I'll get a team. It's it's me, It's Quig Anthony harpert'z the you projected Tiffany and Cook over there at typ Central, uh and Lucas. We're going to go with Andrew. We'll find out a minute. Lucas Andra Dixon, I made that up.
It could be.
I bet it starts with a vow. Not sure, TIV. Why are you wearing glasses?
Because I wanted to fit in halps peer pressure? Really? Yeah, well, secure Lucas looked really intelligent. You've got you RWs And I was like.
Let's call him doctor Lucas because he's a fresh doctor. He's like about six months a doctor, so we're going to call him that. And he's afreshy. And when you're a freshy, I mean, I don't know. I've never been one, but maybe one day, who knows. Tif How things over on planet tiff.
Things are fabulous. Although I've got my hot lucky blanket on my legs and instead of roasting, and I don't know why I'm not turning it off, But you know, maybe one of you doctors can or almost doctors can.
Well there's a real doctor. There's a real doctor and a not a close doctor, so just a bullshitter. So and I don't think he's that kind of doctor, although he might have some kind of psychological interpretation of what the fuck you're doing. Hey, Lucas, welcome to the show.
Pleasure to be here, Craig, and thanks Tiffany.
Wow, thanks for coming to playmatee. Now let me tell everyone how you and I. I was telling you before we went live. I typically don't invite guests on the show, it's not my job, but Melissa and Tiff tend to one do that and to be much better at that than me. And I was reading a paper when I should have been reading other papers. So I blame you for my lack of productivity with my own research.
I'll take them.
Yeah, yeah, but you wrote a paper called the Secret to Success, the Psychology of belief in manifestation. Is that the oh no, no, no, this was the one. No, that was it. Yeah, that was the paper, and and I'm like, oh, this is so good. So I want to dive into that, but I just want to give you.
You didn't say it, whether you didn't say it with the question mark tone in your voice. For those of the podcasts, that's the secrets success question mark.
Yeah, the psychology of belief in manifestation or perfect You know those people who went down the old secret rabbit hole about a decade ago, They're just going to sit on the couch and manifest fucking excellence. How's that going anyway? So here's a bit of a snapshot. Doctor Lucas Dixon, graduated with a PhD in Social and consumer psychology from the UQ Business School in twenty twenty three, investigates the
psychology of the success industry. I fucking love this, including the marketing and consumption of small business and solo preneur business education. He also investigates psychological factors that contribute to participating in multi level marketing and get rich quick schemes. Having run his own small business, Lucas aims to reduce fraud, misleading marketing, and improve offerings in this space. Are people, let's start with, are people just as gullible now as
they were ten years ago, twenty years ago? Are they more gullible or are we more discerning? Or don't you know, doc, Oh.
That's a good question, Craig, But I couldn't answer that really, But I look, my sneaking suspicion is we we're all gullible if people say the right things to us at the right time. Some perhaps more gullible than others. If we I mean, I guess as psychologists or whatever, we will break that down and think, well, what are the aspects of gullibility. So it's not just one thing that
kind of makes us us gullible. But I do feel that we're in a unique time for this kind of being persuaded, being you know, being I guess hypnotizable in a way because of the factors that this new media landscape is not something we've experienced before. AI is going to be super interesting. They see what happens there. We're just not very great at times in making decisions with our heads.
Or working out how to do that.
Yeah, I guess also, like you know, to quote many people, we love the idea of two minute abs, right love. We love the idea of reward without work. We love the idea of the destination without the journey you know, fill in the blank. The instant gratification, the quick fix, the magic pill, the silver bullet, like all that stuff is fucking attractive. And if you can get someone to believe that that might be real, which is not that hard for people who don't want to do the work.
Then bibbity bobby boo ka ching you've got a sale.
Yes, yeah, exactly, No, I agree, And it's one of the it's you know, that's I guess something I can speak to that we've we have found that, you know, the more you believe that, the more you believe that there really are get rich quick schemes, the more you're likely to believe the next one. You know, And so I guess the more that you're around groups and people and consuming content that is kind of reinforcing that message.
And it's easy to see why you might believe that when you can hear people's stories of a success that are kind of like got that hero's journey, or you know, they're sort of leaving out all the hard bits, or you know, they're just kind of doing their their best to sort of tell an appealing story about how we've triumphed over some adversity. But of course life's not that simple, and there's so much that maybe we don't even know
that's contributed to our success. But those simplistic narratives are great for TikTok, great for YouTube, and great for and of course they can be really motivational, but also kind of leave us down this path of feeling like success should be a quick or easy or a linear process of just climbing a ladder, and it's I don't know about you, but it hasn't been my experience.
