Is There Really a Plastic Spoon in Our Brains?

Headlines are screaming that we have tons of microplastics in our brains — the equivalent of an entire plastic spoon. OK, that sounds terrifying, but is it true? We talk to chemist Prof. Oliver Jones. Find our transcript here: https://tinyurl.com/ScienceVsPlasticSpoonBrain In this episode, we cover: (00:00) A plastic spoon’s worth of microplastics?! (05:21) Something dodgy here? (17:39) So how much plastic is in our bodies, really? This episode was produced by Rose Rimler, with help from Wendy Zukerman, along with Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, Meryl Horn, and Michelle Dang. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Fact checking by San Lemonick. Music written by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, So Wylie, Bumi Hidaka, and Bobby Lord. Thanks to all the researchers we spoke to for this episode, including Dr. Roger Kuhlman, Prof. Martin Wagner, Dr. Elke Fischer, Dr. Marie-France Dignac, and Rachel Kozloski. 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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wendy Zukerman?

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

• 0:05Wendy Zukerman?

  So, there are a lot of scientific papers out there that you will never read, and that I will never read, and only nerds really know about them. But every now and then, there is a scientific paper that will break out of the ivory tower and go viral. You see it all over the news, it's all over your feed. And sometimes these papers make these very extraordinary claims that, I don't know, maybe sound a touch dodgy, it's hard to know what to make of them. And that is where our brand new segment, Viral Papers, comes in.

• 0:44Wendy Zukerman?

  And here with our very first viral paper is Science Versus senior producer, Rose Rimler. Hi, Rose.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Hi, Wendy. I also have the honor of debuting the jingle for this new type of episode, which I know you had asked our very talented sound engineer to mix up a jingle. He sent it to me and I have it here for you to listen to.

• 1:09Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes! So I was thinking the jingle could be something like, "Viral papers, viral papers, they're everywhere, but something's gone wrong."

• 1:23Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, that was just a suggestion. I didn't think it was gonna be the...

• 1:29Speaker 01

  A good idea is a good idea, you know? You can't just throw out a great melody like that.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Or vocal performance.

• 1:39Wendy Zukerman?

  I thought it was a Greenlight Freindstum session!

• 1:44Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, well, I hope everyone's excited.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  They should be excited. Because today, we're gonna talk about a paper that makes a very extraordinary claim. I'm just gonna play you some of the headlines here.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  The new study has found an alarming amount of plastic in our brains.

• 2:01Speaker 03

  This morning, a new study is raising concern about microplastics after researchers found an entire spoons' worth inside samples taken from human brains.

• 2:11Speaker 04

  And get this, when they looked at the average brain, the amount of microplastics in the brain was equivalent to the weight of a plastic spoon.

• 2:19Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, this was everywhere. New York Times, CNN.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it got a lot of American press, but internationally, it was everywhere. It was, you know, down in Australia, where you are, India, Brazil, Mexico.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  France.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  It got a ton of attention on socials as well. And that's because it sounds terrifying, right?

• 2:46Speaker 05

  You and me and everyone you meet has enough plastic in their [bleep] brain to make a spoon. If that doesn't scare you into changing everything from plastic, then I don't know what will.

• 3:03Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, I mean, the idea that a plastic spoon is sitting in our brains, yeah, it's very potentially scary. What's it doing in there? How is it affecting our behavior, our health?

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you know, Wendy, my reaction here was less alarm and more like, really? Like, I was very skeptical.

• 3:25Wendy Zukerman?

  Tell me more.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Well, we did this episode about microplastics last year. And in the course of working on that episode, I just came across a lot of bullshit, including like bullshit in the science, in papers. We're talking really sloppy math and overestimates. There's even a case where it looked like the scientists forgot to convert kilograms to milligrams and then they overestimated this thing that they were trying to estimate by six orders of magnitude.

• 3:51Wendy Zukerman?

  What? That's a, that's a, that's a primary school era there. You forgot to convert? It's like that Simpsons episode where they're like, oh, sorry, I forgot to carry the wand.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Um, and there's also all that stuff about how much of the chemicals and black plastic cooking utensils were like leaking into our food.

• 4:11Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  That made a big splash. You know, people were throwing out their spatulas. But turns out that those researchers also screwed up their math. And in fact, the chemicals that are leaching out of the utensils are way lower than what first got reported. So I'm just skeptical of this whole field.

• 4:28Wendy Zukerman?

  Which takes us to the plastic spoon paper?

