Entering the Post-guru Phase of Self-help: Reflecting on James Ray’s Death with Dr. Christine Whelan

[00:00:00] At Seek Safely, it's our mission to empower seekers to have a safe and meaningful self-improvement journey. Why do we care? Seeking to be your best self is an amazing, beautiful human impulse that has led us to create art, invent technology, tell amazing stories, and reach the moon.

[00:00:19] But we saw the dark side of self-help in 2009, when a recklessly run self-improvement retreat led to the death of three people, including my sister, Kirby Brown. We want people to seek, to dream their big dreams and chase their beautiful goals. But we want to make sure they're safe along the way. This podcast is about education and empowerment, and getting real about the promises and problems of self-help.

[00:00:46] We talk with people who understand and care about the self-help industry, and everyone it touches. I'm Jean Brown. I'm Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle. And this is the Seek Safely Podcast. Alright, hello and welcome to the Seek Safely Podcast. My name is Jean Brown. I'm here with my host, Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle. Hello, Dr. Glenn.

[00:01:14] Hello, Jean Brown. Long time in the podcast. I know. Everyone's always busy, unfortunately. But we have one of our favorite guests, Dr. Christine B. Whalen with us. And hi, Dr. Christine. How are you? Hello there. It's so good to be here. Yeah, we're always happy to have you. As one of our resident self-help industry experts, we have you on because we have kind of like a big development in the self-help world to talk about.

[00:01:43] And we figured you'd be a good person to have with us. So yeah, Dr. Glenn, do you want to talk about the big development given that you love to talk about this guy? Oh boy. It's only appropriate that I would be the one to break this on the podcast. Of course, by the time this is coming out, it's not exactly breaking news, but it's breaking on our podcast.

[00:02:03] So if you listen, if you're hearing our voices right now, if you listen to our podcast, you probably know about James Arthur Ray, self-help guru. He hated that term, which is why I love calling him that.

[00:02:16] But he was one of the guys who really came to prominence with The Secret in 2005. And he was one of the talking heads on the movie version of The Secret, talking about the law of attraction. But we know that Seek Safely, the organization kind of has its genesis in the tragedy that occurred in Sedona. Facilitated by James Arthur Ray. Facilitated, some might say even caused by James Arthur Ray when people including Kirby Brown died.

[00:02:43] Anyway, James served prison time for that about a year and a half and has been trying to restart his self-help career. But we got news at the beginning of last month. So this happened on January 3rd, I think, when it was announced on X that by his brother that James had died. And this is the extent of the details we have, actually. Like we were kind of holding off on podcasting about this because we wanted to see if anything else would come out.

[00:03:10] But we still don't know how James passed or what happened. But it was confirmed by James's wife, Beersabah.

[00:03:17] And she, in the week or two after passing, you know, she said a little bit about James. Like, and she released kind of a tribute video to James. But we still don't really know what happened. But yeah, this is James passed away. He was 67 years old. I mean, I wouldn't consider that a ripe old age. I mean, that's a relatively young age at which to pass. And I mean, James represented himself as being in excellent health. Yeah.

[00:03:44] So this was all kind of interesting. Now, Jean, you know, like, obviously, when James passed, attention kind of turned to your family, specifically you and your mom, Jenny. And I know you guys have had things to say publicly, but we can just kind of recap it briefly now. Like, so how did this, like, when you heard this, kind of how did it hit you?

[00:04:03] Yeah, it was definitely surprising. Because as you said, there was no indication that there was anything wrong. It seems that to everyone, his family included, it was a surprise, unexpected. So it was surprising. And then, yeah, we wrote a statement and put it out publicly. And basically, it's, you know, the kind of complicated set of emotions that come with this.

[00:04:26] I do, I again, express my condolences to his family and his loved ones, because we do know what it's like to unexpectedly lose someone. And it's, you know, death is always difficult. But when it's so unexpected, it can be, it just adds an extra layer of difficulty to it. So I feel for them.

[00:04:45] And then, yeah, it's definitely complicated, because there's some sense of relief. But honestly, it's not really a great sense of relief. You know, I didn't give him a lot of space in my head and my heart for many years. We'd have to kind of deal with the annoying fact of seeing him continue to try to be something in the self-help world when we felt that he didn't really have any business being in the self-help industry, given how irresponsible he was.

[00:05:15] He had behaved prior to going to prison for that irresponsible behavior. And I think the greater sense, greater than any sort of relief was a sense of loss for the fact that he could have chosen to really dive into what his mistakes were so that he could have made amends by, you know, being a voice for what was wrong in the industry, what he did wrong, and then how it could be improved. And he never did that.

