"we have two tubes that are right next to each other in the throat one is for food drink saliva mucus snot whatever you're gonna swallow all of that stuff must go down the esophagus the food tube and e..."

"you wrote a book called unseen body all about the human body the messy the weird the beautiful and the fascinating details so from an evolutionary perspective are most parts of the human body a featur..."

"one thing i talk about in the book there's some other body parts that seem to be lacking that kind of brilliant design such as the throat you know where the food drink are swallowed and air is inhaled..."

"individual fingers comes to attention is when people have severe injuries to their fingers for instance um i have a story in the book about a guy whose thumb is nearly ripped off by his dog's leash an..."

"that is important to have two so we can you know even everything from kind of spearing an animal to firing a bow and arrow to butchering an animal you really need two hands to do it very effectively b..."

"from now do you think that's fundamental to like if there's alien civilizations out there that have uh the same order of magnitude of intelligence or greater do you think that we will see something li..."

"like the nature of wisdom is stubborn and old like that's that's what wisdom is it's like the lessons of life solid the lessons of experience solidified and the solidification is the thing that actual..."

"read your book they will come face to face with the fact that you do not shy away from the weird and the wonderful of the human body it's like it's fun but it's honest uh so given that sorry to make y..."

"um 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 how do yo..."

"makes sense yeah maybe the roots of it make sense but the way it propagates especially as the times change might not because you can wash your hands but the the taboo remains right society is very slo..."

"abdomen like some forgotten organ but they're they are great i did consider being a nephrologist which is a kidney specialist because i was so taken with the kidneys but you know decided i like all th..."

"human biology all right that's exactly what it was it's cold honesty about the kind of the story of of each individual human body it has an end and that's it um i think that well actually before the e..."

"any uh you know 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 ..."

"so all those things you mentioned are things you can see you can you know take the skin for example right most things that happen to us leave a mark uh you know as i say a kind of a story written in t..."

"is a story there that's such an interesting way that the skin does tell a story uh both tattoos and scars some of the damage you've done right and even when i when i evaluate a patient i can use scars..."

"is there ways to get more data about the human body as we look into the future of medicine biology that would be helpful to fill in some of the gaps of the story so you know you have you have companie..."

"into a new age where you know 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 bette..."

"that's promised those efforts to do more than they currently can i think that her you know that goal that she had that she created theranos to try to achieve to use less blood in tests is a very worth..."

"would be these devices she was going to create that would sort of do it you put a drop of blood in it spits out everything you ever wanted to know about what's in your bloodstream and in a way that wo..."

"so to return to that cadaver that first day uh when you got to meet with the with the dead with a human body that's no longer living so how how quickly did it take for you to get used to sort of uh he..."

"feelings possible in the case of training to be and becoming a doctor that's a good point yeah i think you know sometimes just as you know a barbed wire fence can leave a scar on your skin you know em..."

"might make you a better psychiatrist returning to the ordering is that order is a chaos to the ordering of the chapters from throat and heart and feces and genitals all the way to fingers and toes and..."

"uh like almost like a dance because there's multiple painters one of the painters is the biology so let's return to throat you mentioned it's a weird one so first of all a friend of mine said i i just..."

"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 one you know secretes hormones like insulin into the bloodstream and the othe..."

"and uh you know 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 thr..."

"thanks to these kind of compensations these adaptations we have to the danger of the throat that keeps us alive as i actually took a sip of uh water it's it's kind of it makes you appreciate the wonde..."

"structure of this the anatomy and the physiology does it echo other mammals are we so are we just basically borrowing a lot of stuff from evolution and maybe making small adjustments maybe due to the ..."

"of basic problem is that you know where tubes and the air tube and food tube are right next to each other how well do we understand so just even lingerie on this little part is there still some myster..."

"it's very fascinating so moving on to chapter two and we'll jump around uh he actually said the liver um does a lot of things i also saw you retweet something where it said uh you know showing that th..."

"so i could see why um you know the way ancients saw the functions of different organs is fascinating but often hard to explain would it be fair to say that if you look at the entirety of human history..."

"sure um that's true but in terms of things to stab so i'm trying to sort of introspect like why why talk about the heart and love my thought would be that is because the heart was seen as the most imp..."

"interesting i'm sure there's a there's a kind of a poetic answer to maybe the way people wrote about it but what to you is the wisdom in the design of the heart i mean the main function of the heart b..."

"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 isn't it amazing to you how much volume of blood just gets push..."

"mechanism blood for all kinds of good stuff and bad stuff nutrition drugs all that right medications too medications such a fascinating design and it also takes the waste away you know it kind of brin..."