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Yes, and as it turns out, the science here is also kind of fraught, actually in a way that has big implications for a lot of the headlines that we see about microplastics.

• 4:42Wendy Zukerman?

  So let's get into it. What is going on? Do we all have an entire spoons' worth of plastic lodged into our brain? Coming up after the break. Joanna, Joanna, sing us out with the jingle, Rose.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  As wonderful as that melody was, I don't remember it. I would have to listen again.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Wasn't an instant earworm.

• 5:07Wendy Zukerman?

  It was not an instant earworm.

• 5:18Speaker 06

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• 6:59Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. Today on the show, Rose Rimler, senior producer, has been smelling something fishy in a scientific paper that claimed to find a lot of plastic swimming around in human brains. So where do we begin?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Well, we've been hearing about microplastics for years. We've been hearing that they're all around us, that they're in our food and our water and even in the air that we breathe.

• 7:25Wendy Zukerman?

  Right.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  And now we're hearing that they might be getting into our bodies. And that's alarming, you know, because we know that plastics kind of come hand in hand with endocrine-disrupting chemicals. We talked about this in our episode last year.

• 7:38Wendy Zukerman?

  That's right. The chemicals can interfere with our hormones.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's also early evidence that microplastics could irritate the immune system, like causing inflammation. So we don't want a lot of microplastic in our bodies, even beyond the fact that it's gross. Like, that could be really bad.

• 7:55Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes. So we have good reasons to not want a spoon's worth of tiny microplastics in our brain.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, believe it or not, yes. Science is on our side.

• 8:06Wendy Zukerman?

  Great.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  With that gut feeling.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  So let's dive into this paper. Let's find out what's going on here. I talked to a bunch of scientists about this. One person I spoke to was a professor of chemistry named Oliver Jones. He is at RMIT University in Australia. Do you remember when you first heard about this paper that said there's enough plastic in the human brain to add up to a plastic spoon?

• 8:30Speaker 08

  Yes, I remember reading it. I thought it was a pretty unlikely, to be honest. I thought, I was a bit suspicious when I saw the headline.

• 8:40Wendy Zukerman?

  Like our old friend Rose here.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, just like me. He thought to himself.

• 8:46Speaker 08

  Was that actually true?

• 8:47Wendy Zukerman?

  So why suspicious?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Well, to understand that, you have to understand exactly what these scientists did. So they got little pieces of brain tissue from dozens of people who had died for a variety of reasons. And they were looking for evidence of plastic in these tissue samples. And the way to do that is, you know, there's no magic wand that you can wave over a tissue sample and it beeps like, "Plastic detected." There's nothing like that. So what these scientists did is they used this technique that's called pyrolysis. What is it?

• 9:21Speaker 08

  Pyrolysis, I can't say it now. Pyrolysis gas chromatography mass spectrometry.

• 9:27Wendy Zukerman?

  Pyrolysis gas chromatography mass spectrometry.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Which I feel like I could imagine there's like a Lin-Manuel Miranda rap to be written about. Gas chromatography mass spectrometry.

• 9:46Wendy Zukerman?

  So I've got my brain tissue. And how do I put it through the pyrolysis?

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Gas chromatography. Well, the very first step is pyrolysis, which is what it sounds like.

• 10:01Speaker 08

  Which is essentially burning the sample so that you get a smoke coming off, right? So then you've got a gas sample.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they literally get these bits of brain and then burn them. And the game is to try to search for evidence of plastics in the gas that comes off.

• 10:17Speaker 06

  Oh, that's cool.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  So you take the smoke that you've created, you run it through a machine, that's the gas chromatographer. It separates and sorts all the different components of the gas, all the separate molecules. And then the mass spectrometer weighs those molecules. And that helps scientists identify them.

• 10:35Speaker 06

  Hmm, okay.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it spits out something that looks like a chart where all the molecules that are present in the sample are broken down by weight. So the scientist gets this printout that looks like...

• 10:46Speaker 08

  It's a lot of lines of different lengths.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  And then, so then what do you do with that? How do you go from that to like, oh, this is what the material is?

• 10:53Speaker 08

  So, well, each bunch of lines, so to speak, is sort of like a fingerprint.

• 10:58Speaker 06

  Uh huh, so they're looking for the fingerprints of plastics within those brain samples that they just burnt up?

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically. They're looking for the molecular weights of different types of plastic. And in this study, they reported that they did find this in these brain samples. In particular, they said that they found evidence of a lot of polyethylene. And that's the kind of plastic used for plastic packaging and plastic bottles and stuff like that.

