These are people who are gonna get scammed.
I'm Angela Duckworth.
I'm Mike Mon.
And you're listening to no stupid questions.
Today on the show, can you use the law of attraction to manifest a better life?
I'm gonna write myself a check for $10 million.
And I'm gonna be the most successful comedic actor in the universe.
Angela, I am excited by today's question and truthfully have no idea what direction this
conversation with you will go.
Hmm, so I didn't go ahead.
Well, so here's to the journey we're about to walk.
It comes from anonymous who says, I've been coming across the idea of manifestation
or law of attraction in a lot of self-help podcasts and readings.
I wanna understand more on the psychology of these ideas and do they actually work in
real life.
Okay, so Mike, I think I know what manifestation, actually I don't know what manifestation
of the law of attraction or is this like positive thinking?
I think so. The first time I was truly introduced to the idea of manifestation came in, I don't
know, 2006.
There was this book that came out in this movie that came out called The Secret.
Oh, yeah.
Have you ever heard of this?
I have heard of it.
I know it was a wild bestseller, like crazy, just like publisher's dream, right, that
like some book written by it.
I don't even know, it wasn't a psychologist by training.
I don't wanna say just a person, but like a man mortal.
A man you're mortal, but who knows the secret apparently.
So tell me more because I have now exhausted my recollection of the secret.
So the secret was written by this Australian TV writer, her name is Rhonda Burn.
The book went on to sell more than 30 million copies worldwide and has been translated
into more than 50 languages.
That's nuts.
Heavily influenced by a book from 1910, so almost 100 years before she wrote hers, by a
guy named Wallace Wattles, who wrote a book called The Science of Getting Rich.
And it was this three-step process, ask, believe, receive.
Wattles talked about how he got inspiration from the Bible, the book of Matthew, says,
what, so ever you ask in prayer, believing you shall receive.
So in the secret, Burn refers to this three-step process.
And she loved this idea so much.
She ran with it and talked about how her life had collapsed around her.
She'd worked herself into exhaustion.
Her father had died.
Her relationships with colleagues were in turmoil.
And in the midst of all this, she gets the glimpse of a great secret.
And then she starts looking back through history.
She said, the greatest people who ever lived all knew the secret play-doh, Shakespeare,
Newton, Hugo, Beethoven, Lincoln, Emerson, Edison, Einstein.
And then she's like, how does everybody know this?
How does everybody successful know this and how do the rest of us not know this hence
the best seller?
Right?
Yes, absolutely.
Okay, keep going, yeah.
And then she just says that manifestation, seeking the secret, pulled all these people
to her and quickly she writes this book, makes this movie, and it blows up in the largest
way where everyone starts talking about manifestation and the secret.
And manifestation is interesting.
I can't define it necessarily.
Manifest means to happen, right?
Like to occur, like something that was a thought then manifests, something that was an idea
manifests.
Yeah, it's basically believing something into existence.
I mean, okay, so what you've explained to me is that there is an idea that is both old
and new.
This idea of manifestation is this the same as law of attraction?
I think that would be our way that many people sort of define it.
So the book that Bern wrote, the secret, was largely based on law of attraction.
But like attraction to what?
Is it the idea that you create a positive future in your mind and then that attracts your
reality to the ideal?
Yeah, so I'll just give you an example from famous actor Jim Carey.
So Jim Carey self describes as, quote, a huge visualizer and manifestor.
He tells this story about how he spent four years working in random comedy clubs, quote,
visualizing and manifesting my life.
During that time of just kind of slogging through the challenges of going to late night comedy
clubs where you're not a big deal, blah, blah.
He viewed himself as a great actor.
He literally wrote himself a check for $10 million and put in the memo line for acting services
rendered by Jim Carey.
He post dated the check to Thanksgiving, 1995 and carried it around in his wallet.
He said six months before that date, he was making $10 million for a movie.
