. The format of the entire book is that there will be somewhere between one and three paragraphs of prose by Rhonda Byrne, followed by quotations that illustrate the point being made. Here is a sampling of the folks being quoted. And this is just from the first chapter. There are well over a dozen of these.
Bob Proctor, who is described as a philosopher, author, and personal coach. Okay. Dr. Joe Vitale, described as a metaphysician and marketing specialist, although I did some research and he is a former Amway executive. Nice. Which is just perfect. Yeah.
John Assaraf, described as a money-making expert. Dr. John Demartini, a philosopher and chiropractor. These are grifters, Michael. These are grifters. They have grifter names and grifter professions. Yeah. And they sell grifter things. Money-making professional. It's like...
Being a money-making professional is how he makes his money. That's right. You're paying them to tell you how to make money, but that's how they make money. It's this weird Mobius strip. It's altruism, Michael. They could keep it to themselves, but they are bringing this knowledge to you. It always cracks me up because it's like...
You could imagine a real version of this, a realer version of this, where it's like, here's Warren Buffett. Right. Instead, it's like, here's, you know, Steve, the top salesman at the local GNC. Right. And he's going to explain to you how he understands the secret to the universe. Here's Jack Lemmon from Glengarry Glenroth to tell you. So, you know, I was a few pages into the book and I was like, why is this the format of the book? Why is it just quotes and...
alternating over and over again. And then I realized, remember I said the book was based on her documentary. What's a common documentary format? There's some narration and then it's interspersed with like little quotes from interviews with relevant people, right? What's happening is that Rhonda Byrne isn't writing a book based on her documentary. She is basically writing the novelization of the documentary where it
It's like a carbon copy. So you have like her narrating and then yeah, an expert pops in and says something just like in the documentary. It makes for this very unnatural reading experience, especially when you combine the format with the content. And it's just like,
Layer upon layer of New Age gibberish being presented to you in one of the most unusual book formats I've ever witnessed. I'm... Okay, so I'm having this playing in the background without sound as you're talking. And it's like...
It is just like a parade of talking heads of people with extremely dubious titles. One of them was a Feng Shui consultant. There's all this language on the screen, these title cards about how like the secret was suppressed for so long. And it doesn't sound like it was. It sounds like it was like a book that was published. And it doesn't sound like...
There's very much here that is like kind of worth suppressing. One of the big themes of the book, especially early on, is that she makes this claim that the secret is this thing that's sort of held by the elites. Right. And not purposefully not shared with the people. But at no point, literally not once, is there evidence to like backtrack.
back that up like evidence of the elites hoarding this knowledge i paused this because i can't keep fucking watching this while we're talking because it's it's too rich of a text and when i paused it the title card is a quote that says the secret is the answer to all that has been all that is and all that ever will be ralph waldo emerson
A, that's probably fake. And B, what is he talking about? Is he talking about the same secret? Like that's just a generic quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson. I'm glad you mentioned the Emerson quote. The quote is in the book, but it's jammed in the back. There's like an appendix sort of area that I did not read as closely as the rest of the book because my brain was melting. She attributes a quote to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
where he's talking about the secret, quote unquote. Right. When I read that, I thought, that's weird. A, because I'm not familiar with famed essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson thinking that this sort of new age gibberish is real. Right. And B, because why would he call it the secret, which is promotional terminology that Rhonda Byrne and her cohort sort of like latched onto. So I looked into this
And the only thing I could find about it is one woman, Julia Rickert, in 2007, wrote a piece about trying to track down the source of this, including like talking to Ralph Waldo Emerson experts and never finding any evidence that he ever said. So from what I can tell, Rhonda Byrne made up a quote...
And just attribute it to like a famous author from the 1800s.