Well yeah, I mean, my background, as I told you briefly, was working with thousands of people helping them change their body. And you know, one of the funny things is, or one of the common things I guess is somebody wakes up one day. Let's just pick someone who's forty and they've been in and out of shape for a lot of their life, which was my story for a long time, in and out of shape, fit, unfit, big, small, overweight,
fucking you know, ripped and rock hard everything. And then you know, one day people wake up and they want to undo forty years of kind of shitty thinking and choosing and behaving in four weeks, you know, and to
create a new operating system. And all of that is great, but ye know, for so like when we talk specifically about the idea of physical transformation, you know, it's a physical process, but it's also such a psychological, emotional, sociological journey and like, you know, being able to step up and own up and say, well, I really do want
to be successful. I do want to create that outcome, but I also need to acknowledge that it might not be fun or quick or easy or painless, you know, because that the two minute ads the silver bullet, that stuff is hugely appealing, right, Yeah, I.
Agree, And it's it's also you know, really appealing for us perfectionists out there, and when I'm sure you've spoken a lot about that in your fifteen hundred episodes, and it's one of those things that if you expect you're going to you want to have high expectations of yourself, but you know, to hold yourself to that that I guess to have some kind of degree of self esteem and self confidence and want to to really raise that bar, but at the same time kind of realize we're not
always going to hit it and not let that be the thing that's advotages you just because you're not you're not winning at the degree or the rate that you thought you were going to to be doing. And sometimes, hey, I hope that sometimes we could surprise ourselves. I always say to my students, you know, I try to keep my expectations in check, and then I'm just pleasantly surprised. I love being surprised when things go well. But maybe it's because I'm a natural pessimist.
I don't know you.
Are you truly a natural?
Like?
Is that how you're kind of wired? Look?
I mean that's such a It's interesting, I think I when I become too optimistic, which I can do so I can be influenced and I can get.
Caught up in imagination.
My background was as a musician, that was my first career, and so I guess I have a creative, artistic mind and I've definitely had I've been through sort of the self help and personal development industry side of things as well as a consumer of that, from probably when I was maybe sixteen seventeen all the way up until sort of being a practitioner as a coach and as a hypnotherapist for as a transition from music to doing research.
So I think that I've gone through phases of really digging my heels into the optimism space and going, yes, yes I have I'm going to think positively, but it never ultimately fit me. So I'm guessing that that means that I'm kind of on that pessimism scale somewhere.
Below maybe I don't know, maybe just slightly somewhere in the neutral space.
I feel really okay with that now, and I think, yeah, so that's self awareness.
Maybe maybe I'm Maybe you're kind of a realist, you know, maybe you're pragmatic. You know. Let's so, yeah, I wanted to I want to talk about the paper and then kind of we'll see where we go. But the paper is called The Secret to Success question mark the Psychology of Belief in manifestation. Give us a snapshot of that research and that paper and what you found if you would.
Sure think well, me and my colleagues, my advisors were it was.
It was something we were interested in looking at. I didn't know if I was going to get to it.
During my PhD, we started by looking at we're looking at multi level marketing organizations, you know, so Amway, Herbal Life, those kinds of companies, and looking at the personal development side of those businesses and thinking, wow, you know, there's a lot going on here as far as teaching people how to think about success or how to think about
how to improve their business. And one of the things that came out of that was definitely this focus on manifestation and manifestation belief and even sort of going into the religious space of the prosperity gospel, believing if you invest a certain amount of money in.
Your church or your group that it'll re return to you.
And so we thought from that, I wanted to really, I know, it hadn't been looked at a lot in any kind of academic work. It hadn't really been looked at as kind of law of attraction manifestation. And of course that was what fifteen years ago, but it's been around for longer than that, longer than the Secret and in various forms. But I just thought, well, okay, how long has it been. It's fifteen sixteen years, it's the secret, and should we even look at it?
People still in to this.
But then I realized, look, the secret so of what thirty million copies or something was huge, and maybe it would be good to look at what's going on in
the space now. If you look at TikTok at the time, they've changed their statistics strangely, but it was like thirty billion view you know, views or swipes on how TikTok works, but on manifestation content, you know, and so it's right manifestation of you can you know, if you just put that thought out there and you believe strongly and you act like you're successful, that sends this energy out to the universe. The universe hears that message and then sends
that back to you. And you've got to look for those opportunities and make the best of those opportunities. And I've always been interested in like the difference, like the fact that there's these gray areas here, there's like all of these elements of truth there. Yeah, you know, self fulfilling sort of prophecies. Looking at the positive things helps you to see more positive things in the future. And
and of course those things are kind of true. But then on the other side, like could we be embracing a world view like that? There's actually like quite a strong if you really believed the book The Secret, You've taken on a I would say, a pretty extreme view of how the world works. Every thought that you have is what creates every experience.
