YouSaid · the spoken record

Jonathan Reisman

lines on the record: 155
first: 2022-06-25
most recent: 2022-06-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I guess that would be one solution, but just maybe a different type of chemical reaction would not be reliant on the lower temperature, let's say. You know, it'd be great to design spermatogenesis or sperm production process that would function best at body temperature, and then we can keep those delicate organs inside the body and not have them hanging out in danger.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the penis for starters, I mean, let's also discuss the testicles. You know, they're very important too. I mean, So they're fragile and they're important, and yet they're hanging off the body in danger, basically. So does that make sense? They begin in the womb. They begin inside the abdomen, and they slowly descend. And sometimes before birth, sometimes in the first year of life, sometimes never, they pop out of the body and end up hanging in the scrotum. There's a reason because the chemical reactions that create sperm function best at a few degrees cooler than body temperature. And so that's why you might notice in the warm weather, they might hang further down and in the cold weather, they scrunch themselves up to get closer to the body, to maintain that ideal temperature a few degrees cooler. So it's hard, you know, if you could create a sperm production mechanism that did not rely on that lower temperature, that would be great. Keep them inside the body protected like the ovaries are.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely, especially certain kinds of insects like Drosophila, a lot of the fruit fly, a lot of experiments are done on because their life cycle is so rapid. A lot of kind of insects and other creatures are almost ready to mate as soon as they're born.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Use those terms. There's more technical parts, various parts. Medical school, you learn every bump and every little part of every little organ, including the genitals.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reason that the uterus grows aligning and sheds it each month is to one day the ovum to get fertilized and fertile to implant in the lining, and then the rhythm ceases. And that's obviously not a medical emergency, unlike most other rhythms, you know, cessations, it's the point of the whole thing in the first place.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Female babies are born with all of the eggs they'll ever have in their ovaries already. They're just sort of in this stasis until they start waking up kind of once a month. And it's this cycle, you know, there's so much in our bodies that are cyclical and rhythmic, the heartbeat, the breathing. But menstruation is kind of a very strange rhythm that takes over a decade to start. And only, you know, the rhythm beats once a month, which is very slow compared to every other rhythm of the body. unusual thing is you know in medicine when rhythms of the body cease when they stop those are emergencies right when your heart stops that's a cardiac arrest you need cpr maybe an electric shock to restart it when your breathing stops you know you need a breathing machine to breathe for you or something to reverse whatever might be causing the suppression of your breathing but when menstruation stops it's the point of menstruation in the first place”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't need them from moment to moment. You don't even have to use them at all. And in fact, they often make us do stupid things that are the opposite of kind of enhancing survival. And they've affected the brain and you can become sort of focused and nuts based on those desires that kind of stem from the genital. So they can be dangerous organs too. But, you know, I mean, sexual dimorphism helps with genetic variability, as it does in so many other organisms. You know, you take two people and mix them together, their genetics. You just get a lot more variation and more opportunities to try different genetic codes and see what'll enhance survival. As we talked about sex and death, I talk about in the book a lot of, for instance, the female genital tract, how the uterus is a very unusual because, you know, it doesn't even sort of wake up and start doing its thing until the second decade of life. Even though babies...”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So they're very unique organs. I would say one of the things that I like to point out is that, you know, while every organ from moment to moment keeps us alive and ensures our survival, the genitals are in a way the opposite.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not really inside the body until it does cross the lining of the alveoli into the blood, as you said. That's when it really gets inside. And the other, besides the respiratory tract, the gastrointestinal tract is another way kind of a chink in the armor. You know, we have to eat, we have to drink, and therefore we're taking the external world into ourselves, into our gut, in order to extract from it what we need and let the rest kind of flow out. So those two, the gastrointestinal and respiratory tract, you know, there's a reason that, you know, respiratory tract infections and gastrointestinal infections are kind of the most common that afflict us because those are the ways in to the body. So I would definitely pick one of those. Not just be a lazy cold in the nose, but really a more aggressive pneumonia down deep in the lungs and get across that barrier into the blood.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you got to look for the body's weaknesses, of course. You know, we have inherent weaknesses, for instance, like our respiratory tract. We have to breathe. We have to get air in from the outside. And so that's one of the entries into the body. When we inhale, let's say, a poisonous gas, you know, it's an easy way in. You have to breathe, can't hold your breath very long.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the blood itself is sort of, I mean, it's the most important bodily fluid, of course. From moment to moment, every cell in the body needs a flow of blood to bring it, most importantly, oxygen, but also, again, all the other nutrients and to take away waste. And if that stops for even a few moments, you can be in big trouble. Blood is sort of the most important medium. It's also doctors use it to kind of evaluate the body. It does have this kind of all-seeing quality to it where, you know, we can evaluate organs through the blood. I can tell you about your liver, your heart, your kidney just by taking a sample of your blood. So it's sort of like this crystal ball in a way, and we use it kind of all the time, you know, to assess someone's health, to assess their disease.