[00:05:44] So there's, you know, the loss of that missed opportunity. Well, and it warrants mentioning that so at the founding of Seek Safely. So Seek Safely was kind of formed as James was getting out of prison. And one of the first things your mom and dad did upon publicizing the creation of Seek Safely, it was invite James to sign the seek promise. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:06:38] Learning from this tragedy. This is one of the other frustrating things about James. Yeah.

[00:07:11] Kind of where would you put him in terms of the landscape, both before and after Sedona? Like, where was he in kind of the pantheon? And kind of what's your sense of how this affects the landscape, if it affects the landscape at all?

[00:07:26] So James Arthur Ray was one of the last of those sort of, I guess you could even call them the 20th century self-help gurus, right? So these are folks who were leading in-person retreats, who were selling physical books, and who came to prominence because of TV shows that people watched like Oprah Winfrey and others.

[00:07:54] Those means of disseminating advice are now not the most popular ways that people get their guidance. So James was, we didn't know this at the time. So at the time of the Sedona tragedy, that was almost sort of the peak before the fall of these self-help giants.

[00:08:46] And this was, we didn't know this. This was a freak event. This otherwise self-help is safe. This was just either a bad guy or just a bad situation. Something gone wrong. And it would never happen to me. Or people could say, gosh, this whole industry is pushing the limits of what is safe for people as they seek transformation. And this is something that we have to look at.

[00:09:10] And so when I was writing about this, and this is Jean, where I first met your mom, I was initially interested in what happened in Sedona from a history of self-help perspective. I was really trying to get the world to acknowledge that this was not a freak event, that this was something that we all should pay attention to because it could happen at any point in at any of these self-help retreats.

[00:09:38] And that it was really, you know, that this could be any of us who were in that sweat lodge. And so I was trying to make it this thing that was very relevant to everybody. I'm not sure that I was entirely successful doing that. I think what actually happened was that the mode by which we were getting self-help advice changed. And we started doing a whole lot less in person and a whole lot more online. Yeah. So, I mean, I'd be interested to what you guys think about this.

[00:10:05] But, you know, as the arc of Seek Safely, you know, are we in fact seeking physically more safely because we are seeking from a distance now online? But I don't know that we're emotionally seeking any more safely. Yeah. And I think the pandemic also accelerated that move away from the in-person. It was like a little accelerant on a fire that was already sparked.

[00:10:31] But, yeah, I remember, you know, your New York Times article that came out soon after Sedona. And it was like a beacon of truth amid all of this, not false information, but just this lack of understanding about the situation.

[00:10:50] Because it, yes, it became obvious to us very quickly that while the Sedona was the worst thing that could happen, it was also kind of an inevitable outcome in an industry that was unregulated and full of irresponsible actors. So, yeah, your New York Times article was like, yes, thank you. This person knows what she's talking about and she's saying the same thing we are. And it was very validating and helpful for us. But, yeah, no, I agree.

[00:11:16] It puts the self-help industry is definitely in a different place in terms of it's not so much about physical safety as it is about emotional safety and also financial safety because there's still money involved. And I think people end up spending a lot of money that they shouldn't spend. I completely agree.

[00:11:39] And, you know what, I actually, as you were talking to me, I realized, well, gosh, you know, physical safety is not just about whether you are physically there in a sweat lodge. Yeah, that too. Physical safety is about the supplements that are being sold that are unregulated. Physical safety is about all of the gummies and the this and that that are sold under the idea of wellness. Yeah.

[00:12:02] So perhaps maybe what we have changed, what we have really seen is that was the peak of the group self-help movement. And now we, in fact, have gone into an even more isolative and individual wellness seeking culture, both physically and emotionally. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Which also kind of mirrors where we are at in society.

[00:12:27] Like, I feel like I've had lots of conversations recently with people, even just saying in our social lives, that there's like this irritating sense of formality now where it's like you can't just pop into a friend's house. It's like we, it just feels like we're all very isolated in our own little bubbles. And then as soon as you want to invite other people in, it's like a big deal.

[00:12:51] And it, that kind of big deal of it makes it, you know, is kind of a barrier to just having more casual relationships. And yeah, I just feel like in so many ways, our, in society, we're like really kind of stuck in our own little isolated bubbles. So it's not surprising in a way that self-help has gone the same way that other things in society have gone.

[00:13:12] Well, it's so interesting that, so as somebody who has always had a lot of skin in the game when it comes to self-help, like, like you guys know my whole thing of, you know, man, self-help really literally saved my life once upon a time. And I've always had strong feelings about whether players in the industry are good or bad citizens of the community. Like one of my criticisms of James was not like, I don't know what kind of a guy he was.

[00:13:39] I have my suspicions, but I actually, you know, I didn't really know him, but I do know that I considered him a bad citizen of the community. But as somebody with skin in the game, I've, it's interesting. Like I've always thought of the in-person events with like the physical challenges. So, I mean, James kind of copied that part of his spiel from famously Tony Robbins and the Firewalk, right? In fact, James even credits his entry into the industry at all.

