Rhonda Byrne's "The Secret" sold millions of copies based on a simple premise: All of science is fake and the only reason anything ever happens is because people manifest it by communicating with the universe.
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Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!
Rhonda Byrne's "The Secret" sold millions of copies based on a simple premise: All of science is fake and the only reason anything ever happens is because people manifest it by communicating with the universe.
Where to find us:
Sources:
Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!
Peter: Michael.
Michael: Peter.
Peter: What do you know about The Secret?
Michael: All I know is that for two weeks now, I've been visualizing having a good opening zinger for this episode.
[If Books Could Kill theme]
Peter: All right, I am going to set the vibe by sending you a YouTube video.
Michael: Ooh.
Peter: And I want you to just watch the first 50 seconds of it.
Michael: Okay.
Peter: And this is a pure vibe setter.
[video clip]
Rhonda Bryne: 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. [Michael laughs] I'd been given a glimpse of a great Secret.
Male Speaker: This secret gives you everything you want. What kind of a host you want to live in?
Female Speaker: Do you want to be a millionaire?
Male Speaker: What kind of a business do you want to have?
Female Speaker: Do you want more success?
Male Speaker: What do you really want?
[video clip ends]
Michael: 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 some sort of like, haunted castle. [Peter laughs] And then she opens a box, like a secret treasure box. And there's a book like a tomb inside with a note that says, “Mama, this will help.”
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Michael: And then she opens what is fundamentally just like a fairly generic self-help book. [laughs]
Peter: That's right.
Michael: But she's presenting it as this, like yeah, a secret of how to live, I guess.
Peter: And when she opens it, images of great philosophers and artists flash before her eyes.
Michael: Right. [laughs]
Peter: 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 that it contains The Secret to life. When it came out, it was a sensation. It sold, Michael, 30 million copies.
Michael: Holy shit. [laughs] That's almost 10 Freakonomicses.
Peter: Rhonda Byrne, herself, who was really just a nobody before this, suddenly everywhere. Talk shows, morning news segments, whole nine yards. She is an Australian woman, visually like a Yassified Paula Deen, Targaryen platinum hair. Yeah, she has that Snapchat filter look where she just looks almost blurry.
Michael: Right.
Peter: Now, the story that she 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 titled The Science of Getting Rich. This is a 1910 book by Wallace D. Wattles, who was just an old timey self-help guy from what I could gather. She claims that this 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, multilevel marketing Facebook post. [Michael laughs] 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.
Michael: Okay.
Peter: Here is a sampling of the folks being quoted. 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. Dr. Joe Vitale, described as a metaphysician and marketing specialist, although I did some research and he is a former Amway Executive-
[laughter]
Peter: -which is just, mwah, perfect. John Assaraf, described as a money-making expert. [Michael laughs] Dr. John Demartini, a philosopher and chiropractor. [Michael laughs] These are grifters, Michael. These are grifters. They have grifter names and grifter professions and they sell grifter things.
Michael: Money making professional, it's like being a money-making professional is how he makes his money.
Peter: That's right.
Michael: You're paying them to tell you how to make money, but that's how they make money. It's this weird Möbius strip.
Peter: It's altruism, Michael. [Michael laughs] They could keep it to themselves, but they are bringing this knowledge to you. It always cracks me up because you could imagine a real version of this, a realer version of this, where it's like, here's Warren Buffett. Instead it's like, here's Steve, the top salesman at the local GNC. He's going to explain to you how he understands The Secret to the universe.
Michael: Here's Jack Lemon from Glengarry Glen Ross, to tell you.
Peter: 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 statements 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 little quotes from interviews with relevant people. 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's like a carbon copy. So, you have her narrating, and, yeah, an expert pops in and says something just like in the documentary.
Michael: Right.
Peter: It makes for this very unnatural reading experience, especially when you combine the format with the content. 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.
Michael: Okay, so I'm having this playing in the background without sound as you're talking. [laughs] 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 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. It doesn't sound like there's very much here that is kind of worth suppressing.
Peter: 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 held by the elites.
Michael: Right.