Maybe it's a mix-up. Maybe she thought that it came from noted man of letters, Ralph Waldo Emerson, when actually it came from Steve, the Feng Shui chiropractor in a strip mall in Las Vegas. So, all right, let's talk about the content a little bit. Now, as you can gather, the book makes it immediately clear that like the secret is not just a nice thing to know, but a fundamentalist.
fundamental secret to life, right? It's presented as this age old truth known by the great figures of history. That is the gift that she is bestowing upon you. Right. So what is the secret? The secret it is revealed is the law of attraction. She quotes Bob Proctor, aforementioned philosopher and personal coach,
Quote, everything that's coming into your life, you are attracting into your life. And it's attracted to you by virtue of the images you're holding in your mind. It's what you're thinking. Whatever is going on in your mind, you are attracting to you. Byrne later says, quote, thoughts are magnetic.
and thoughts have a frequency. As you think, those thoughts are sent out into the universe, and they magnetically attract all like things that are on the same frequency. Exactly how magnets work. They just attract ideas and events. Yes.
This is one of my favorite fucking things where it's like you can say the most banal shit, but if you tell people that it's forbidden knowledge and it's been hidden from you by the powers that be, your idea will suddenly take on this like special magical property in people's brains. It's just a secret between you and 30 million of your best friends. All she's really saying is like try to have a positive attitude.
Which, whatever, maybe that's true and maybe it's not. But it's like that is something that people have been saying for hundreds of years. There's nothing remotely unique or interesting about that idea. Absolutely. But I think there's a nuance here because it's true that the functional takeaway here is have a positive attitude. But the core of this book...
is not about self-help, right? But what the secret is meant to be is a scientific...
Oh, okay. About the power of positive thinking being a real thing that really works. Right. Peppered throughout the explanations of the law of attraction are various extremely unsourced scientific claims by both Byrne and her various co-experts. Love it. One dude says, quantum physicists tell us that the entire universe emerged from thought. What?
No. I almost pulled a Michael Hobbs and reached out to a quantum physicist about this. And then I said, no, I'm not going to debase myself. It started with thought. Yeah. By the way, not the only time quantum physics is brought up. At one point, the book is addressing the question of how long it takes to manifest what you want once you put it out into the universe, right? Because that's sort of
One of the obvious questions that flows from like, well, if I if I can just attract things into my life with my thoughts, how long does it take? Right. Come next year or whatever. Right. And Byrne says that Einstein told us that time is an illusion and that everything is happening simultaneously and therefore it takes no time.
for the universe to manifest what you want. The only obstacle is you truly believing it. Not what Einstein said, but okay. Yeah, not really what Einstein said. Also, does not make any practical sense, but there's only so much time I can spend on like every little time that she says something that made my head just fucking spin around like the exorcist. If you blast this book at a wall, it goes through two different slits and then it creates a mark on the next wall.
So probabilistically, you can't say where the book is at any given time. So before we get too far, maybe worth pausing to note that the book never explains anything about how the law of attraction works scientifically. Oh, I'm livid. I would have loved like a long, like really try hard scientific explanation. Like some physics diagrams. Yeah.
At certain points, it expressly says that you don't need to know how it works. You just need to know that it works. And there are hints that asking how it works is counterproductive because, quote,
How it will happen, how the universe will bring it to you, is not your concern or your job. When you are trying to work out how it will happen, you are emitting a frequency that contains a lack of faith.
Don't question it. If you think at all about the rank pseudoscience that this is, you're actually denying it and it won't work for you. I mean, you're seeing the direct parallels with religious thinking, right? Totally, yeah. If this is not working for you, if you're confused about it, that's actually you not having enough faith and
Totally. The only way for it to work is for you to not question it. It sounds like every religion and every diet. It's like I'm going to sell you something that probably isn't true. And if you can't make it work for you, it's not the fault of the plan.
It's the fault of you for not being able to implement this like baroque deranged system of like scheduled things and fasting and like macronutrients. I have texted you a couple of images, pages from the book. Okay. I imagine you will be unsettled from the first sentence onward. So this is, I guess, a quote from Bill Harris, who's described as teacher and founder of Centerpoint Research Institute. Mm-hmm.