And he credits that to this manifestation that he would get to that point.
So that's how people talk about manifestation who are manifestors.
Okay.
I have a lot to say actually about this topic now that you have explained to me what it
is.
So this idea that you can visualize the future has been interesting to me before I was a
psychologist because when I was in I think fourth grade, I remember being in this classroom,
I remember the windows were on the left.
I remember where you know Miss Ryan's teacher desk was and in the back of the room, there
was a poster, a ballerina on point.
So she's in this like dramatic pose and there's a quote, if you dream it, you can achieve
it.
And I remember walking into that classroom every day and thinking to myself like, well,
that's interesting.
Like really?
And I think that actually has the flavor of this idea of manifestation or law of attraction
or you write yourself a check for $10 million and you imagine yourself the most successful
comedic actor in the universe and then it comes to pass.
So it is intriguing walking into a classroom 180 times and seeing that on the wall, but
also growing up then to be a psychologist who wants to understand people's goals.
You know, we've talked about this a little bit Mike.
There are these self-fulfilling prophecies, right?
These beliefs that we have about whether we can or can't make the track team, whether
we are or are not going to blow the interview that we have.
And these beliefs can become self-fulfilling prophecies when they shift our behavior and
our attention in ways that are consistent with what we think is going to happen.
And some psychologists think it's all the way down to the non-conscious level where
like there's evidence that when you don't believe that you can do something, you adjust
your attention, your behavior, and maybe even non-conscious things, in accordance with
what you believe will be the future or won't believe will be the future.
So it's an idea that actually has some scientific merit.
Right.
And that's a huge piece for me as I kind of looked into this is the shift in attention.
There's this thing in TikTok right now.
And I will just say that on TikTok, manifestation content has surged past 9 billion views.
Wait, is this like indexed under manifestation or is it like people who are rereading the
secret?
People using like hashtag manifest, hashtag manifesting.
Oh, really?
9 billion views.
But one of the most popular things is this 369 method of manifestation.
It asks people to write down the thing that they are manifesting three times in the
morning, six times in the afternoon, and nine times in the evening.
Wow.
I have not heard this.
I'd never heard of this before either.
But when you said a shift in belief and attention, I mean, think about that.
How often have I, I'll just use myself as the example, how often have I set a goal and
then not looked back at it?
In fact, I just found a notebook from nine years ago with a list of things I wanted
to accomplish.
And by accomplish, it was like, go read X book or visit X place.
I've accomplished like half of them.
And I didn't do the rest partly because I never looked at the list again.
You forgot.
Yeah.
And so if you're writing something down a total of 18 times a day, if your attention is so
squarely focused on that, right?
Well, then yeah, that becomes the kind of massive thing at the front of your brain that
you're striving toward all the time and from a psychology perspective that has to have
a lot of merit that you're just thinking about it all the time, right?
Let's say from a motivational perspective, because it's a little more specific.
Okay.
So there turns out to be maybe not nine million research articles on this, but did you
say nine million or nine billion?
Nine billion views of manifestation content.
Then again, I'm like, I have no idea.
Maybe that's a small number in the world.
Like maybe that's like your typical cat video or something, but it seems like a lot.
So there are not nine million, certainly not nine billion research articles written about
manifestation, the law of attraction.
But there is one article that as you were talking, I just looked up and it was published in
2023.
So it's very recent research.
And it's called the secret to success, the psychology of belief in manifestation.
Now, is the secret in quotes as in referring to the secret?
The secret as in the secret, yes, exactly like the secret.
And so what the research shows, it's really basically the validation of a questionnaire
called the manifestation scale.
And it has two sub-scales trying to delve into the psychology of those who really believe
that they can cosmically attract success through their own visualization, through their own
self-talk or other, you know, in a way like magical actions.
So there are questions on the personal power sub-scale that go like this.
Visualizing a successful outcome causes it to be drawn closer to me.