[00:14:05] Like, like he went to a Tony Robbins event and that's what opened his eyes to that this was even a thing. So, once again, we can thank Tony Robbins, not just for Glenn Patrick Doyle being in the industry, but also for James Arthur Rains. There's the good and the bad guys. But the point is, I've always looked at that part of it as, so that's a marketing shtick, right? That's kind of like bells and whistles and like whatever.

[00:14:29] Like, like I've never viewed, for example, the Firewalk experience to be integral to Tony Robbins shtick, like, like his material. Likewise, none of the physical challenges that James would do. Like, so James did the Firewalk. Like, he also did like the martial arts board breaking thing. Like, he also did like the arrow against your throat bending rebar thing. And up to and including the sweat lodge, I never viewed that as integral to his shtick, like what he taught.

[00:14:58] Now, what he taught, I found pretty derivative. Like, I mean, he famously kind of cobbled together a lot of old stuff. But the point is that, you know, we can kind of think about this in terms of a dichotomy. Like, on the one hand, there's the physical risks that people take going to these events that can range from COVID now to, again, being hurt, you know, perhaps losing their life, et cetera, et cetera. But then there are, as we point out, like the intellectual, emotional, financial risks.

[00:15:28] And that's always been kind of more real to me because, look, I'm probably never going to be the guy who goes on the Firewalk. Look, I am the guy who's going to get really interested in the core of what they're teaching. And we've found it out for years that, you know, even if you take away all the physical risks, like even if like another self-help in-person event was never held again, there would still be this victim-blamey, financial-exploity. Is that a word? Exploity? You know, kind of exploitative thing going on.

[00:15:56] And James, unfortunately, was such a shiny example of both. Christine, I'm curious, what did you think of James's shtick? Like, again, if we take away the irresponsible physical risks and stuff, like what did you think of kind of him as a teacher? So certainly there were derivative elements of it. But what he did very well and very dangerously was blend that mix of sort of modern psychology and esoteric spirituality into a really toxic stew.

[00:16:24] Because it convinced people that he knew far more than he actually did. So what always bothered me in particular about James was his willingness to incorrectly quote neuroscience articles from the stage. And as an academic, I could pull the articles that he was citing and find that, in fact, they do not say at all what he was claiming that they were saying.

[00:16:51] In real time, in an audience of lay people, they would never know. And they believed him because he had a position of authority. So that's really just flat out lying to people. So that always bugged me. But then when you add in esoteric spiritual practices, when you, creation was not a term that people used back in 2009. But this was major cultural appropriation of Native American rituals.

[00:17:17] And that was one of, when I was researching for that article that I wrote after the Sweat Lodge event, the person who was the, that I talked to was a Native American Sweat Lodge expert who was just furious that his beautiful religious ritual had been bastardized in this way.

[00:17:37] So on the one hand, I've always been really frustrated by James Ray's shtick, in part because of its power over people and its success. In another way, though, I have to say that I have some sympathy for him. I really did have sympathy for him at the time. And I had sympathy for him in the years after. Because the whole way that the industry is structured is that you need to keep making money. This was his job.

[00:18:03] He had to continue to sell people on his retreats over and over again. The only way to do that is to up the ante, is to make it more wild, to make it more extreme so that people will go. And so I also envisioned him, and perhaps this is my projection on him, but I envisioned him being sort of trapped in the success of this industry as well. Yeah. And being almost sort of financially forced to go that extra mile. Yeah, totally. Absolutely.

[00:18:33] That idea of, you know, the self-help provider being kind of trapped in the model, I think is really important. We said that in the statement that we put out, which I will link in the show notes as well. You know, we said that he continued to operate within this paradigm of the self-help industry that is built on sort of exploitation and misrepresentation and all of this.

[00:18:58] And so that's one of the things that we identified, and that's part of the reason why we put together things like the Seek Safely Promise. And I'll put out a little plug right now for Anne Peterson, our, you know, Seeks friend. She's put together the workshop based on the promise to work with self-help providers who are well-intentioned, because we've come across so many of these people. They want to help other people.

[00:19:24] They feel like they have a story to share, or they just have some insights that might be valuable to people. And their intentions are good. But then what they get into is all of these, like, scammy kind of marketing practices, or this sense, this feeling that you have to continually escalate things and make it more and more sensational. That's how you gather customers. That's how you market yourself.

[00:19:48] They get trapped in this paradigm, and then they end up perpetuating all of these kind of dangerous practices, and they end up manipulating people. That was never their intention. So that's part of the work that we are doing with Seek is to try to also help these well-intentioned industry people operate in a more ethical way. Because if you're not paying attention to what you're doing, you might get pulled into that path of being exploitative when you never intended to do that.

