YouSaid · the spoken record

Jonathan Reisman

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155

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2022-06-25

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2022-06-25

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1. “Think the difference is unimaginably stark. One thing I do want to point out is that the use of laxatives early in the 20th century and before that, they were used for a surprising number of ailments where they probably did not help at all. But I think that was a holdover from sort of the old theory of medicine, the humoral theory, where you have to balance the fluids in the body. And so causing people to vomit, causing them to have diarrhea, or purposely taking blood out of them in bloodletting was a big part. And I think the crazy use of laxatives was maybe a holdover from that time. But that being said, they were probably not eating very high fiber food on that expedition, so perhaps laxatives could have been helpful. You know, there's a lot of seal penguin and seal meat being eaten, which is not super high in fiber. So I don't want to discount the importance of laxatives in that setting.”

   2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Which you wouldn't expect. You expect sort of trauma to be the sort of main problem, but actually infection is a huge problem throughout history and war. So we can learn a lot. It's this kind of horrific natural experiment in medical care.”

   2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Of really pushes the envelope, you know, DARPA is one aspect of the military budget that really funds these moonshot experiments that are really fascinating and to really push the frontiers more than seemingly most kind of universities doing doctors and researchers doing their research. So in a way, the space program, which sort of was military initially, then became civilian under NASA, also led to a lot of advances and understandings of health on Earth and in space. So the military is, or war in general, is a huge way that medicine advances, not to mention the epidemics that come. My grandmother was from what's today Moldova, what was then Romania. She got typhus during World War II. So there's typhus outbreaks, there's cholera outbreaks, you know, all these, even infectious disease things can advance in war.”

   2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Definitely war and medicine has a very intricate and complex relationship. I don't know if it was Walt Whitman who said it, though he was a nurse during the Civil War, that war is the best medical school. But some people have said that. And even advancements in medicine come from war. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have in some ways really revolutionized certain aspects of the way we treat trauma patients in the civilian world as well, the importance of tourniquets, the importance of transfusing whole blood instead of red blood cells isolated from serum and platelets, et cetera. The importance of pain control in the battlefield, that's changed dramatically. Everything from ketamine injections to fentanyl lollipops in the battlefield. So war has really improved medicine in many ways. In another way, the Department of Defense spends a lot of money on medical research and”

   2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “It's tragic, of course, seemingly pointless to watch the destruction of a country in real time. I guess it's, you know, when you read Russian history and Ukrainian history, I guess it just sort of, you know, destruction is a big part of it, the populace being beaten down is a big part of it, you know, from the Mongolian hordes through the Tsar and the Soviets and Putin. I guess, you know, it's just in science in particular, medical science, it feels like this sort of unrealized potential, you know, the culture so beautiful. People are so smart and well educated.”

   2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “It makes me surprised, sort of, that, for instance, like Russian medical science is not doesn't, you don't see a lot of sort of studies, medical studies advancing of medical science come out of Russia. I'm surprised, sort of, I wish that it would. I visited Academ Gorodok outside Novosibirsk, which is an entire city the Soviets created just for the study of science. And it's like, there's the geology building and there's the biology building and there's the chemistry building. I just feel like Russia has this potential to be a science powerhouse, or even in the medical sciences, but I guess you just, I don't see it. I'm not sure why.”

   2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “I did. It's quite rusty at this point, but I did one of these wonderful elderly Russians in St. Petersburg sort of adopted me. I think that was another thing that a lot of these elderly women on every side of the country kind of adopted me or saw me as this real curiosity. You know, it's sort of just not, I mean, this was around 2002, 2003. It just wasn't. Common for this sort of strange American to suddenly show up in the Millicum Chatka or even St. Petersburg and just absolutely ravenously curious about everything they had to say. So I often got adopted and one of them taught me Russian and had to ride a horse. So, same Babushka taught me both of those things.”

