Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Listener Questions #21 featuring Cat Bohannan

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

Daniel and Kelly are joined by Cat Bohannan, who answers questions about whether we can shorten gestation, superhuman feats of strength, and whether viruses are ever good for us.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. She said, Johnny. The kids didn't come home last night. Along the central Texas planes, teens are dying. Suicides that don't make sense. Strange accidents and brutal murders. In what seems to be, a plot ripped straight out of Breaking Bad. Drugs, alcohol, trafficking of people.

There are people out there that absolutely know what happened. Listen to Paper Ghosts, the Texas Teen Murders, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast health stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night. I'm Dr. Priyankawali, a double board certified physician. And I'm Hurricane Dibolu, a comedian and someone who once Googled, do I have scurvy at 3 a.m. And on our show, we're talking about health in a different way, like our episode where we look at diabetes. In the United States, I mean, 50% of... Americans are pre-diabetic.

How preventable is type 2? Extremely. Listen to health stuff on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of heavyweight. And so I pointed the gun at him and said this isn't a joke. A man who robbed a bank when he was 14 years old. And a centenarian rediscovers a love lost 80 years ago.

How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again? Listen to heavyweight on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know the shade is always Shadiest right here. Season 6 of the podcast Reasonably Shady with Giselle Bryan and Robin Dixon is here dropping every Monday. As two of the founding members of the Real Housewives Potomac were giving you all the laughs drama and reality news you can handle. And you know we don't hold back. So come be reasonable or shady with us each and every Monday. Listen to reasonably shady from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hey everyone. I've got a new fun physics book out now. It's called Do Aliens Speak Physics? And I think it's a lot of fun. But don't take it. my work for it. Here's what Blake Crouch, famous author and smart guy said. Do Aliens Speak Physics is a charming, thoughtful meditation on the common language of the universe, a book which asks important questions about the fundamental nature, not just of our existence, but of reality itself. So go out and pick up a copy of Do Aliens Speak Physics? I think you'll enjoy it. This pregnancy thing is just the pits.

Is there anything we can do to speed it up a bit? When we're under great stress, can we really lift a car? Or is that an urban legend that's gone a bit too far? Bacteria can be beneficial, as I've come to understand. But what about viruses? Do they ever lend a helping hand? Whatever questions keep you up at night? Or sometimes beyond the intellectual grasp of Daniel and Kelly.

So, on today's show, Dr. Kemp. Capo Hannan joins us to answer questions that stumped, well, Kelly in particular. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe, plus friends. Plus friends. And note, this friend studies reproduction and sex, and so you should decide ahead of time if that's appropriate for young children. Thanks. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I don't know the answer to every single physics question you might imagine.

Hello, I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites and space. And wow, y'all ask me a lot of biology questions that I do not know the answer to. And I was on a road trip with my friend Capohanan. We were driving through Wales. We did the show together called Moms on Mars, where we talk about how difficult reproduction on Earth is and how it would be even more complicated on Mars. And it's, It's not a great idea to rush into that. And I mentioned that I have this new podcast and I have these amazing listeners who send me a bunch of questions that I don't know the answer to even though they're about biology. And Kat was like, dude, I'll come on and answer them. And I was like, sweet. So we decided to do that. Well, it's incredible to me how broad biology is as a field. I mean, even physics, like in my department, we have people who do particle physics and condensed matter physics and plasma physics and the fields feel totally different.

But, like, we have 16 different biology departments here on campus, you know, like the breadth of stuff from, like, ecology to microbiology to medical stuff is just really astounding. I don't know why y'all even call each other biologists. No, it's super different. Yeah, I was at a university that had, you know, immunology, ecology, nematology, botany, and it's, they are all very different. And I'm very flattered that the listeners think that I can handle any biology question. But I do every once in a while, and by every once in a while, I mean, quite often, need to lean on a friend who's an expert. And I've thoroughly enjoyed hearing about all these biology questions. I'm so glad folks out there are curious, not just about the physical universe and cosmology and particles, but how all this gunky stuff inside of us works and how we can go on doing its meat machine for so many years.

It's amazing to me as well. And, of course, I'm interested in biology. I hear about it at home, but it's wonderful to also get to dig into it. on the podcast. So send us your questions about physics, about biology, about all the gunky stuff inside of you. Write to us to Questions at Danielandkelly.org. We will answer your questions or do a little bit of research or put it here on the podcast to joke about. To joke about and try to answer. Oh yes. And I'll also answer yes. Yes. We try to get answers one way or another to nearly every question, although there are a couple that are just way too far out of our

wheelhouses and we have to throw up our hands and say, I'm so sorry. But I think that gives us credibility because, you know, sometimes you don't know the answer. And you should say you don't know when you don't know. That's one of the joys of working at the forefront of knowledge is you just get to throw up your hand sometimes and say, nobody knows. We don't know. It's one of the mysteries. That's right.

Or it depends, which is my favorite. Or we have no idea. That's right. There you go. But Kat has an idea. And so Kat will be answering the questions today. So let's go ahead and bring Kat on the show. On today's show, we have my good friend Kat Bohanan, who completed her PhD in 2022.

at Columbia University, where she studied the evolution of narrative and cognition. Eve, how the female body, drove 200 million years of human evolution, is her first book. It's a New York Times bestseller and was listed for the Royal Society Prize, the Orwell Prize, and the Women's Prize in 2023. She lives in the U.S. with her partner and her two semi-feral children, and those are her words, not mine. I'm sure they're lovely. Welcome to the show, Kat. Hey, folks. Thanks for being here and for helping us answer these amazing questions. I'll do it. I can. Questions are great.

Yes. Yeah. So we've been getting a lot of questions about the human body, and the first person I think of when I think, how does some part of my body work is I should ask cat. And so we're passing these questions to you. Okay. So let's go ahead and listen to our first question. Hello, Extraordinaries. I'm Andrea from Italy, a big fan of the podcast and your books. You with me is my wife with some questions for you, probably more in Kelly's ballpark. Hello there, Alessandra here. My question for you is, what determines the length of pregnancies in humans and other species? Is it correct to assume it's a function of the needed number of cells? That said, have there been studies on how to shorten gestation? If so, how would that be technologically achieved? And lastly, what social implications would arise as a consequence of shortened gestation in humans? Do you think it can affect the current birth rate? or other aspects of our social structure. Ooh, so that is a meaty question full of many questions inside that little package of question.

