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July 8, 2014 33 mins

The idea that the larger the brain, the higher the intelligence is an old one, but it's pretty much utterly false. Modern investigation into how the brain works suggests there's a lot more to take into account when comparing brain biology to intellect.

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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know fromhouse Stuff Works dot com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and this is stuff you should Know. Yes,
I think this might complete our brain. I don't know

(00:22):
about that, because we've done Einstein's brain, You've done difference
between men and women's brain, and now we're tackling brain size,
which is sort of gets on both of us a
little bit. It does, but there's always new findings. So yeah,
that's what I'm saying. If there's ever an ongoing sweet,
it's got to be the brain. Man. It's growing all

(00:42):
the time. It's changing shape, changing size, changing connections. You
could almost say that sweet is plastic plasticity. Baby. Yeah,
that's right. Um, you sent me something that I think
we should talk about first, Chuck. This is kind of like, um,
this is just like a ad bag hodgepodge of loosely

(01:03):
related studies that all find that we don't really know
the answer to the question like does a big brain
mean a smarter person? Yeah, because there's a lot of
different conflicting findings. Well, a few million years ago, our
brains started growing a lot and that kind of timed
out with becoming smarter and using tools and things. So

(01:26):
I mean there's a little bit of you call it evidence. Well, yeah,
there's definitely some plenty of evidence. I think that's what
the confounding part is that there's plenty of evidence that, yes,
as a brain grows, it is correlated to intelligence. But
then that's only holding true up to a point. I
sounded like a Soviet immigrant. Just then that's only holding

(01:48):
true up to a certain point. Right. He's in Branson, Missouri, though,
did you know that. I think he's got like his
own restaurant or something. Well, he's own theater, and I
think all the theaters are food buttery. We should go
to Branson, man that I want to see what that
place is all about. Okay, you know yeah, I mean
it's a parade of stars. If it's nineteen seventy three,

(02:12):
you know. Uh, I bet your boy Ronnie mills Up
is there. Yeah. If he doesn't have a place there,
I'll bet he plays Branson fairly regularly. He sub lets
he would play well there. Um, so Branson, how do
we even get them? Yeah? So brain size does correlate

(02:34):
to intelligence to a certain extent, But you can point
out like, well, sperm whale has a seventeen pound brain.
Holy cow, it must be the smartest animal on the planet.
Well it's not. I'm sorry to tell you sperm whale
fans that it's not the smartest animal on the planet.
Humans are the smartest animal on the planet, and don't
you forget it. But we don't have the largest brains,

(02:57):
so you kind of take that idea of well, if
it's not brain size, maybe it has to do with
the size of your brain in relation to your body.
Then we started to get a little closer to jack pot.
But even still, I just want to I want to
spoil it for everybody. There's no definitive answer. Yeah, but
sometimes those are the best ones because we get to

(03:17):
explore all this stuff and we can't really get anything
wrong because nobody knows what's right. Oh I like this, then, yeah,
I've turned you know these? Yeah, now now I feel
good about this because I can't be wrong right exactly. Well,
I guess we should start off with um a little
bit about what determines what size brain you do have.

(03:39):
And again they don't know everything about it, but they
think that genetics plays apart. They know this in part
by studying twins and identical twins um have, of course
the same genes. Fraternal twins have about half the same genes,
and there's a greater correlation in brain size if you're

(03:59):
identical then fraternal. Yeah, so genetics, you know, looks like
it probably plays a role. Yeah, And they've done a
lot of exploration into what genes in particular have to
do with brain size, and they've isolated a few. Um
one is called beta catenin. There's a hyphen in there too.

(04:20):
It's pretty flashy gene not beta carotene, no caten in.
And who's who's coming up with the naming convention for genes?
They are all over the place, like you can't look
at the name of a gene and be like, that's
obviously a gene unless there's like a couple of weird
consonants and a number and then another consonant. Then you're like, well,
that's a gene. But you're right, that's a gene. It

(04:44):
is a gene, and it's a gene that they know
controls brain growth because they've injected poor mice with this
stuff until their heads exploded. Exactly their heads they fell
short of exploding. But a lot of the mice died
as a result of their heads growing too big. But
they're they're they're brain means grew big, and as a
result of their brains growing big, they exhibited um more intelligence,