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it also takes the waste away. You know, it kind of brings the nutritious stuff, brings the nutrients, especially oxygen, but many other things. And then it also, as it passes the cell, takes the cell's waste. So it's sort of the freshwater and the sewage system in one.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. They say every red blood cell takes about five minutes to circulate and come back to the heart. And that circulation kind of starts in the womb and continues and kind of until the moment that we die. But the volume is tremendous. And it can never take a break, basically.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know that's all it is. I don't want to downplay it. It's amazing. But it just pushes, it fills with blood and then squeezes it. Fills the blood and squeezes it. And just that squeezing, that pushing creates the blood pressure that you need to get blood to every cell in your body, especially when you're standing upright to get blood to your brain. You need a certain amount of pressure to get it up there.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the main function of the heart basically is to push blood through the cardiovascular system, through the branching blood vessels, to feed every cell in the body. You know, I believe our ancestors started off as single-celled organisms floating in some ancient brew, and they were surrounded by the medium that would bring them all the nutrients they needed. So there's no issues there. And then once you start getting multicellular organisms that are thicker and the ones on the inside aren't in contact with that sort of nutritious brew that they're growing in, you kind of need a way to distribute those nutrients to every cell. And so that's what the heart and the branching vascular tree do. So the heart, you know, the biggest disconnect between how the organs talked about in poetry and through history versus his actual function is probably the heart because we ascribe all these things like love, passion, and life itself sometimes to the heart. But actually, it's just a simple mechanical pump.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like in America today, cardiovascular disease and coronary artery disease is one of the most common, perhaps the most common cause of death. A hundred years ago, 200 years ago, it was probably not. People were not living as long and people were dying of infections that we tend to die less of these days.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes can actually be some chest pain involved in love. I remember when I was a med student, I was very smitten with another medical student who was totally brilliant and beautiful. And it actually does cause this kind of burning in your chest. I don't know what that is. I don't think it's from the heart itself. I don't know if it was like acid reflux because I was so nervous. I'm not really sure. But I definitely felt something in my chest whenever I saw her. I don't know what that is. But you could see why someone might think, oh, you know, maybe it is your heart. That's kind of the most prominent organ in your chest when people come to the ER with chest pain, you know, the big question is, is it my heart? And that's my main job is figuring out if it is or not. So I could see why, you know, the way ancients saw the functions of different organs is fascinating, but often hard to explain.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's definitely still mysteries. We understand a lot about, for instance, how the swallowing mechanism is coordinated in the brainstem, sometimes using some higher levels of the brain, but it is a very thoughtless thing, as you mentioned when you drank the water. It's not something we have to think about, thankfully. We'd be thinking about it all day. There's a lot we don't understand about the basic mechanisms, perhaps, about how the nerves fire and how they kind of, you know, coordinate on the microscopic level, how ions rush into and out of nerve cells to kind of create that electrical signal. But we sure understand a heck of a lot, and it's very fascinating.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, we have hands. We don't need to bite them. Yeah, there's a lot of overlap between different animals, which I find very comforting and fascinating. You know, someone asked me, is there any animal in which the throat is better designed? And my first thought was whales because the blowhole is kind of up on the top of their head. So I was thinking, oh, maybe. Maybe they are set more separate. But when I looked into it, actually, no, you know, the paths do come very close, just like in us. And I saw a paper about some new discovered organ that actually helps keep food and drink out of the airway in Wales that they had never noticed before. So it's a different mechanism, but the same kind of basic problem is that, you know, where tubes and the air tube and food tube are right next to each other.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nerves. It uses over 15 different muscles. It's this coordinated act to keep food out of the airway. You can see someone's Adam's apple in their neck kind of jump upward when they swallow, which helps lift the airway up against the epiglottis, which plugs it closed and allows food or swallow drink to kind of skirt just past it. But every time we swallow, those things do come within millimeters of going down the wrong pipe. And it's just thanks to these kind of compensations, these adaptations we have to the danger of the throat that keeps us alive.