Matruska doll. Do you think this is somebody who just went through a pregnancy and wished it was shorter? She was like, oh, my gosh, how can I end this sooner? I mean, that's one of those things any OB will tell you that by the time you get to your third trimester, gestating people are ready. They're like, you know what? I'm freaking good. Yeah.

Let's do this thing. In fact, the only thing that could probably push any reasonable person over that totally reasonable fear of the process of giving birth is the idea of continuing to be pregnant as an alternative. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. So you don't think anybody was like, hmm, this has been cozy. I could use another 40 weeks of this. Oh. Well, human beings are a little cray, so I'm never going to say no one.

You know what I mean? There are some people, some unicorns. who like, love the knocked-up state and are like, I want more of this. I want more of this. I think most of us, it's a mixed bag. There are bits we like, bits we don't like. It's very complicated. But most of us, by that third trimester, if we make it there, are like, yeah, get this thing out of me, now.

I was done. This is a Ridley Scott scenario. Get this thing out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely. So the short answer to have there been studies to. shorten gestation is, yeah, and we're already doing it, but not on the development side on the like, can we do it outside the body side, right? And that's an slightly easier thing to rig, right? So, for example, literally all IVF, as we currently do it, shortens the process by which, you know, a thing that becomes a human later is in the body at the front end because we are fertilizing that egg outside of that pelvis. We are doing. We are doing it in a different way. We are doing it. Sometimes it's a tube. I think nowadays it's a

petriotian. It's complicated. Depends on the lab. There's a history of it. There's a lot I don't know. But yeah, basically, so like a blastocystice, a five or six-day blastocystice, which is kind of a basketball of cells. So at that stage of development, which isn't yet gestation. Gestation technically is when it starts burrowing into your body, into your uterus, right? That's your start of pregnancy. So this is just cells doing crazy stuff, making a hollow basketball. That thing is not in your pelvis until it gets transferred in, right? So that's already shortening what's going on in your body. And the other end gets more complicated, very late stage preemies, basically.

Now there's a lot of development around improving a NICU by creating a more womb-like environment, right? So you can think of the whole NICU is shortening gestation, even though the gestaeton person probably didn't want to. Thank you. Those are preemies, right? But now we're trying to improve it because, like, the way we do it now is damaging to the lungs. Those lungs are, you know, often not quite ready to breathe air. They're still developing. So we're working on having that be a more fluid environment.

There's a thing called a bio bag that can mimic more of that liquid environment. It's not out there. You're not going to find it in the hospital. But those are labs developing that stuff. But that whole middle bit, which is basically when that placenta attaches on up until very late stage pregnant, we don't have that yet. We don't have a way to have a mammalian pregnancy, like, happen without a uterus and without a body that's hosting that uterus, right? So that's like the counterintuitive way of thinking, how can we shorten gestation. The way they're really hoping, which is speed up, is a lot crazier and actually unpacks a whole bag of worms that we don't know in biology, which is really interesting. Like, why the hell do fetal cells multiply so rapidly? And then for some reason, once you achieve a certain kind of body organization, certain body plan, some of those tissues start slowing down their

replication cycle. And some of them stay fast, you know. Like when you're building a body, which, again, is actually not just making cells, but also having them migrate, right, to different areas in that developing embryonic body. You know, there's just a whole city infrastructure going on in there, right? And it's going really fast. It's going really, really fast. And then some parts of it slow down. Like, I couldn't build a baby faster than that, for sure.

It would take me a lot longer. So this is pretty impressively quick, right? I mean, technically we could attach a placenta to like your abdominal wall, but you probably don't want to do that. You probably, that's not like on your bingo card for 2025. I mean, I know there's been a lot that's been surprising this year, you know, like at the NIH. But not, not, like, knocking you up, Dan. No, no, no, no, no.

Well, put this in context for us. Like, are humans, do they have a longer gestation period than other great apes, for example? They do. Are human babies more developed or less developed than, like, chimpanzee babies when they're born? See, I think that's also a really good way of framing it. Because, like, when you get born as a mammal is not like this set thing. Like, you are so ready for the world or so unready. for the world. Like when mice are born, they're pretty fetal. They're, you know, we call them pinkies. You know, they have no hair yet. Their eyes aren't open. Their ears aren't unrolled. Like, even to poop, the mother mouse needs to lick along the abdomen to, like, stimulate, you know, them to pee. And they will actually die of not defecating and peeing if they don't get that stimulation in those early phases of being out. So is that really developed? Is that really being born? Right. And that's that interesting thing. Like, all my

species have a different level of development or readiness, you know, for existence outside that body, which is really interesting. And so human bodies, when we're born, a lot of people make a lot of hay out of the fact that we're pretty freaking useless. We can't hold up our heads. Like, we are just barely able to exist compared to, say, a chimpanzee or a gorilla or many other primates, right? But I didn't have to lick Ada's belly so she could poop. So that's pretty That's pretty great. I'm calling that a win. Sorry, go ahead. No, no, that is really great. But you trying to make sure she didn't snap her stupid neck was definitely like a thing that other monkey moms don't have to do, right? So we are a needy baby species. We are like, got to do more to keep this thing alive species, for sure. And Holly Dunsworth did the most famous research on this. So for a long time, we thought human babies were born because our heads are stupidly large. and our vaj is really not that large.

It's actually not the vaj that can, you know, stretch or tear. Don't think about that too hard. But like the actual pelvic inlet, the bone opening, you know, where the babies come out at the bottom is small compared to how big a thing we got to push out. So we thought that was the obstetric dilemma. We thought that was why we were born when we were born. But Holly Dunsworth did some really great research saying, actually, this is a metabolic threshold.