I am more likely to attract success if I believe success is already on its way.
Success is more likely to come to me the more I focus on positive emotions.
So that's just three of six items on the personal power sub-scale.
Now that sounds a little bit like an extension of locus of control.
Like I feel like I have power to impact my own surrounding situation, et cetera.
Well, the first thing I thought when I was reading these items is it sounds like Jim
Kerry, right?
You know, believing that this positive and high resolution vision of who you want to
be ten years from now actually has some force behind it.
That's not exactly the same thing as locus of control.
Locust control means like I believe that what happens to me is under my control.
I mean, obviously they're close cousins, but I think they're different in that this
really has this specific emphasis on the power of visualization, the power of positive
thinking.
You could be somebody who's really high in locus of control and you believe in Excel documents
and making lists of to-dos and writing in your journal so that you don't forget what
you intended to do.
So there's this.
I get it.
And by the way, I'm not like saying this is good or bad and I'll explain the other sub-scale.
And then we can just look at what the scientist found about what it correlates with, you
know, people who score high on manifestation.
So here's the second sub-scale.
It's called the cosmic collaboration sub-scale.
Okay.
I love this.
I think these authors like alliteration because there's personal power.
There's cosmic collaboration, but okay.
This scale has items like I attract success into my life with the help of the universe
or higher power.
The universe or a higher power sends me people and events to aid my success.
I ask the universe or a higher power to bring me success.
So look, the first sub-scale, I can kind of see how visualization can be helpful and
indeed there is science behind that.
The collaboration, like believing that you can draw the powers of the universe, the
cosmos to aid in your success, that I think there's less research on, but anyway, these
are two sub-scales of the manifestation scale.
And in this research, there were over a thousand volunteers who answered this questionnaire.
And over one third of them positively endorsed these manifestation beliefs.
That means about two thirds of them didn't, of course.
And those who scored higher, here's the drum roll, were they more successful or less successful?
Would you predict would be true of these one out of three people who endorse these manifestation
beliefs, Mike?
Oh, gosh.
Okay, I'll just tell you my thinking.
Part of me is thinking that yes, they're more successful.
The one area where I'm just not as sure is maybe they felt reliant on, quote, the cosmos
or the universe to deliver something and put less energy into it themselves, but that
wouldn't negate the personal power.
So I'm going to go with yes, they were more successful than the two thirds who did not
buy into it.
Well, in this research study, it's self-reported success.
But anyway, people who score higher on the manifestation scale certainly perceive themselves
as more successful believe in their positive futures more.
I guess that makes sense.
But here's the downside and I think it really is the flying the ointment.
They're also more likely to self-report being drawn to risky investments and to self-report
that they've experienced bankruptcy.
Yeah.
And also to believe that they could achieve kind of implausible levels of success more quickly.
These are people who are going to get scammed.
Well, this is a thing, right?
Like for every Jim Carrey who's like, I'm going to write myself a check for $10 million
and I'm going to be the most successful comedic actor in the universe for every one Jim
Carrey.
How many people are falling for scams, throwing good money after bad, spending time, doing
things that are actually not going to help them live a better life.
So that's the very recent research.
But I think your intuition that a lot of success in life is having what psychologists call
this internal locus of control and not an external locus.
In other words, what happens to you and whether your life turns out the way you want or
not depends a lot on whether you believe that you can change it, that you have some agency.
I think that there's so much power to this idea of believing that you can influence your
life versus your life happens to you.
You want to be the subject of your sentence, not the object of your sentence.
Yeah.
But here you're saying on this idea of manifestation that may be by going too far into this idea of
like, I can pull in the cosmic collaboration.
Then when someone calls me and says, Hey, I have this investment opportunity.
You're like, Oh, I've manifested getting rich.
Exactly.
Well, look, I know Angela and I would love to hear your thoughts on manifestation and
this so-called law of attraction.