It says,
His whole life was one of unhappiness and misery, and it all focused around being attacked because he was gay. I began to teach him that he was focusing on what he did not want. I directed him back to his email that he sent me and said, read it again. Look at all the things you do not want that you're telling me about. I can tell you're very passionate about this, and when you focus on something with a lot of passion, it makes it happen even faster. He started taking this thing about focusing on what you want to heart, and he began really trying it.
What happened within the next six to eight weeks was an absolute miracle. All the people in his office who had been harassing him either transferred to another department, quit working at the company, or started completely leaving him alone.
He began to love his job. When he walked down the street, nobody harassed him anymore. They just weren't there. When he did his stand-up comedy routines, he started getting standing ovations and nobody was heckling him. His whole life changed because he changed from focusing on what he did not want, what he was afraid of, what he wanted to avoid, to focusing on what he did want. Yeah. Thoughts? Yeah.
This is true. Sounds totally nothing to pick at here. This is my favorite anecdote in the whole book. It's so good. This dude cured homophobia through the power of the secret. He had his entire department restructured through the power of his mind.
He willed a open mic stand-up comedy career into success. The secret is so powerful that he somehow got a standing ovation at a comedy club. Something that does not happen. Something that has never happened in the history of comedy clubs. So there's a lot going on here. One thing I want to use this to illustrate is that it's not just...
about the power of positive thinking per se, it's that whatever you think about, you attract to you. And that means when you focus on the negative, you're actually attracting those negative things into your life. So if you become obsessed with the people that street harass you, you're attracting street harassment. But if you visualize walking to work with no street harassment, you're attracting that. So
So that's the that's the lesson. When you're getting homophobia done to you, you don't want to dwell on it. You just want to think positively and you will eventually get all of your coworkers laid off. I like how in the history of American victim blaming, we've gone from what was she wearing to what was he thinking? Huge progress.
I'm also, I mean, obviously homophobia still existed in America in the early 2000s. But like, where was Robert getting constant street homophobic harassment? Yeah, you don't want to downplay societal homophobia. But the idea that this guy was going to like stand up comedy clubs and people were just like, get off the stage, you queer. Where was this? I think better advice would have been like move to San Francisco, Robert. Yeah.
So...
The book spends a lot of time going over ways to harness the law of attraction, right? Meditating to clear your mind of bad thoughts, maintaining a mental catalog of happy thoughts. Okay. It is mostly throughout the book, the same concept restated over and over. The interesting parts come when they are trying to discuss like the real world things that you can accomplish using the secret. Okay. Almost immediately, Byrne turns the discussion to making money.
She claims that wealthy people use the secret, whether they know it or not, and that the key to being rich is just thinking about being rich and not thinking about being poor. One expert, quote unquote, says that wealth inequality is explained by the secret. Here's the quote.
Why do you think that 1% of the population earns around 96% of all the money that's being earned? Do you think that's an accident? It's designed that way. They understand something. Oh, hell yeah. They understand the secret. All those heirs to fortunes just have positive thinking and that's the reason they get their like Mars dynasty money when their grandparents die. Yes. I would give up everything I own.
to be able to go back in time and read that to Karl Marx. You get these like pearls of wisdom, like the only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts. Turns out you just don't want money. That's the one thing. Why hasn't anyone asked poor people to want money? Their vibes are too negative, Michael.
We've talked on the show a lot about how most of the books that we cover like could have been magazine articles. I feel like this is one that could have been just a bumper sticker. I don't understand how you can pad this concept out to like 200 pages. I mean, yeah, it could be a tweet that just says, get your vibes right. Yeah. That's it. Again, we are literally explaining poverty here, not as any sort of systemic condition or the consequence. Yeah.
Right. Right.
She quotes some other grifter's book about this that was called like Millionaires of the Bible or something like that. Jesus famously loved inherited wealth. Millionaire Jesus. I'm coming around to the view that she's actually correct.