Actually, it's more like, how much longer can you gestate this super greedy, metabolically costly fetus before your local resources are not sufficient? In other words, it's actually an ecological concept, right? When are mammals born? It's like, how much longer in our case can this body continue to literally bear the load of this resource hall, right? before it's like, oh, no, we got to switch to lactation. You need to get the hell out of here. This is not cool. Is it calories or is it space?

Like, are they pressing on your lungs and your heart? Or is it both? I did not enjoy how difficult it was to breathe in late-term pregnant. Same. You know, I wasn't cool with like how literally my diaphragm was compressed upward by this new mass growing. Not, nah, no, no, no, no, no, not fun. But so, yeah, that's not great. But no, it's actually, it's calories in general just load.

Now, metabolic load is going to be a cost that isn't simply how many calories transferred. But also, what are the resources you need to continue to exist gestating while bearing this thing that also requires resources? So that's not simply you transferring resources. It's also, how much does it cost for you to carry this thing around? How much does it cost for you to care to have a heart that's still working, pumping this much blood, etc? So that's like a whole, it's a complicated sweet of stuff. But that's a general idea. We give birth when basically it's too costly to continue doing this thing, you know?

And that was Dunsworth's great insight. That it's not about head size, although head size also sucks. Well, I remember when my kids were born feeling like, wow, this baby was better suited inside the womb because, you know, you didn't have to worry about it crying. It was fed automatically, you know, the whole diaper thing. Like, it just felt like it was so much easier. Also, of course, it wasn't inside me. Ding, ding, ding, ding. There's that.

That's an important insight, yeah. Really significant bell just went off there. Yeah, thank you for acknowledging that. Uh-huh. Hello. I heard that. No, for sure. I mean, technically that mother was having to, like, eat and drink and go to the bathroom a lot.

So I wouldn't say it was automatic. It's just that you didn't have to think about feeding it. And you didn't have to think about dealing with its cellular. waist, like how often, and where is it peeing? You know, my first child had a, had a penis. My son definitely peed not just on me, but greatly upward. I definitely, my face was peed on taking care of that thing. Oh, yeah. My daughter did not have that. It was fascinating. I was like, oh, it could be like this. This is better. So the listener wanted to know if the length the pregnancy is the function of the number of cells. But it feels like what we've said is

maybe number of cells matters. But it's also how developed the baby needs to be before it's ready to enter the world, which depends on like the evolutionary history of the animal. Does that sound fair? I think that sounds fair. I mean, elephant gestation takes a long time to build a big freaking body like that. That is true. And it's very rare for elephant twins, almost never. Oh, interesting. Both the metabolic load of that thing. And also, also, it's an elephant and it's in you. So even if you're an elephant, you're growing an elephant. Oh, God. You know, so that's a thing. So, yeah, so that newborn size, just sheer size is definitely definitely a factor. But, you know, even as adults, our cells are replicating at very different rates. their cell cycle, like how long do you go through that early cell phase until when does it finish out? The lining of your intestines can finish a cycle in like, I think, 10 hours or something like that, you know, whereas your liver can take like a year.

I'm pretty sure it's the hepatocyte. It can take like a long time. And then, of course, the most famous case of the longest cells to complete their cycle is our freaking eggs, right? So like, Kelly, when you were inside your mom, well, the tissue and the fetus then that became you, and you were developing those nascent follicles in your little baby ovaries, right? Those things reach a certain stage and then just stop, just hang out, just pause, some of them for as many as 40 years or more, right? Whereas the rest of your cells are definitely not doing that. So actually, one of the big mysteries in biology is what is regulating all of it? that? How does that work? What are the switches? What are the inhibitions genetically and otherwise

that? And what changes that later on? Because actually, that's one of those things in cancer. You get a lot of cells that then, say, a liver tumor that originates in the liver, right? How do you take a cell that has a really long turn over time and have it start multiplying rapidly, right? What's controlling that? If we can actually figure that out, oh, we can keep a lot more people healthy. Well, say more about that because say we understood what is regulating this. Isn't that downstream of something else which is regulating it? Isn't the whole thing some complex Rube Goldberg machine? It's not like if we understood, oh, it's this level of hormone, you could just like give somebody more and it would happen faster or take it away to make things slower.

Isn't it an enormously complex device that we have almost no hope of being able to like manipulate to our ends? Daniel finds biology frustrating. Yes, it's not just a particle. I was just about to say, you seem to just be describing biology. These are complex systems interacting complexly. That's what what wear is. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's nice.

It's nice in physics that you can just, like, get your foil from Costco and build your experiment. But we have to have things make babies, okay? You just described all of physics. That's amazing. Wow. Congratulations. Fold from Costco, that's my entire budget, yes. That sounds nice. Well, unless you're actually trying to build CERN. You know, there are different levels of cost and experiments. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, man. So I think I completely agree with you that there isn't going to be one smoking gun for what regulates all this stuff. And like in oncology, there's definitely a case that some cancers are, what you're describing with the hormones is environmentally triggered cellular pattern changes, right? Where like, if you get your more estrogen and you have a kind of breast cancer that is especially

responsive to estrogen, then you want to downregulate that to keep the cancer at bay if you're a survivor, right? There are many kinds like that. That's also true of, you know, prostate and testicular cancer, that you want to downregulate certain androgens so that you don't end up with more of that cancer profile, right? So that's manipulating the environment of those cells. And there's a lot of stuff that changes your replication rate that doesn't have to do with that. But, you know, like one of the things that we're starting to think about in aging science is, okay, what does resource availability do to cell replication? We know, for example, in diabetic patients that they have a higher risk profile for a number of different kinds of cancers. And the thought is that

many cell types are responding to that higher level of local sugar, basically. You know, that that is changing what the cells are doing, almost as if like in an ecological problem, there's more resources so we can make more babies. You know, we can replicate those cells faster, right? So really thinking about the body as a bunch of different local environments is surprisingly useful. But again, is that thing where, like, can we speed up gestation? Well, the first thing you think of is like, so are we just going to turn all fetuses into cancer, just a whole lot of cancer? Because that's probably what you're proposing to try to speed up a basic body plan without knowing what the hell you're doing. I'm guessing that's not what she had in mind, but it's a good way of highlighting.

