Manifesting: How Powerful Are Our Thoughts?

Influencers are out in full force, telling us how we can “manifest” anything we want using only the power of our thoughts. Want that dream car, dream boyfriend, or dream house? Act as if you already have it, and the universe will respond. And we know our thoughts can be powerful … so, could this be legit? We go on the hunt for a manifestation method that has the science stamp of approval. We talk to psychologists Prof. Laura King and Prof. Gabriele Oettingen. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsManifestation Chapters: (00:00) The Promise of Manifesting (04:54) The Best Possible Self Exercise (09:40) Wendy and Rose Give it a Go (12:23) The Fantasy Fiasco (17:19) How To Get Your Dream Life (science approved!) (20:44) Just a Bit of Magic Check out Gabriele’s science-backed manifesting method here: https://woopmylife.org/en/science This episode was produced by Rose Rimler, with help from Wendy Zukerman, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, Michelle Dang, and Meryl Horn. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Emma Munger, So Wylie, Peter Leonard, Bumi Hidaka and Bobby Lord. Thanks to all the researchers we reached out to, including Dr. Lucas Dixon. Special thanks also to Mark Johnson. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman and you're listening to Science Versus.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Today on the show, we are putting facts against finessing your future.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  We are looking into manifesting. Can you really use the power of your mind to create the future that you want? Because according to folks online, the answer is yes.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  It's real, man. Manifesting is real.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  This shit, it works. What I'm about to tell you is going to change your life.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  And here's what you need to do to change your life. You focus on what you want and then act as if you already have it.

• 0:46Speaker 03

  While you're writing this or typing this, I want you to genuinely feel the emotions as if that thing has already happened to you.

• 0:52Speaker 04

  So what would it feel like if you received what it is that you desired? How happy would you feel? What would that moment look like?

• 0:59Speaker 02

  For method acting, we're cosplaying our future self.

• 1:03Speaker 00

  And before you know it, whatever you wished for will appear. And this idea that just by thinking about what you want, you can get it, it's become almost mainstream. One survey of over 300 people found that about a third of them believed manifestation could be real. And people say they've manifested all sorts of things.

• 1:26Speaker 04

  I manifested my crush.

• 1:28Speaker 05

  I also manifested some speaking opportunities, some partnerships.

• 1:31Speaker 04

  This is how I lost weight, a size 16 to a size 4. Literally, I manifested my green card.

• 1:36Speaker 05

  An espresso machine.

• 1:37Speaker 06

  I actually manifested a full man.

• 1:42Speaker 00

  And maybe it sounds strange that you could think your way to an espresso machine or a green card or a full man. But scientists have actually been studying the best way to achieve your goals for years. And that's what we're telling you about today. So get ready for your dreams to come true because when it comes to manifesting, there's a lot of...

• 2:04Speaker 02

  What I'm about to tell you is going to change your life.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  But then there's science.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  Science versus manifesting is coming up just after the break. As long as you believe it to be true.

• 2:25Speaker 00

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• 3:03Speaker 00

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• 3:38Speaker 00

  Welcome back. Today, we are manifesting our futures. We're making dreams come true. And look, already one of your dreams is going to come true. Because senior producer Rose Ripley is in the room!

• 3:52Speaker 02

  It sounds like you manifested some coffee not too long ago.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  Hi, hello.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Hi, Wendy. So, a few weeks ago, just so the audience knows, Leech decided we were going to manifest something. Try to do this.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. And you were going to try to manifest doing well in a swimming race?

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I am going, I signed up to swim an open water race. Swimming a mile at the beach and I've never done that before. Uh, so that's what I decided to manifest, like just like a good race, safe race, finishing the race and not coming in last because there's also ego involved.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  Have you done this yet? Have you done the race yet?

• 4:32Speaker 02

  It's in a few days.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  Okay, so as we were chatting, we thought your manifestation goal, you know, it's kinda in your control, but we thought maybe ride up the ante a little for what I'm trying to manifest.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  And so I, uh, here's, here's what I'm doing. I'm trying to manifest every time I need to ride my bike, it will not rain.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  I feel like that's a good one because it's very like universe, do me a solid.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. And what I didn't tell you at the time, Rose, is that as a kid, I believed, convinced myself that I could indeed make clouds disappear.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Oh, so you were drawing on an ancient power?

• 5:21Speaker 00

  So we would go on family trips. I have very distinct memories of mom saying, you know, we're gonna go on a hike today, Wendy, so no clouds, please. And me being like, I've got it. And I would stare at the clouds and think dissipate, dissipate. You know, sometimes it works.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  So you kind of believe this, it sounds like?