So we created a scale that measured this.
We work on basically in psychology, like scales that from one to seven. You know, how much do you agree with certain kinds of statements, and we we thought, okay, so people's believes different in this than they believe certain types of things, whether you read The Secret or you've read another kind of book, Think and grow rich Napoleon Hill if.
You you know.
But we thought there's commonalities there, the two commonalities being cosmic collaboration. So the idea that you collaborate, I've got hard to is the alliteration.
Yeah, hey, I was in the apiration.
And personal power, which you know, hey, we all know Anthony Robbins that kind of thing. So basically that you either use you can harness that power of cosmic collaboration by doing the visualization, doing the positive affirmations, and we've found a whole bunch of things, so we I mean, the first thing was that we were trying to validate this scale, so making sure that the scale action measure of what we thought it was going to measure so we could use it in the future. But then we
started to look at so manifestors. People who are scoring higher on this scale were more likely to believe that they would be successful in the future, so have that self confidence and optimism about the future, which maybe we
could say is could be a good thing. But what we also did was then sort of look at, well, where are people at in their lives as far as maybe things like income and education and attainment, and sort of using that as a bar of going okay, so if you should we do manifest as people who are stronger in manifestation, do they maintain that kind of positive expectation about the future regardless of what their level of kind of income or is and education, so regardless of
where they're at in that kind of process of attaining success. So we ask them things about, you know, what's your goals in life, and manifestos were more likely to say they had goals for sort of being rich, being famous, having being popular, having this kind of appealing image, and so when we looked at that, they were more likely to believe that they would achieve those things regardless of
when we control for income and things like that. So it's this kind of level of success that's beyond whatever restrictions that people have.
So from that we.
Thought, okay, so that could be good for people maintaining hope and all of that. But then on the other side, perhaps that's kind of an unrealistic bar to put on yourself, like if you've got you're not you know, I don't know. So we looked we were interested in that, curious about that.
We then looked at a particular type of We just gave them a scenario, a fairly simple scenario, asked them what do they think they're best at or what do they like in their life that they value, And basically then we said, okay, so imagine that you are doing that thing that you value and you could earn three hundred thousand dollars a year, have hundreds of thousands of fans, and have that respect and admiration, and like, first of all, we asked people, would would you how much would you
like that to be the case. Of course, everyone, with most almost everyone in our samples said that they would like that, But manifestos were more likely to rate themselves as more likely to achieve that in their lifetime and also achieve it quicker.
So we asked them how many years that we thought that, and.
So every every step higher on the scale, they were more likely to say that they would achieve that goal in less time.
So, considering it's a fairly.
It's going to be an unattainable goal for most people, and we could kind of assume from that that manifestos kind of had more of an unrealistic expectation about.
Achieving that kind of success.
And then you know, we went on to look at some financial risk variables too, So we thought, well, if you have a kind of belief in this sort of secret source or extra power that you have be able to collaborate with this kind of cosmic law of attraction, you're probably more likely to feel that you could take more risks, that things will come more easily to you, especially if you're saying those kinds of informations to yourself.
And so we looked at.
We looked at basically some other some risk variables, so manifests, people who scored higher on the scale, more likely to say that they would be okay with taking higher risks, more likely to endorse the idea that you can get rich quick, more likely to have investments in things like crypto rather than sort of standard stocks, so those more you know, volatile but you know, I guess, more gambling
style investments. And then also the one that really got the news attention was they were also more likely to report that they'd been bankrupt in their in their in their life, So yeah, that was basically what we found in this first set of studies that we've looked at manifestation.
So it's some pros and some concept could you.
So just for people who are going, what the fuck is a manifesto? Could you you to me? Like, like you said before, there's a bit of that. Let's focus on what we want. But I think if it ends there, well that's a problem. But if that leads to a decision and a plan and behavior and action and adaptation and like, if there's a whole kind of strategy and action plan that's that's executed, that's great. But more about the just focus on it and it will happen. Am
I correct? So yes, to find what you're talking about. So somebody who is a manifestor what do you mean by that?