"trouble so blood is sort of you know the 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 um you know we can eva..."

"um 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 and so you know..."

"so speaking of which let us go for time to the genitals chapter so uh what are genitals i think i've heard of those i think i've read about a penis and a vagina can you explain to me how those work ju..."

"start doing its thing until the second decade of life you know it's um even though uh babies uh baby female babies are born with all of the eggs they'll ever have in their ovaries already they're just..."

"place so these particular penis and vagina are that whole thing the uterus whatever am i not using the wrong terms i don't know i'll just keep saying you use those terms there's more technical there's..."

"of meta planning going on like this is the optimal solution for the sexual selection mechanism among uh like somewhat intelligent species like it's useful to after the brain has developed sufficiently..."

"have them hanging out in danger or maybe the argument for this design is uh maybe it's nice to put them in danger so you uh are constantly concerned about it could be maybe that's beneficial for male ..."

"um you know i guess that's that's a side effect of the fact that uh people still have sex when they're pregnant are still you know exposed to injury if there's a way to make it more protected perhaps ..."

"so some aspects of the human body we can develop technologies that outsource them sort of uh offload some of the stress and the workload from the human body to do it elsewhere like dialysis does that ..."

"all right what about the neighbors poop feces there seems to be a lot of interesting stories in that particular output as well um what what to you is fascinating what um what to you maybe is misunders..."

"they do poop it gets into the water supply and then everyone else kind of ends up getting infected as well wow it's genius just the same way like you know tuberculosis or coronavirus kind of infects y..."

"science well okay actually i want to linger on that because i'm a fan of just diving into conversations right away with strangers just getting no small talk and this is like the ultimate i don't know ..."

"yeah some people might be better at math some people might be better at music but at the end we're just meat bags beautiful as we are there's a poem that just uh a small tangent i want to take i just ..."

"now there's not a sperm chapter in your book this uh you mentioned offline that this is the second and the third book that you're working on all about sperm no i'm just kidding um but or maybe i'm not..."

"projectile bodily fluid um from the body um you know vomit can be projectile usually that's a disease state that's not the expected kind of normal healthy state oh sneezing would you classify that or ..."

"two kidneys we have two hands if we lose one we can still go on we have you know however many millions of sperm get sort of launched in every ejaculation is uh you know if a bunch fail or don't make i..."

"that's sperm returning to the liver the place that deals with all our poor decisions no um many of them many of the are poor decisions is there um you said that deliver does uh quite a few things uh w..."

"completely different returning to testicles for time you posted uh instagram posts of uh testicles as food perhaps eating them doesn't help libido because ingested testosterone is totally metabolized ..."

"absolutely and it's delicious this was like uh i was a kid in a candy store basically i rounded a corner and barrow so when people do get a whale during the spring uh whaling season they raise a flag ..."

"people's diet has changed dramatically in the last 100 years as it has for actually everyone living in kind of modern societies but for them perhaps more than anyone else since their diet was the most..."

"so i took that desire with me to medical school i decided i would go to medical school and uh from the very beginning i was intent on traveling around the world so a lot of my career has been fashione..."

"travel in a unique way you know through the medical profession you know there's a documentary happy people here in the taiga or something like that um i think uh warner herzog voices it it tells a sto..."

"human and they fill the empty space with their own human complexities um are there people that just stand out memorable people memorable experiences from those places some people that maybe made you s..."

"creates a fascinating um populace like then you take that education that excellent early education and you throw a bunch of hardship at those people and then they kind of um cook in that hardship and ..."

"learned russian do you have some thoughts that you want to say about the war in ukraine currently it's tragic of course um seemingly pointless to watch the destruction of a country in real time um i g..."

"doctors and researchers doing their research so in a way you know the space program which sort of was military initially then became civilian under nasa also has led to a lot of advances and understan..."

"i'll talk about it another time perhaps but nothing reveals the honesty of human biology like war um just to stay on your wild journeys for a little bit longer um you have a tweet about shackleton say..."

"can you think about how hard shackleton's journey was i think the difference is unimaginably stark um one thing i do want to point out is that the use of laxatives early in the 20th century and before..."

"but that wouldn't be the essential thing if you're thinking if you're thinking of a tiny kit that has only the essentials i mean pain yes laxatives maybe not i think the the medical kit possibilities ..."

"though i did use some of it for people um but uh and i i slept and you know i got free room and board um on the ship so ev every southern summer cruise ships go take people to antarctica the southern ..."

"but i sort of like that challenge i mean i like going to the ends of the earth it's beautiful it's exciting it's fascinating um practicing medicine in those settings is extra challenging and really ma..."