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Um, away from rain clouds. I do get part of this, you know, if you focus on what you want, subconsciously you'll make steps to achieve it or consciously. I don't know, this, is there something to this?

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Uh, well, let's dive in. So believe it or not, there is a scientist who has studied something that's an awful lot like a manifestation meditation, the kind of thing you might hear from these influencers. Um, her name is Laura King. She is a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri in Columbia. When I got on the horn with her, I chatted with her a bit about all the TikToks that I've been watching lately. And, you know, interestingly though, The comments section is full of people saying that it worked. They manifested their ex-boyfriend texting them, wanting them back. How do we explain that?

• 6:36Speaker 06

  Because life is super fun. I mean, I'm a fan of magic when it happens. I think it feels super meaningful to people. But it's not. It's magic with a little "m." Not a big one.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  So I got in touch with Laura because of this study she did back in the early 2000s. She had about 80 college students come into the lab and do 20 minutes of journaling. And they did this for four days in a row.

• 7:05Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  And they were given different topics to write about. Like, one group was told to write about their plans for the day. That was like the control group, just this neutral, kind of boring topic. Another group was told to write about a traumatic event that they'd gone through. And there was a third group, and this is where the manifestation part comes in. They were told to write about their best possible self, which went like this.

• 7:29Speaker 06

  Think for a moment about their life in the future, their best possible life in the future. Imagine that you have succeeded at attaining all of your life goals. And think of this as the kind of happily ever after for your life.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  And the people given this prompt loved it.

• 7:47Speaker 06

  People walked out of that lab feeling fantastic, right? Like, "Oh, Dr. King, I love your research. I love this study. Anytime."

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Just by imagining their best possible self, this had a real effect on people's moods. Something that Laura could actually measure.

• 8:01Speaker 06

  Oh, that's cool.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  But what's really intriguing, and what intrigued Laura and other scientists, who ended up doing their own versions of this study later on, is that the effects seemed to actually last a while.

• 8:13Speaker 06

  Wait, just feeling good that lasted longer? How much longer?

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Well, Laura checked in on them three weeks later and found- That they were better off than the people who had done the other prompts.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  Three weeks later?

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  Three weeks later?

• 8:26Speaker 02

  And other studies since then have had people do this best possible self-exercise and found similar things. In fact, a few years ago, a review paper called this exercise, quote, "a viable intervention for increasing optimism, positive affect, health, and well-being."

• 8:42Speaker 00

  Wow. So why does it work?

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Um, we don't really know. Laura doesn't know. But her best guess is that it has to do with putting sort of smaller everyday things into context, like sort of adding some perspective about why we do the little things that we do every day. Sort of like, what is the ultimate purpose of all this stuff?

• 9:05Speaker 06

  Which is something that we often forget, right, in the everyday kind of mundane hassles and the stuff that we're trying to accomplish, right? At the end of the day, you checked off all your boxes, you feel good. But when you've placed that to-do list in a larger, grander context, it also gives you meaning.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  So Wendy, the bottom line is that thinking about a bright future for yourself feels good.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. But then the question becomes, does it end up being true? Because manifesting, the mythology of manifesting-

• 9:36Speaker 02

  It goes a step further.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  It's not just... You know what's a really nice thing to do? Just picture your goals and dreams. You'll feel great. They say those dreams will happen.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  So will they happen?

• 9:48Speaker 02

  So I asked Laura about that. So do people, after they do the best possible selves intervention, actually make their best possible self come true?

• 9:57Speaker 00

  I have no idea. I don't know. Um, I don't know. I don't know. Laura, why don't you know?

• 10:06Speaker 02

  They didn't test for it. They didn't follow them, you know, 10, 20 years later or whatever. And as far as I can tell, of all these, all these studies that like had people do the best possible self thing, none of them actually like, that wasn't their goal. They didn't, they didn't find, they didn't follow up and see like, did you make it come true?

• 10:23Speaker 00

  So who do we need for this? For our big M magic?

• 10:28Speaker 02

  I don't know if I could offer you big M magic, but I can offer you big S science.

• 10:32Speaker 00

  I'll take it.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  I do have some answers for you about that, and it's going to come up after the break.