[00:20:15] There's a real interesting part of the Enlighten Us documentary where it's discussing James' rise in the industry. And it discusses how even James acknowledged that he was kind of in this – well, I think what he viewed as a temporary moment in his career where he was not turning a profit, but because his reputation had grown, he had to continue increasing the size and the scope of his events, which was expensive.

[00:20:45] And so he had to charge more and more for the events. So he had to make the events more, he would say, value-added. I would say more marketable. But the point is that he was not getting rich. That's the irony of this whole thing. We even found out in the subsequent lawsuits that he was not actually a wealthy man. I mean, he was not managing his business or his personal finances in such a way that this was sustainable. But he was projecting that image. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:21:12] So I've always thought there was a parallel between James and Theranos, like the fraudulent drug company, or I guess it was a device company. But Theranos, I truly believe, and I don't know, but I truly believe that the people behind Theranos, they really thought – they really believed in fake it till you make it. Like they really thought that there would come a point where their technology would catch up with their promises and it would all be good. I think James probably thought that too.

[00:21:41] Like I think he thought that there would come a point where he would make enough money and he could actually be as abundant as he pretended to be. And that was part of the philosophy that they sell to people. It is. Right. I mean, the prosperity gospel, the idea that if you are rich, then it means that you have found spiritual favor, whether with God or some other entity. And so obviously projecting success was a really important part of this.

[00:22:07] It was also a really important part because James came out of the secret, right? And so the secret said that basically if you were not a success, it was because you didn't want it badly enough. You didn't think it badly enough. You weren't making it happen in your mind. So he, of course, then had to be fit, successful, all of these things. Otherwise, he couldn't do his business. He couldn't do his job.

[00:22:33] And the pressure of that must have been just incredible. I remember one of the things that came out after the Sedona experience was when the police went and looked in his room. They saw all of the supplements and injectables and testosterone and all of the hormones. Yeah, human growth hormone.

[00:22:53] So really, we can see somebody who had a whole lot of insecurity and self-loathing and was totally trying to project an image of success while not really feeling it himself. So this is where I just, the pathos that I feel is really deep.

[00:23:14] And yet, this is also where so many dictators and so many bad people come out of feeling like they are hurt and, you know, hurt as children and feeling like they have something to prove. So we can't just excuse it. But wow, I mean, and I see it not just in James. So this is the other thing that I will always keep coming back to. This is not just one dude who, like, I don't know, had a rough childhood and then decided, you know, he needed to be successful to be loved. Oh, no.

[00:23:43] So I have other people that I know who put out all of this prosperity gospel, law of attraction, secret stuff on the Internet. And they have these images of them drinking champagne on private jets and doing all of these things. Those are all in front of green screens. They are not on private jets. They have no money. But they are projecting this to try to sell their workshops about getting wealth.

[00:24:12] That's really rough stuff to me. Yeah, there are so many things. Like, for one, this whole, the content of self-help has not changed much. So we're still talking about manifestation. The secret isn't as popular as it once was, but the law of attraction ideas are still like everything in self-help. And yeah, you see it all the time with these people on Instagram.

[00:25:07] I'm trying to remember. And they're all doing this. And so now she's, you know, she does all this like kind of parody content that makes fun of it. But she's like, yeah, they're all doing it. And they're all using like the same Instagram filters to make themselves look really good. And they're all like, you know, wearing, like peppering all of their content with these particular markers of success so that they are using their own success to market themselves.

[00:25:33] And that is just the same thing that we've seen forever and ever in self-help. And I don't know, I guess it's effective except that nobody's really making money. So I don't know. Is it effective? And by the way, this is not just in the self-help industry. In any sort of marketing and sales, there is a sort of fake it till you make it. I think the thing that becomes challenging with the self-help industry is that it intersects with psychology. And it intersects with a very vulnerable place in their lives.

[00:26:03] And when you want to have hope about the future, when you want to grow in some way, you are more susceptible when all of this is packaged. Yeah, you're ready to believe it all because you want it. And we want to because it's easier, by the way, to believe it all than it often is to do the hard work of making lots of small daily real changes.

[00:26:29] And I say that not with any judgment because I also, I had to basically stop going on Instagram because what I would do on Instagram is I would get served up one of these sort of, you know, by this tincture or this thing. And I know better. I totally study this. I talk about this. And yet I was like, maybe this one would fix it for me. Maybe this would work. And I really wanted to. Right?

[00:26:57] And I was like, how, if I'm struggling with this, how does anybody have a chance? Christina and I are both making the same gesture of like pulling out our hair because yes, I do the same exact thing. I'm like, I fucking know better that all of this is garbage. And I'm still like, should I just try it? Should I just like, maybe I should just try it. Like, it's 50 bucks. Who, who, like. Cool.