No? She wasn't thinking a lot of cancer. She was just like making me less pregnant for less time. That's right. It's a good way of highlighting the complexity, I think. But let's say that somehow you could, right? Somehow you figured this out and you could have a baby in six weeks instead of, you know, 40 weeks. What do you think that would do to the social structure and, you know, the decisions people are making about having babies we've heard on the podcast recently about how, you know, birth rates are dropping worldwide. Yeah, birth rates are dropping around mostly wealthy or mostly white women. But we could get into that debate another time.

Actually, our global population continues to grow, and it's fine. Okay, so now that I've done that PSA, I'll just quickly say that, like, we're definitely thinking about a matrix scenario now. We're talking about external wounds. A human body would not be able to supply, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the resources necessary without dying to create a whole human body in six weeks, in a uterus. Besides just having that uterus grow to sufficient size, remember that normally it's the size of a freak and adult fist and we're now making it a basketball. So that's a thing

that takes time. It's also simply, again, that metabolic load. How do you transfer sufficient resources and stay alive? That's the mammalian conundrum, right? Yeah. So, so, okay, So external wound would be a major thing. And as soon as you have that, then the social implications are absolutely massive, right? That now there is no individual body that needs to bear, you know, the burdens and the blessings, but mostly burdens, of making bodies inside of it, right? That actually changes a lot about what it is to be a person with a uterus. That changes a lot about things that we assume are simply part and parcel of being female, which could be both really cool. and really weird. All right, so let's go ahead and we're going to share this answer with the listener and see what she had to say. Thank you so much for your answers, Kat. Let me clarify that I'm not currently pregnant or have been pregnant. The reason for my question was rather my interest for social policies and how science can shape them.

As a matter of fact, I found especially interesting your insight on how an external uterus would disrupt our traditional understanding of gender roles. That is definitely something to think about. I, on the other hand, found very interesting the idea of birth as a metabolic necessity that explains how some newborn animals can instantly run, while others can't even stand. Thank you all and keep up the good work. Bye-bye. that keep you up at night. Yes, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally, a double board certified physician. And I'm Hurricane Dibolu, a comedian and someone who once Googled,

Do I have scurvy at 3 a.m? On health stuff, we're talking about health in a different way. It's not only about what we can do to improve our health. But also what our health says about us and the way we're living. Like our episode where we look at diabetes. In the United States, I mean, 50% of Americans are pre-diabetic. How preventable is type 2? Extremely.

Or our in-depth analysis of how incredible mangoes are. Oh, it's hard to explain to the rest of the world. Like, your mangoes are fine because mangoes are incredible, but like you don't even know. You don't know. You don't know. It's going to be a fun ride. So tune in. Listen to Health Stuff on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And she said, Johnny, the kids didn't come home last night. Along the central Texas planes, teens are dying. Suicides that don't make sense. Strange accidents and brutal murders. In what seems to be, a plot ripped straight out of Breaking Bad. Drugs, alcohol, trafficking of people. There are people out there that absolutely know what happened. Listen to paper ghosts, the Texas teen murders,

on the I-Heart Radio. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The forces shaping the world's economies and financial markets can be hard to spot. Even though they are such a powerful player in finance, you wouldn't really know that you are interacting with them. And even harder to understand. Donald Trump's trade war, 2.0, is only accelerating the process of de-dollarization, which in a way is jargon for people turning away from the dollar.

That is where the big take from Bloomberg podcast comes in, to connect the dots. How unusual is a deal like this? Unprecedented. Every weekday afternoon, we dive deep into one big global business story. The biggest story of the reaction of the oil market to the conflict in the Middle East is one of what has not happened. Katie, you told me that ETFs are your favorite thing. They are. Explain that.

Why is that the case? And unpack what it means for you. Our breakfast foods are consistent, consistent. consumers staples, and so they sort of become outsize indicators of inflation. Listen to the big take from Bloomberg News every weekday afternoon on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Robert Smith. This is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money.

And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people. horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all. It's a very simple, elegant lesson. Make something people want.

First episode, How Southwest Airlines Use Cheap Seats and Free Whiskey to fight its way into the airline business. The most Texas story ever. There's a lot of mavericks in that story. We're going to have mavericks on the show. We're going to have plenty of robber barons. So many robber barons. And you know what? They're not all bad.

And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of famous business geniuses, along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked. Like Thomas Edison and the electric chair. Listen to business history on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back, and we are on to our second question with Capohanan. And so let's go ahead and hear the listener question. Hi, Daniel and Kelly. I was recently with a group of friends playing a superhero RPG,

and a question was posed that I'm hoping you can help us out with. Can humans really lift a great deal of weight in times of great stress? I've heard that humans have restrictors on their muscles. Otherwise, they'd hurt themselves with how much they can really do. I've also heard the story of a mother lifting a car off of her trapped children. Are either of these things really true? Would an ordinary non-body-built human be able to lift a car a foot or so off the ground if they really needed to? If so, what happens in our bodies to make such a thing possible?

If not, where do you think stories like restrictors and super-strachshank moms come from? Thanks in advance. Can we start with just what happens when you have an acute stress experience? So like something stresses you out, let's say not stresses you out enough that you need to try to lift up a car. What does our body do there? And then maybe we can move to, can you lift up a car if you're stressed enough? Well, first, I think one of the things that's really great about these accounts, which have to do with, like, removing normal limitations on muscular use and things like that, you know, during periods of intense adrenaline, intense stress. What it's often called in the literature, I looked this up, is hysterical strength.

Whoa. Which is amazing. That is amazing. That's amazing to me knowing anything about the history of feminism and the term hysterical. That's amazing to me just picturing these people, just losing their minds. I love all of that. You know, and there are these accounts of people like lifting cars off of trapped, you know, teenagers and toddlers and things like that. And again, the listener was right to say, we're talking like one wheel. You know, if you think in basic physics, those other wheels are still on the ground.