• 10:45Speaker 02

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• 13:49Speaker 00

  Welcome back. Today, we are manifesting. We are trying to make our dreams come true with our minds. Senior producer Rose Rimla is telling us all about it.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Hello, Wendy. So, um, yeah, I wanted to check in about your manifesting experience. You said that you were manifesting sunny days while bike riding, or at least no rain.

• 14:11Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  And you sent me some evidence that you were doing your homework.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  That's right. I'm a good student.

• 14:16Speaker 06

  There is this gray cloud looming. It will not rain. It will not rain. The gray cloud that I see before me will dissipate. It will not rain.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  And I, too, have been trying to manifest something, a good swim.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:43Speaker 04

  So I'm imagining that I'm...

• 14:46Speaker 02

  In the water, I'm towards the end of the race. I'm watching everyone on shore cheering. And as I'm swimming, the water is getting shallower and shallower. I'm getting up to the shore. And I get out of the water and I cross the finish line. And I'm just celebrating with everyone and eating a hot dog, maybe. And then I checked the results later and I'm fifth place.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  I love it. You're like, you can manifest whatever you want. You could have been first place.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  Oh, you're right, you're right, right. Oh, I'm ruining it. I'm sending out my negative vibes, of course.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  And you were thinking, na, na, na, na, na. Manifesting dreams. I want to be fifth. I don't even need a medal.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  It's all rose. And you call yourself American.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  Remember how, whatever my score on the narcissist test, I think.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  So the idea here behind this, this whole thing is that you're, you're supposed to be putting out positive vibrations into the universe. And then the universe will match your positive vibrations. I've heard it described as like turning yourself into an antenna that you like tune to what frequency you want the universe to be on. So like it only, you send the signals.

• 16:11Speaker 00

  Wait, this is how manifestation is supposed to work.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically. I'm summarizing a bunch of different schools of thoughts because this whole concept has been around at least a century. And, you know, there was this big book that came out about it a while back, The Secret, if you remember that.

• 16:29Speaker 00

  Yes, wow.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  But moving away from vibes, the big science question here is, does the act of like thinking about manifesting something up your chances that you'll actually get what you want? And for this, we need Gabriela Etignan. She's a professor of psychology at New York University. And her research is all about how people turn their wishes and fantasies into things that they can actually achieve. So she had this one big experiment where one of the things that they did was they recruited students who were in their last year of grad school and asked them, do you ever have, you know, positive fantasies about your future job, once you get out of grad school?

• 17:15Speaker 02

  And she found that some people just naturally do this a lot. They do this more than other people. And so what's cool about the study is she followed up a couple of years later and asked them basically like, how is it going with your career? Are you getting a lot of job offers? Are you making a good salary? And what we find is that the more positively these university graduates fantasize

• 17:39Speaker 00

  about their success in work life, the less successful they were. Two years later. The more positively that they fantasized, the less successful they were.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  It basically backfired.

• 17:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  The more they dreamed about like getting a job and having a job that they liked, that paid them well, the less likely they were to have a job to they had less, they reported having like fewer job offers and they made less money than people who didn't really fantasize about that stuff.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  Wow, wow. So less job offers, less money. Totally different to those folks on socials we were hearing from before.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  And I found other examples of manifesting backfiring. There was a survey of almost 400 people that found the ones who believed in manifesting the most were more likely to have made risky financial investments. They did stuff like they bought crypto. They believed in some like get rich quick stuff. And they were more likely to have declared bankruptcy than other people.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  Ooh, OK, yeah.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  Which made me think of all the advice from manifesting people about how you need to spend so much time, you know, daydreaming and like just thinking about all these good things that are going to come to you. So that sounds actually like pretty, given your results, maybe that's really bad advice. It's good advice if you want to just feel good. It makes you feel good. We found that too. But.

• 19:13Speaker 05

  If you really want to go and get your fantasies in reality, then it's bad advice.

• 19:20Speaker 00

  And does Gabrielle know why it backfired?

• 19:23Speaker 02

  Well, what might be going on is that the people who were fantasizing more were putting in less work to actually get what they wanted. Like Gabriella found that those graduate students that she followed up with two years later, the ones who fantasized a lot, they weren't putting in as many job applications as their peers.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  Mm.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  And there was a similar study she did about college students fantasizing about getting good grades. And the ones who fantasize the most about their good grades spent less time studying. So Gabriella thinks that this backfiring effect is all about where you put your energy.

• 19:57Speaker 05

  Maybe people don't put so much effort in their realization of the positive fantasies.

• 20:05Speaker 00

  They spend too much time off in La La Land. They forget to actually fill out their job application.