Because if this is a secret that like all of the world's elites know, and then the secret is that like poor people are poor because they're lazy and they don't want to be rich. That is actually what most rich people believe about poor people. Right. This is just power flattering bullshit that she's like repackaging for people who don't have that much power. The funny part about her claiming that like Jesus is a millionaire is because like,
you can't ever claim that Jesus's vibes were wrong. Yeah. Right. When you're putting out a self-help book and if his vibes were right, he had to be rich because that's how the secret works. Right. You're not editing the ideology. You're editing his biography to make it fit the ideology. Yes. Right. Now, the first sort of case study that Byrne does is called The Secret and Your Body. Oh, no. As you might imagine, it's about using the secret to lose weight. Now, as soon as I saw this, I got
Admittedly, very excited thinking about how mad you are going to get.
I am sending you another portion of this book. Okay. I want you to read it. Oh, no. Even though you've covered almost every type of pseudoscience related to weight, this might still be new to you. So I'm excited. The first thing to know is that if you focus on losing weight, you will attract back having to lose more weight. So get having to lose weight out of your mind. It's the very reason why diets don't work.
What? Okay. Jesus Christ.
A person cannot think thin thoughts and be fat. It completely defies the laws of attraction. Whether people have been told they have a slow thyroid, a slow metabolism, or their body size is hereditary, these are all disguises for thinking fat thoughts.
There's actually science that confirms this, that people in South Pacific islands just have higher rates of fat thoughts. That's why we see higher rates there. When she got to fat thoughts, I had to like do a lap around my apartment.
You resisted texting me about it beforehand, which is nice of you. I really, I was like, oh my God, this is so on point for Michael. I love the circular logic of this. She says, a person cannot think thin thoughts and be fat. It defies the laws of attraction. It's like, well, if it doesn't all come back to thin thoughts, then the law of attraction isn't even true. And we know it's true, therefore. We know it's true. Yeah.
I also love that she throws slow thyroid in there. Like, there are, like, physiological reasons why some people are fatter than others. And she's like, no, no, no. That's the thoughts. That's, like, what this made me realize. So she's expressly saying here that food has no relationship to your weight. But beyond that, that your weight is dictated in full by your thoughts about your weight. Right.
Which is the first time it hit me that like not only is the law of attraction fake science, but it's also supplanting real science. Right. Not only are you fat because you're thinking fat thoughts, but your thyroid condition is not real. Right. Your bodybuilding routine is useless. You should just visualize being jacked. I wonder if she's proposing any limits to this. So like I'm five foot six. I'm 40 years old. If I start thinking tall thoughts, will I be like six one by the
This basic question in its various forms haunted me throughout the book. If you read what their claims are, literally...
There is nothing stopping you from visualizing being taller and therefore getting taller. Fuck yeah. They will expressly say there is no limit to the law of attraction, right? The universe's power is infinite. I believe that if you ask them this question, my best guess is what they would say is that like our collective belief that this is impossible is
makes it impossible. Right. So I can't, humans can't fly because we all think that humans can't fly. Remember in Miracle on 34th Street when everyone starts believing in Santa? Yeah. If we could, if we could pull off that kind of collective energy. Mm-hmm.
We all grow two inches. It also implies, because I know too much actual science of fatness to like swallow fucking any of this. It also implies that Americans started becoming fatter in the 1980s because we all started having more fat thoughts. But then what would the cause of that be? Like she's just pushing the causality up one level. Well, beyond that, every social trend, Michael...
Michael, of any type. Right. Is just the result of vibe shifts. All of it. Wait, has she told Stephen Leavitt about his abortion and crime hypothesis? Because I think that we have some more explaining to do about the 1990s. Actually, Bill Clinton just manifested low crime rates. Thank you. So she puts all of this weight loss stuff in the context of like,
Aren't we all trying to lose a little bit of weight, ladies? But the implication is also that like a starving person could manifest a healthier weight through positive thinking. Right. Right. And you see this dark current running throughout this book, occasionally made explicit that human suffering is something that people bring on themselves because their vibes are off. Right.