[00:27:23] Well, part of what makes that tough is because all of us have probably also had the experience. Let's be real. Like, we've also had the experience of trying something out. Like, so in my, like my analogy to that or my analog to that is, you know, there are tons and tons of books, self-help books out there. And I'll look and my algorithm recommends them all to me because I know that's what I read.

[00:27:50] And I'll be like, am I really going to invest in reading this, the time and the money, et cetera, et cetera. But there's still that part of my brain that says, look, you know, that in the past you've stumbled across books. Like, and you've stumbled across ideas that have become enormously useful to you. Who's to say this isn't going to be the one? It's to say, because you've had that experience.

[00:28:10] Like, we've all had the experience of whether it's a supplement or whatever, a habit, whatnot, and not expecting it to be this thing that turns out to be really helpful. But it turns out to be really helpful. So we have had that experience of that lottery, like winning the lottery, right? You know, things. So it's addictive. It's literally our addictions happen in our system.

[00:28:32] So something about James that I think is really interesting is he's one of the few self-help figures who we can analyze both in terms of him at his height when he was a really big deal, when he was like a two-time Oprah guy. And one of the top, arguably the top guys in the field. So there's that James, pre-Sedona James. Then there's post-Sedona James, which I think is almost an entirely different creature in some ways, because he certainly wasn't at that position anymore.

[00:29:02] Like, he was in this position of trying to almost start from scratch and break back into the field like he didn't have. Like, any name recognition that he had was suddenly now working against him. And the landscape of the industry, as we've been talking about, when he was trying to get back into it, had changed dramatically from when he first got into it. So, like, all his old stuff, like everything he knew about how to build that brand, was now not only not applicable, but actually working against him.

[00:29:29] So, there's pre-Sedona James and post-Sedona James. And post-Sedona James became a creature, especially in these last few years. And, you know, Gene, you and I did a whole episode about this, about the unexpected mashup of politics and self-help. But James became, like, he entwined on very much on purpose. He entwined his self-help brand very much with this political brand as this very – I don't even know to call it right wing.

[00:29:59] Like, I don't – God, I think we're almost beyond left and right at this point. We are. Yeah, it is. It's a whole big stew. Everything's gone convoluted. Right. But it's a huge – but it's a huge feature of the landscape. Yeah. And to turn back, I would say, toward a Christian-based spiritual outlook. Right. Correct. Yes.

[00:30:18] So, to me, kind of closed in on themselves in this conspirituality of ideas, sort of picking and choosing what worked with the idea of the law of attraction almost as the thing that was holding both of them together. Right?

[00:30:35] So, the law of attraction then pulling in from maybe more of – and the sort of psychedelic drug and transformation route, but then also pulling in from a sort of more traditional spirituality and Christianity higher power route. And pulling it all together into the mix that, man, this has been the story of the last decade of self-help.

[00:31:00] This conspirituality of conspiracies, of esoteric spirituality meets modern and sort of traditional spirituality. But also then intersects with money and power, sex. And like, wow, is it a stew? And it has been very successful. But not in the way that I think is making individual self-help gurus a lot of money. Yeah. Like, who's really making money from this?

[00:31:30] Do we know? I mean, these ideas are very – these ideas are all over the internet. But I don't know who – other than the supplement makers, I'm not sure who is capitalizing. Donald Trump and Elon Musk. So far, that's all I – you know? Well, that's what I was going to say. Like, I wonder if kind of the currency is now less money and more power and cultural influence, right? It's hard to pay rent with that, though. Yeah. Well, it is.

[00:31:57] But I mean, but I also wonder if the figures who are benefiting most are kind of beyond that point, right? Like, Elon's not worried about paying rent, right? Yeah. Sure. But I'm less interested in the Elons and the Trumps and more interested in who would be the modern equivalent of the James Rays and the Tony Robbins. And that's what I don't see in this industry right now.

[00:32:19] It's like we're sort of in a post-guru phase of self-help that you would – that me of 20 years ago would have thought, oh, that's wonderful. Like, you know, we've gotten past this. Careful what you wish for. Oh, honey, don't get so excited. It gets worse. Once again, on my own podcast, Christine refuses to acknowledge Glenn Patrick Doyle as the next big guru. Why? Why? Go on. I'm sorry. Just throw him a bone.

[00:32:47] No, I was – yeah. Okay, so one of the things that happened for me after Sedona and looking at the self-help industry, you start to see these patterns everywhere. So, you know, like we've said, it's not just – this idea of marketing yourself and the fake-it-to-you-make-it stuff, like, it's not isolated to self-help. So I started seeing, like, these patterns of the way that you manipulated people everywhere.

[00:33:14] When Donald Trump came, you know, to the fore politically in 2015 and 16, whatever, I was like, well, God, here's another guru guy. Like, it felt very apparent to me how he was operating and how he was manipulating people. And it has nothing to do, for me, with, like, any political ideology. It's just how he functions. And I just saw it for – to me, it looked very clear what was going on.