• 20:09Speaker 05

  Too much time. And what we later found in the experiments is that they feel already arrived. They feel already in the positive future. Our mind is very strong. So they feel in the positive future. And if you already feel accomplished, what do you do? You relax.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not just that people were less motivated. She's also seen a physiological reaction in people's bodies. So in a study where they had people fantasize while they measured their blood pressure, she found that their blood pressure actually went down while they were fantasizing.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  So her idea is that as you're fantasizing and feeling good and relaxed, you just have less fire in your ass to actually go out and then accomplish these goals? That's how Gabrielle thinks about it?

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. And I will say this is different from sort of generally having a positive or optimistic outlook on life. You know, being a person who kind of generally believes that things will go OK for you, things will work out. That's actually associated with good outcomes, even being good for your health. But fantasizing, not so much.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  So then, I guess, for folks who do have goals and want to achieve them. Has science learned a better way to do this? Do we have a science-backed way to manifest?

• 21:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  I mean, there's actually a whole branch of psychology that's dedicated to figuring out how to help people set and achieve goals. And we can draw from that.

• 21:52Speaker 00

  Great.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  It turns out, a critical thing is not being too Pollyanna about what you want. You actually have to consider the hard stuff or bad stuff that might come up and might get in your way.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  Which is the exact opposite to TikTok, right? Which is saying, you know, just focus on...

• 22:11Speaker 02

  Just think about what you want. Yeah. And scientists like Gabriella have come up with some, I guess, you know, to compete with our TikTok colleagues out there, we should probably call them hacks.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  Right, okay. So hack number one, think about your obstacles.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Gabriella has tested this by having people pick a goal, imagine why that goal would be so great, you know? But then also imagine what the obstacles might be to getting there. So like, add in a splash of realism.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  And she's found that this approach works better than just focusing on the goal or just focusing on the obstacles. You need both together.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  Great.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  And she's done experiments where this technique has gotten people to do more exercise, to deal with issues at work, and has even gotten children to do their homework. So, that's really something.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  Okay, okay.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  But if you really want to take it up a notch, you gotta go a little further. Which brings us to hack two, use if-then statements.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  I remember these.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, from our ADHD episode. So these come up in ADHD coping strategies as well. So the idea is to think up specific obstacles that could come up in, you know, stopping you from getting your goal. And think about what you're gonna do if that obstacle comes up. And put it in the statement, if blank, then why? So if this happens, then I'll do why. For example, there was a study of T-girls who wanted to avoid getting pregnant. And the researchers had half the girls do this exercise where they made if-then statements about what could go wrong with their birth control. They said stuff like, if I forget to take my pill one day, then I will, you know, use a condom the next time I have sex.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Or if my partner doesn't want to use a condom, then I will, I don't know.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Tell them to [BLEEP] off.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. And researchers followed up with these people a couple of years later and found that in the group that made these if-then planning statements, there were half as many pregnancies among them.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Compared to a control group.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  Uh huh. Wow, wow.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  A review paper found that overall, people using these two hacks, imagining an obstacle to their goal and then coming up with an if-then statement for what to do, generally works pretty well. The paper found a small to medium effect size for people achieving their goals using these methods.

• 24:43Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. A small to medium effect.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Which in psychology is not bad.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  I mean, that's true. That's the world, that's the entire field of psychology is based on small to medium effect sizes.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  And actually, Wendy, now I guess I can finally ask you, did you get rained on?

• 24:58Speaker 00

  Nope.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Oh, forget it. Throw the whole episode out. Manifestation works. Oh, my god.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  Sometimes it was, yeah, it was really quite surprising. The, I would arrive at my destination and rain would start.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  Well, Wendy, you may very well be a weather witch, and I wish that for you.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  But actually, like, seriously, what do you think explains that?

• 25:24Speaker 00

  Um, coincidence, of course.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 25:28Speaker 00

  But you know what? Maybe because I really wanted it to happen, I was probably just way more aware of the weather than I normally would. So, leading up to the time I would have to go. I wouldn't cheat. I wouldn't look at the radar.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  But maybe if I'm being really honest with myself, I would think, you know what? I could see some clouds off in the distance, but it's looking pretty good now.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  I'll go now instead of...

• 25:55Speaker 00

  I'll just leave a little earlier. I'll leave, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  You just became like, hyper-aware of the weather.

• 26:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Plus, I mean, I think if you were to keep doing this... There might be times when you get like a little drizzled on and you're like, "That doesn't count," or, yeah, I don't know. You would just notice, moving forward, every time that did, it did supposedly work, and you might not notice every time it didn't really work. Classic confirmation bias.