• 11:27Speaker 06

  Hmm, yeah, that does sound scary, yeah.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and to laypeople like us, that sounds pretty irrefutable at first. It's like, dang, okay, they found plastic bits in these brains. But there's a problem here. Remember that the first step of this process was the pyrolysis, the burning part?

• 11:46Speaker 06

  Oh, that was the funnest part.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so of course you remember. The thing is that when you burn your sample up, you've changed its identity from what it was originally. So what was initially polyethylene, for example, would now be a handful of different molecules.

• 12:01Speaker 06

  Uh huh.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  And the problem is, there are other materials that can break down into those same molecules when they're burned. So it's...

• 12:09Wendy Zukerman?

  It's kind of like if you had a bunch of baked goods, muffins, loaves, soufflés, I don't know. Anyway, and then you burnt them all up and put them through your pyrolysis spectrometer, whatever, and then on the line, it all just looked like flour or something.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like if you were to see a line for flour and you're like, aha, I know this was a soufflé. You're like, well, no, it could have come from something else. It could have come from the pie or something. Yeah, I guess I'm going with it. So I'm approving that analogy.

• 12:45Wendy Zukerman?

  Excellent.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  And bringing this back to plastics.

• 12:49Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes, yes.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  So here's what the polyethylene could get mistaken for. That's kind of a big problem, fat. And here's Oliver.

• 13:00Speaker 08

  The fingerprint of fat is very similar to the fingerprint of polyethylene. They look so similar that it's quite easy to mistake one for the other.

• 13:07Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, this is a big deal because the brain is full of fat.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Exactly. The brain is very fatty.

• 13:15Wendy Zukerman?

  Uh huh. That feels like a huge problem.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  So I asked Oliver, could this supposed plastic spoon in our brains just be normal human fat?

• 13:30Speaker 08

  Yes, I think the majority of it.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 13:33Speaker 08

  What's more likely, that I actually have a plastic spoons' worth of plastic in my brain or there's a measurement issue from a technique that I know has issues with measuring plastics?

• 13:42Speaker 01

  I mean, dang, that's a big problem, right?

• 13:44Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah. Yeah, so that headline could have just been human fat in the brain.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Human brain has human fat in it. Yeah, it doesn't really have the same ring to it.

• 13:56Wendy Zukerman?

  No.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  And it's not just Oliver that's raising alarm here. There's a group in Australia that was so concerned about the problems of this technique that they really put it to the test. They spiked blood samples with microplastics. So like they had a known quantity of microplastics. They put it in the blood and then they ran this analysis to see, could it accurately read how much was in there? And they found that it couldn't. And actually, they concluded that this technique is, quote, "unsuitable" for looking for these particular plastics in our bodies.

• 14:27Speaker 06

  So what did the authors of that plastic spoon paper say about this general problem? That you can't tell the difference between healthy fats and plastics?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Well, yes, I reached out to them and they did acknowledge to me, this is a quote, that the paper is a single study and the science is nowhere near settled.

• 14:46Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  But they also say that they tried to solve this problem by trying to remove all the fat in their samples before they put the samples through the spectrometer at all. So basically, before they burned it up, they soaked it in a solution to break down all the organic matter and then they centrifuged it to get rid of that stuff.

• 15:05Speaker 06

  Oh, that seems smart. So they, they thought they got rid of all the fat. So anything they're saying is truly plastic?

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Yes, but other scientists I spoke to were skeptical that what they did worked or that it worked well enough to get all the fat out, like not even a little residue left behind. And just in general, more and more scientists are looking at this technique and they're saying, "Hold up." You know, one scientist I spoke to, he was very blunt. He said that papers that look for microplastics in human tissues using this technique are, quote, "garbage."

• 15:41Speaker 06

  Ooh.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  And the thing is, a lot of the studies that you see that say things like "microplastics are in our testicles" or "this or that part of the body," they use this technique.

• 15:53Speaker 06

  Hmm, okay. And in our microplastics episode, we talked about blood having microplastics in it. Are you now questioning that paper?

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, that paper, that was, um, we looked at a paper that found microplastics in the arterial plaque that got scraped out of people's arteries. And that, I'm sorry to say, did use this now controversial technique that we just shat all over.

• 16:19Wendy Zukerman?

  Uh huh, okay, interesting.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  When I asked the authors of that paper about this problem, they pointed to the fact that they had looked at their samples under a powerful microscope and they had seen what looks like little jagged pieces in the cells, which they think must be bits of microplastic. So they argue that that meant their findings were legit.