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We developed all these mechanisms as a compensation, right? We have the gag reflex whenever food or something is headed towards your air pipe, your windpipe, or down to your lungs. Your throat has this sort of like rejection of it. It pushes it away in a gag reflex. At the same time, we have a cough, which is something our body does when something inappropriate does get down the windpipe. When we get a little food down the wrong pipe, we end up coughing on the coughing does usually flush it out. and get rid of it. We even have something called the mucus elevator in our lungs, which is this constant flow of mucus up the airways, up to the trachea, dragging with it all kinds of particulates that we've inhaled and perhaps some food that went down the wrong pipe and drags it up into the throat and we swallow it kind of unconsciously all day every day is the truth. Even the mechanism of swallowing is super complicated. It uses a number of cranial”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You slip up once and you can die. You can choke. You laugh or speak while eating and its curtains, unfortunately. So it seems like every aspect of the body, when I was learning about it in med school, seems so brilliant and so perfectly designed by evolution or whoever you might think designed it to favor survival, to enhance life. the throat seemed the opposite. It seemed set up almost for failure.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a lot of organs, for instance, do have multiple functions. You know, the pancreas has two. It's like two organs in one, you know, secretes hormones like insulin into the bloodstream, and the other aspect of it secretes digestive enzymes into the gut to help you digest and absorb food. The liver is like 15 organs in one. It's just amazing how many different things it does. But the throat, you know, so basically the problem with the throat is, as I said, we have two tubes that are right next to each other in the throat. One is for food, drink, saliva, mucus, not whatever you're going to swallow. All of that stuff must go down the esophagus, the food tube, and end up in the stomach. And right next to the esophagus, millimeters away is the windpipe or the trachea, which goes down to the lungs. And your throat does these daily gymnastics to keep everything but air out of the windpipe because, you know.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're very obsessed with the output. You're absolutely right about that people have medical complaints about their output very often that are, you know, I never cease to be surprised by a new kind of complaint or observation about the output.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, we are. And we sprout eyes and a brain and a sense of smell and taste pretty much to regulate what comes in the front of the tube. We don't want to eat anything dangerous or poisonous. We want to choose what we eat, even choose who we kiss.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The throat I would count as just sort of the very back of the back of the mouth where the nose also comes down and meets it, where the tonsils are and the uvula. But you're right that we are a bunch of holes, but more accurately, we're a tube, right? We start in the womb as kind of this microscopic little disc almost like a flatbread. And then we roll almost like a burrito into this tube. And we're a simple microscopic tube. And from there, we grow into this bigger and bigger tube and we become more complicated. And each end of the tube does split into various holes. So all the holes you mentioned at the front end of the tube, the front end of her body, right? It splits into the nose, the mouth, the ears, the sinuses, the tube to the lungs, which is the windpipe, the tube down to the stomach, which is the esophagus. And then the other end of the tube splits as well. You know, men end up with two holes, and women end up with three holes. The urethra, the vagina, and the anus and men just, you know, the urethra and kind of the reproductive system they share a whole.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I did mention that the throat was the first one because I kind of wanted to throw the reader right into the brutal honesty of death. And I followed it up with feces as this third chapter in a way, partly to also throw them right into the deep end of how I like discussing parts of the body and revealing their gross and fascinating aspect. So I didn't want to hide anything. You know, when you train to be a doctor, everything is on the table, literally, in the cadaver lab, but also just you deal with blood and piss and vomit and feces. And that's kind of the medium of your craft.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good point. Yeah, I think sometimes just as a barbed wire fence can leave a scar on your skin, you know, emotional, psychological experiences can leave a mark on your brain or your memory. And I think that that definitely could be a problem in medical training. You do see a lot of things that are very shocking, very repulsive, things that you never forget. I know one of those students that had nightmares initially went on to be a surgeon. So I imagine she's not having the PTSD of kind of seeing inside her first dead body because she sees inside them all day every day now, but I'm sure it could. You know, we go on to see so many kind of grosser or more shocking things in medical training through medical school. And then by working with actual living patients, not just dead and embalmed bodies. So I do think that things can leave a mark.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, it did not take long at all. I guess I've never been a squeamish person. So for me, it was kind of riveting and fascinating right from the first moment. But I do know some of my fellow classmates did have some trouble with it. Some of them I heard had nightmares in the first few weeks of anatomy lab. But then everyone, as far as I know, got used to it. And that was also actually a big lesson for me that it's pretty amazing what people can get used to in their daily lives. And I kind of extrapolated that to people living through war and through, you know, just terrible situations and living under, you know, oppressive regimes. And it really is amazing what people can get used to, almost anything.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Learn to care about both children and adults. In children, we do draw much less blood, they have a much lower blood volume, and we use these tiny little tubes to draw their blood, and we seemingly get equivalent information out of the larger tubes we draw from adults, and I'm still unclear to be on as why we can't draw that little amount of blood from adults. It seems technically possible. I don't know what the barriers are. I'm sure there are or else we'd be doing it. But I do think that it is a very important goal. And if Theranos had done it, they would have really revolutionized the practice of medicine.