So if you would be willing, record a voice memo in a quiet place with your mouth close
to the phone and email it to us at NSQ at Freakonomics.com and maybe we'll play it on a future
episode of the show.
Also, if you like the show and want to support it, the best thing you can do is tell a friend
about it.
You can also spread the word on social media or leave a review in your podcast app.
Still to come on no stupid questions.
Angela and Mike discuss the steps to take in order to make your resolution a reality.
We set goals and now we're going to jump over this blue piece of paper symbolizing the
River Rubicon.
Now back to Mike and Angela's conversation about manifestation.
So when you said manifestation and law of attraction, I was searching my memories like,
what research is there?
But there is a lot of research on what psychologists call positive fantasies.
Interesting.
So let me tell you the story of how I got serious about trying to understand positive fantasies.
So when I was in graduate school, I was working with the Kip Charter Schools, working with
Dave Levin who co-founded these charter schools that are now national and Dave gave me
a mission.
He said, I want you to find out what the most important insights of psychological science
are.
So we can import them into the Kip Charter Schools.
He's like, yeah, I mean, I don't know what it is.
Is it physical exercise?
Is it mindfulness?
Is it something else?
Like go forth and accomplish your mission.
So I took out my notebook and I made a list of all of the living world experts in anything
that could be related to goals and achievement and effort, et cetera.
And I went down the list one by one and I called each of these experts like, so I have this
question on behalf of all the children who attend these schools.
What do you think is the biggest idea in psychological science, the most robust and important?
What idea could we help kids with most effectively?
I talked to Walter Michelle and I talked to the famous marshmallow study.
Marshmallow guy and then some other people whose names I'll start to name and you're like,
who?
But the point is that these experts came to actually a pretty resounding consensus.
Most if not all of them said that the sturdiest finding and the most useful was the research
on goal setting and planning.
And they sent me to the door of two psychologists at NYU, Peter Goldwoodser and Gabrielle Ettingen.
Their research I think more than anyone else's reveals why positive thinking about your
future, these like positive fantasies, you know, visualizing and high res detail.
What it will be like in 10 years when you're a successful comedic actor, whatever, like
how wonderful it was but how dangerously incomplete.
So when you are deciding on a goal, a goal is a desired future state.
I want to be the most important comedic actor in the world a decade from now.
I want to, okay, this is my own.
I want to finish my second book.
I was going to use an exploduit.
I just, I could tell.
You knew it, right?
When I do something like that, I say I want to finish my bleep book by bleep myself.
Yeah, I'm going to bleep.
That's good.
So I want to finish that.
I mean, think about when you blow out candles on a birthday cake, right?
We make a wish.
And what's really powerful about visualizing your future about these positive fantasies,
about closing your eyes even and making it happen in your mind is that it helps you do
something that all human beings need to do when they commit to a goal.
And this is what Gabrielle and Peter are called crossing the Rubicon of commitment.
Oh my gosh.
I love the phrase.
I have friends.
We use that all the time.
We talk about crossing the Rubicon.
Now you, as a more learned human being than I am, probably already knew what that phrase
meant and where it came from.
The beauty is that I knew and have since completely forgotten.
I know that I knew once.
Well, okay, I've had more learned students in my classes.
And so they've enlightened me as to like the history.
But you will recall, Mike, that when Caesar crossed the river Rubicon and therefore, you
know, violated one of these like, if you cross this Rubicon, it's war, right?
Right.
And when Caesar was thinking about whether or not to declare war, he said, if I cross
this Rubicon, then the die will be cast.
And then he decided to.
And the point was that you could not go back.
This was not a two way street.
And so this idea metaphorically of crossing the Rubicon for yourself, when you make a goal,
like when you say to yourself, you know, I'd really like to lose five pounds next year.
You could be not yet across the river.
Right.
Across the river, there is actually a qualitative change in your energy and your attentional focus.
And also a very different attitude toward obstacles.
Yeah.
