We often turn to successful people for advice. Bookstore shelves are heavy with tomes adorned with photos of rich luminaries resting their head on their fist, and podcasts can’t get enough of famous stars explaining how they got to where they are.
By following their breadcrumbs, we hope for similar outcomes, but the thing is, chance plays an outsized role in success. Those who ascend to the top may not be smarter or more rational than us, just luckier.
Our Office has shone a light on Dr. Mercola, for example, an osteopathic physician who has made a fortune—over 300 million dollars, he admits—presenting himself as an avuncular natural health advisor while, behind closed doors, he sits for daily sessions with a marketing guru claiming to channel an all-knowing entity and blows carbon dioxide up his rear to feed the bacteria in his gut.
Moguls can be weird.
One company has recently caught flak for its CEO’s disturbing beliefs. You may know Scentbird as a frequent sponsor of YouTube channels. The subscription service charges USD 17.95 to mail you a different test tube of perfume in a plastic spray case monthly. It’s “the Netflix of fragrances,” as the slogan goes. Its Better Business Bureau rating right now is a “D” (the equivalent of 64 to 67% if this were a school grade) due to 419 complaints lodged against the company, primarily by customers who claim to not have received their monthly shipment, to have great difficulty unsubscribing or receiving a refund.
So far, the story is no different from your typical social media sponsor, where the marketing is slick but the product or service deficient—if not outright deceptive. But the flak here has to do with Scentbird’s CEO, Mariya Nurislamova, and the things she regularly says on multiple platforms. Her magical thinking with regards to blood type, eye colour, and the foods you should eat—not to mention her unhinged opinion on Adolf Hitler—can serve as a case study on how to think more critically about the world around us… and as a warning that successful people are not necessarily wise.
Chemophobia
Nurislamova is a Russian immigrant now based in New York City whose LinkedIn page cites a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from a Russian university and a Bachelor of Business Administration from a well-ranked college in Manhattan. She’s the CEO of Scentbird (the fragrance subscription service), drift (a car freshener subscription service), and Deck of Scarlet (a clean beauty product supplier).
Our first lesson here focuses on chemophobia, the irrational fear of things we label as “chemicals,” which are often substances that are artificially produced and which we fear might harm us. In truth, everything in the universe, including what makes up our bodies, is a chemical. Some chemicals are good for us; others, much less so. As Paracelsus stated, the dose makes the poison. Not so on Deck of Scarlet’s website, where the company has banned a long list of ingredients from being added to their products: phthalates, petrolatum, aluminum salts, even chemical sunscreens.
There is no reason to be afraid of chemical sunscreens (which contain agents like oxybenzone and homosalate instead of minerals like zinc oxide). They are safe to use and they do a good job—when applied in sufficient quantity—of protecting us from skin cancer and from skin ageing due to sun exposure. By learning about chemistry, we can recognize natural hazards (sunlight) and embrace synthetic protection (chemical sunscreens). The world is more complicated than “natural, good; artificial, bad.”
Confirmation bias and the need to categorize ourselves
Nurislamova has a quarter of a million followers on TikTok, and her most popular clip right now, viewed nearly three million times, is on 11:11. In numerology, noticing this time on a clock is said to be significant: Nurislamova concurs, saying the illusory veil of the world in which we live temporarily drops when we spot this time on a clock face. It’s the spiritual realm telling us help is on its way.
This is a classic example of confirmation bias and rationalization. We assign special meaning to this time—why? how do we know it’s special? because it looks like four straight lines?—and we remember the times we noticed it and we put aside the numerous times we didn’t. Once we’ve decided that noticing 11:11 is special, we can decide that this act of noticing is the actual cause of any feeling or life event that surrounds it, anything that coincides vaguely with noticing the time. But in the end, it is purely arbitrary.