You are a temporary jack on one corner there. So you're not lifting the whole car. You're lifting a certain amount. And what you're really doing is a deadlift. And so you, as an untrained person, are not doing a deadlift that somehow is better than, like, the world record keeper of deadlifters. Right? That's not, it doesn't matter how much adrenaline you got, babe. That's not a thing. What's interesting about it to me is like, okay, yeah, like Kelly says something happens in your body. You get that adrenaline going. And two things are happening. One, a lot more blood is rushing to your muscles, all of your muscles, really, but especially the ones you're trying to activate. your heart rate's accelerating and what have you. That's a thing that's happening. And a lot of, you know, in that blood, you're getting a lot of sugar transfer, a lot of energy transfer. So not just local, but also bodywide energy is going to the thing you're trying to do. But what's really interesting about this moment is that you're actually affecting your brain that much more than the local muscles. We used to think that the brain was kind of not really involved in these caps on your strength. Because remember, when you're when you're using a muscle, you don't want to use all your strength to lift your coffee cup. It may feel like that at 6 a.m., but it's not that at all, right? You don't want to blow out your back for reasons by ridiculously lifting your coffee cup. You're just going to use what you need, right? But if you're

trying to lift a car to save a life or save your own life, this thing that happens with people who are trying to escape war areas and you hear stories of soldiers or even mothers with children walking for days with no food or water, going up into the hills, surviving extreme temperatures, you know, that normally we wouldn't really be able to do. And what's happening there is that your body is willing to damage itself to save its life or willing to damage itself to save another's life. That's what's really up. And that's actually a brain thing. That's a brain thing more than your heart rate thing. And so what your brain is doing is it is ignoring more of those pain signals.

And that's a thing. So you literally experienced less pain during this period of crisis, right? Because if you're not noticing the pain, that literally means you're experiencing less pain. What is pain? It's a thing happening in your brain, right? So actually, a lot of studies have been done that really during these moments of intense fighter flight, intense stress, your brain is down regulating its response to normal pain response. And there is an account of a dude who lifted a corner. of a car off an adolescent, who later found out that his teeth really hurt because while gripping his, you know, clenching his jaw, he managed to crack eight of his teeth while he was lifting, right? So talk about a no pain response. Talk about like, I am using the limits of my body to save this person's life. But what I think's really smart about what you said there, Dan, is it's not just, you know, this account of what's the heart doing. It's not just what the brain is doing. It's also how we understand. these experiences after the fact, whether we go through them or someone else does, because these are the stories we tell. These are the incredible, weird stories that don't line up with our normal experiences of our bodies or other people's bodies or human capability. You know what I mean? Which is situated in our lives, which is culturally situated. You know what I mean? Like, for example, Dan and Kelly's incredible universe exists in a culture of doubt.

where a lot of times, you know, it isn't that the spirit world is literally imbueing you with extra strength and that's why, right? You know, and there are cultures now and cultures in the past that do have that model that don't find these moments so as extraordinary maybe as we do. Because we don't have as much of an explanatory frame for something that feels hard to understand, understandably hard, because it's rare, right? And some cultures do have that explanatory frame and then don't find such moments as novel. Yeah, never thought of it that way. Well, yeah. So there's one culture, for example, I'm not remembering the name because I am not an anthropologist. But there is one culture that tends to give birth alone.

This is hunter-gatherer community. Very rare in the human species. We do not normally give birth alone. But they like go out in the grass. They go out in the fields and they do that thing. Now, it's not that they're not prepared. Let's make it clear. Their whole childhood has stories of how to do it, and so they have their own knowledge, and there are people who help in certain cases.

You know, anyway, but they have a frame where to get through the pain of it, they are calling down strength from the universe effectively. So their experience of contractions is this deeply different thing where they are experiencing the pain as a calling down of strength, which is good for them. No. I did not have that. I just had your basic fear of death. I'd rather have the epidural, really. I had that too. I had that too, but it actually didn't work as well. But I still am grateful for the portion that did work. So the way to think about this is that your body has certain capabilities and certain limits, which are just physical. There's no way I'm lifting a boulder. But there's also warning signs your body sends you when you're starting to damage yourself. And those typically limit what you're actually going to do. But in moments of great stress, essentially it ignores those and you're willing to do stuff that damages yourself or cracks your teeth, depletes crucial resources to survive the moment. But that's a subconscious thing, right? It's not like I'm saying, Daniel, I'm going to turn off these pain regulators because I think it's a good idea. It makes it sound like there's some sort of strategizing or some thought process there.

But if it's subconscious, there must be some mechanism there. Do we understand how that works at all? Do we understand how pain works in the brain? Oh, kinda. Kinda. We've made great strides. I will say that it's, you know, it's been studied that there are a number of pro athletes of various types who are known to have effectively higher pain tolerances than the average population. So the most famous pain tolerance thing is shoving your hand in a thing of ice water because we all, you can't think your way out of it. It's your hand lowering temperature.

And it's one of the best ways to gauge what is your basic pain tolerance here? What's your nociceceptive? Like, what do you do? And many of these athletes do indeed have start to feel a lot of pain later and respond to it and feel that urge to take it out later. So part of what may enable some of those extreme athletic things isn't simply training, but also kind of being wired differently. So how do you differentiate between I put my hand in and for some person, it starts to hurt immediately. And for some people, it takes five minutes to hurt. And it hurts both of us at the same time. But I am just better at handling pain for longer. Like, are those two

different things? I think that that's a thing that we all want to do with the idea of pain. We want it to be about the virtue of endurance, you know? We want it to be about like, you're more badass because you just deal with it. Right? But that actually doesn't allow for bodily difference. there are a lot of bodies that are just sending a more muted or blunted or delayed pain signal. And that's not because they're badass. It's just that it's a different body. Yeah. But then there is a kind of mindfulness training. There is a thing that a lot of people with chronic pain have to do, which is training your brain to ignore certain pain signals more so that your life becomes more tolerable, which can, in fact, make things slightly less painful. It doesn't truly remove certain kinds of pain, but it can make it more. bearable, right? So there are different tiers of awareness of pain. As far as the ice water, though, I mean, there is a moment that everyone, except for those rare people who have that genetic condition where they don't kill pain, need to take their damn hand out. They just can't, they can't bear it anymore. It's very, very rare to be able to bear it through. This is not a, like, badassery,

you know, thing. It's one of those basic tests of pain. Well, my son is an athlete, and I've learned just by watching him train and push how much of racing, he's a runner, is mental. Do I think I can go faster? And also, how long am I willing to sustain this feeling of pain? Yep. And one of the best examples is he was telling me that after the first person ran a four-minute mile, then like a bunch of other people did it.