• 26:19Speaker 06

  For sure, of course.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  And also, I think a lot of us have a certain amount of main character syndrome. I'm not accusing you, Wendy, but...

• 26:28Speaker 06

  Definitely, definitely not fifth place rose.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  It reminds me, actually, of a story that Laura King told me. She's the psychologist that we heard from earlier. It was about something that happened to her when she was in college. And at the time, she was training to be a singer, and she was at a voice lesson one day.

• 26:48Speaker 06

  And I was trying to hit this high note, and trying to hit this high note, and I could not do it. So at the end of my lesson, like the last few minutes of my lesson, my teacher said, "Let's try this one more time." And so he's running up the scale, and he's running up the scale, and I'm trying to hit that note. And when you're trying to hit that really high note, right, you're almost whooping as if you're making a siren sound, right? Like a child. And so I'm making this noise, and suddenly, this, you know, I opened my mouth as wide as I could, and I hit the note. And I sustained that note. And I stood there on this stage, and this amazing sound is coming out of me. And then, the building started to shake.

• 27:33Speaker 06

  And the floor of the stage is shivering under my feet. And this old building's like, "Eh, eh, eh." Snow is falling off the roof in these grand, boom, boom. And I'm standing there sustaining this note, right? I caused an earthquake, right? In rural Ohio, in the middle of January, I'm standing there.

• 27:59Speaker 06

  And I'm thinking, oh, my God, right? Like, I caused an earthquake. This is incredible. I felt like I had discovered my superpower, right? And I was thinking, I'm standing there thinking, I will only use these powers for good. My, my voice teacher, who was a very, you know, religious slash spiritual man, like, I am not kidding you, got down on his knees and started praying at the piano bench.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 28:29Speaker 06

  Okay. So this became a kind of a super meaningful, personal touchstone, right? Like, I'll never forget that time I caused an earthquake.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  Of course not.

• 28:41Speaker 06

  And I've just shared the story so many times. And then, um, a few years ago, I thought, did that happen?

• 28:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're like, wait, what?

• 28:50Speaker 06

  And so I started looking it up. And it turns out there was an earthquake on this day in January in Ohio at exactly that time. And that's when I started thinking about, oh, my God, like, all over Ohio, so many people caused that earthquake, right? So many, like, someone slammed a door and it started. Someone sneezed really hard. Someone turned on their hairdryer, right?

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:18Speaker 06

  All of us caused that earthquake because that's how human cognitive processes are, right? Something big happens and we're like, whoa, what did I do?

• 29:27Speaker 00

  Hmm, yeah. Okay, so Rose, your, your swim, your big swim is in a couple of days, right?

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Yes, so, yeah, I'll call you afterwards. I'll let you know how it went.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  Great, good luck.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Hello? Hello, Wendy, it is I. And I have, I have completed my race. I don't know, I said it like that. Did you have a good swim? Yes, the weather was perfect. Well, you're welcome.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  Crowd cheering on the other side?

• 30:07Speaker 02

  Actually, yeah, it did kind of end the way I had envisioned it in my, my goal that I, you know, I was swimming, the water was getting shallower and shallower and people were cheering and like waving me in and uh, that part came true.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  But the big question, fifth place?

• 30:24Speaker 02

  I got seventy first place.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  But you said for your age category, did that change it?

• 30:29Speaker 02

  In my age category.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  How do you feel? It's your first open water swim.

• 30:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I feel good. And I have one more thing to tell you, Wendy.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  This week, there were thirty two citations in this episode.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  Oh, great.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  If people want to see them, they should click on the link in our show notes for our transcript and that's where all the citations are.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  Great. Thanks, Rose.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  Thanks, Wendy.

• 31:04Speaker 00

  This episode was produced by Rose Rimler with help from me, Wendy Zukerman, Katie Foster Keys, Michelle Dang, and Merrill Horn. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Emma Munger, So Wiley, Peter Leonard, Boomi Hidaka, and Bobby Lord. Thanks to all of the researchers we reached out to for this episode, including Dr. Lucas Dixon. A special thanks to Mark Johnson. Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We are everywhere and if you like what we're doing, give us a five star review. It helps others find the show. If you are listening on Spotify, follow us and tap the bell icon so you get notifications when new episodes come out.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  I'm Wendy Zukerman. Back to you next time.

• 31:58Speaker 00

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