(05:06):
higher cognitive function. They injected these things with a gene
your brain. That yeah, that made them smarter. But that,
like Molly points out in this article, you can't. That
doesn't mean we should start doing that because these mines
are dying, so you can't. Just you can't play god,
as they say, no, But it does make you wonder, like, Okay,

(05:27):
you don't want to shoot up beta caton in like
before the s A T S or anything like that,
but like, is there a way to kind of tamper
a little less but still tamper with that gene something
put under your tongue and let it dissolve. Maybe sure,
like you know, just epigenetically, just a tad bit. Yeah
not maybe you know, amplify it just a tad and

(05:49):
see what happens. But it would cause your brain to
grow because that gene is partially responsible for the size
that your brain gets to. That's right, as far as
large your brains go. Yes, like it makes it larger. Yes,
if you want to talk smaller brains, there's another gene.
And boy, you're right. The names are all over the place,

(06:11):
just convention wise. It's not like they have different names
that some are numbers and dashes. And to get it together,
people AESPM. It's an abbreviation for abnormal spindle like, uh,
micro cephalely associated, that's the name of the gene. Yeah,
that's it's just shameful. And they say microcephalely associated because

(06:32):
that is a condition that you've probably seen before when
you're born with a small head and small brain, which
probably means you're going to have some cognitive impairment. So
so right there, smaller brain is is correlated to lesser
or lower faculty your cognitive function. Yeah, we should look
into that more for another podcast. So I think it's

(06:53):
uh from the images I saw, it looks like you
remember like the movie Freaks. Yes, that that guy. I
think that's so cute the deal. I think you have
like normal sized nose and ears and eyes, but your
actual head and skull and brain or smaller. You don't
look like the the um the African Safari guy from

(07:16):
Beetle Chuice not proportionately shrunk, right, it's yeah, how you
get him down so small? Right? Favorite? What was that
guy's name from Freaks? I've read about him before. No,
he had his stage name. It was like Topsy or
Flopsy or something like that, and he apparently like the

(07:37):
greatest personality of all time, just so lovable and was
just exploited basically his whole life until that movie like
kind of got vengeance for him because he was a
real life side show performer. Well that's good. Yeah, Topsy.
It wasn't Topsy that was the elephant that Edison electrocuted,

(07:58):
but it was something along those lines. Just a fun,
fun name. Yeah, so check. There's another gene. This is
a little more genetically sounding e m x two. Yeah
that sel sounds like a dirt bike or a gene. Yeah,
it's um Again, we're not We're not saying like, well,

(08:21):
these are the genes that provide you with your intellect.
These are just genes that they are saying these things
have to do with the size of your brain, and
they we also have figured out that if you mess
with these genes, you may also be messing with cognitive function.
So we're laying the groundwork here, everybody to bear with us.

(08:42):
The e m x two gene UM apparently has to
do with the growth of your UM, the functional subdivisions
of the cortex. You have different cortices, they're responsible for
different things. So like if in that New York Times
article you seth me, the guy uses the visual cortex
as an example, UM, where like you get all your

(09:03):
visual sensory input and your brain puts it all together.
That cortex, that region of your brain is responsible for
a fairly specific but also very um complicated task. Now,
this one functional cortex that the e m x two
gene is responsible for UM has to do with basically input,

(09:24):
sensory input and motor output. So your behavior, Like, um,
if I came across this desk at you and like
pinched your cheeks, you'd like jump back, I'd say, what
is it Wednesday? Right? Yeah, you would make the connection
that's Wednesday. Your behavior would occur. So, UM, this e
m x two gene has to do with that cortex

(09:47):
and its size. What they found is that bigger is
not necessarily better. If you have a lower expression of
it and you have a smaller subdivision of that cortex,
you're not to do very well behaviorally functionally, like you
won't be able to hit a baseball very well, all right,

(10:07):
but if it's too big, if that gene over expresses,
you don't get better at hitting a baseball. With this
in particular, it seems to be fine tuned. So if
you're not hitting that sweet spot, you're never going to
hit a baseball. And there may be myriad other problems,
but you're definitely not gonna hit that baseball. So that
means you're born with baseball talent pretty much. Yeah, because

(10:30):
it's genetic, and there's like there's some people who are
so close to perfect that like baseball just comes naturally
to right, right, like Robert Redford exactly. Yeah, he really
gave those lights a wall. Yeah, he's the natural. So
that's the genetic basis of it. Chuck. Yeah, and uh,
I guess we should talk some about size if it's important,

(10:54):
because this is sort of the debate that keeps going
on and on. Is brain size corollary to intelligence levels? Uh?
They did find or they have found links between if
you have a lot of brain growth, um, if it's
disproportionate early on, Um, they've linked that then early I
mean the first twelve months too. They've linked that to autism.