And it was just sort of this mental barrier. People thought, well, that's just impossible. There's no way I could accomplish it. But then after somebody did, they're like, oh, turns out he can do it. I can probably do it too. I'm just going to go do it. Sure. It's incredible how much of athletic performance is just believing you can

do it. Did any of them get hurt after that? I'm sure they were all in pain. But there's no amount of believing I can do it that's going to make me run a four-minute mile. Same. No, that's right. And that's because, well, we're all sliding towards death. We're not young anymore. There's just that true thing about aging. But also maybe you're slightly less susceptible to peer pressure, which hopefully is also an aging thing. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, let's go ahead And see if our listener has any follow-up questions. Hi, Daniel and Kelly and Kat. Thank you all for answering my question about humans gaining momentary superpowers or not.

It makes way more sense that our brains just tune out the pain rather than us turning into a 1% version of a very angry green Marvel Comics Man. I did sort of have a tangential question sparked by what was said. I've heard that people that can give birth have something that allows them or enables them to forget the pain of childbirth. I know conceptually that there is a lot of pain involved, because I will never give birth. Is it kind of similar to the man that cracked eight of his teeth? Are both brains tuning out the pain? Or is there a different mechanism at play for people that can give birth versus people that can't? P.S, I've listened to the audiobook for Eve and I absolutely loved it.

So thank you, Kat, for writing that. Cheers. Hey, thanks for the follow-up question. And so glad you liked Eve. Okay. So your question has two parts. first, do people who give birth really forget the pain of childbirth and not just like on Instagram or completely lying about it? And two, if they do, is the mechanism similar to that

guy who didn't notice he was cracking his teeth when he was lifting the corner of a car or something because of adrenaline? Okay. So first, it's totally not true that we all forget the pain of giving birth, though thankfully we do forget the pain of being born, which doesn't actually sound very fun at all, so I'm down with that. In fact, we forget much of the first five years of our lives. It's called childhood amnesia. We basically all get it. It seems to have to do a childhood brain development, and that's totally why you should stop feeling guilty about that time you yelled at your toddlers in public because they're not going to remember any of this. Most studies show that as long as you're not actually abusing them, a lot of that parenting crap

comes out in the wash. Okay, so forgetting pain. Pain is actually one of those things that doesn't get perfectly encoded in memory. We remember the many side effects of pain, like starting to sweat, like having a hard time moving or breathing fast or whatever, and we can kind of describe pain, like when your doctor says, was it a stabby pain or a grinding dull pain? But your brain doesn't seem to usually encode totally specific impressions of the pain itself in long-term memory. It's like we save the gist of pain. It's not like remembering the face of a loved one. That's a long way of saying we forget a lot of pain all the time.

Do mothers forget the pain of trying to squeeze a bony watermelon out of her vatch? She might say she does. She might have been experiencing such total pain delirium, which is a thing. Kind of like the guy who cracked his teeth. She's trying to achieve a goal, and her focus on that goal overrides her focus on the pain her body is experiencing to achieve that. goal. And attention is a big memory driver, right? So if you're literally not paying attention to the pain in the moment, you're less likely to remember it happening later. But women who experience

birth trauma, which is a shocking number of people, are more likely to go on and develop secondary tocopophobia. That's fear of giving birth. For I don't know, the obvious reasons you tear yourself open to get another body out of your body and it's a little traumatic more so for some people than others. So, like, they're remembering those painful, terrifying features of that experience really, really well, too well, well enough that therapy becomes useful or even necessary to go on having a fulfilling life, much less try to do such a thing again, right? So I suspect it's a mixed bag of some people who usefully glide over the pain of that moment, usually in part because they value the outcome. Hey, look, I made a baby. And,

luckily they have brains that are able to basically downplay the sense memory of what it took to make said baby, which not all people have. And the ability to do that is by no means a measure of how much they value the resulting baby. It's just that brains are organs. And just like everybody's heart is a bit different, ask any cardiologist, everybody's brain is also a little bit different. On the podcast Health Stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night. Yes, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally, a double board certified physician. And I'm Hurricane Dibolu, a comedian and someone who once Googled, do I have scurvy at 3 a.m.

On Health Stuff, we're talking about health in a different way. It's not only about what we can do to improve our health. But also what our health says about us and the way we're living. Like our episode where we look at diet. In the United States, I mean, 50% of Americans are pre-diabetic. How preventable is type 2? Extremely. Or our in-depth analysis of how incredible mangoes are.

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The kids didn't come home last night. Along the central Texas plains, teens are dying. Suicides that don't make sense. Strange accidents and brutal murders. In what seems to be, a plot ripped straight out of Breaking Bad. Drugs, alcohol, trafficking of people. There are people out there that absolutely know what happened. Listen to Paper Ghosts, the Texas teen murders, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The forces shaping the world's economies and financial markets can be hard to spot. Even though they are such a powerful player in finance, you wouldn't really know that you are interacting with them. And even harder to understand. Donald Trump's trade war, 2.0, is only accessible. accelerating the process of de-dollarization, which in a way is jargon for people turning away from the dollar. That is where the big take from Bloomberg podcast comes in, to connect the dots. How unusual is a deal like this? Unprecedented.

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I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History. about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people, horrible ideas, and destructive companies in the history of business. Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all. It's a very simple, elegant lesson. Make something people want.