Her TikTok videos also highlight this need we feel to put ourselves in a category, even if it is made-up, so that the category can tell us something about ourselves. The best example is astrology. Here, Nurislamova practices astrology of blood types by claiming that, for example, people with O blood type have a lot of physical energy and are prone to burnouts, while also being pig-headed and reluctant to hear out the people around them. As someone who studied biochemistry, molecular biology, and human genetics—the actual ways in which the human body works—I can say that this is complete balderdash. Your blood type does not influence your energy levels or whether or not you’re a team player. But it feels good to be assigned a group and told everyone in that group shares the same characteristics.
What she says about blood types is flexible enough that anyone can relate to them. My own blood type is O and if I squint I can make some of what she says about my type fit… but I’m sure so could someone with an AB blood type. The way to break the illusion is to see if the description of another group fits you too—look up astrological predictions for a sign other than your own, or better yet, recruit a friend to read you two predictions, one for your sign and one for another, and see if you can figure out which one is yours. You will begin to notice that these predictions are so generic as to apply to nearly everyone.
Barnum statements
The way to appear to be specific while being the exact opposite is to make Barnum statements, named after P.T. Barnum, the American circus showman. A Barnum statement is vague but feels personal. For example, “you have a tendency to be critical of yourself.” This applies to most people, at least some of the time.
Barnum statements can also say two opposite things at the same time—“while you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them”—which means that 100% of people will be able to relate to them while thinking that they were singled out by these declarations.
Which takes us to psychic divination.
Mariya Nurislamova wears many hats. “As you guys know,” she says while advertising her first online two-day retreat over Zoom, “I’m an intuitive, I’m a psychic, I read Akashic records, I do the things.” One of those “things” is attempting to predict the future.
Her January 2, 2025 predictions for the year we just left behind are perfect examples of Barnum statements: empty, out of focus, but spelled out with enough confidence as to appear meaningful. “It’s going to be a very fast-paced year in certain instances, and then a year of complete, almost like a pause, in others,” she states as if teaching the Barnum effect to a classroom of students learning about critical thinking. She predicts tech making big strides; the fear that automation will take over jobs; weird political scandals and turmoil; and a lot of advancements in the biosciences. “It’s a year that is actually really hard to predict,” she admits, and maybe she should have stopped there.
A more recent video of hers on YouTube attempts to provide her viewers with a personal forecast. She asks them to pick one or two objects from the following list: brick, river, fence, treasure chest, and seed. Let’s say I went with my gut and picked “brick.” She then explains what “brick” can mean for me in 2026: buying a house, building a house, thinking of buying a house, renovating a house, buying a new set of furniture, thinking of potentially moving. My concept of “home” could be shifting… or maybe I now feel more like a citizen of Gaia, Mother Earth, than a citizen of my own country. Throw enough spaghetti at the wall and something will invariably stick.
Sympathetic magic
An old idea of humanity’s is sympathetic magic, meaning that two objects are linked supernaturally because they resemble each other. Keeping a phallic object around the house will bring potency, our ancestors thought, and displaying a carved idol of a woman with birthing hips will help the family conceive. Nurislamova draws from the same well when she states that people with brown eyes have a connection to the earth, and that honey looks like sunlight and therefore contains it. Hazel-eyed people, with flecks of gold in their greenish-brown orbs, can accumulate solar energy, she calmly states. Meanwhile, if you crave baked goods, it’s because you miss your father. “When you’re reaching out for that piece of baguette,” she says with a straight face, “you are craving the nurturing of your father.” Hearing this, Sigmund Freud would nod and start taking notes.
This type of understanding of the world is as crude and unsophisticated as it gets. There is real magic in seeing the universe as it truly is—by learning about nebulae, and gene expression, and human psychology—but what we are relegated to while watching her clips on TikTok is that if a thing looks like another thing, they must have a spiritual connection.
Once you believe that, anything is possible, even rehabilitating Hitler.
Moral relativism in the higher dimensions
Nurislamova’s videos are full of “manifesting” and “channelling.” In fact, she has her eyes closed in most of them because she claims to be channelling her Higher Self from some spiritual realm or other. This is how she allows herself to say things that don’t sit right with some Scentbird customers.