(11:15):
So super rapid growth may what it may do is
just prevent those neural connections from happening like they should, right.
Um And actually, well that's kind of links into that
tethering thing I sent you too, it does, which we
will talk about later. Um. In biology, though, is there's

(11:36):
kind of this consensus that it's it's not the only determinant,
that it has a lot to do with um environment
as well, I think kind of as a whole. People
who investigate correlations between brain size and intelligence have totally
abandoned the idea that, um, like, your brain is predetermined

(11:58):
to grow a certain way and then that's the Yeah. Well,
size wise, they've also found that if you have a
d h D, if you're an adolescent, your brain might
be three to four percent smaller than your classmate who
does not have a d h D. UM, and your
brain shrinks as you get older, but doesn't necessarily lose
functionality because of the shrinkage. It's not to say when

(12:20):
you get older, you don't, you know, loose functionality, but
it's not due to the size. No. They think that, um,
it's probably mostly due to really Okay, that you're you're
synapsies are just kind of built up with gunk remnant
proteins from years and decades of firings. Then you shake
that off by continuing to use it. Yes, that's one thing.

(12:43):
But also they've recently found that, um, while you sleep,
they think now the function of sleep. They didn't notice
it before until I don't know what kind of new
imaging technology they used, but they found out that there's
this whole channel of like basically a sewage system that
just clears out all the gunk from your brain while

(13:05):
you're sleeping at night. And it's just that's why you
are cognitively refreshed. That makes sense from sleep. And we've
done we did one on why sleep is important, right, Yes,
I think that was in there. We've done a bunch.
There's a whole sleep suite too, alright. So one of
the reasons why uh people are still debating whether or
not brain size equals more intelligence or less intelligence is

(13:29):
because when there are a lot of different ways to
measure the brain, um, you know, like do you take
a tape measure and go around it or do you
go from the middle out or do you do it
proportioned to your body size, which is a real measurement
called insephalation quotient. And if they're talking about your body size,

(13:49):
what if you're super fat? Like, there are all these
different ways and no one I don't think has ever
come to a consensus on the best way to actually
do the measurement in the first place. No. And there's
another a really big outstanding question is how do you
measure intelligence? Like our i Q tests actually legitimate. Yeah,
So when you have two parts of your equation that

(14:12):
are both hinky, how can you come up with an answer? Well,
it depends, like if you're comparing species to species, that
in cephilization quotiation actually has been proven to be pretty effective.
So like the proportion of your brain to your body
size is a pretty decent predictor of your e Q

(14:35):
is what it's called as a mammal. Yes, as as
a mammal. When you go outside of mammals, it gets
less and less effective. Um. But with humans, for example,
we our our brain is like two point seven pounds
on average, it's something like around two to three. I've
seen as much as five, but I think it's about

(14:55):
three percent of our body weight. Um. But it uses
up a about of the energy, which is another measure
like how much energy is your brain require? The more
energy your brain requires. In addition to things like eq,
you can get a pretty good idea of like how
intelligent that being is. Well, Einstein's brain remembers this was

(15:18):
the same size, but different parts were bigger than others. Right,
so supposedly let's come under fire lately. Yeah, somebody was like,
these studies are terrible, Like, you can't make these huge
leaps and bounds and um in conclusions just from a
couple of strips of brain tissue. But apparently most studies have.

(15:41):
Well I think that's sort of like a juicy thing
that people like to talk about Einstein's brain. Yeah, you know,
I could see people making that leap, right, and the
idea that like, oh, well, Einstein's brain is just like
anybody else's, Well, that means that anybody could be a genius.
You know. It really argues in favor of the nurture
side of things. But if his brain is structurally different, well,
the genius is an inborn natural thing. It's just nature

(16:04):
versus nurture played out on pout. Einstein sliced up brain. Yeah,
that lived in a garage for many years, like everyone's brain.
So here's the most controversial thing, Like when you're comparing
species to species, like you said, especially among mammals, chuck. Um,
it's easier to say like, yes, this EQ thing works,

(16:24):
but within a single species that when things starting to
fall apart, for instance, specifically among humans. Um, men tend
to have about a hundred grahams more mass to their
brain than women. But if a bigger brain means that
you are more intelligent, then does that mean that men