Okay, well, let me just let me read some of the items that are in the scale. I feel that that's the easiest way to describe what I've got. The luxury of two screens here, so I can just read some of those items.
It's great.
I don't well look, I mean, look, you look like you've got a lot of screens there. I have to say, there's a big screen behind you. So they're not as big. Mine's not big, but you know I know how to use them. Okay, So visualizing a successful outcome causes it to be drawn closer to me. I can speak success, success into existence through positive self talk, I'm more likely to attract Let me think, go down here, I attract success into my life with the help of the universe
or a higher power. The universe or a high paths sends me. People are events to aid my success. To attract success, I align myself with cosmic forces or energy. If I think about success, achieving success, those thoughts alone make success more likely. So what we're talking about is if you really score high, we're very very high on this scale, say that you're really believing that that is the secret, right, that is the cause that's happening there.
And so if you if you believe that it's the thing that causes success and you read something like this secret, which we also obviously looked at whether people who score high on the scale have read the secret, and.
Obviously they have more likely to have done that.
But yeah, you're going to believe that, you're more likely to be able to sort of sit back and let the universe do the work.
Don't worry about the how it will come together.
And of course there's something that's maybe positive about sometimes stepping back and just sort of saying, hey, I'm going to hand things over. But as you're saying, like if it sort of prevents you from taking certain actions but this, Yeah, so that's definitely one thing that we didn't focus. There's definitely more room for work in that area. So maybe you'll do that, Craig for me, that would be good. But yeah, I think that that's probably going to be
the case. They're more likely to I've done a little bit of piloting of some studies with this, and it seems to be the case that they're going to be less likely to take those what I called like like those instrumental actions, which are those step by step, day by day, the effort you have to make, but more likely to spend time on symbolic actions, so the things that sort of are supposed to prove to the universe.
So things like dressing as your rich self for you know, right, doing a vision board and again on their own, those things are kind of harmless, but if they're done, and it means that you're doing more of that and spending a lot of time and energy on that and less time on the sort of hard yards of taking those actions that there's probably you know, that could sit to some extent explain what we found, or there's some other things that probably explain it to that I'm sure we'll get into.
There's probably, I mean, there would be some groups and organizations that fucking hate your research. I hate to tell you that'd be like do you know what I mean? That's going to rub a few people the wrong way. But how when people who are strongly towards the high end of the manifesto scale, you know, they they tick all the boxes, no pun intended. Are they very are they open to this? Like when you say, look, I mean,
bottom line is in a nutshell, it doesn't work. Like manifesting doesn't correlate with better outcomes, better income, better long term results, better health. There's no evidence at all to suggest that this strategy or this whatever ideology philosophy works. Have you had any feedback from people when you kind of present them with that.
I think I haven't experienced a lot of it publicly or like directly to me, but I would say that I probably don't.
Present it exactly that way and maybe that's.
Why I try to like, we're only this is one state, like one journal article in so I don't want to say that there's no advantages. And you know, obviously to really look at that, you probably have to look at over time, which we didn't do.
We didn't look at people's success over time.
But I think that, like what we were trying to do with this is set up some questions moving forward, and some of those questions are like what could be again, like what could be causing the perhaps poorer financial outcomes in this The fact that there is no sort of advantage necessarily except for the fact that maybe it we do know it makes people feel better. You make some more hopeful, and it makes them and that can be important. But I think just that it's not actually having the
effect that maybe these books are promising. Is I think I could put my foot down and say that that it's not you're not going to get what the secret is telling you you're going to get. I'm happy to put my flagging.
Them on that. It sounds a little bit like you and I have had like similar components to our background, which is opening the door on you know, self help and personal development and you know, which you ended up doing a PhD in psych the same as me, and blah blah blah. And you It's interesting because I do a lot of like my main job is speaking, is corporate speaking, and working in the public sector doing workshops
and stuff. And I was talking to somebody this morning and they literally asked me how, I how do you keep coming up with new stuff? Right? And like I said, I don't. And I said, like, they're pretty much there is no new stuff like the stuff that I talk about. You know, philosophers and stoics and theologians and psychologists and researchers have been talking about for hundreds and thousands of years.
You know, it's like there's there's nothing. You know, there's new ways of sharing old ideas or old wisdom, you know, but it's like I'm just opening the door and pointing towards you know. It's like, make hard decisions, do hard things. You might get better results. Sitting on the couch crossing your fingers not a great strategy.
You know.