If you're poor or sick, that is something you could fix by just properly visualizing being rich and healthy. And if you view the world like this, things like charity and human kindness are literally useless, right? You cannot help other people. They can only improve their circumstances by manifesting it. Like just this...
truly dark view of the world. The framing of it as a secret also invites you to become an evangelist for this, right? And like walk up to fat people who you see on the street and be like, did you know? And just be terrible to them, right? Because it's like, I know something that you don't. Any marginalized minority, you would give them a fucking lecture about their attitude. So worth taking a step back here, I think, and realizing that the premise of this book is that it is telling you the secret to the universe, right?
And then they follow that up by explaining how to get skinny and rich with it. Imagine having like the power of all the infinity stones. And then you look around the entire world and you're like, I want a six pack. That's your finger snap is like, you know what? 2% body fat. That's it. Thanos just snapped his fingers and gets like a little more vascular. Yeah.
I mean, there are sections of the book that are a little bit emotionally healthier, if I could put it. There's a part about using the secret in relationships, which actually focuses a lot on loving yourself in order to attract love from others, making it by a wide margin the least problematic portion of the book.
I know, that's actually... Yeah, I was like, yeah. On a relative scale, that's not that bad. There's a chapter on the secret and health, which goes beyond losing weight and unfortunately talks expressly about using the secret to cure diseases. Yeah, that's not good. Now, we have a...
as you can tell, taken a turn away from the emotionally healthy portions of the book pretty quickly. Yeah. Recall what I mentioned about the science of the secret supplanting real science. Yeah. Byrne says that you cannot catch any virus unless you think you can. Oh, no. So I guess the claim is that the field of virology is an illusion of some sort. Fake shit. The COVID pandemic was just because the entire world at once decided to make themselves safe.
vulnerable to this, I guess, virus that doesn't exist. That's right. It's a plandemic. There's a story shared about a woman who claims to have used the secret to cure her breast cancer, which is actually a piece of shit move because you could theoretically manifest
Right. So she could have manifested the actual cure for breast cancer. But instead, she just cured herself. Very selfish. I know. Why doesn't she manifest that like a big research breakthrough? All of these people claim to like have this sort of mastered and none of them have ever done anything good for the world. Yeah.
Can I manifest like a bunch of billionaires deciding to pay their taxes? Can I manifest that? At some point, we need to talk about the conflicting manifestations. Oh, yeah. What happens when one person is manifesting one thing and one person is manifesting another. Right. Never explained. Okay. All right. Byrne says, quote, you can think your way to the perfect state of health, the perfect body, the perfect weight, and eternal youth. Okay.
And it's hard to read this section without wondering what the death toll of this book might be. I know. I remember when we were talking about the title of our podcast, we were like, is this going too far? But then we have books like this. Yeah. It's like, we're not going far enough. Jesus Christ. Moving on to like the sort of extraneous chapters toward the end of the book, there's a chapter called The Secret to the World about using the secret to make the world a better place. But...
One thing the book never really makes clear is the extent to which your use of the secret impacts others. Remember, that's not the case with the book.
That one guy fixed homophobia among what seemed to be a few dozen people at least, right? And in doing so, violated their religious liberty. So how do we balance that? If you can will away localized homophobia, can someone just manifest world peace? What are the limits here? What about just peace in like one decent sized place, right? I live in Queens. Could I manifest peace?
No crime in Queens. Could I manifest decent Mexican food in Berlin? The final chapters are titled The Secret to You and The Secret to Life, respectively. Same drivel over and over again. You have the power to manifest anything and everything. Go forth and prosper. And that's sort of it. That's how the book wraps. There is a sort of semi-appendix that just gives like...
sort of mini biographies of all of the contributors. Oh, filler, the filler in these fucking books. Right, right. Once you hit the actual end of the book, you're at like 160 pages. And so you could tell that some publisher was like, I'm going to need 40 more. Yeah, we just need, we got to hit the marks, man. So yeah, I mean, that's the substance of the book. I think it makes sense to step back and think about this book's
in like the canon of self-help, which I imagine we'll be returning to many times on this podcast. Yeah, unfortunately. I think part of what's happening here is that The Secret is taking the genre and
to like its natural end point. These books propose magic bullet solutions to complex problems, right? And so it sort of makes sense that eventually someone would take that idea and just make it explicit. Right. Not like I'm giving you useful advice, but like I'm giving you
the magic bullet. I'm giving you an ironclad scientific way to fix all of your problems in like the snap of a finger. It was like the only place that this sort of positive thinking self-help grift could go. It had gone everywhere else. The point had already been made a hundred times by a thousand different people. And here we are, right? At the natural endpoint, which is just taking it to the most absurd possible place. Do you, I mean...