• 16:40Wendy Zukerman?

  Uh huh.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  And interestingly, the plastic spoon brain paper did the same thing. They also looked at their samples under a microscope and they also saw some irregular shaped pieces and think that they're plastic. But the truth is that we don't actually know what those bits are. And even if they are plastic, it's like it doesn't mean they got in there from the person eating or inhaling microplastics while they're alive.

• 17:05Wendy Zukerman?

  What do you mean?

• 17:06Speaker 01

  It could be this other very simple but very like infernal problem that researchers in this space have to deal with. And that is the problem of contamination. Because these samples, they're analyzed in a lab and labs are full of plastic.

• 17:22Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  You've got plastic tubes, plastic equipment, plastic fibers that can shut off lab coats. And at any point, any of those things could have snuck into the sample.

• 17:33Wendy Zukerman?

  So e- even if you find actual plastic in your sample, you don't know if it was in people's brains while they were walking around in the world. It could have just gotten into the sample from the lab.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Right. It could even have come from the medical examiner's office as the brains are being harvested, you know? I doubt that's a plastic-free zone. So the authors tried hard. They talk about it, they like, they thought about it and they tried as best they could to keep plastic away from their samples when they had the opportunity to, but like, it's pretty hard to do. There's actually a plastics research group that has set up a lab that's supposed to be as plastics-free as possible. And even they can't get contamination down to zero.

• 18:17Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  So if some plastic particle or fiber got into the sample, then that means it could have really blown up these results.

• 18:26Speaker 06

  Right. And because they're, you mentioned they're starting with these tiny tissue samples. They weren't analyzing the entire brain for plastics, right? They've got a tiny tissue sample.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:37Speaker 06

  And then.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  And then to get this idea of how much could possibly be in the whole brain, you've got to multiply it out.

• 18:42Speaker 06

  If you've got two tiny pieces of plastic contamination, and then you multiply that out by 100, 1,000, whatever, now all of a sudden you have a plastic spoon in your brain.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  It could be. It could be. Yeah.

• 18:57Speaker 06

  So then, do we have any idea how much plastic is in our body and our brain? And our testicles?

• 19:06Speaker 01

  I'm going to tell you about that after the break.

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• 22:20Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. Today on the show, viral papers. We don't need to play the jiggle again. We have just said that the headline that you might have heard, that we have a plastic spoon worth of plastics in our brain, might be garbage. Strong words from some scientists. But there is still this question of how much plastics are in our body. Right?

• 22:46Speaker 01

  That's right. And even though people critiquing the study and other studies like it, they say that there probably is some plastic in our bodies. But right, we want to know how much. So there are other techniques that are used to look for microplastics in the body. They're not perfect, but some of the scientists I talk to think that they're more reliable.

• 23:05Wendy Zukerman?

  They haven't gone up in smoke just yet.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  No, and literally, they don't use that technique. They basically shine a laser. This is very oversimplified, but it's a technique that uses light to identify molecules instead of what we talked about before. And they look for individual particles. And the most reliable papers that have used those kinds of techniques, they do report microplastics in different parts of the body. They have found microplastics in human lungs. They've also found microplastics in unhealthy livers, from livers from people who have cirrhosis. But here's the thing. These studies that use these other methods, they report small amounts of plastic. So for example, there's one study that found microplastics in lung tissue.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  They reported an average concentration of less than one microplastic particle per gram of lung tissue. And most of these particles were smaller than a grain of sand.

• 24:04Wendy Zukerman?

  I know microplastics are small, but it still doesn't sound great.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  It doesn't sound great.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  And it would probably be better if there weren't any, but it's not like the mass of cutlery, you know?

• 24:16Wendy Zukerman?

  Right, right.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  And Oliver isn't freaked out by it. If we could collect all the microplastics and nanoplastics from our body and wad it up into one thing, what would it be? You can write that headline. What do you think?

• 24:31Speaker 08

  Personally, I reckon it'd be pretty... Probably if you could take it all and wad it up, it'd probably be a very small little particle that you could probably, might not even be able to see with your, with the naked eye.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 24:40Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think it's pretty small personally.

• 24:44Wendy Zukerman?

  It's a very tiny spoon.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Which kind of makes sense, right? Because I don't know if you remember this, Wendy, but in our episode on microplastics, we talked about there was a stat that got around that we eat a credit card's worth of plastic a week or something.

• 24:59Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  In reality, the better paper that tried to estimate how much we eat, they found that it would take 23,000 years to eat a credit card's worth of plastic.