Peter: And purposefully not shared with the people. But at no point, literally, not once is there evidence to, like, back that up. Like, evidence of the elites hoarding this knowledge.
Michael: I paused this because I can't keep fucking watching this while we're talking because it's too rich of a text. 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.
Peter: I'm glad you mentioned the Emerson quote. The quote is in the book, but it's jammed in the back and there's, like, an appendix area that I did not read as closely as the rest of the book because my brain was melting.
[laughter]
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: She attributes a quote to Ralph Waldo Emerson, where he's talking about “The Secret.” When I read that I thought, "That's weird. A, because I'm not familiar with famed essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson thinking that this New Age gibberish is real." B, because why would he call it The Secret, which is promotional terminology that Rhonda Byrne [Michael laughs] and her cohort like, latched on to. 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. [Michael laughs] From what I can tell, Rhonda Byrne, made up a quote and just attributed it to, like, a famous author from 1800s.
[laughter]
Michael: 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. [Peter laughs]
Peter: All right, let's talk about the content a little bit. Now, as you can gather, the book makes it immediately clear that The Secret is not just a nice thing to know, but a fundamental secret to life, right?
Michael: Mm-hmm.
Peter: 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.
Michael: Right.
Peter: So, what is The Secret? The Secret, it is revealed, is the law of attraction. She quotes, Bob Proctor, aforementioned philosopher and personal coach, “Everything that's coming into your life, you are attracting into your life-”
Michael: Oh, my God.
Peter: “-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, “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."
Michael: Exactly how magnets work. They just attract ideas and events. Yes. [Peter laughs] 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 special magical property in people's brains.
Peter: It's just a secret between you and 30 million of your best friends.
Michael: All she's really saying is, like, try to have a positive attitude, which whatever, maybe that's true and maybe it's not. It's like, that is something that people have been saying [laughs] for hundreds of years. There's nothing remotely unique or interesting about that idea.
Peter: Absolutely. 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. What The Secret is meant to be is a scientific claim about the power of positive thinking being a real thing that really works. Peppered throughout the explanations of the Law of Attraction are various extremely unsourced scientific claims by both Byrne and her various co-experts.
Michael: Love it.
Peter: One dude says, "Quantum physicists tell us that the entire universe emerged from thought."
Michael: [laughs] No.
Peter: I almost pulled the Michael Hobbes and reached out to a quantum physicist about this, and then I said, [Michael laughs] “No, I'm not going to debase myself.”
Michael: It started with thought. [laughs]
Peter: 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 because that's one of the obvious questions that flows from, like, "Well, if I can just attract things into my life with my thoughts, how long does it take? Does it come next year or whatever?"
Michael: Right.
Peter: 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.”
Michael: Not what Einstein said, but okay. [laughs]
Peter: Yeah. Not really what Einstein said also does not make any practical sense. There's only so much time I can spend on every little time that she says something that made my head just fucking spin around like The Exorcist.
Michael: If you blast this book at a wall, it goes through two different slits, and then it creates a mark on the next wall. [Peter laughs] So, probabilistically you can't say where the book is at any given time.
Peter: 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.
Michael: Oh, I'm livid. I would have loved a long, really try [laughs] hard scientific explanation.
Peter: Like some physics diagram.
[laughter]
Peter: At certain points, it expressly says that you don't need to know how it works. You just need to know that it works. There are hints that asking how it works is counterproductive because, “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.”
Michael: 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.
Peter: I mean, you're seeing the direct parallels with religious thinking, right?
Michael: Totally.
Peter: If this is not working for you, if you're confused about it, that's actually you not having enough faith, and the only way for it to work is for you to not question it.
Michael: It sounds like every religion and every diet. [laughs] It's like, I'm going to sell you something that probably isn't true. If you can't make it work for you, it's not the fault of the plan.
Peter: Yeah
Michael: It's the fault of you for not being able to implement this, like, Baroque deranged system [laughs] of scheduled things and fasting and macronutrients.
Peter: I have texted you a couple of images pages from the book.
Michael: Okay.
Peter: I imagine you will be unsettled from the first sentence onward.