"problem that arises mars takes that to a crazy extreme obviously i know that even going to antarctica different countries have had different strategies i believe it was australia used to kind of just ..."

"amazing i think because i have a wife and two small children probably not in the cards for me at this point but you humans with your human attachments sex and death if you just put more priority on th..."

"extension of high altitude if i could just return to the we didn't really i think we mentioned a little bit about the food you had just if you can high level say what is the greatest meal you've ever ..."

"there's more connection than you think you know we talked about symmetry of the body earlier that is a real thing you know fluid dynamics of how our various bodily fluids flow and what makes them not ..."

"way the body really does it because the body is is an incredibly weird complex system and it finds a way the adaptability the resilience the redundancy that's built in it's it's weird it's it's and it..."

"that has advanced a lot recently i think i think um some advances actually have been where you know we pay a lot of attention to stem cells stem cell stem cells we can grow whatever we want out of ste..."

"i think it's it's definitely feasible i think there we need to probably know more than we do um and and know how to connect it you know in all these ways i think some advances for instance you know mu..."

"first of all i i believe and i trust in the adaptability of the biological system to whatever crazy stuff you try to shove in there so it's going to potentially reject things but it's also going to if..."

"of this like how should we feel that how should you feel as a doctor how should we feel as scientific explorers of the human body the fact that we're probably going to be wrong about everything we cur..."

"certain condition it might make perfect sense in my head knowing the biology the biochemistry the anatomy it makes perfect sense it must work i gave it to the patient they got better and that's happen..."

"shocking and this has been driven home during the last two years how hard it is to figure out what the hell's going on in the universe and with especially with our bodies like it is really hard to get..."

"uh and see a doctor it's absurd for that doctor to have just a couple of minutes with me like with just like looking at basic symptoms looking at such like crappy uh data like first of all no long ter..."

"so many times something doctors were sure of was the case is not and it's important to um to be cognizant of that um you tweeted about somebody that had a big impact just by reading about him on my li..."

"first to kind of open everyone's eyes i think about the good you can do with just money that we would you know change that we would throw away just you know put in a person forget it or wherever we ac..."

"struggle of every doctor like when you have to choose how to allocate your time how to allocate your mental energy right it's a tough it's a tough choice that a doctor has to make and it's a human cho..."

"so you do what you can to help them you've done quite a lot of things in your life it's an interest it's been an interesting journey and of course there's a lot of story yet to be written but what adv..."

"you know i'm partial to health care i love being a doctor i think it's the perfect combination of kind of intellectual problem solving being a detective while also working with your hands you know whe..."

"patient you know after seeing patient after patient hundreds of patients maybe thousands over years you do get this sort of innate kind of sense this just dalt about what might be going on and you kno..."

"all in one and i would you know if anyone's going into health care i would strongly encourage them to do so but i'm very biased so with that early passion whatever that little flame was that uh brough..."

"and that i guess that's what i've you know sought after ever since so just that was just so fascinating like my trip to kamchatka in 2003 where i was there for four months and um i didn't speak englis..."

"you because it's telling you something yeah i think you know i guess the plan could be specific or could be as general as i just want to go far away and see something very different that's my plan and..."

"and residents um teaching is actually a huge part of being a doctor that's um underappreciated but that's actually part of the fun of being a doctor is that you're also a teacher of course the word do..."

"like becoming an adult my two big realizations have been one no one knows what they're doing and two suicide is incredibly common like in in all humans in all societies and that i just find shocking i..."

"yeah that's a that's a question we all have to struggle with or learn how to ignore maybe because if you ask the question too much you're not gonna you're not going to find a good answer that's a choi..."

"they're abused in one way or another and i think a lot of people who have not not a major i'm not saying a majority but a lot of people for instance who i see in the er uh coming in for threatening su..."

"should change the equation perhaps so i think a lot of now when i think about what will happen when i die you know there's a lot of um worrying about what will happen to the people i care for you know..."

"i don't think it's like cognitively easy to just realize how terrifying that is we we we love life so much that the end of it it just um it's something that makes no sense and if you linger on that th..."

"uh when i was a medical student i was particularly fascinated with kind of what actually happens as people die like in the last minute seconds of life it's sort of surprising sometimes like what actua..."

"them specifically see i like those concerns because i feel like i can do a lot about those those make sense to me then just be if you're a father just be a good father uh if you're sort of you mention..."

"that well john this your your uh [Music] for people who should know you're from philadelphia i'm from philadelphia so it's an it's an honor that you would travel all this way from a place i love to th..."