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It too, and so that goal is very worthy. I put that goal up there with the frontier of making painkillers that are as good as opioids without the addictive quality. That would be such a huge revolution if we did have that in medicine. And particularly for me, because I trained in both...”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Theranos is a company that was basically started to revolutionize the way medical blood tests are done, both to use a whole lot less blood in doing it. You know, if anyone's ever been to the doctor and had five to ten tubes of blood removed from them, it can be quite surprising how much they take out. That's the limitation of our technology that we need those volumes of blood to run all the tests that we want to. And so the promise of Theranos was that perhaps with a single drop of blood we would be able to know as much about the person's, the condition of their body without drawing all that blood and thereby there would be these devices she was going to create that would sort of do it. You put a drop of blood in and it spits out everything you ever wanted to know about what's in your bloodstream and in a way that would make it so much easier. You know, it could be you could have one in your home theoretically and you, I don't know why you'd wonder what your potassium level is on any given day, but you could check if you want.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that goal that she had, that she created Theranos to try to achieve, to use less blood in Tess is a very worthy goal and a huge frontier that we have not achieved and that I hope we will achieve. So I understand why someone describes what a huge step forward that would be and it would be. Indeed, I understand why people put a ton of money behind it.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much like, for instance, some of the COVID vaccines, actually, like Moderna never had the virus in their lab. They made that vaccine completely without ever having the virus themselves, just by having the genome, which is sort of astounding. And there's a lot of potential going forward based on that technology and some others.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly, think that we have more data than we know what to do with right now, especially with kind of direct-to-consumer medical devices, you know, smartwatches, et cetera, that are just collecting these reams of data. I have not seen them put to, I think, the eventual use that they will. I think that the potential is sort of just unimaginable. And I hope we're heading into a new age where you can determine, for instance, is a person going to have more of the dangerous side effects to a drug based on their genetics, or are they going to tolerate one drug better than the other based on their genetics? And we are slowly moving into that age, and especially the age of kind of completely synthesizing drugs in the lab.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And even when I evaluate a patient, I can use scars to help me make medical decisions. So for instance, someone comes in with abdominal pain into the emergency room, you can see scars on their abdomen that tell you about the past kind of activities of a surgeon, perhaps. I recognize the scars that are left when someone has their gallbladder removed, the scars when someone has their appendix removed, when maybe when someone's had a hysterectomy. And that can tell you what it might be or what it isn't. If someone doesn't have an appendix, their abdominal pain is not appendicitis. End of story. So in that way, I'm sort of looking at the tracks of the footprints of past surgeries to tell me what might and might not be the cause of this patient's abdominal pain, which is kind of my main job in the ER is figuring out what's causing it and to help them.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All those things you mentioned are things you can see. Take the skin, for example, right? Most things that happen to us leave a mark. As I say, kind of a story written in the language of Scar where it tells you injuries you've had. And same thing with animals. I've seen deer hides that have marks that look like they were made by maybe a barbed wire fence, something like that. You can tell, you know, sometimes it's conjecture, but you can sort of imagine what might have happened to cause that perhaps, you know, two bucks were fighting and one got injured with an antler. And the same with humans. I have scars on my body. And when I notice them, I remember what happened. I got a big cut on my hand when I was 13. And it's still there and I remember what happened, you know, every time I look at it. And so in that way, only I might know that story, but other people, you know, when they dissect me and notice the same scars, they can kind of, it can fire their imagination as my...”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we could tell that he probably had a kidney tumor or cancer that was removed. So you do get an insight into people's lives from picking them apart after they're dead, but you don't know their name or what podcast they've been on.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The universe will chuckle, but the medical student won't know because they never, as I did not, learn any personal information about the person. Only what I could glean from looking inside him, which actually tells you quite a bit. I knew he was a smoker. I knew he had coronary artery disease. You know, you get a window into, I knew he was overweight. You get a window into people's lives just by looking in their bodies after death. Other cadavers in the lab, not my own. Or I shared one with three other students, but other cadavers some had metal joints like a knee replacement. Some had a kidney missing. So they probably, and we could tell it was surgically removed, not that he was born.