I always really struggle with books like this because I feel like on some level, it probably is good advice to tell people to like, you know, I don't know, not wallow in misery. Yeah, yeah. There's a version of this advice that is like kind of prudent, right? Like 100% you, you are dealing with a job loss. I am going through a breakup. I have a tendency to like wallow in sadness and anxiety. And I have had people tell me like,
maybe try to think about something you enjoy or like maybe try to do something you love right now. Yeah. The responsible version of that advice is like, this will help a little bit, right? It's like taking a Tylenol or something like, is it, is it going to make your back pain go away? No, but it's going to like lessen it a little bit. It'll help. Yeah. So the problem here isn't necessarily that these books are telling people to think positively. It's that they're telling them to think positively in every situation that
And the inability to think positively is something that explains societal phenomena around you, which it really doesn't. If you want to explain cancer rates, you should look at like, I don't know, environmental toxins. Yes, but what's upstream of environmental toxins? It's people manifesting environmental toxins. You have to go deeper. Michael, it's always manifestation. Yeah.
Like on a serious note, like it's hard not to imagine the ways in which this would get in the way of actual self-improvement. Right. Right. We've talked about how this can blame indigent and sick people for their own lot.
But like what about when someone is the victim of ongoing abuse, right? Like there may be things that they should do and do quickly if they want to escape the abuse, if they want to survive. But what The Secret is telling you is that it's all
all of that is just an illusion, right? All of that is just an output of your own thoughts. And therefore what you really need to do is visualize yourself in a better situation, which is not just victim blaming, although it is, but it impedes actual solutions, actual actions the victim might take to make themselves safer. I don't think it's difficult to conceptualize of circumstances where this advice is just like flat out dangerous. What's so bleak to me about it is that
not the content of the book, but the fact that it was so popular and like Oprah famously gave it a ton of,
credibility. I feel like so much of it comes back to this is such my like old man thought, but like historical literacy. I mean, this is one of the oldest ideas of humanity, right? Is that it's all attitude. You need to think positively to get ahead. There's no societal structures that affect you in any way, blah, blah, blah. One thing I've learned from doing the show with Aubrey is that like there's medicine shows that were peddling the same bullshit in like the late 1800s. Yeah, it's it's
Really weird to me that at no point was there like a producer at the Oprah show who was like, wait a minute, this has been proposed as like the key to humanity roughly 10,000 times before. And none of them have worked out. And, you know, I mean, look, when you have pseudoscientific bullshit rising to enormous levels of prominence.
You know that Oprah's involved. She has to be. Yeah. Right? So the Oprah saga gets pretty dark pretty quickly. Yeah. Oprah has Byrne on her show in like 2007 and gives her like a full-throated endorsement saying that she should be, that viewers should be teaching the concept to their kids. Oh. A few months after Byrne is featured on the show, a woman named Kim Tinkham wrote to Oprah saying that after hearing about the secret on the show, she...
she decided to forego chemotherapy for her breast cancer and instead rely on the power of positive thinking. Oprah flies her out to be on the show and to tell her, hey, don't ignore modern science.
Which is sort of bizarre because the woman was not misreading the book. The book expressly says that the secret can and has cured breast cancer and very heavily implies that medical treatment itself is functionally a placebo.