   2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “I just found them to be so enlightening the way they talked about history, about people, so insightful about humanity. You know, all they've lived through in the last 50 years in some of these parts of Russia, like the upheaval, societal upheaval, the destruction, the building up. It's just something I could not even imagine. And I think their insights were just very, I'm not thinking of anything in particular, but I just remember I could listen to some of these elderly women talk about their lives for hours and hours. I remember there was this older elderly blind Koriak woman who you would have thought was the most country bumpkin of country bumpkin and yet she couldn't stop talking about how much she loved reading Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and which might also speak to the Soviet education system. I was just sort of surprising and fascinating and just those stories and perspectives on life.”

   2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “I think when I was interested when I was in Russia, I found that most of the people I hung out with were old women. I'm not sure why. I mean, actually I didn't meet a lot of old men in Russia, which might speak to kind of life expectancy there for men in particular. But I found women, older Russian women, including Russia from St. Petersburg or some of the elderly women in Kamchatka who were some were Koriak, some were half Koriac, half Russian, some were Chukchi.”

   2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “The incredible material know-how they must have to get their food from the land. The number of animal species, plant species, the behaviors of the animals, seasons, how to live that way. In a way, it's more complicated in a way that I find fascinating how people live on the land and the knowledge and experience it takes to do it well and survive. Obviously other aspects of modern life in a city are much more complicated than they would be there. But I guess that was something that struck me too, that it's simpler in some ways, but more complicated in other ways.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “It's definitely very different for sure. You know, I guess I found like in some of the remote villages of Kamchatka, I was actually surprised how similar they were in that, you know, there was, I saw the same family strife, the same fights, the same, you know, kind of pairing of relationships and bickering and politics. And, you know, in a way, from the New Jersey suburbs and being... Being in this remote village of northern Kamchatka, I remember writing the email to my friend about how just it seemed so similar, even though on the surface, it was this exotic other world.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “South Dakota. I currently work in a few different parts of Pennsylvania Appalachia, which for me is a unique geography and culture that I didn't grow up with, wasn't familiar with. So in some ways, it's exotic for me as well. And I worked in other places too, like Calcutta, India, Nepal. Just I think my love of travel has shaped my medical career. And being a doctor does give you these opportunities to go to places and travel in a unique way, you know, through the medical profession.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Took that desire with me to medical school. I decided I would go to medical school. And from the very beginning, I was intent on traveling around the world. So a lot of my career has been fashioned so that I'm practicing medicine in a place with an interesting geographic context, an interesting place with an interesting cultural context. And that just makes it more interesting, I find. Not only are medical service is often more needed in these remote and rural parts of the country and world. So I feel like I'm taking my knowledge and education experience to places where it's needed. But also for me, it's just such an enlightening experience, the way culture, history, geography, climate affects medical disease, but just getting to know people, getting to know their culture, being a very useful traveler by providing medical services in that place. And that's taken me to Arctic Alaska, to Pine Ridge Reserve.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “And I was sort of fascinated. I was actually studying the International Environmental Movement and how it came to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union and how organizations like Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund and the World Bank are trying to kind of push the timber industry, which is huge in Russia, toward a more sustainable path. And so sort of evaluating how is it working? If not, why not? And that seems like such a little niche, such a small detail about Russian society, but in a way researching that in depth was almost this window into the entire country and the history in a place I knew nothing about. And I learned the language, traveled all over the country, got to know the food, the history, the literature. It was just immersive and amazing and life-changing experience that made me want to see every spot on the globe, basically learn about every culture.