“The heart is one of those energies,” she channels, “that, if your heart is activated internally, you can heal your own body in a manner of days.” Even cancer, she says. People diagnosed with the Big C or some terminal illness are, in her opinion, either ignorant of their true purpose in life or purposefully deviating from it. We had a naturopath in Montreal who thought that cancer was your body’s way of letting you know it was becoming too acidic; Nurislamova claims cancer is essentially a guardrail letting your car know it’s deviating from its one true course. This is victim blaming. Cancer is often outside of our control, but here, Nurislamova blames it on the person who has it for not fulfilling their true function in life.
Worse than this, morally speaking, is a comment she makes at the end of an hour-long Q&A livestream on May 11, 2022. Her co-host reads a question aloud: “Can a Higher Self be evil?” Nurislamova sighs and contends that it’s hard because the perception of good and evil by humans is very different from, let’s say, when it’s done by “beings in the seventh dimension.” Your Higher Self, she continues, considers everything to be a learning experience: it’s neither good nor evil. Murder could be considered all good depending on the intention. If your goal is to learn about murder and upload this knowledge to the Akashic records—a fictional, spiritual library, by the way—then murder is not evil.
“And by the way, look at Hitler,” she says, unprompted. “He’s one of the poster children for, like, being an evil person. Do you know how many millions of souls benefited from learning from the experience that he has created?” In our dimension, we may think it’s a Holocaust, but she argues that in a higher dimension, it’s “one of the greatest sources of knowledge of, you know, of 3D planet Earth warfare. […] So, is he evil? Not really. I don’t think so.”
I dare her to repeat this comment, with her eyes open this time, in front of a Jewish congregation, a Romani assembly, a queer community, or any of the many groups who were targeted in Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
Survival bias
When she was asked to comment on the fact that Scentbird customers were now learning about her kooky spiritual beliefs, Nurislamova said she thought it was a good thing. “I’m glad that it’s coming to the surface, that I’m both of those things.”
The problem with irrational beliefs is that the real world doesn’t go away because you wish it to. People who pay hundreds of dollars for her online classes or thousands of dollars for her retreats or workshops—her upcoming two-day Sedona retreat costs USD 1,111 minus accommodation and meals—may feel better in the moment, but this closed-eye channelling is unlikely to resolve actual mental problems, or deal with trauma, or treat psychiatric conditions. And her advice could potentially lead to disordered eating, as she flags so many types of food as bad for your spiritual journey: meat, fish, seafood (it has a vibration of death), tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, bell peppers (they bring darkness to your aura because they are the products of nightshade plants—get it? “night” and “shade”?), and gluten from bread (because it’s glue, so it makes you energetically heavier). What are you supposed to eat? What does she eat?
And before you accuse her of just being a grifter—a liar who closes her eyes and spews nonsense simply to cash in—making money with claptrap does not imply deception. There are true believers out there, I’ve written about them before. There is nothing the human brain can’t be convinced of, and if there’s money involved, all the better.
That’s why we can’t try to replicate a successful person’s career path by stepping into their footsteps. It’s called the survival bias. We point to Mark Zuckerberg and how he is a financially successful college dropout while ignoring the many more college dropouts who never achieved anywhere near this level of success. We remember the great books from yesteryear which are still around because they are great and fail to take into account the thousands of mediocre novels from decades earlier that are now out of print.
Magical thinking infects all of our minds. Eminent actors go on podcasts where they are asked about their star sign in a bid to explain who they are and how they became so famous. Tech billionaires open their minds up so much in an attempt to delay death they allow all sorts of nonsensical ideas in. Even scientists and doctors can flirt with beliefs that are not entirely evidence based.
Magic is reassuring. Believing in it separates you from the real world.
But the real world doesn’t go away and when you least expect it it’ll bite you in the rear just to remind you that it’s still there.
Take-home message:
- Successful people are not necessarily smarter or more rational than others, as success often depends on chance
- If we want to think more critically about the world around us, we need to understand the problems with chemophobia, confirmation bias, sympathetic magic, and Barnum statements