[00:33:41] It's almost like the ills of self-help have, like, swallowed everything. And then we don't want to, like, go too heavy on the cult stuff, but I feel like, you know, when you look at cults, you've got the people at the top who are benefiting financially and making lots and lots of money. And then you've got all these people layered throughout down to the very bottom, the customers.

[00:34:04] But all the people layered in the middle are doing a lot of heavy lifting for the organization, and many of them are not actually making a lot of money. They're working very hard. They themselves are also manipulating and exploiting people, even if they're not meaning to. They're this, like, middle management level of the cult and the self-help organization. But they're not really gaining from it. And I feel like that's the structure that we are all in right now, where there are a few people at the top who are benefiting greatly.

[00:34:33] And everybody in the middle is working for them, but they're not making, you know, what they think they are, what they've been promised. But they're still doing lots and lots of work. And maybe I've just described, actually, a capitalist system in which, you know, the wealth distribution is heavily up at the top. Sorry, Mary, I just gave you my theory of everything. You guys remember now, Jean has been waiting to make this exact argument. Like, this has been a long con until Jean finally gets to make this argument.

[00:35:04] I just, Christine, you gave me a woo. Expand on your woo for me. Okay. So, and then I'm good. Can I take it one level even darker? Go for it. Dr. Doyle puts his head in his hands. All right, I'm going to take it one darker. These large language models being programmed with the ideas of this kind of self-help. And if they are, where are they going to fall in this structure of who has the power and the influence?

[00:35:34] One of the things that is disturbing to me about the way that ChatGPT and other large language models interact with us is their perky and upbeat and sort of self-congratulatory kind of responses to a lot of the things that we say. Maybe toxically positive, we would say? You might even call them toxically positive, yes.

[00:36:01] It is really hard to get your large language model to criticize you. And that is a real problem if you are actually trying to get a real view of the world.

[00:36:12] The more that we interact with LLMs that are programmed to basically give us sort of feel-good, toxic positivity, self-help advice, the more than this way of interacting with the world almost gets written into how we are doing business and embedded in the way that we are communicating.

[00:36:35] And even one darker than that, potentially, Dr. Doyle, the way that young people are getting some therapeutic advice. Because as more young people turn to these AI bots for entry-level therapy, if it's coming out with toxic positivity kind of stuff, have we basically gone from Sedona where we had a couple gurus who people were paying a lot of money to do these in-person retreats and we thought that was bad.

[00:37:02] Now, it's disseminated throughout the entire culture and we can all get this in our phones via chatbots. Did I take it more darker for you, Gene? Yeah? You did, but you're just confirming everything I already feel. So what's interesting about that, and like so many things in the industry, maybe in the world, but specifically in the self-help industry, it's almost paradoxical or there's a dialectic here.

[00:37:27] Because so much of, just take it back to James, like so much of James' shtick when he would run these retreats is pay me 10 grand so I can tell you how much you suck and it's all your fault. And you need to, you know, play full on, like this is all on you. Like one of my problems with guys like James, certainly not only James, but guys like James. So me as a trauma specialist, that's my therapy specialty.

[00:37:54] I know that trauma survivors, including myself, we will often sink into kind of like, like if somebody tells us we suck, that'll click something. That feels right, right? Because that resonates with our old conditioning. And I think James really, and guys like James, I think they really take advantage of that. Yes, pay me 10 grand so I can double down on what you already think of yourself. But with that promise of I can teach you how to turn it around.

[00:38:22] And it's so interesting that, you know, now we kind of have this culture that, I mean, toxic positivity, again, I think that in itself, I think it's a layered concept. But no, man, like on the one hand, we don't want to concede that certain things suck, that certain things like are beyond our power. That's the big sin is when you say like, so there's certain things beyond you. So let me tell you something of my content that I put out there. Like, so I put out trauma recovery content and addiction recovery content.

[00:38:51] The trauma recovery content outperforms the addiction recovery content enormously. Like whenever I'm talking about addiction in public, no one wants to hear it because it's a bummer. And to say that, you know, the trauma recovery content is not a bummer. Like, of course, it's a bummer. It's trauma. Like, of course, it's a bummer. But they're bummers in kind of different ways. Like when we're talking about addiction recovery, like we're very often talking about like, you know, look, this is, you know, we need to confront the idea that, you know, your addiction might be beyond you. Step one of the 12 steps.

[00:39:21] People hate, they don't want to hear that, right? They don't want like this, we're going to embrace our powerlessness thing. And guys like James really traded on this idea of like, well, no, you're not powerless. Like, of course you're not. It's all your fault. Actually, you're not powerless. Anyway, this gets into a much larger, more complex conversation. But I'm so curious about large language models. I'm so curious. So James and Tony Robbins, those guys come out of the NLP tradition, right?