(16:45):
are more intelligent than women? I think we all know
that women are more intelligent than men. Okay, so then
brain size really has nothing to do with it, at
least intra species, That's what I'm saying. But um, there
have been plenty of studies that I'm sure got a
lot of people's hackles up. Um. One guy named Michael McDaniel,
who's a psychologist, basically entered the news cycle bursting onto

(17:11):
the scene in two thousand five, which is always a
little bit like yeah's this guy right, Yeah, But he
came up with a study that was ready made for CNN. Yeah.
I mean he said flat out that bigger brains means
you're smarter and that I E or e G. Which
one is it? Uh? I EVE in this case, men

(17:33):
are smarter than women. Yeah, yeah, that's what he was saying. Yeah,
because he basically put brain imaging tests and i Q
tests together and said, well, there's a direct correlation between
the two. And again with these tests they did, uh,
they compared, Um, they converted s A T scores of

(17:54):
a hundred thousand seventeen and eighteen year old to an
ice Q score And I don't see why they and
had to do that, and they found that males average
three point six three IQ points higher. But um, I
don't know. It just seems really hinky because first of all,
they used ten thousand more females and males, so that's
gonna excuw things. And then it's an s A T R.

(18:16):
What does that even mean? Yeah, it has been proven
time and time again to be biased. Yeah, and then
they converted that to an i Q source with some
like I guess machine, seems like some things would be
lost in translation. Yeah, I think it's a bunch of bunks.
So yeah, I think you're not alone in the idea
that it's a bunch of bunks. So a lot of
um scientists have said, Okay, all right, this whole brain

(18:37):
size correlating to intelligence stinks of phrenology when you're talking
about looking at it just in the human species, right,
So what is it though? I mean, surely there's got
to be some biological part or aspect of the brain
that correlates to intelligence. If it's not size in maybe

(19:01):
it's the number of neurons that you have, Yeah, neural connections.
A lot of people have thought that that was kind
of the second to most recent wave in thinking about
what brain structure correlates to intelligence. Yeah, this um was
this the New York Times one about the tether hypothesis.
This is just December of last year, so it's pretty recent.

(19:23):
And a couple of neuroscientists from HAVID so you know
they're right. Um, they had a pretty simple explanation. Um,
when back in the day when tooktok had a little
bitty tiny brain. Uh. Their argument is that the neurons
were tightly tethered in a pretty simple connection pattern, and

(19:43):
that when our brains started getting bigger, those tethers were
torn apart and it formed h It enabled us, We
formed new neurons and new neural pathways and new circuits.
That that makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah,
it's like the brain size might have been about the same,
and it was, but the neuro connections were still following
the primal animal connectivity, where it's like they they connect

(20:06):
in a predictable way, whereas with this untethered idea, they
just blossomed out. And do you know the idea of um,
like like what neuro connections look like today, rather than
following like straight predictable lines, they were all over the place.
And from these new connections, new associations arose, and that
gave rise to intellect. According to this, it's pretty simple smart. Yeah,

(20:30):
I like, I think sometimes the simplest hypotheses might be
on target with acam's razor my friend, or maybe they
just speak to me because I'm a dummy other ball um.
So that's that is a competing explanation. Another one that
I've seen, uh says that it's not not the neurons,

(20:53):
not the number of neurons, not even the number of
neural connections. It's the chemistry and the complexity of the
neuro train sbmitters that are being conducted between these neurons,
and from this has kind of come this new idea
that it's folly to even say, well, humans are obviously
smarter than a bottle knows dolphins, even though they're smart,

(21:15):
because the bottle knows dolphins. Um experience understanding of life
is so radically different from humans. Yeah, you can't. You
can't compare intellect to intellect. Yeah you can't say, well,
a dolphin can't, you know, talk and speak, but I
can't do things a dolphin can do. Or maybe dolphins

(21:35):
are speaking, I mean, to one another, just not to us.
That doesn't make them less intelligent. So long, and thanks
for all the fish and we're not Yeah, that's a
good one, and we're not like anthropomorphizing here. Basically, there's
there is very little um point I guess. Yeah, I
don't get it to comparing the two. There's tremendous point

(21:56):
to getting to cracking this code and understanding dolphin intellect
or bird intellect, degreed octopus intellect and human intellect. But
to compare them is it's an exercise and futility. There's
no point to it. I don't get it. Yeah, I mean,
compared dolphin A to dolphin B one, maybe smarter one
might have a little patchy mustache and hang out at

