Jonathan Reisman: A physician (medicine and pediatrics) and author of The Unseen Body who has practiced in remote places including the Alaskan and Russian Arctic, Antarctica, and the Himalayas of Nepal. He blends anatomy, global health, and travel into a writer's perspective on the human body.
What this episode covers
Jonathan Reisman walks through the human body organ by organ, mirroring the chapter structure of his book The Unseen Body, explaining the brilliant and the badly-designed (the throat's deadly proximity of food and air pipes), the underappreciated (kidneys, liver), and the taboo (genitals, feces). He shares vivid stories from medical training, the cadaver lab, and the emergency room, where he sees humanity at its most raw. The conversation ranges into his travels among Arctic peoples whose diets are built on blubber and raw whale, and into the global-health work inspired by Paul Farmer. Throughout, he stresses medical humility: half of what doctors learn turns out to be wrong, and sham-surgery studies show many accepted treatments may not help. The episode closes on darker territory: suicide, trauma, death, and the unanswerable why of existence.
Recommended on this episode
Mountains Beyond Mountains
Tracy Kidder
“a book about him by tracy kidder that's really great mountains beyond mountains about how even when he was a medical student he was flying back and forth to haiti”— Jonathan Reisman
The guest's own work
The Unseen Body: A Doctor's Journey Through the Hidden Wonders of Human Anatomy
Jonathan Reisman
“the unseen body a doctor's journey through the hidden wonders of human anatomy he has practiced medicine in some of the world's most remote places”— Lex Fridman
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
Werner Herzog
“there's a documentary happy people here in the taiga or something like that um i think uh warner herzog voices it”— Lex Fridman
Seinfeld
Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld
“saw this on a seinfeld episode so i know how it works shrinkage yeah that was a good one”— Lex Fridman
Tylenol
Johnson & Johnson
“it metabolizes drugs like tylenol which is why tylenols uh can be very toxic to the liver when taken out as an overdose”— Jonathan Reisman
Moderna COVID-19 vaccine
Moderna
“some of the covid vaccines actually like moderna never had a vir the virus in their lab they made that vaccine completely without ever having the virus”— Jonathan Reisman
Big reveals from this episode
- Reisman decided to donate his own body to a medical school dissection lab before the end of his very first day of anatomy class.
- He explains Moderna created its COVID vaccine without ever having the actual virus in the lab, working only from the genome.
- He defends Elizabeth Holmes's underlying Theranos goal as a 'very worthy' frontier even while the execution was a fraud.
- He frames diarrhea as a 'brilliant' and 'intelligent' evolutionary strategy by microbes to spread via the fecal-oral route.
- His love of travel, not a career plan, drove him to practice medicine in Arctic Alaska, Russia, Nepal, India, and Antarctica.
- Asked for his last meal, he picks bone marrow, calling it 'the perfect food' (and notes Joe Rogan loves it too).
- He cites sham-surgery and placebo studies showing knee arthroscopy and cardiac stents for stable disease may not beat fake procedures.
- His two big adult realizations: no one knows what they're doing, and suicide is shockingly common across all humans and societies.
Worth remembering
- Swallowing uses over 15 muscles and multiple cranial nerves to keep food millimeters away from the windpipe every single time.
- Every red blood cell takes about five minutes to circulate the body and return to the heart, nonstop from womb to death.
- Testicles hang outside the body because sperm production works best a few degrees cooler than core body temperature.
- Certain baleen whales have erectile tissue in their mouths that helps cool their bodies, similar in structure to the penis.
- Reisman cites Chekhov, also a doctor-writer, that peasants and aristocrats 'all have the same ugly bodies.'
- An average human male produces about 500 billion sperm, roughly four to five times the number of people who have ever lived.
- The liver can regenerate itself, which Reisman links to the myth of Prometheus having his liver eaten and regrown daily.
- Traditionally over half of all calories in the Inupiat Eskimo diet came from blubber and marine-mammal fat.
- In Antarctica, Australia historically removed expedition members' healthy gallbladders preemptively to avoid winter emergencies.
- A saying in medicine: by the time you finish med school, half of what you learned is already wrong.