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Well, I think I got the travel bug before I ever went to medical school and even wanted to be a doctor. So right after college, I kind of wasn't very into college, didn't enjoy things kind of wanted to get out there and see the world get out of New York City where I was a student at NYU. The first thing I did after finishing college was I was invited to be an intern at a research center in St. Petersburg, Russia. I spent six months there on my first trip and went back four more times to Russia, traveled all over, including to Kamjatka twice and other parts of the country I'd never heard of, cities like Petrozavodsk and Sikhtifkar and Scoff. I didn't even know a word could start with PSK, like the city of Skof, but it can.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “But for them, perhaps more than anyone else since their diet was the most extreme, I think, of any human culture on earth.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “So I spent a lot of time in kind of Western Russia as well, but I did take two trips to Kamchatka, including northern Kamchatka. I didn't go far enough, for instance, until more recently when I was a ship doctor on a wildlife cruise that sailed from Anadeir, Russia, up to through the Bering Strait and to Wrangle Island. And we stopped in some villages in Jukotka, and I got a chance to try some whale and stuff like that northern Kamchatka, where it's more the Koriak or the indigenous people. They do a lot of seal hunting, so I had a lot of seal blubber, but I don't believe they do any whale hunting quite there. But the Chukchi, in a way, are sort of, you know, similar to the Nupiet in their diet and their life ways. Of course, everyone's diet, all these people's diet has changed dramatically in the last hundred years, as it has for actually everyone living in kind of modern societies.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Absolutely, and it's delicious. This was like a, I was a kid in a candy store basically. I rounded a corner in Barrow. So when people do get a whale during the spring whaling season, they raise a flag. The whaling captain raises a flag over his house and everyone in town is welcome to come try some. And so before I went inside to try some, I was kind of playing around with Blubber and I saw that this is a bowhead whale. I saw its heart, which was huge, like the size of a yoga ball. And that was for me just like amazing. I spent probably the next 45 minutes just looking at all aspects of it. And the stump of aorta that was attached to it was the size of my thigh. That was really fascinating.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Spring ice in the Arctic Ocean by Barrow, Alaska. And two of the guys, the Inupiat guys who had invited me, were kind of talking about how eating things raw is sort of the most essential characteristic of Inupia culture. And the one guy who's half white, half Inupiate, said people often doubt his ethnicity because he looks like a white guy. So he'll bite the head off of a raw bird to show them that he is truly a nupik is what he said.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Well, traditionally, there's not a lot of cooking in the Arctic. A lot of things are eaten raw, partly because there's not a lot of fuel for making fires. So in some of the big rivers in Russia, for instance, that flow north, they will bring trees, you know, dead trees and logs up to the north, and they can get some wood that way. And same thing in some of the rivers kind of flowing northward from the Brooks Range of Alaska. You do get some trees, but just not enough to really produce a culinary art that requires cooking with heat. You know, they do have traditionally blubber lamps where the blubbers of seals and whales are used to create a little flame. Often that's for light and for a little bit of heat and less for cooking. But eating things raw is definitely a huge part of the culture there. And while I was, I went on a whale hunting trip out on the”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “So they often eat it raw. So, the raw whale blubber is called Muktuk, and it's often just sliced thin. And it's sort of cold but not frozen often when they eat it and they slice it thin. And a lot of people assume it would be very chewy, but it's not that chewy. It's quite pleasant, actually, and has this kind of sea smell to it as you're eating it. I quite like it.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “I would say, I guess I've always been extra fascinated with the diets of natives of the far north. I spent some time there in Russia and in Alaska and always loved their diet. So when I worked in Alaska, an emergency room and did some other travels in Arctic Alaska. And they eat a lot of fat traditionally before contact, you know, more than half of all calories in the Inupia at Eskimo diet came from blubber marine mammal fat or also fat from fish, fat from ducks and other birds that go up there to mate in the summer. So things like raw whale blubber was especially interesting for me and very exciting. I had some belugauga whale chowder, things like that. There's just all these very unusual dishes. There's a dish called Mickey Yuck. Which is whale meat fermented in whale blood, which is quite delicious, actually.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “As far as I know, hasn't been successfully done. The heart is done. And definitely I've evaluated a lot of patients with a heart transplant. It does work pretty well. The mechanical heart substitutes are also advancing quite rapidly these days for a failing heart. There are certain kinds of devices they can surgically implant. Like when a failing heart isn't able to push hard enough, you know, that's the heart's job is pushing blood with sufficient pressure to create blood pressure. When it fails, there are actually these devices you can strap onto the heart to help it pump harder. Those are rapidly advancing. Many of those were not available even 10 years ago when I was got out of med school and now they're commonly used. So maybe heart transplant won't be as necessary in the future if those mechanical things do advance. And as I said, the heart is basically a mechanical pump. So perhaps it would be the easiest organ to replace with some mechanical device.