Self awareness is a pretty good idea. Authenticity and humilistic humility, and like in this space of personal development and you know, self help, it's like for me it's largely a regurgitation of things. And especially maybe it's just some of the people that I follow or connect with on social media platforms, but you know, people who seem to be on a level reinventing the metaphoric wheel and pretending that they invented
the actual wheel. It's like, no, dude, this is this is just you're saying shit that has been said forever. And I talked to some really big audiences, but I don't say anything that hasn't been said. I might say it in my way, you know, and it's it's for me unless the and I know i'm digressing here, but for me, unless the message is empowering the individual, not me. You know. It's like I tell everybody constantly, I'm not the answer whatever. I'm just a resource and I may
or may not be any value to you. That's more about you than me. But empowering people to maybe lose the wishful thinking. It's good to be positive, it's good to focus on what you want to do be create change, but also perhaps you know, going back to that pragmatic thing of going, well, what is it that I want to create and change? What do I want to learn and unlearn and now what decisions do I need to make an action do I need to take to truly
manifest it myself. So the manifesting is a byproduct of my work and courage and choices, rather than sitting on a couch thinking happy or positive thoughts. No disrespect to anyone.
Yeah, I mean there's a few points there that I could grab and go on go on about too, I feel, but I want to I want to just say that I agree that like that there's so much regurgitation and and actually you find that fields like stagnate when there is that, right, you're not actually creating anything new, and people get very sort of sensitive about protecting their you know, trademarked kind of system of success or whatever it is.
Let's call it. Let's call it pseudoscience.
Yeah, yeah, and it stagnates.
And so it's strange, you know, because that's one of the things that pushed me into doing going to university. Actually because I I was training NLP, so I was training neurone risky programming training trainers, and and that that I was trying to I was creating content like I was creating the curriculum and wanting to really understand where these ideas came from. And it was really frustrating to me because I had no way of really getting back
to and tracing these things back to their roots. I read the books and then I read you know, the Founders books, and they're just squabbling with each other, and you know, the thing is that there was just no systematic way of being able to understand the roots of
these ideas. And to me, that's why it's I don't know, like we're doing sort of talking shop here, but it's like it's hard to really be able to say, look, this is what NLP is, or this is what whatever modality it is that you do if you can't actually sort of agree on the philosophies behind this, or at least be able to talk to each other and challenge each other on what the roots of these things are and then be able to test those, hopefully scientifically or
at least sort of empirically or observation. And so I think citing your sources is just a bloody good idea.
You know, I think you can do it easily.
You can just say I heard this from blah blah or you know, Marcus Aureli has said, and it's done. You know, people can go do their own, like you said, their own kind of research. So that really piqued my interest when you said that, because that's what I found from going to university. And I try to tell my students too that hey, like this is not just the boring thing that we try to get you to do, but like that is the way you learn, that's the
way you grow. And part of how you do that is that you're held to a high standard when you're doing a PhD. Right to like not reproducing stuff that's been done before. The only way you know whether or not.
And hey, we don't even really know. I'm sure someone's done some research or manifestation and called it something different that I didn't find, but I know that I'm at least one of the first that's just made this little contribution in my field because we can trace back, do you know what I mean?
So I don't know.
For me, that was really eye opening to go to university and understand that that's those books in the library and these millions of people writing things down. The only way we can have a sort of way of navigating that is to be able to understand how to to cite our sources, and I don't how you do that other links.
You know.
Yeah, And one of the that's actually fascinating. I want to talk to you about NLP in a moment. But one of the ever present realities too is when you are truly intertwined with an ideology or a philosophy, or a practice or a construct, then you get a sense of your identity from that. Right, So when people have certain strong beliefs, then logic and science goes out the window because now we've got a motion wrapped around this idea. And if you challenge my idea, you challenge my identity.
So fuck you and your science, you know what I mean. And this is like one of the challenges. And I'm not a very good scientist, right, I'm not bad. You're way better than me, I'm sure. But one of the ever present realities for me is that every scientist has got bias. Like we all like to think where totally objective, None of us are. We're all subjective, every including me. Do I have bias? Of course? Am I emotional? Of course? Do I get defensive? Of course? Have I got an ego?
Of course? Do I want to be that? No? I don't, Right, But I think that acknowledging our humanity not as a flaw or a weakness, but just an ever present reality and saying look, you like you've just done this is what I think. This is what I did. Maybe someone else did some similar research called at something else. But when we've got an incentive to produce a certain outcome, which a lot of research has now because it's funded and the people who are funding it on a certain outcome,
let's not open that door. But yeah, it's trying to find the absolute unbiased truth at the bottom of all of this stuff, which can be you know, I mean that's a that's a minefield, you know, yeah, steps down our high horse.