Michael: This is, I guess, a quote from, Bill Harris, who's described as teacher and founder of Centerpointe Research Institute. It says, “Robert was gay. He outlined all of the grim realities of his life in his emails to me. In his job, his co-workers ganged up on him. When he walked down the street, he was accosted by homophobic people who wanted to abuse him in some way. He wanted to become a stand-up comedian. When he did a stand-up comedy job, everybody heckled him about being gay. 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. 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. [Peter laughs] 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.”
Peter: Yeah. Thoughts?
[laughter]
Michael: This is true. Sounds totally nothing to pick at here.
Peter: This is my favorite anecdote in the whole book. It's so good. [Michael laughs] This dude cured homophobia through the power of The Secret. He had his entire department restructured through the power of his mind. He willed an open mic stand-up comedy career into success.
Michael: The Secret is so powerful that he's somehow got a standing ovation at a comedy club, [Peter laughs] something that does not happen.
Peter: Something that has never happened in the history of comedy clubs.
[laughter]
Peter: 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. That means when you focus on the negative, you're actually attracting those negative things into your life. If you become obsessed with the people that street harass you, you're attracting street harassment. If you visualize walking to work with no street harassment, you're attracting that. 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 co-workers laid off.
[laughter]
Michael: I like how in the history of American victim blaming, we've gone from what was she wearing to what was he thinking. [Peter laughs] Huge progress. Obviously, homophobia still existed in America in the early 2000s, but where was Robert getting constant street homophobic harassment.
Peter: 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." [Michael laughs] Where was this?
Michael: I think better advice would have been, like, "Move to San Francisco, Robert."
Peter: So, the book spends a lot of time going over ways to harness the law of attraction. Meditating to clear your mind of bad thoughts, maintaining a mental catalogue of happy thoughts.
Michael: Okay.
Peter: It is mostly throughout the book, the same concept restated over and over. The interesting parts come when they are trying to discuss the real world, things that you can accomplish using The Secret.
Michael: Okay.
Peter: 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, says that, “Wealth inequality-
Michael: Oh, no.
Peter: -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. They understand The Secret.”
Michael: All those heirs to fortunes just have positive thinking. That's the reason they get their Mars Dynasty money when their grandparents die. Yes.
Peter: I would give up everything I own to be able to go back in time and read that to Karl Marx. You get these pearls of wisdom. The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts.
Michael: Turns out you just don't want money.
Peter: That's the one thing.
Michael: Why hasn't anyone asked poor people to want money?
Peter: Their vibes are too negative, Michael.
Michael: We've talked on the show a lot about how most of the books that we cover 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.
Peter: I mean it could, yeah. It could be a tweet that just says, “Get your vibes right.”
Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Peter: That's it. Again, we are literally explaining poverty here not as any systemic condition or the consequence of policy of any type, but as a purely personal failing. At times, it's almost expressly religious with Byrne at one point assuring the reader that Jesus, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and Moses were all millionaires.
[laughter]
Peter: She quote some other grifter's book about this that was called, like, Millionaires of the Bible or something like that.
Michael: Jesus famously loved inherited wealth.
Peter: Millionaire Jesus.
Michael: 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 [Peter laughs] that is actually what most rich people believe about poor people.
Peter: Right.
Michael: This is just power flattering bullshit that she's repackaging for people who don't have that much power.
Peter: The funny part about her claiming that Jesus is a millionaire is because you can't ever claim that Jesus's vibes were wrong when you're putting out a self-help book. If his vibes were right, he had to be rich because that's how The Secret works.
Michael: Right. You're not editing the ideology. You're editing his biography to make it fit the ideology.
Peter: Yes. Right. Now, the first story of a case study that Byrne does is called The Secret and Your Body.
Michael: Oh, no.
Peter: 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 were going to get.
[laughter]
Peter: I am sending you another portion of this book.
Michael: Okay.
Peter: I want you to read it.
Michael: Oh, no.
Peter: Even though you've covered almost every type of pseudoscience related to weight, this might still be new to you. So, I'm excited.
Michael: “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 because you're focused on losing weight, you must attract back continually having to lose weight.” What? Okay.