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Organ, the liver would be hard because it's huge. And I guess we just have the most experience with kidney transplants because they are the most common.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “I would say the kidneys are, you know, nothing's easy, but kidneys are easiest in a way, partly, I mean, maybe a big factor there is that other people have two of them and can give one to you. So you don't have to wait for people to die, which is the case with hearts and livers. Sometimes you can take a part of a liver from someone who's alive. And the liver does have this kind of mythological ability to regenerate itself in the myth of Prometheus. He's chained to a rock and the bird eats his liver every day and it grows back every day. And that's actually biologically accurate. Not that you can completely get rid of it and it'll appear again. But when pieces of it are removed or injured, it does regenerate itself pretty amazingly. So I'd say the kidneys, the fact that they're more around. Also, the kidney's a smaller organ. It's often just, you don't have to put a transplanted kidney where the kidney should be in the back of the abdomen. You can just kind of stuff it into the pelvis there because it's a small.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “But the liver is the biggest internal organ, and it really is a powerhouse and does a lot, which is why when people suffer from liver failure kind of everything goes wrong in a way”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Drugs like Tylenol, which is why Tylenol can be very toxic to the liver when Daken has an overdose. So the liver, you know, even beyond that, the liver produces a lot of different things that flow in the bloodstream. It packages cholesterol and fats and sends them to where they're needed. It deals with protein in the blood. It deals with clotting factors in the blood, helping the blood clot. processes things like bilirubin and other things that really as i mentioned is like 15 organs wrapped into one maybe that's why it's sort of the biggest internal organ the skin's bigger but it's not an internal organ”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Say its primary function seems to be as the sort of gatekeeper for what we eat and absorb. The entire gastrointestinal tract from the esophagus to the rectum, the blood flows from it, not back to the heart, but to the liver where it's first examined, kind of things are evaluated, packaged, you know, processed, detoxified perhaps. It's kind of this great overseer of what we digest and absorb. And so it kind of keeps track of what's coming in the outside world that comes in and will become part of us. That's why partly the liver suffers sometimes the injury from certain toxins like alcohol. But beyond that, the liver is also the place, as I said, it metabolizes things too. So metabolizes alcohol and why it can be injured by alcohol. It metabolizes.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “And redundancy, I guess. We have two kidneys, we have two hands. If we lose one, we can still go on. We have however many millions of sperm get sort of launched in every ejaculation is, you know, if a bunch fail. Don't make it inside.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Competing against each other to find this egg. It's really amazing. And when you learn about it from the biological perspective, the most amazing thing is how many things can go wrong, you know, just in the sperm not surviving long enough for it making it to the egg and then some genetic abnormality causing a miscarriage. It's sort of astounding that it works as often as it does. And I think the lesson there is just that people have a lot of sex. And so statistics just favor it's going to work out a good number of times.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “True, I guess it's, yeah, there's some particles in the air. I guess it's not a fluid. I mean, not a liquid. But true. I mean, cough in addition to sneeze, right? Sneeze is how our nose gets rid of something that shouldn't be there. Cough is how our lungs get rid of something that shouldn't be there. Vomiting is sometimes how our stomachs get rid of something that shouldn't be there. All projectile sometimes in their own way. Sperm is sort of interesting. It's created with the food for its journey. Sperm mostly feed off a fructose, a kind of sugar for the few days that they live inside the female genital tract. But it's sort of, I like comparing our genitals to the genitals of the plant world, which is flowers. And in the same way that touch me knot, for instance, the kind of flower where when you brush up against it, it sort of launches seeds into the distance to try to survive in a way kind of the sperm is doing something similar, launched into the female genital tract, and then all trying to find this.