[00:39:48] Neurolinguistic programming famously, like one of its trademark schticks is we can influence your behavior via language without you really realizing it, right? That's one of NLP's big promises. I kind of wonder what happens when ChatGPT learns Milton Erickson tricks of NLP persuasive language. And I wonder if anybody, I've never heard anybody paying attention to this. Christine, I don't know if you have. I'm taking notes. I'm taking notes right now, Dr. Doyle. I'm so curious.

[00:40:18] There is a really gross, I think it's a gross subset of self-help resources that became popular in the early 2000s, kind of this pickup artist stuff. Yeah. It was popularized. One of the people popularized was a guy named Ross Jeffries. And he was very into you can use NLP to basically hypnotize somebody while just talking to them into liking you, right?

[00:40:40] And so whenever I think about ChatGPT, I'm always curious, like, okay, what happens if ChatGPT gets a hold of Ross Jeffries' speed seduction techniques, right? Like what happens when ChatGPT gets a hold of James Arthur Ray? You remember his whole thing where he would like put people, he was like doing guided meditation, and then he'd slip in suggestions to buy his stuff. You remember this? Like Connie Joy describes this in her book. This is how the machines take over the world. Oh, Skynet. Oh, no. Not Skynet.

[00:41:08] But actually, what's interesting about this is you're saying that when they get a hold of it, I mean, I would imagine. So we don't know what they've been trained on, right? Exactly. And I can tell you that a lot of my friends who are in the motivational world right now are getting emails from their publishers asking whether they would allow their books to be used to train ChatGPT and that they would get paid a little bit of money.

[00:41:33] And the advice that I'm hearing most people say is take the money because ChatGPT is actually getting trained on all of this anyway. And if you can get a little money, it's helpful. So there is no reason to think that ChatGPT has not actually been trained on NLP techniques. One of my concerns with ChatGPT, I feel like we all openly talk about how flawed the internet is.

[00:41:57] And now we have trained our artificial intelligence, I'm using air quotes, on the content that exists on the internet, which again, we all know is so flawed. And so our large language models have at their core some, I would feel like some very big flaws.

[00:42:16] So in a way, yes, please have it train on the content that is actually well-researched and maybe peer-reviewed rather than, I don't know, the comment sections of everything else. Reddit, right. Okay, but this is, but so as a, so one of my interests, my longtime interests has been the history of self-help and the periods of self-help. So this is what I did my doctoral dissertation on.

[00:42:43] But since that was like more than 20 years ago, I stopped at the end of what I called the personal action period of self-help, which was sort of the end of the 20th century, the idea of Dr. Phil. And to some extent, James Ray, the idea of just sort of just do it. Then came the secret where, you know, you can just do it, but you also need to believe it, right? So that was like that next sort of period. It does seem now, though, that what then happened next was it sort of self-help kind of jumped the tracks.

[00:43:12] Like rather than staying in its own lane, what it did then was infuse into culture more generally. So was this, the messages of self-help then became infused into everything.

[00:43:25] If that was maybe the first two decades of the 21st century, that infusion of self-help into everything, this next period of self-help may be how the NLP and positivity and manifesting elements of self-help are then training our large language models and AI bots for the future. This is a thought I had never had before. And I will tell you, that is a terrifying thought to me. So what do you think?

[00:43:54] I mean, I've always been playing with this idea of these sort of chunks of history of self-help, and it's very hard to do it in real time because obviously you can't predict the future. No, I think there's something to that. And we will do a whole episode about this. I've just decided. But briefly, I also think that the trend I see in the personal empowerment world, the self-help world, is in some ways it's getting even more abstract and conceptual.

[00:44:19] But in some ways it's getting, it's veering right back toward materialism as well. I think supplements and diet are having a moment like they haven't had in a long time. No, we definitely have more to talk about with this. We can, so in our last few minutes here, if we can bring this back to poor old James, I can say, and I'd love to hear you guys' thoughts about it. I can say a few nice things about James. I've said so many mean things about James on this very podcast.

[00:44:48] And just to show that we, like, this is not a vendetta thing. I started out as a fan of James Arthur Wright. That's the only reason I know about James Arthur Wright. When I heard that he had been arrested, I thought it was a huge bummer for this industry that I cared about so much. I literally had the thought, I remember where I was. Like, I had the thought, man, people are going to use this now as reason to bash self-help. And it's going to be a bummer. I can say, look, we can say a few things about James. I will say this about James.

[00:45:18] One, I think that he understood, understood. I'll say this. I think James had a work ethic. I think homeboy grinded. Now, whether you consider that a uniformly positive thing or not, I think he worked really hard. I don't think James' struggle to rebuild his business, like, after Sedona was due to lack of effort. I saw him out there, man. Like, he was going on every podcast. He was trying really hard. I think he had a work ethic. And I think to a certain extent, he believed the things that he was saying.