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could happen. They might not know that that person they're listening to on the podcast will be the carcass in front of them. But we never learned”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly what it was cold honesty about the story of each individual human body. It has an end, and that's it. I think that, well, actually before the end of that first day, so what we did on that first day was study the superficial muscles of the back, like the lats or latismus dorsi and some other muscles. We cut through the skin of the back. My cadaver was laying face down on this metal gurney. We pulled back the kind of plastic sheets that would keep him moist for the next four months as we dissected him. cut through the skin on his back and then started dissecting through the superficial muscles of the back. And that was really all we saw that first day. We didn't get any deeper, didn't enter the abdominal or chest cavity to see internal organs, but I was so fascinated with this sort of behind the scenes look at how things work in the body, how you move your arms, how you arch your back. You know, these are the muscles that do it that I decided I wanted to donate my own body for the same purpose.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A few different reasons that went into it. I did want to start with the throat, the reason that it kind of presents the topic of death, which is sort of obviously very important in the training of a physician, in the career of a physician. It's a big part of what I deal with. You know, on the first day of medical school, we started the dissection of a cadaver in the class called Anatomy Lab. And so in a way, we were kind of thrown right in there in the beginning. This is the end of the human story. Understand this. And then we sort of backed up to the beginning with embryology and reproduction and stuff. So it's kind of like we got and I got thrown into that right away, right in the beginning, kind of like, here's a dead body. Now start cutting it apart and learn the name and function of absolutely every bit of flesh.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Abdomen, like some forgotten organ, but they are great. I did consider being a nephrologist, which is a kidney specialist because I was so taken with the kidneys, but decided I like all the organs, so couldn't pick just one.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess the most obvious one is the brain, partly because it's so sort of poorly understood, though we understand more than we ever have in the past. There's still so much that we don't understand about how the lump of matter in our skulls kind of creates this subjective experience that we all kind of understand quite viscerally. That's an easy one. I would say the kidneys are an underappreciated organ. The way they tinker with the bloodstream raise levels of this, lower levels of that kind of our entire lives from inside the womb until we die is just really incredible. And when you look at how much energy different organs consume, the brain and the kidneys are two of the biggest ones because the brain obviously in us is always active and controlling parts of the body, but the kidneys are just consuming a ton of energy to do what they do. They're kind of the unsung hero of the body relegated to the back of the”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the toilet paper is your left hand. So while the body is anatomically symmetric, the taboo creates this pretty intense asymmetry. But for a good reason, you know, you probably shouldn't be shaking hands with other people with the same hand that you use to kind of clean your bottom. So in that sense, it makes sense.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, yes, society loves rules for sure. Some societies more than others. They love controlling how you think and what you do in public versus in private. There's a lot of societies where, for instance, parents have sex in front of children. For instance, like in a traditional Inupiat Eskimo societies, that was sort of normal. I mean, but what are you going to do go outside in the middle of the winter in the Arctic and do it out there? Of course not. So, you know, there's different taboos in different societies. Some taboos make perfect sense. Some taboos are even public health measures, you know, like as I talk in the book about in India where they, you know, the hands are symmetric, as you said, but in Indian culture and the left hand is taboo and the right hand is what you use for shaking hands, for eating, for other things, and the left hand is the dirty hand that you use for wiping your own body.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Genital is what we do to our quote unquote private parts. They're private, even though it's sort of the thing that we have all have in common is the most we try to hide from other people and don't talk about polite company. I mean, it makes sense as a human living in the society, but from the outside, it sort of might be surprising.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely everybody part and bodily fluid has their own kind of both gross and fascinating aspects. That's probably why I'm a generalist. As you said, pick one of my children, become a specialist because I like them all. I feel like one of the strangest concepts about the human body is that kind of the aspects of it that are the most universal that we all do are the most taboo socially. I wouldn't have expected that if I had just looked from the outside, like what we do in the bathroom, what we do in the bedroom, what we do to our...”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would think so. I mean, it sure seems to be on Earth, you know, perhaps in some distant future when medicine is nearing perfection and people can live a really long time. Maybe we won't even need to reproduce as much or something like that. It's hard to even know what life will be like in the distant future. But I would guess that any alien civilization will have the same dependence on who has sex and who dies.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a way, yeah. So sex is how more of us get made, obviously. And death is how we get weeded out, or the gene pool gets weeded out, and certain genes survive and others don't. And, you know, the age at which we die, whether it's before we've had sex and reproduced ourselves, is a big factor in who survives, who doesn't, who passes on their genes and what the future of the body looks like. Who lived and who died before they were able to be at reproductive age a million years ago was pretty important in what we look like now. And perhaps how we have sex and die now will determine what we're shaped like unless technology hasn't even been bigger role in that a million years from now.”
2022-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #297 – Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body – From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source