• 25:10Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  If it takes 23,000 years to eat a credit card's worth of plastic, then how would a spoon show up in a single human lifetime, right? Because that's like roughly the same amount.

• 25:18Wendy Zukerman?

  Right, yeah.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  You know, and some of these more reliable studies have found microplastics in our poop, which suggests that we are eating some plastic, but we're also getting rid of at least some of it. So, I don't know, on the bright side, like, we're not totally helpless here. Like, our body can get rid of stuff.

• 25:34Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, if we're finding it in the poo, that's actually a potentially good sign.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:38Wendy Zukerman?

  Because we know intuitively we are ingesting it if it's sloughing off food products.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:45Wendy Zukerman?

  But if we're pooing out a bunch of it, that's great. The body's like, I don't want this.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:51Wendy Zukerman?

  So where are you at? How much do you think we need to worry about microplastics in our body and our brain?

• 25:57Speaker 01

  I mean, I think not that much, really. Even one of the authors of this brain paper told me that he thinks that the media hype has gotten a little out of control and it's like freaking everyone out when they probably shouldn't be that freaked out.

• 26:12Wendy Zukerman?

  Mm.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that it's still worth limiting your exposure to plastics, especially around your food. And that's because of the endocrine-disrupting chemicals that can come off the plastics. But as far as like worrying about this idea, I think that's out there that we're becoming like plastic people.

• 26:33Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  That we're, you know, half-human, half-plastic.

• 26:35Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  I think that's just hype. I don't think the evidence is there.

• 26:39Wendy Zukerman?

  Uh huh.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  So I don't know. I guess my takeaway for the audience is like, then the next time you see a headline that's like, there's a He-Man action figure in your prostate, you know? Don't, don't believe, don't, that, that, take it with a grain of salt, I would say. So more studies will come. There's going to be more information. But like, this, I'm just saying there's nothing to panic about. And the plastic spoon thing in your brain thing, that is panic-level information.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  And when I asked Oliver for his takeaway, he agreed.

• 27:13Speaker 08

  I think there's a lot of unnecessary worry that people have about because they read these things online, they assume they're true. And then they're like, oh, my goodness, I'm going to die. I've got plastic in my brain. And it's like, the stress is probably worse than any plastic.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Worrying about the plastic spoon in your brain is the bigger problem.

• 27:30Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 27:31Speaker 06

  And that concludes our first segment of viral papers. Thanks, Rose.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Thanks, Wendy. Should we cue the jingle again?

• 27:42Speaker 13

  Viral papers, viral papers. They're everywhere, but something's gone wrong.

• 27:52Speaker 06

  All right, Rose, how many citations are in this week's episode?

• 27:55Speaker 01

  This week, there are 55 citations.

• 27:57Speaker 06

  And if people want to read more about this paper and this technique, where should they go?

• 28:04Speaker 01

  They should check the show notes because there's going to be a link to the transcript of the episode there. And all of our citations are in the transcript.

• 28:11Speaker 06

  And also, if you have a viral paper suggestion for us, let us know. You can find us on Instagram, we're science underscore V S. I'm on TikTok at Wendy Zukerman.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Thanks, Wendy.

• 28:24Speaker 06

  Thanks, Rose.

• 28:32Speaker 06

  This episode was produced by Rose Rimler with help from me, Wendy Zukerman, along with Keddie Foster Keys, Merrill Horn, and Michelle Dang. We're edited by Blythe Jurell. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Fact checking by Sam Lemonick. Music written by Peter Leonard, Emma Munga, So Wiley, Bumi Hidaka, and Bobby Lord. Thanks to all of the researchers that we spoke to for this episode, including Dr. Roger Coleman, Professor Martin Wagner, Dr. Elka Fisher, Dr. Murray France Diniak, and Rachel Kozlosky. Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We are everywhere. If you like what you're hearing, give us a five star review on whatever podcast app you're using.

• 29:14Speaker 06

  And if you are listening on Spotify, then please follow us and also tap the bell icon so you get notifications when new episodes come out. I'm Wendy Zukerman. Back to you next time.

• 29:33Speaker 12

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot stop your new clients from emailing you at 3 a.m.

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• 30:04Speaker 14

  From the creators of Zootopia and Frozen comes Disney's Hext. Welcome to Hext and enter the world of witches, where it was foretold that an ordinary girl would become an extraordinary witch and save the world of magic. Disney's Hext arrives in theaters this Thanksgiving.