Go oh, I'd say.
That that that's a really interesting point about truth and and you you, I think your research that you said you've been doing with your PhD s Thatt are touching on on that too, of being able to look at the accuracy of certain beliefs that we have.
But I think it's some of us, you know.
I guess you could call it like in academica or call it epistemology, right, but basically the idea that like, how how do we judge whether.
Something is true?
And we all do this in our own way, and some of the stuff that I've looked at in my research has been like that sometimes we have certain styles that we that we gravitate towards on a spect like from trusting our gut versus and being really quick and intuitive with our decisions versus thinking through things really sort
of slowly and deeply. And it's not to say that one is always good or one is always bad, and it's not to say that we don't all naturally fluctuate and use our hearts so to speak, and our heads sometimes, but we tend to gravitate. It's almost like a personality trait that we have where some of us will kind of prefer to trust our gut and perhaps if we have a belief by manifestation, it's almost like.
You're supposed to, you know, and so you you really develop.
That that, yes, I do this, and those sort of trusting your gut versus preferring to think deeply about things.
There's been a lot of research lately about how how that you know that.
That trusting your your your gut when it comes to complex issues is not always.
The greatest way to make decisions. So especially like.
If you think, I'll just give you an obvious example. So if it's it's something like finances, you know what I mean, or how well your business is going, you know, at your at your three year mark or something.
Like that, when you really.
Yeah, like you said, you're motivated towards wanting to think good about this.
It's not nice that to have the hard conversation with yourself.
And so we're going to all naturally kind of go towards that intuitive sort of like, oh, this is how I want to feel about this, this is how I hope that things are going to go in the future.
So I'm going to I'm just going to brush over, you know, I'm just going to brush over these these hard truths and prefer like and I think that you can find yourself in groups and in around people or gurus that will encourage that in you for and that's some of the recess I've looked at with multi level marketing, where it's kind of used as a tool to sort of stop you from thinking critically about Hold on a min, I haven't made any money in three years, and perhaps
I've lost money, but you know, maybe there's something not quite right about this model or you know, should I just keep listening to them telling me that it's my fault because I'm not manifesting this enough, you know.
So, you know, I think it's important.
To to kind of understand that we can fall in this spectrum of I mean, we've got to try to find a way of integrating our heart and our head. And that's that, to me, is a really fascinating process moving through life.
You don't want to be a stone, you know.
But at the same time, you know, thinking sort of intuitively and quickly helps us to buy our coffees and do the automatic things every day, but not necessarily make those big life decisions that that might be it might be more helpful to really deliberate on and think about.
Yeah, I love that I'm fascinated with cults, Lucas, And to me, and I've done lots of pseudo research into cults, and I listen to fucking countless podcasts on cults too many when I should be doing actual research. But to me, multi level marketing is like a cult of thought, a cult of behavior. It's like it's like we were going
to tell you how to think. We don't want you to think for yourself, going to tell you how to think and what to think, how to be, what to focus on, what to pay attention to, and if you have this thought, get rid of that thought because that's bad thought. And so literally it's a form of mind control and manipulation and coercion. And you know, like many actual what we would call religious cults or spiritual cults.
I mean there are food cults, there are exercise cults, there are cultural cults where in order to belong in that group, you need to think and be an act and behave and align with that group. Otherwise, like if you can't disagree with anything, or you're out of the group. So the idea of critical thinking, as you that's truly discouraged because you know, they're neither you're a sinner or a backslider, or you're mistaken or you're a problem or you know you've slipped out of the light into the
darkness or whatever metaphor you want to lose use. But like I don't care what kind of group it is, but if you are in any group and they don't want you to question anything or think for yourself or ever be critical of anything that is like a fundamental of that group, then you should get the fuck out of that group. Like for me, that's just that's a you know, there's there's alarm belts right there.
Yeah, I agree, I agree. Couldn't say it better.
I mean, that's that's how that's the advice that I give people to Like, even though my research isn't necessarily directly looking at cults, I think, you know, I always just try to say, look, if you're feeling like this real social pressure to to have to think a certain way and not think another way, and that that involves you not thinking critically, not questioning, then that's a red flag.