So when you are still deciding about, you know, do I want to lose five pounds or not?
Do I really want to, you know, go to the gym twice a week or not?
It's commitment toward the goal, right?
Like actual commitment.
Yes.
There is a kind of resolution and obstacles before you have crossed the Rubicon, actually,
make you less likely to be committed.
You're like, oh, then again, the gym is so far away.
And honestly, who really cares?
Or they brought in donuts to work or they whatever.
You know, the days are too dark.
I don't really like going out.
So all those obstacles before you have crossed the Rubicon, diminish your commitment.
But when you have already crossed the Rubicon, those obstacles just heighten your energy.
So there's this qualitative shift.
It's sometimes called the difference between being in the deliberative mindset.
Like you have crossed the Rubicon, you're weighing the pros and cons.
I tell my students, this is the ring your hands phase of motivation.
You're like, I don't really know.
Or like you tell yourself you're going to do it, but you're not actually committed to
doing it.
And you can just introspect.
People know, like if you interest back and you're like, have I crossed the Rubicon or
have I not crossed the Rubicon, you know, because on the other side, any obstacles, you
know, you've got this like mother bear energy to overcome it.
So this is why the wife and husband couple of Gabrielle engine and Peter Goldwoods are
have actually said, when you try to understand how to achieve your goals, there is some value
in a positive fantasy because it gets you across the Rubicon.
It gets you to realize that there's a reason to strive and to toil and to overcome the inevitable
setbacks without positive fantasies of the future.
It'd be hard to really get out of bed in the morning.
Right.
Right.
So that's why positive fantasies are awesome.
But if you sit in their office at NYU long enough, and I think you should stay for the second
part where they're like, but right?
And I was like, what's the but because I'm like, oh, I'm like writing this all down in
my notebook.
Right.
It all sounds great.
I'm going to go back to these Kept Charter schools.
I'm going to say like, oh, you know, maybe what all these kids need to.
Maybe what I should have done as a teacher is sat at lunch and really helped kids visualize
these positive futures.
I don't know, passed around the secret.
No, I was actually visualizing you putting down blue paper and holding hands with these
kids and saying, we set goals.
And now we're going to jump over this blue piece of paper symbolizing the river Rubicon.
We're going to visualize us crossing it and starting our new lives.
I like that.
I mean, look, I think that part is something to hold on to.
And you know, by the way, in the self-help literature, which people I hang out with don't
really love.
But there often is a grain of truth, but the problem is that it's often incomplete.
So here's the thing that you don't read about in the secret.
The butt is this.
When you cross the Rubicon, you're not done.
The second phase is planning.
And a plan is a desired future action.
You need to articulate all the things that you can't do right then, but you're going
to do in sequence in order to achieve your goal.
So this second stage of planning is something that people don't do when they only positively
fantasize about their future because it's almost like you have indulged.
This is the word that Gabrielle used.
In a way, you've sort of already indulged in the victory.
You're kind of done.
So just by visualizing it, we've indulged in the victory.
Yeah.
And people actually feel a lot of positive emotion when they vividly visualize a positive
future, but if you don't do the hard work of planning, then you don't get to the next
phase, which is action.
This is how Gabrielle phrases it.
She has an acronym for this.
It's whoop.
So the first thing that you did was you made a wish.
And the second thing starts with oh, and that's the outcome.
You visualize a positive fantasy, a positive future.
Here's the second oh in whoop.
And this is the thing that is the big butt.
This is why the law of direction is maybe misleading.
The second oh is obstacle.
And now let's make the plan.
So that's the P, right, that we can put into a time and place that will be the very next
thing that you could do to make progress toward your wish coming true.
So wish outcome obstacle plan.
And I will say that this is half the secret, right?
Positive fantasy.
Really visualizing what it would be like.
But this downer part of the obstacle and the plan, I think this is what my students
never did when I was teaching them.