“The second thing to know is that the condition of being overweight was created through your thought to it. To put it into the most basic terms, if someone is overweight, it came from thinking fat thoughts, whether that person was aware of it or not.” 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. If you accept any of these conditions as applicable to you and you believe it, it must become your experience, and you will continue to attract being overweight. 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.”
Peter: When she got to fat thoughts, I had to do a lap around my apartment.
Michael: [laughs] He resisted texting me about it beforehand, which is nice of him.
Peter: I was like, “Oh, my God, this is so on point for Michael.”
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."
Peter: We know it's true, therefore--
Michael: We know it's true.
[laughter]
Michael: I also love that she throws slow thyroid in there. They're like physiological reasons why some people are fatter than others. And she's like, "No, no, no [laughs] that's the thoughts."
Peter: That's like, what this made me realize. 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.
Michael: Right, 100%.
Peter: Which is the first time it hit me that not only is the law of attraction fake science, but it's also supplanting real science-
Michael: Right.
Peter: Not only are you fat because you're thinking fat thoughts, but your thyroid condition is not real. Your bodybuilding routine is useless. You should just visualize being jacked.
Michael: I wonder if she's proposing any limits to this. So, like, I'm 5'6", I'm 40 years old. If I start thinking tall thoughts, will I be 6'1" by the end of the year?
Peter: This basic question in its various forms haunted me throughout the book. [Michael laughs] If you read what their claims are, literally, there is nothing stopping you from visualizing being taller and therefore getting taller.
Michael: Fuck yeah.
Peter: They will expressly say there is no limit to the law of attraction. 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 our collective belief that this is impossible makes it impossible.
Michael: Right. Humans can't fly because we all think that humans can't fly.
Peter: Remember in Miracle on 34th Street when everyone starts believing in Santa?
Michael: Yeah, yeah.
Peter: If we could pull off that kind of collective energy.
[laughter]
Peter: We all grow two inches.
Michael: It also implies, because I know too much actual science of fatness to follow fucking any of this. It also implies that Americans started becoming fatter in the 1980s because we all started having more fat thoughts. What would the cause of that be? Like, she's just pushing the causality up one level.
Peter: Well, beyond that, every social trend, Michael, of any type-
Michael: Right.
Peter: -is just the result of vibe shifts. [Michael laughs] All of it.
Michael: Wait, has she told Stephen Lovett about his abortion and crime hypothesis, because [Peter laughs] I think that we have some more explaining to do about the 1990s.
Peter: Actually, Bill Clinton just manifested low crime rates. Thank you.
[laughter]
Peter: So, she puts all of this weight loss stuff in the context of, like, “Aren't we all trying to lose of weight, ladies?" The implication is also that a starving person could manifest a healthier way through positive thinking, right?
Michael: Right.
Peter: 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. If you're poor or sick, that is something you could fix by just properly visualizing being rich and healthy. If you view the world like this, things like charity and human kindness are literally useless, right?
Michael: Right.
Peter: You cannot help other people. They can only improve their circumstances by manifesting it, like, just this truly dark view of the world.
Michael: The framing of it as a secret also invites you to become an evangelist for this and walk up to fat people who you see on the street and be like, “Did you know,” and just be terrible to them because it's like, "I know something that you don't." Any marginalized minority, you would give them a fucking lecture about their attitude.
Peter: 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. They follow that up by explaining how to get skinny and rich with it.
Michael: 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.” [Peter laughs] That's your finger snap. It's like, "You know what? 2% body fat. That's it."
Peter: Thanos just snaps his fingers and gets, like, a little more vascular.
[laughter]
Peter: I mean, there are sections of the book that are emotionally healthier, if I could put it.
Michael: Okay, okay.
Peter: 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.
Michael: I know. On a relative scale, that's not that bad.
Peter: 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.
Michael: Yeah, that's not good.
Peter: Now, we have, as you can tell, taken a turn away from the emotionally healthy portions of the book pretty quickly. Recall what I mentioned about the science of The Secret, supplanting real science. Byrne says that, “You cannot catch any virus unless you think you can.”
Michael: Oh, no.