And yeah, well I think also, I mean, if you think for yourself too much, they can't control you. And the idea of any cult is control and manipulation and domination on the premise that you know, like think about a lot of religious cults. You know, it's all a matter of semantics, really, religion cults, some religions I would
call cults. Some are maybe more mainstream and I don't know, but you know, think about like I grew up in a cult that said if I behave a certain way, not the way I should behave, I'm going to burn in an eternal lake of fire. Forever. And I learned that when I was six. Right now, when you're six years old, and you get told if you do this thing, if you die in this state, and by the way, you could die at any stage. You don't know when
you're going to die, Craig. And if you die with a mortal sin on your soul, this is what a mortal sin is. Right then you're going to burn for eternity in fire. Well, how fucking terrifying is that? And what a great way to control a mind. And it's like, this is not presented as an idea. This is presented as a truth. And so I grew up being terrified of dying, you know, with a sin. And it's like
fucking hell. And this is being imprinted into children's minds by adults who don't go, oh, maybe this is not a good idea to do this And you know, the few times where I would question things, and again, this is just my story. And really it's not just about religion everyone, it's just about thinking and programming. But it happens to be in a religious context here. Yeah, I mean, wow, talk about how to dominate somebody, make them terrified and make them think that only you know the escape route.
Yeah, yeah, it's terrible. I mean is it's terrible.
And the interesting thing as well, when when you when you like because I guess one of the ways that then they'll just sort of come back is go, well, no, but God God loves you, you know, or you're whatever you're you know, and it's doing it because he loves you.
And what a message. What a mixed message going on there.
But the same with positivity, I think that can happen, and I guess with manifestation and things that happen in MLMs if you plaster over that with oh yeah, but we're giving you something to grab onto, so yeah, don't think negatively, but you know, don't be critical, but you know, we've got all these tools and techniques to help you to be positive. Then it almost feels like it's not why why would people just want the best for me?
You know, they want me to succeed.
They there's no, there's no, they just don't want me to be negative. So it's very hard to see through that veil and realize that it could be used as a form of especially when it comes to positive thinking, it could be used as a form of control because it just feels like people have the best of intentions for you. They want you to succeed, they want you to think happy thoughts, they want you to you know, whereas.
I think that it can be that they've mortgaged.
In a case of MLM, they've they've remortgaged their you know, they mortgage themselves up to the hill or paying rent just so they can show you their expensive house and pretend that the MLM was the thing that got them there, you know.
So I yeah, it's.
It's a I think when you when you see it's hard, but it's it's important to really think, you know, do these people have the best intentions for me?
Or or what are they getting out of this? You know, what's the vested interests here?
And MLM is multi level marketing? Everyone just that's cool? What's fucking MLM? Before we go, I want to ask
you one thing. So I don't know what the answer to this is, but you know, ten years ago, anyway, I think most people, most actual researchers and psychologists or people in the psychology space kind of thought that NLP new neurolinguistic programming was kind of bullshit, kind of a pseudo science, not real not really respected or taught in universities or I don't know what what is it in twenty twenty four, What regards is NLP held in these days?
I don't think it's much changed, but I think that that's the same kind of There was a set of studies done and that's been the thing that people have grabbed on to, I think, and sort of that it
sort of disproved an aspect of NLP, the eye accessing queues. Basically, when the idea that if you look in a certain direction, it means that you're visualizing or talking to yourself and you can kind of not really people's minds, but get a sense of what's going on behind what their words are saying, and it was sort of they did some studies on that and it sort of disproved it.
But it does also show you.
There's a slight bias towards anything that's sort of not scientifically proven, and you find that, then people will grab those studies and make a big deal of them. But they weren't super high quality and they weren't able to no one's replicated it, so I don't take much of that. I just think that the two founders really pissed off a lot of psychiatrists and psychologists with their rhetoric for years and years.
It's never going to be accepted. But of course, look, the NLP is.
The thing with these things that are sort of suito scientific is that there's grains of truth all over the place. There's great practitioners that are doing excellent work, and there's a lot that's helped me in my life, and I've had great, great experiences with helping people.
But if you're a.
Field that can't sort of define what it is that you do and and what like, can't agree on like what these techniques are or what these tools are, and and you know, if you haven't got a kind of real foundation therefore or be able to test your claims, then I.
Don't know, you know, I can't.
I can't point to one thing and say that's NLP, that's an NLP technique, or that's a I don't know, cognitive behavior therapy technique, or that's a you know, something from family therapy, because it's and it's not NLP. I don't know, you know, because we haven't really progressed much as a as a as a field in being able to sort of test these things and set ourselves apart and say, well, let's do I don't know, a randomized
control trial. Well, we put out put our techniques to the test and be able to see whether or not there's we can do just as good or as better as the standard approaches that are out there that would give you some kind of sense of, like, you know, how things are.
So I don't know.