(22:18):
the gas station a lot. And that's not the smart one. Yeah.
I think people do this to either. I think they're
trying to claim some either superiority of animals over humans
or humans over animals, right, And that's kind of that's
a big issue of these days, Like there there are
groups um animal rights groups that are trying to further
animal rights by getting them inalienable rights like humans have right,

(22:42):
which would really screw up the zoos system. Yeah, you
can look for a podcast on that too. We did. Yeah,
that was a good one. I think we landed pretty
heavily against zoos. Yeah, we did. But to each their own.
But I haven't been to a zoo since then. What
is this Project Enigma? I thought that was pretty interesting.

(23:04):
It was another genetic thing, this um it was. It
was neat though in that like this Australian researchers said, Hey,
we have something called internet and m r I S
and willing participants, so everybody starts sending in your brain scans.
Is that who proved that the complexity of the neural
activity was the most important thing? Was that project? No,

(23:25):
that was a different one. That was there was a
New Scientist or no Scientific American article that um that
explored that idea as the the synaptic proteins that create
intellect or intelligence. But the Project Enigma basically found that
there is a single mutation on a specific gene where

(23:50):
if you have a C instead of T, I think
you um have a bigger brain. And they correlated that
to more intelligence. Yeah, but again using the i Q test. Well,
what I'm tired of are the studies that throw out
the results that don't make a fun headline, you know. Right,

(24:11):
There was this one um from Smithsonian magazine from December
of last year that uh, well they it wasn't from them,
was from the Proceedings of the Royal Society b and
Smithsonian reported on it. But it was a study of
country mice and city mice. Well a bunch of animals.
But they found that city mice and vol I don't

(24:32):
even know what that is, v l E. Prairie vols?
What is that? Like? They're very sweet. They they are
monogamous like a bowl eevil, No, that's a bug. A
bowl is like a like a prairie dog. You should
look up prairie balls. Very cute and the idea that
they're very sweetest, even better. You wouldn't like shoot one
for being on your property. No, I mean some people would,

(24:54):
but not good people. I know someone who does that
kind of thing, shoots at voles, not bowls, but woodchucks
with with the air rifles. That's not nice. He knows
who he is. Boom. But this study basically said that
city mice and city bowls had larger brains than country mice.

(25:18):
And of course that makes a big headline because people
are going to try and make the point that, you know,
people that live in urban environments are smarter and the
hillbillies out in the country are dumber. They study ten animals,
only two of them showed that, and some of them
showed the opposite that the I think bats and shrew's
actually the country versions had larger brains. So they don't

(25:39):
say any of that in the study because they just
want a headline that says, you know, if you live
in a city, you're smarter. Yeah, and we I mean
we've been addressing this lately, like there is like a
symbiotic collusion between bad science and bad science reporting, you know,
yeah that results and stuff like that, where it's just like,

(25:59):
you know, city city people are smarter than country people.
Says this one study that where the data was massaged. Well,
can you city person, can you go make butter with
your hands? I have to say, can you farm land? No?
Of course not um, but there it is possible that

(26:19):
there's a basis to this. Whereas city people are, their
brains are more stimulated than country folk perhaps, and so
more neural connections, more plasticity takes place. I don't I
don't think that's true. I think there's just as much
stimulation in nature as there is in a city full
of people. Spends once you're stimulated by I look at

(26:42):
Dar when he spent his entire life living in the country. Yeah,
for sure, But I mean like we're also we also
have hundreds of thousands of years of latent inhibition built
up against a lot of the stuff in nature, whereas
the stuff in Times Square is relatively new, so our
brain isn't doesn't defend against it quite as easily. So
hence we're possibly more stimulated. I think it depends on

(27:04):
what you're doing with your time. Sure, if you're out
the country sitting around watching reality TV. If you're in
your apartment watching reality TV. I found this other study
today to um from Germany about pornography may reduce your
brain size. Another kind of sexy headline, right and um

(27:25):
sample size at three And it's always self reported to
and when you're dealing with porn and self reporting, do
you look at check the box? Do you think your
brain is small? Check the boom? Yeah? How smart are you?
Somebody called the Uh they cannot say that watching porn
caused a decrease in brain matter, but they did say

(27:45):
they found that the volume of striatom, a brain region
that's been associated with reward processing and motivated behavior, was
smaller the more pornography you consumed. And basically where they're
at is we don't know whether it's causing this or
if people did. Oh yeah, they gets struck dumb and

(28:05):
they're like, yeah, they're just end up watching porn more
like in Idiocracy again that movie. There's probably been no
other movie that's made more of a legitimate appearance in
our episodes than that MOVIECCY, Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. Yeah,
my judge, he's onto something. Do you watch Silicon Valley?