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Sperm is, yes, it is a very interesting bodily fluid. Maybe I'll write about it in a second or third book. We'll see. But I guess sperm is interesting because it's kind of the only projectile bodily fluid from the body. Vomit can be projectile. Usually that's a disease state. That's not the expected kind of normal healthy state.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Exactly. Fake it till you make it. And I think I imagine every medical student has this feeling when they first go into a room. Like I talked about asking this nice old lady about the color of her poop for the first time. And you're just like, what am I doing here? Like, does she believe I'm a doctor? You know, this just feels absurd. But then it's, again, ho-hum becomes normal.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Same concerns about whether poop turned green today, all these things that they bring to the table. So in a way, it is this great equalizer where people are kind of all the same in some ways.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Water cooler conversation. But you do see a lot. In a way, medical problems are sort of the great equalizer, right? Class, race, culture, background. You know, the failings of the human body, the way it fails and what we can do to help in those situations is almost universal. I always like this quote from, you know, Chekhov was a doctor and a writer. And he treated a lot of peasants very low class and also treated a lot of aristocrats. And he wrote that they all have the same ugly bodies, basically, which I think is really right on. And it's sort of, you can see people underneath a superficial layer of clothing. Maybe it's the most expensive clothing bought from the fanciest places.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Yeah, I think you do see all those things. I think on one end of the spectrum, it is this very unique place where you get all these unique insights. On the other end, it can become a ho-hum workplace just like any other, which is sort of surprising, as I mentioned before, humans seem to be able to get used to almost anything. And doctors can get ho-hum used to, oh, dying of a heart attack. Oh, actively in labor and the baby's half out. Oh, you know, just co-hum. I know what to do going about my job and go home at have dinner with my family and not think too much about it. That's amazing. I do try to maintain both my fascination. I think writers in general tend to think more about what they see, write more about what they see, maybe draw connections with what they see to other things. So I do think that writer's perspective does help me kind of maintain my fascination and my kind of more of an insightful perspective than just, oh ho, hum.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Get this tremendous insight into people, how they live, what they worry about, what they think about, how their body works, and also how their mind works. You almost don't see anywhere else. It's a really interesting place to work. And also the way our society is shaped, the ER is where people go for almost everything. When they're suicidal, they come to the ER, when they're too high on drugs to walk, they come to the ER. You know, children who have been abused, sexually abused, physically abused come to the ER for us to investigate. It's sort of like the all-purpose waist bin for the dregs of society, what people do to themselves and what they do to other people. You know, you mentioned you're interested in the darkness of humanity. It made me think of the ER where you really see what human life is like in the ER.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Yeah, it's a huge part of being a doctor is dealing with the psychological aspects of whatever's going on with the patient's body. I mean, in the ER, you deal with psychiatric emergencies kind of left and right more than ever these days. And that's a huge issue, not to mention sort of drug use, alcohol-related stuff. That gets into sort of psychology and the human love of intoxicants and changing the brain's chemistry and habit, of course, were creatures of habit, and that plays in as well. I mean, a big part of, for instance, pediatrics is reassuring parents and kind of convincing them, giving them the confidence that what's going on with their child is not serious. We'll go away on its own, does not need any particular intervention. But adults too, you know, reassurance is a huge part of the game. Yeah, you know, in the ER, you see humanity at its most raw. I feel like you...”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “You know, your professional demeanor and this normal human level interaction, even though you're talking about poop. And that's a skill, that's an art and a science”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “They're complete strangers, sometimes like a nice old lady who resembles my grandmother and all of a sudden I have to ask her all about what's happening in the bathroom, like is she straining, what color is it, what's the consistency? Does it float on top of the water more than it should? Is it hard to flush? I mean, there's a million different questions you learn as a medical student and you're like this poop detective when people come in with issues. And so it's funny. I guess in the exam room where the doctor patient relationship, there's sort of no barriers. You talk about everything and you're talking about the most intimate details of a person's life, even though you just met them a second ago. It's so different than normal social interactions. Yet there is this social aspect. A lot of what I do is social. You know, it seems like doctors, what they do is mostly scientific. But actually, it's just relating to another person. And you have to maintain.