To me that it's hard to make a claim about whether it's great, good or not.
And that's kind of why I walked. I guess I walked away. Let's be honest. I don't do it to be honest.
Let's be honest. Look, but I kind of understand because my first, my first foray, my absolute for first foray into personal development was reading How to Win Friends and Influence People, which was written in nineteen thirty six by Dale Carnegie. But my first face to face live experience was Tony Robbins, and I reluctantly went along as a guest of some other people and fully expecting it to
be bullshit and hate it. And honestly I got lots out of it, you know, like there was stuff that I really enjoyed, there was stuff that challenged my thinking there was like I realized that, Like I was very closed minded for the first hour or two it was like a ten hour or twelve hour day. But half
way through, I'm like, he actually is making lots of sense. Now, love him or hate him, it doesn't matter, Like if you can get past your bias and just tune into what's being said and try to have a level of objectivity and awareness. And you know, that was I then went on, I would say a ten year kind of journey of what people would typically call self help and personal development. And some of it was garbage, and some of it was gold, and some of it was somewhere
in the middle. And it's like, yes, some of it's pseudo science. But I think for me, more than anything, it got me to question, It got me to try things. It got me curious, It got me excited, It got me inspired, It got me to make decisions and change behavior. You know, So whether or not it was the book, or whether or not it was me, or whether or not it was the workshop or a bit of everything,
it kind of doesn't matter. Right, So I think there are lots of tools that may not even be highlight regarded by science, that can still be valuable, you know, in the right context for the right person.
Yeah.
Absolutely, And I kind of feel that you can usually use your common sense meter with it. You know that if you someone just can describe to you what it is that they're giving you this technique for and what it can what it can do, and then you try it and it works for you, then then it's great. And I, like you, have definitely spent my life with a kind of growth oriented approach and wanting to grow and learn. And I love learning and that includes learning
about myself. I think the thing for me that I guess I'm coming at it more from a thinking that, like for consumers, you've got to do what works for you. You don't have all day to be spending rummaging through all the scientific literature on something. You just have to trust I guess what you're so you need to trust other people to help you to Like I guess that's what you do, That's what I do. We're trying to be the leaders in I guess, the thought leaders whatever.
I don't like those.
Terms and change makers, thought leaders there, you know, but you know you're trying to disseminate and put together all of this wisdom and knowledge and communicated in a way so that people can then take that and make it.
Meaningful to them.
So I guess when for the consumers of that, yeah, they need to be able to trust that the people at that other level where the communicators of that information are I guess doing a good job of thinking about this stuff. And so I guess I'm more critical of that the industry, And.
That's kind of where I'm you know, I'm not critical.
Of anyone's individual journey, but I'm kind of critical of the industry for not for they Because if you're doing this professionally and it's your life's wor well that's what you want to do, and you're making these massive promises to people, then you should be being able to think about these things a bit deeper than and not, you know, regurgitating the same sort of simplistic ideas about and so I guess, yeah, I'm on a bit of a mission to try to wake people, wake practitioners up, I think,
and go, you don't have to go to university, you don't have to spend I have to spend eight years to get in my PhD. Like I know, not everyone has that time or inclination and we don't have to do that, but I think we can all get better at, you know, being able to be a bit more nuanced and.
Being able to help people to understand what's going to work best for them. I guess so awesome.
Well, but it's been a pleasure meeting you, mate. I've got the name for you. Have you written a book yet?
I'm halfway through a couple, so they're just sitting there at the moment, in the middle of semester.
I've got a title for you. You ready, Yes, the title is There is no Secret. But ah and you had an exact same cover design and then you and you just put above in little words, there is no How do people find you? How do people find you and follow you and connect with you? Doc?
Oh? Yeah, good question. You know.
I spend so much time online looking and lurking and but I'm so not active. But you could go to that horrible cesspool that is x and find me there mainly posting a little bit about my research and some ironic memes.
That's about it. But that's doctor Lucas Dixon. So l U C A S D A x O N and LinkedIn And if you.
Go to University of Queensland and pot my name in the search.
You can find me there and get in contact. Love to talk to people.
I've found that through this whole process that speaking to people who aren't academics has been probably the most rewarding part. I've got lots of insights and people's personal experiences with this, whether they're still into manifestation or into emilms or not, has been like super rewarding and yeah, so happy to chat with people about anything.
Really well, mate, we'll say goodbye fair but for the moment, Lucas, thanks for being on the new project. It was great. I appreciate you.
Yeah, cheers, Crog, Thanks Tiffany, Thanks Deer, thank you