[00:45:47] I don't actually think James was all that much of a hypocrite. Like, so when, you know, Christine, when you talk about how James would mischaracterize what certain things actually said, right? I don't think he was intentionally misrepresenting things. I think he didn't. He truly didn't understand it. I think he was one of these guys. Unfortunately, I think my boy Tony Robbins is another one of these guys who hears a thing and he's like, great. That's awesome. I'm going to repeat that. And he doesn't have a deep understanding of certain things. So, I mean, in that way, I don't think he was a hypocrite.

[00:46:15] I do think that he, look, it's undeniable that he lied about a lot of stuff. He lied about specifically his own experiences, his own training, his own credentials. However, I also think that he just kind of saw that happening in the industry and he just thought, look, this is just how we do business. Like, it's, again, I don't think he started out with like, I'm going to deceive all these people because I'm a bad guy. I think James was a limited guy. I think he was limited by his own wounds. Like, as a trauma therapist, I see his own trauma, what I assume is his own trauma leaping out.

[00:46:45] And I will also say that the stuff he wrote humbly knew how to write a self-help book. I think Harmonic Wealth is a pretty well-organized book. It contains a lot of ideas that did not originate with him. But I think it was a well-marketed, a well-organized. I can hear his voice in all of it. I know he got assistance with the writing, but I can hear his voice. So there are some pseudo-positive things that I can say about our friend, the late James Arthur Ray.

[00:47:11] Christine, I saw your face go just not blank as I said those things, but like, meh. It's really hard. I got to tell you, my introduction to him was not as positive. My introduction to him was from one of my friends who was attending his events. And it set off my alarm bells immediately. The idea that, you know, you have to take the goggles off that we're all wearing and that he's helping everyone see the world clearly and that nobody else who doesn't follow his way is seeing the world clearly.

[00:47:40] I mean, that was one of his opening bits. And that, to me, set off all of the dangerous markers of problematic empowerment and self-help. So I don't have a lot of kind things to say about him. I think the kindest thing that I can say is that he was a product of a larger industry that had a toxic way of doing business.

[00:48:06] And so when I kept saying, no, this was not just a one-time thing. No, if you had been in that sweat lodge, you could be dead too. No, this is not something for us to distance ourselves from. I will say that both from the lives that were lost and the people that were hurt that day, but also from James Ray himself, right? James Arthur Ray was also a product, a perpetrator, but also a victim of the larger toxic elements of this industry.

[00:48:34] And I would like to say that it sort of ended there, that when we saw the decline in group stuff, then people were protected and saved. But I don't believe that's true. I believe it moved online. It moved into a digital format and it has morphed.

[00:48:51] And that is one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about Seek Safely, because I think what we are doing is trying to be a voice in this new wild west of self-help and call things out. Yeah. That's the best I can do, Dr. Doyle. Yeah, and that was, you know, ultimately in our statement, that was the kind of largest point that we tried to make was that it was always much bigger than James Ray for us.

[00:49:20] He was just one man in a whole industry that was acting dangerously. And that's why, you know, Kirby's death for us warranted a response that was much wider than just one incident. And that is what, you know, that's what Seek Safely is. So, yeah.

[00:49:38] Well, again, condolences to his friends and family, but I do appreciate this opportunity to kind of reflect on what has been and what is yet to come with self-help as a really, I think this has been a very interesting discussion with lots of ideas to consider and think about. So, thank you. Let's do it again sometime, huh? Sure. You bet. This has been the Seek Safely podcast.

[00:50:05] If you liked our podcast, please go to your podcast distribution platform and leave us some stars and leave us a good review. If you didn't like it, forget I said anything. Exactly. Stay tuned for more conversations about self-help and the industry and apparently the future of humanity. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, it's just everything at this point. Christine just blew up her mind.

[00:50:29] And if you feel that the work we're doing is important, you can consider making a regular donation to Seek Safely. I will put that link in our show notes as well as all of the other things that we've talked about will be in the notes. So, have a look. And then thanks again to both of you, Dr. Christine and Dr. Glenn. And yeah, thanks for listening. Ciao, ciao. Bye. Thanks for listening to this episode.

[00:50:58] We hope that you have found it enlightening. And we'd be so, so grateful if you'd share it with the seekers in your life. We all know at least one, right? Until our next episode, you can find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at Seek Safely. Connect with Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle at Dr. Doyle Says. And me, Jean, at Jean C. Brown on Twitter. Feel free to send us an email, info at seeksafely.org.

[00:51:24] To support Seek Safely, you can make a secure donation on our website, seeksafely.org slash donate. The Seek Safely podcast is produced by Citizens of Sound.