(28:26):
I haven't I know. Uh, Kamal nan Giani's in it. Yeah,
he's funny. Does he do well? Yeah, Martin Starr, it's
uh yeah, it's a good show. Nice, it's I think
it was high time that someone took on the tech
industry and like a comedy like that. Yeah, leave it
to Mike Judge. I know if there's any crusader crusader
people feeling good about, right, Yeah, it's Judge. Uh. If

(28:51):
you want to know more about brain size in relation
to whatever, just type in brain in the search part house.
So first dot com and it's get lost. That's what
I say. Type in brain and just go on a trip. Man.
All right, that's right. Journey. I think that's the slogan
for how stuff works. That's right, um answers, I said,

(29:14):
search far as the time for what? Listener mail? Yes, okay,
I'm gonna call this help for a fan in need.
It's hey, guys, I want some help please. My wife
and I are expecting our first kid this summer, and
thirteen days ago we also found out that my wife
has staged four breast cancer. So we are spending our
third trimester getting chemo. My goodness, I know, Uh, We're

(29:37):
gonna kick cancer in the butt, we have no doubt,
but we're scared and overwhelmed. Obviously, we're doing chemo now.
Then we'll have the baby get more chemo than bilateral
mastectomy than radiation. We have great doctors and great fins
and families. So even in the face of this, we
feel very lucky. Uh. And by the way, I gotta
follow up more recently. That says, uh, there is no

(29:59):
gestational ibtes and the cancer is already shrinking. Oh, it's great.
So thanks are going great so far. Thanks for keeping
us in suspense. I know I was gonna wait till
the end. Uh. And he asked for a couple of favors.
He said, First of all, if you want to follow
and promote my tumbler, uh to keep people updated, it
is um h T t P colon slash slash gala
freaki diky g A l l i U f r

(30:23):
e k y d e e k y dot tumbler
dot com. He says, we're huge nerds and doctor who fans.
So that was lost on me some doctor who reference,
I guess apparently, so does that have to do with
the phone booth. Maybe that's the only thing you know
about same here. Um. Secondly, I'm biking a hundred and
fifty miles to raise money, and could you plug that?

(30:44):
And you can go to g O O dot g
L slash two w j z x Q. People don't
like normal words, well that's one of those shortened U
R l oh. I see it's a google. Uh. And
then third, how about a shout out. I think that's
what we're doing here. My wife is a little shy,
so just use her nickname the mayor. That's hilarious. Whereas

(31:08):
a sash during chemo and childbirth. I guess, so, I mean,
I call Emily the boss, so I guess it's the mayor.
But the mayor is like the boss of several bosses,
I would guess. Yeah. We used to call my friend
Justin who you know, the mayor of Atlanta, because everywhere
he went nobody knew him. He's a fellow. But now
we just call him the manager of Atlanta because everywhere
you go he has some improvement to that place, like

(31:30):
the lighting is not quite right, or the door should
be over there, the kitchen is not located properly Brits Yeah. Uh.
And then forth, my wife works in public policy, specifically
helping women and families get themselves out of poverty and
advocating for low income workers. So there you have it.
An awesome an incredible woman who dedicates her considerable talents
helping others. He's pregnant and his breast cancer. Kind of

(31:53):
hard to say no, right, I'm not above guilt tripping.
So Bob from Swithmore, Pennsylvania. UM, there you go. People
should go and check out that stuff and support your
bike ride. And I hope things have continued to progress
well for your wife and child and keep us updated. Yeah,
and you keep me updated at the very least. If
not everybody listening, I will. Okay, thanks a lot, Bob

(32:16):
and the mayor, good luck to you both. And um,
let's see if you want to get in touch with us,
whether you're a mayor a provincial governor who knows, you
can get in touch with us on Twitter at s
Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook
dot com slash stuff you Should Know. You can send
us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works

(32:39):
dot com and join us at our home on the web,
Stuff you Should Know dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works
dot com

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