Peter: So, I guess the claim is that the field of virology is an illusion of some sort.
Michael: Fake shit. The COVID pandemic was just because the entire world at once [laughs] decided to make themselves vulnerable to this, I guess, virus that doesn't exist.
Peter: That's right. It's a pandemic. 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 anything. She could have manifested the actual cure for breast cancer, but instead she [Michael laughs] just cured herself. Very selfish.
Michael: I know. Why doesn't she manifest, like, a big research breakthrough?
Peter: All of these people claim to have this mastered, and none of them have ever [laughs] done anything good for the world.
Michael: Yeah. Can I manifest a bunch of billionaires deciding to pay their taxes? Can I manifest that?
Peter: At some point, we need to talk about the conflicting manifestations.
Michael: Oh, yeah.
Peter: What happens when one person is manifesting one thing and one person is manifesting another.
Michael: Right. Never explained.
[laughter]
Peter: Okay. All right. Byrne says, “You can think your way to the perfect state of health, the perfect body, the perfect weight, and eternal youth.” And it's hard to read this section without wondering what the death toll of this book might be.
Michael: 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.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: It's like, "We're not going far enough." Jesus Christ.
Peter: Moving on to the 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 one guy fixed homophobia among what seemed to be a few dozen people at least.
Michael: And in doing so, violated their religious liberty. [laughs] So how do we balance that?
Peter: 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?
Michael: Right.
Peter: I live in Queens. Could I manifest no crime in Queens?
Michael: Could I manifest decent Mexican food in Berlin? [Peter laughs]
Peter: 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.
Michael: Oh, yeah.
Peter: There is a semi appendix that just gives like mini biographies of all of the contributors.
Michael: Oh, the filler in these fucking books.
Peter: Right, right. Once you hit the actual end of the book, you're at like 160 pages. You could tell that some publisher was like, "I'm going to need 40 more."
Michael: "Yeah, we got to hit the marks, man."
Peter: 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 place in the canon of self-help, which I imagine we'll be returning to many times on this podcast.
Michael: Yeah unfortunately.
Peter: I think part of what's happening here is that The Secret is taking the genre to its natural endpoint. These books propose magic bullet solutions to complex problems. It makes sense that eventually someone would take that idea and just make it explicit.
Michael: Right.
Peter: 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 the snap of a finger." It was like the only place that this positive thinking self-help grift could go. It had gone everywhere else. The point had already been made hundred times by thousand different people. Here we are right at the natural endpoint, which is just taking it to the most absurd possible place.
Michael: 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, I don't know, not wallow in misery.
Peter: Yeah, yeah.
Michael: There's a version of this advice that is like kind of prudent, right?
Peter: 100%.
Michael: You are dealing with a job loss. I am going through a breakup. I have a tendency to wallow in sadness and anxiety. I have had people tell me, maybe try to think about something you enjoy or maybe try to do something you love right now. The responsible version of that advice is like, this will help. It's like taking a Tylenol or something. It going to make your back pain go away? No, but it's going to lessen it a little bit. It'll help. 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. 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.
Peter: Yes, but what's upstream of environmental toxins? It's people manifesting environmental toxins. [Michael laughs] You have to go deeper, Michael. It's always manifestation. On a serious note, it's hard not to imagine the ways in which this would get in the way of actual self-improvement. Right?
Michael: Right.
Peter: We've talked about how this can blame indigent and sick people for their own lot, but what about when someone is the victim of ongoing abuse. 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 of that is just an illusion, right?
Michael: Right.
Peter: All of that is just an output of your own thoughts. 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.
Michael: Right.
Peter: I don't think it's difficult to conceptualize of circumstances where this advice is just, like, flat out dangerous.
Michael: What's so bleak to me about it is not the content of the book, but the fact that it was so popular and, Oprah, famously gave it a ton of credibility. I feel like so much of it comes back to, this is such my old man thought. But, like, historical literacy, I mean, this is one of the oldest ideas of humanity, 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.
Peter: Right.
Michael: One thing I've learned from doing the show with Aubrey is that there's medicine shows that were peddling the same bullshit in, like, the late 1800s.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: 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."