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All right, we are back with our third question. Let's go ahead and listen. If I understand it correctly, there is a hypothesis that the mitochondria in our cells came from one cell enveloping another, which formed a symbiosis that was mutually beneficial to both. This is mind-blowing in and of itself. However, I believe that I have heard something similar about viruses. So my question is this. Have there been any positive or symbiotic benefits resulting from viral infections?

Depends how you feel about mammalian pregnancy, actually. On theme for this show. That's right. Because it does seem that, so it's a really weird thing that you can have an embryo implant in your uterine wall. Actually, we take that for granted, but actually, that's very similar to how a cancer metastasis attaches to different tissue. Normally, local tissue strongly rejects and calls in the immune system when a cell that shouldn't be there is there. And a cell that shouldn't be there might be doesn't contain all your genetic material like an embryo. Or it might be like, what is this liver cell doing in this intestine or vice versa?

Right? You know, there's a local community kind of thing that says, you belong here, you don't. So actually, really weird that we're even capable of it. And it does seem that it may be because we got a cold, like ancient little rat-like thing. got a cold and started attaching interiorly. And that's part of how that seems to work, where some genes are effectively switched off that permit implantation that seems to be strongly tied to what we think was a viral infection. So cool. Cheers. That we did that. I'd still prefer to lay eggs. But there you go. There you go. So I think you're suggesting that viruses can infect

you and transfer their DNA into ourselves. And we essentially adopt that. And that's part of being human, that a significant fraction of our DNA actually is viral. I don't know what would count as a significant fraction, and I don't know that we really know how much of our DNA was or wasn't sourced from a virus, because we're talking really ancient time, which we're looking at basic cell mechanics, like, be kind of hard to say what was or wasn't originally. You know what I mean? Especially since the listener was thinking about that really ancient case of mitochondria,

getting in there. So I don't know that we know. I will say, though, that certainly our cells are being infected by viruses all the time, whether or not they make it into that germ line, whether they become a basic part of our body plan, you know, in our eggs or in our sperm is a bigger threshold, usually. Like a huge number of your cells, dear listener, are presently infected with viruses, some of which may well be passed on in that local tissue, some of which will be totally annihilated by the immune system, right? Like, that's just a constant state of being. You're so infected all the time with bacteria and viruses and many other things, depending where you live in the world, right? But whether or not your kids then are going to change

some feature of their body plan because of that legacy is a higher bar. Now, there is interesting stuff because there's another thing. So that's like an inherited thing. So that pregnancy thing is an inherited, maybe we'll call it beneficial, in mammals, right? But there is an across-the-lifetime thing that happens when you're infected with viruses that sometimes is beneficial. So this is a really interesting case. So first of all, you are definitely infected with a number of different herpes viruses. That's just for sure, for sure, true. There are so many of them, and you are definitely carrying. So we all got the herb. Enjoy that. That's right. Yeah, we do. Makes this feel closer to you. You know, we're so

bonded. Depends where you got it. Certainly the one that causes cold sores, like over 90% of the human population, has it at this point. So, cheers. Yeah. And herpes viruses are tricky because a lot of, I think, all of them, but at least a lot of them, if I'm remembering it right, again, not virologists, but what I know, they

infect your nerve tissue. And your immune system tries not to attack your nerve tissue for all the reasons. Your nerve cells are a thing that your immune system is like, should I attack this like your brain and or your spine and or, you know, probably not, unless you have a big autoimmune thing. So it's a good place for a virus to hang out and go dormant, which is what herpes viruses generally do. So there's this one CMV, cytomegalovirus. A lot of people, majority of the population, have it. Okay. And when you're old, it seems to be associated with a number of not great things, like people who are, you know, seropositive, like you can test for it in the blood. You have antibodies

to it. You know, you're more likely to have certain kind of heart problems and other things. But interestingly, when you are young and healthy, like in your late teens and in your 20s, it improves your response to influenza. Huh. So if you're infected with CMV, this is a really amazing paper, you are going to have a better response to your flu vaccine. You're going to have a better response to getting infected with the flu more broadly. Weirdly, CMV seems to do it. And it's not like all herpes viruses do it. Like the Epstein-Barr virus, that's another herb virus. And it doesn't have that effect. So it really seems to be, and we have no idea why, specifically immunomodulating that body while you're young and healthy and, interestingly, to a lot of biologists, when you're probably making babies. Because when you're old, you're kind of probably done with the baby-making thing. And so if it sucks for you in old age, well, oh, well, you know, like evolution. primarily speaking, right? But it's boosting you. It's boosting you. It's making you survive things like flu better when you're young and healthy. Cytomagulovirus also sucks when you're a baby. Like it can make you really sick if you're a very young infant. So new infections at that age actually do very bad things. It can cause meningitis and blah, blah, blah. Basically, it's just the sweet spot. Like specifically, it's okay to have it when you're already mostly adult and or young adult.

right there. Sweet spot. But not so much before, not so much later. Too bad. You can't just get rid of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we actually get a lot of questions from the listeners. I think we've had three or four different times where we've had this question. Like, why does our immune system get worse when we get older? Like, why is a virus that was maybe good initially, bad later on? Like, we've seen so many new things as we get old. Like, we've seen a bunch of viruses, a bunch of bacteria infections. Why doesn't that make our immune system stronger as we get older? Wiser, yeah, with a deeper library. So many things. So many different metaphors we could layer on this thing. I think probably the short answer is it's just harder to do everything as a body as entropy kicks in,

whether that's your immune system or other things, right? So like we shouldn't give a special category to the immune system just because, right? What do I mean by that, though? So like, we know, for example, that when you're younger, you're better at suppressing a latent herpes infection from having an outbreak. You know, and when you get older, you get less good at that. Shingles is a really good example of this. You are far more likely to develop shingles, which is, again, a latent infection that then runs rampant when you're older than when you're younger. So that's that immune system failing to tamp down on that virally infected. cell going nuts and spreading that around, right? And I think I think some of it is just cells get worse at replicating themselves, you know, as they go further along in their many replicated lifespan. You know, when you look in a mirror at one of those fun houses and, like, there's a bunch of mirrors and it makes that infinity mirror effect, so you have an infinite number of views. But, like, you start looking not great if you really look back at the, like, far distant, you know. Like,

there's image loss, if you like, there's info loss is what it really is. And cells have info loss over time, too, basically. They get less good at correcting for errors. The more they've been replicating over a body's lifespan. And as far as we know, the immune system does that too. But to speak to Dan's instinct here, as he already mentioned, it's probably pretty complex. That's actually a pretty simplistic explanation for why aging sucks for all cells throughout the body. And actually, it's probably a lot of different things. That's super fascinating. I've always been curious about this story of mitochondria coming from the outside and then getting sort of incorporated.