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “I think a lot of that is socially constructed, just how it's sort of supposed to be hidden away, yet something we always do, something, you know, we chuckle about as children. But even in healthcare, it becomes this big topic of conversation because you end up talking about it constantly. Like in the ER, people come in.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “To the intestines to increase the volume of stool and its runniness so that when they do poop it gets into the water supply and then everyone else kind of ends up getting infected as well. Just the same way, like tuberculosis or coronavirus kind of infects your lungs and makes you cough and you send it out into the air and it ends up in other people's lungs.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “Poop is amazing. I mean, I guess it's, you know, it's sort of the most dirtiest, the most vile, the most hated aspect of our bodies. It's the grossest. We don't want to think about it, talk about it, have it anywhere near our, you know, food or social interactions with good reason. I mentioned gastrointestinal infections are one of the most common infections the human body suffers from. And what we call the way they spread from person to person, grossly enough, is referred to as the fecal oral route, which means a bit of someone's stool is getting into you're swallowing it through the water supply. For instance, diarrhea is actually quite a brilliant mechanism of these microbes, right? If you, let's say you're in the intestine of one person, your goal is to get into the intestines of another person, brilliant to just trick their intestines into secreting all this fluid.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “The word is great as well. There's so many different words. I do you know when I'm talking to the parents of pediatric patients, I use the word poop. I don't often when I'm talking to adult patients try to choose it more mature word.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Dialysis does that for kidneys. You know, people can live decades without kidneys as long as they get dialysis, which does the work for them. Not every organ can do that, for instance. The liver, there's no dialysis version for the liver. Like if your liver fails, you need a liver transplant, and that's the only thing that's going to do it for you.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “What you can, medicines and other things you can do to premature babies when they're born. You know, ideally, if, let's say, premature labor begins, you can't stop it, that baby's coming out one way or the other. If you could just then stick it into an artificial womb where it can continue its development, that would save a whole host of problems off. And those babies born very early suffer from damage to various organs, including the brain, you know, for the rest of their life. So that could be a very important technology.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “I believe it acts almost like a heart lung bypass machine. So when someone's getting bypass surgery, their heart is stopped. Literally they throw ice in the chest and they give a potassium infusion through the blood, which stops the heart. But the blood is run through a machine that basically does the work of the heart and lungs together, gets oxygen into the blood, and then pushes it back into the body. So I believe it's a sort of similar mechanism to keep blood and nutrition flowing to this fetus. And so it's just not inside the body of a parent. It's in some kind of other device. But I think that science is going to rapidly improve. One benefit is babies are born premature. And while neonatology is able to continuously kind of lower the age of viability through better technology and understanding how”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Know the fact that miscarriages sometimes happen because of sexually transmitted diseases, because of trauma. You know, it would be great if the uterus where the growing fetus is sort of even more protected from those things. I guess that's a side effect of the fact that people still have sex when they're pregnant are still exposed to injury, there's a way to make it more protected perhaps that would be even better. I did see an article recently about artificial wombs, which are rapidly becoming a reality. And in animal studies, they're able to prolong the gestation of a fetus by a month in an artificial womb.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “That's also a bit unique, I suppose, that the way it has this erectile tissue. Actually, they're similar in the mouth of certain baleen whales, similar kind of erectile tissue that helps cool them off because they have so much blubber and creates so much heat in moving around and feeding that they have actually a similar to the penis organ in their mouth that helps cool their bodies because it's a big problem. They have to store all that blubber for fuel, but it makes them too hot. So as a compensation, they have this kind of erectile organ in their mouth. Okay.”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “A better way to do it, you know, I mean, it's pretty good as it is, you know, it kind of when it's time for it to work, it grows and stiffens. And when it's time for it not to work, it kind of shrinks. Hangs out”

    2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source