Peter: Look, when you have pseudoscientific bullshit rising to enormous levels of prominence, you know that Oprah is involved. She has to be. The Oprah saga gets pretty dark pretty quickly. Oprah has Byrne on her show in 2007 and gives her a full-throated endorsement saying that viewers should be teaching the concept to their kids.
Michael: Oh.
Peter: 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 decided to forgo chemotherapy for her breast cancer [Michael gasps] 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 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 and has to dedicate a whole show to low key, being like, “Look, this doesn't actually work, guys.”
Michael: "I mean, not to do what this says." One thing I think a lot about is in Season Two of the Dream Podcast, which is all about the wellness industry. There's the story of this woman who went to a wellness retreat, and it was all about they're building a little shrine in the middle of a pond, and they have these counsellors who are guiding them through it and are like, whatever you don't knock over the shrine. Whatever you do, it can't get wet. As their group is building the shrine in the middle of this pond, 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 counsellors. [Peter laughs] That's kind of what they want. It's like they don't want you to actually believe this stuff.
Peter: Yeah. Which is, I mean, classic Oprah to just quietly step back after the damage is irrevocably done. She has these quacks on her show nonstop and then cuts them loose when someone starts to ask any of the obvious questions that the presence of those quacks implies. But, like, oops, too late, Dr. Oz, is a senator. Some of the other weird things swirling around this book, there are tales of The Secret’s extended universe, all of the associated grifters. One, James Ray, quoted throughout the book, hosted a New Age retreat in 2009, which involved what he described as a sweat lodge ceremony and others described as a heat endurance exercise.
Michael: Okay.
Peter: The ceremony involved 50 people and resulted in 21 of them being hospitalized and three of them dying.
Michael: Oh, fuck.
Peter: 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 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.
Michael: Holy shit.
Peter: During the investigation, before he was charged, I believe, he had a conference call with many of his followers and people that were there. He brought a medium onto that conference call who claimed to be communicating with the dead people-
Michael: Oh, no.
Peter: -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 dead.
Michael: No way. So, they are okay with dying and they don't want to come back, so don't hold me accountable for the deaths basically?
Peter: They wanted to die. They chose to, and they loved it. And so they stayed dead. That was the explanation given. [Michael laughs]
Michael: Oh, my. Imagine if you could do this at every murder trial. "I know I stabbed Susan to death, but I've talked to Susan. She's okay with it."
Peter: "Why am I in trouble for Susan thinking dead thoughts?"
Michael: Right.
Peter: "If she had manifested physically tougher skin, maybe the knife wouldn't have penetrated it. I don't know what to tell you, Judge."
Michael: "Weak skin thoughts." Disgusting.
Peter: Anyway, yeah, that guy is back in the self-help game. Of course, should go without saying.
Michael: Obviously.
Peter: And doing fine. Yeah.
Michael: Good.
Peter: Byrne, 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. [Michael laughs] Yeah.
Michael: I mean, I'll give her points for consistency. At least she's not moving on to some completely new grift.
Peter: Yeah, I guess instead of manifesting world peace, she decided to manifest writing the same book over and over again for 15 years. [Michael laughs] To each her own--
Michael: Just like Beethoven, just like Ralph Waldo Emerson. [Peter laughs] They all knew it.
Peter: I mean, it's hard to articulate how uncomfortable it felt to read this, like, knowing how successful it was.
Michael: Yeah, I know, God.
Peter: 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.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: The book is proposing the tenets of the fall of human civilization. Just 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.
Michael: Right.
Peter: Like, this is the worst book in history, Michael. [Michael laughs] It's the worst. I'm picturing a debate between Rhonda Byrne and a panel of experts, like a quantum physicist, a doctor, etc. And they all make the case for why The Secret is pseudoscience. And they do that for hours. Rhonda Byrne steps up and is just like, "Well, aren't these a bunch of negative Nancys."
Michael: Yeah, yeah.
Peter: And the entire audience erupts into applause.
[laughter]
Michael: That's not a prediction. That's just you watching Oprah.
[laughter]
[If Books Could Kill theme]
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