So Oprah, I assume, has some sort of realization behind the scenes. Yeah. And has to dedicate a whole show to low-key being like, look, this doesn't actually work, guys. I mean, don't do what this says. Yeah. One thing I think a lot about is in season two of the Dream podcast, which was all about the wellness industry, there's the story of this woman who went to a wellness retreat and it was all about like they're building like a little shrine in the middle of a pond and
And they have these like sort of counselors who are guiding them through it and are like, whatever you do, don't knock over the shrine. Whatever you do, it can't get wet. Right. And as their group is building the shrine in the middle of this pond, someone someone's elbow or something like knocks it over, even though they've been given this exhortation a million times that it's like the sacred object.
And they'll ruin the effect if it gets wet. They just all quietly set it back up and keep going and don't tell the counselors. That's kind of what they want, right? It's like they don't want you to actually believe this stuff. Yeah, which is, I mean, classic.
classic Oprah, right? To just quietly step back after the damage is irrevocably done, right? Like she has these quacks on her show nonstop and then cuts them loose when someone starts to ask like any of the obvious questions that the presence of those quacks implies. But like, oops, too late. Dr. Oz is a senator. Yeah.
Some of the other sort of weird things swirling around this book, there are tales of the secrets, extended universe, all of the associated grifters. One, James Ray, quoted throughout the book,
Okay.
Oh, fuck. It was basically meant to be pseudo meditative thing where you're in the very hot sweat lodge. All reports say that he discouraged people from leaving except at like certain set times.
intervals and that many people wanted to leave and felt discouraged or expressly blocked by some stories. He was charged with negligent homicide and served two years for it. Holy shit. During the investigation before he was charged, I believe, he had a conference call with many of his followers and people that were there.
And he brought a medium onto that conference call who claimed to be communicating with the dead people. Oh, no. And reported to everyone there that the dead people had left their bodies of their own volition during the ceremony and enjoyed themselves so much that they decided to stay alive.
No way. So they are okay with dying and they don't want to come back? So like don't hold me accountable for the deaths basically? They wanted to die. They chose to and they loved it. And so they stayed dead. That was the explanation given.
Oh my, imagine if you could do this at like every murder trial. Like I, you know, I know I stabbed Susan to death, but I've talked to Susan. She's okay with it. Why am I in trouble for Susan thinking dead thoughts? Right. If she had manifested physically tougher skin, maybe the knife wouldn't have penetrated it. I don't know what to tell you, judge. Weak skin thoughts. Disgusting.
Anyway, yeah, that guy is back in the self-help game, of course. Should go without saying. Obviously. And he's doing fine. Yeah. Good. Burn herself would go on to publish a bunch of near identical books. The Power was the immediate sequel. The Magic...
Hero, How the Secret Changed My Life, which is just a bunch of testimonials. Her latest she published in 2020, and it's titled The Greatest Secret, which you might think based on the title was going to be a new secret. But based on some pretty light research, I'm confident is just the same secret again. So, yeah. I mean, I'll give her points for consistency. At least she's not like moving on to some like completely new grift. Yeah, I guess instead of manifesting world peace, she decided to manifest...
Writing the same book over and over again for 15 years.
To each her own, you know? Just like Beethoven. Just like Ralph Waldo Emerson. They all knew it. Oh, man. I mean, it's hard to articulate how uncomfortable it felt to read this, like knowing how successful it was. Yeah, I know. God. I cannot imagine reading this book and feeling inspired. I can't imagine reading this book and feeling anything other than like a little bit upset. Yeah. It's like...
These are like the book is proposing the tenets of the fall of human civilization, just like the complete disconnection of every person from every other person, the discarding of all knowledge heretofore acquired, all of it to be replaced by the unfiltered pursuit of our shallowest desires. Right. This is the worst book in history, Michael. It's the worst. Yeah.
I'm picturing a debate between Rhonda Byrne and like a panel of experts, like a quantum physicist, a doctor, you know, et cetera. And they all make the case for why the secret is pseudoscience. And...
They do that for hours. And then Rhonda Byrne steps up and is just like, well, aren't these a bunch of negative Nancys? Yeah. And the entire audience like erupts into applause. That's not a prediction. That's just you watching Oprah. Yeah.