You're telling me that's a real story? Well, it's as real as science is able to make it real without a time machine. But, yeah, like there is this idea that once upon a time there were cells. Like the cells have a lot of different organelles in them. Cells are full of stuff. You've probably seen a diagram, right? Yeah. Okay.

Well, mitochondria are the energy powerhouses of your cell, basically. And they're their own little independent organelle. Interestingly, they have their own DNA, MDNA, your mitochondrial DNA, which is separate from the DNA in the nucleus. So that's your first clue that something's up. Because not all the organelles in your cell have their own DNA. You know, it's like, hmm, what's up there? Why do you got your own? Right?

So that's part of it. But also, it seems generally that once upon a time, either a cell tried to eat another, you know, being. in the soup of ancient world and or actually the mitochondria tried to infect, you know, protobacteria like we're not really sure, a cell and then failed to

die and or eat the cell it was trying to eat. We don't know which direction. We don't know who was eating who here is the point. But somehow one one dude, one cellular dude, ended up inside of the envelope, the cellular envelope, the membrane of another one and somehow didn't

die. And zombie light, That became a mutual relationship, right? And over time, it became a basic part of how basically all cells go about their cellular lives, right? So effectively, your mitochondria and your cells are replicating in an interesting way when each cell goes through the process of replicating itself, right? Hence the separate lineages of DNA. Wow. Now, one of the really cool things about this is that also means that this is yet another reason why sperm don't do a lot. So, well, sorry, sorry.

You know, that nearly all of your mitochondrial DNA is coming from your mom. That's coming from the egg, right? And that's why eggs are so huge and sperms are like a tiny little, like, you know, Twitter feed, a tiny little note of information with a tail, you know, that just somehow has to. to get there. Because when a sperm, you know, decapitates itself, basically, drops off its tail and goes inside the egg, you know, it is then eaten, it's eaten by the egg, basically. And then, you know, hence babies. Yay, the miracle of life. But usually the egg just completely destroys all the mitochondria from that sperm. It's like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, you out, right? But we now know, because unfortunately, some people have, you know,

issues with their mitochondria that gives them certain kinds of infertility or developmental problems. There are disorders that can come with mitochondria, basically, that every now and again sperm mitochondrial information actually do manage to escape the death spree that is going inside of an egg. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because this is an IVF thing, right? The idea is like, well, can you simply get rid of the mitochondria from the sperm or what have you or from the egg and then just replace it and we solve all of our mitochondrial disorders thereby. Wouldn't that be awesome? It would be if only it were a perfect system that it's never the case that the sperm mitochondria actually make their way in. So again, biology is sloppy. Super sloppy. It's a delicious

mess. I don't know if it's delicious. I was fine. Kind of chalky. Hmm. Go ahead. So when the sperm mitochondria stick around, what is the problem? What is the Is it just that they're interfering with each other or the sperm mitochondria is, like, deficient in some way? Like, do we know what causes the problem there? I don't think it's the case that sperm mitochondria are just so janky that let's just not. Although I'm amused by that idea that somehow they're just like the worst option. No, I think it's actually that they've set up their mitochondrial system in that egg, the they that is the collective which is an egg and it's many organelles. You know, and they just don't want to like throw some new shit in the mix.

as it were. So that's the general theory that basically it's controlling for error to not have that be. And this is part of how you trace the so-called mitochondrial Eve. You're actually tracing the mitochondrial inheritance over many generations to say, who is the last being? From whence most of our mitochondria come from? Incredible. All right, well, let's see if we answered Petri's question. Thank you, Kelly and Daniel, for choosing to answer my question on the show. and thank you especially to Dr. Bowhenson for your wonderful answer. I realized that this is an incredibly difficult question that goes way back into deep time

and ideas of what is beneficial versus not beneficial certainly get muddled quite quickly, but your answer was fascinating and enlightening. I also appreciate that you took the time to address the other question of mitochondrial DNA. That is something that's intriguing for me and I'm sure from any of the other listeners. So once again, that's a great answer.

Thank you so much. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by IHeart Radio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it.

We answer every message. Email us at Questions at Danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D&K Universe. Don't be shy. Write to us. She said, Johnny, the kids didn't come home last night.

Along the Central Texas Plains, teens are dying. Suicides that don't make sense. strange accidents and brutal murders. In what seems to be, a plot ripped straight out of Breaking Bad. Drugs, alcohol, trafficking of people. There are people out there that absolutely know what happened. Listen to paper ghosts, the Texas teen murders, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

On the podcast Health Stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night. I'm Dr. Priyamp Gawali. a double board certified physician. And I'm Hurricane Dibolu, a comedian and someone who once Googled, do I have scurvy at 3 a.m. And on our show, we're talking about health in a different way,

like our episode where we look at diabetes. In the United States, I mean, 50% of Americans are pre-diabetic. How preventable is type 2? Extremely. Listen to health stuff on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, the shade is always,

Shady is right here. Season 6 of the podcast Reasonably Shady with Jazele Brian and Robin Dixon is here dropping every Monday. As two of the founding members of the Real Housewives Potomac were giving you all the laughs, drama, and reality news you can handle.

And you know we don't hold back. So come be reasonable or shady with us each and every Monday. Listen to Reasonably Shady from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or we're wherever you get your podcast.

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