And that's partly because I didn't teach them to do it.
And I think it's the trap of this kind of visualization exercise that feels so good.
And I think like the people that we hold out like Jim Carrier or whoever else, like
Will Smith who also has talked about visualizing labor.
I think these people, if you really sat down with them, would probably disclose to you
that they did all hell of a lot of obstacle identification and planning also.
I love that you kind of went into that because I look at the idea of manifestation.
And truthfully, I love it.
I started very skeptical.
But I love the idea of just putting things out there into the universe, taking this positive
belief that the universe is conspiring your favor and just going for things in a way that
is positive.
I totally hear you that what's dangerous is when that's done in isolation and not enough.
One thing that's really interesting because we talked about Jim Carrier, of course, saying
he's a great manifestor and visualizer.
One thing that really has taken sports by storm is this idea of visualization, which is
a little different than manifestation, but to your point of obstacle identification, a
lot of these Olympic athletes, and I think it really kind of blew up in Sochi during the
Sochi Olympics, would visualize their entire run.
Like Sean White?
Yeah, if you're a snowboarder and you're about to do the half pipe with all your tricks.
Journalist named Christopher Clary wrote an article in The New York Times called Olympians
using imagery as mental training and they would show them at the start gate, all kind of
standing around, but they're moving their hips and their shoulders and their bodies as
they're going through every single trick in their mind.
And so there was an American aerialist, which is ski jumping, right?
Her name is Emily Cook and she said, you have to smell it, you have to hear it, you have
to feel it, everything.
And she said it looks ridiculous when we're all up there flapping our arms, it looks insane,
but it works.
I think that's different.
I think visualization when you're an Olympic athlete, when it wasn't just the Sochi Olympics,
like you can interview any Olympic athlete and they all do visualization really.
And it wasn't just recently that they've started doing that.
I think that's different though.
I mean, I think what they're doing is they're activating a mental movie of what they have
to do in hyper detail and that is very helpful when you're literally about to do it.
And think about anybody doing anything, right?
Like you're about to cook dinner, you're about to play a piano sonata, you're about to
conduct an interview and having that mental movie of the way you want it to go is helpful
because basically that's how human beings do anything.
You have a mental movie in your head and then you make your mouth move the way it needs
to move.
I think that's different from like, I'm visualizing who I'm going to be in 10 years.
Like that's very much a motivational technique.
That's less about, okay, I want my elbow to be here and I want to, so I think they're
both good.
I think that they're just both incomplete.
Like which of those Olympic athletes got to be where they are without identifying the
obstacles and making the plans and doing the work?
I know this is obvious to you and me, but I don't think it's obvious to everybody who buys
the secret or who answers questions like, you know, the universe is going to bring me
success.
That's to me the danger of it, not that it's wrong, but that it's incomplete.
That it's incomplete.
Right.
I've talked a lot about manifestation and law of attraction and how it is maybe helpful,
but it's dangerous when done in isolation.
But I think we both agree that there is something to it and it's a yes and type of situation.
So I think my main takeaway from it is that, you know, for example, we can't all manifest
winning a certain lottery that wouldn't work.
We can't all manifest marrying your celebrity crushes.
Don't carry.
But we can't manifest the kind of person we want to be with.
We can manifest making more money and then we can put into action whoop, which is our
wish outcome, obstacles and plan in order to get there.
But I think for me, I've really appreciated the opportunity to talk about focusing on
who we can be and the self belief that we are worthy of something great and won't accept
us.
I agree, Mike.
And look, I think that if you wanted a rule for life, if somebody is telling you something
that they think is going to change your life, they probably are not entirely wrong, but those
things are so often incomplete.
And now here's a fact check of today's conversation.
In the first half of the show, Mike says that in her 2006 book The Secret, author Rhonda
Burn writes that the titular concept is largely based on the law of attraction.
We should clarify that the ideas are actually one and the same.
The secret that Burn claims so many great historical figures had used to achieve their
success is, in fact, the law of attraction.
Later, Mike says that manifestation content on TikTok has over 9 billion views.
We got that figure from a 2022 article published in the British newspaper The Guardian.
However, that number has increased dramatically in the past two years.
As of this taping, hashtag manifestation has over 52 billion views on TikTok.
Angela wondered how that number compares to views on viral cat videos.
And in fact, it seems far less impressive in that context.
The cat has nearly 188 billion views on the platform to date.
Finally, Angela shares the history of the idiom crossing the Rubicon.
She explains that General Julius Caesar, who at the time was governor of a Roman province,
declared that the die had been cast once his troops traversed the river Rubicon and entered
Rome proper.
However, this moment was not an actuality the beginning of the Roman Civil War.
Then historian Christian Meyer writes that by the time Caesar reached the river, his forces
had already occupied Roman territory.
Quote, the die had already been cast.
Reflections and hesitations like the famous quotation were strictly theater.
That's it for the fact check.
Before we wrap today's show, let's hear some thoughts about last week's episode on whether
children should be given more independence.
Thank you for your episode on childhood independence.
One aspect of the conversation that I don't believe is discussed often enough is our
built environment.
I live in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, which is one of the top 20 fastest growing cities
in the US.
A document produced by the city studied 311 miles of roadways, many of the sidewalks end
abruptly or sidewalks to nowhere.
Only 30% of the intersections with signals for cars had signals for pedestrians to cross.
Nashville just last year in 2023 had its deadliest year for pedestrians and cyclists on
record.
It's reasonable to see why parents are not comfortable with sending their children
into a world that was clearly designed for cars and not for people.
When we compare and contrast that with places like the Netherlands, another country with
some of the best mental and physical health and independence outcomes for the youth, the
difference is clear.
I believe if we want our children to be independent instead of being chauffeur around by moms and
dads and cars, then we need to focus on our built environment and build places that
prioritize the safety of people over the convenience of cars.
Hi, I'm the mob who let her 9 year old ride the subway alone.
Yeah, the North can azy, founder of the free range kids movement, and now I'm president
of Let Grow.
That's the nonprofit promoting childhood independence, so you know I absolutely love this episode.
And I especially love that the pediatrics article you were talking about is by one of my Let
Grow co-founders, Peter Gray.
The thing we realized about giving kids more independence is that it's really hard to
be the only one sending your kids to the park or the grocery or obviously the subway.
A collective problem needs a collective solution.
So we came up with something called the Let Grow Experience.
That's a homework assignment that tells kids, go home and do something new on your own
with your parents' permission but without your parents.
And when a bunch of parents are doing this at the same time, that's how the culture
starts to change.
So thank you for a great discussion and don't let Finland win.
That was Austin Fosnot and Lenore Skenezy.
Thanks to them and to everyone who shared their stories with us.
And remember, we'd love to hear your thoughts on manifestation and the law of attraction.
Send a voice memo to NSQ at Freakonomics.com and you might hear your voice on the show.
Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions, what makes an inanimate object feel meaningful
and valuable?
You once sent me a mug with a picture of the two of us on it.
Wait, what?
That's next week on No Stupid Questions.
No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network which also includes Freakonomics
Radio, People I Mostly Admire and the Economics of Everyday Things.
All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
The senior producer of the show is me, Rebecca Lee Douglas and Lear Kvoudich is our production
associate.
This episode was mixed by Eleanor Osborne.
We had help on this episode from Julie Canfer.
Our theme song was composed by Luis Guerra.
You can follow us on Twitter at NSQ underscore show and on Facebook at NSQ show.
If you have a question for a future episode, please email it to NSQ at Freakonomics.com.
To learn more or to read episode transcripts, visit Freakonomics.com slash NSQ.
Thanks for listening.
I've been doing my scales all morning.
Ah, obviously I can't sing.
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