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Now, I guess the night of the researcher and author of the New York Times bestseller Eve, How the Female Body Drove two hundred million years of human evolution?
Please welcome Kat Bohannan.
Hey everybody, how's that hanging a little to the left? Then?
So, okay, you set out to prove that the human body drove human evolution? What did you discover?
One of the central things I discovered was that we are garbage at making babies, just the entire species. This is actually a flaming garbage pile. This is the technical term, right, Yeah, So you wouldn't think so, right, because we have eight billion people in the world, right, so you think that
we are obviously good at popping them out. But no, no, no, no, no no. Actually, our pregnancies and bird and postpartum recoveries are harder and longer and more prone to dangerous and crippling and sometimes murdery complications than they are in most any other primate, well except for a squirrel monkey, and we feel real bad for her, but also also most other mammals. Actually, we do, in fact suck at this, and that changes how you understand the story of the
female body. Yeah, that changes how you understand what all this is for. It's not that it is our destiny to make babies to be fulfilled or.
Something wasn't mine.
Yeah, no, no, no, no, I mean I love my kids, but I'm good to be done with that. No, it's more it's more like, it's how.
We do it, particularly as a species, is so bad.
That there are many fail safes. There are many things built into kind of brace for impact. Yeah, it's more like that. Yeah, that there are ways in which our immune system has adapted because the placenta down regulates the immune system. So you know, since you don't want to die of infection when you're pregnant, maybe your immune system runs a little hot the rest of the time. Right. It may be the case that we breastfeed the way
that we do. It may be the case that we have menstruation the way that we do in each case because we are actually just trying not to die.
Oh, I see, And from what I read that you found. What you found was that all of this medical research in science has been based on the what do we say, cis male sex at births.
I'm progressive, yeah, yeah, it's just dicks all the way down, so instead of turtles, right, exactly, exactly, So this is true in biological research. This is true in biomedical research. We are only studying males, right, And it's basically because this thing we call a menstrual cycle, which a biologist would call an estrous cycle, is just so messy and complicated. Right, So you have this slope of hormones that's doing all kinds of things in a female body if you're studying mammals,
so maybe just don't then don't want study them. That seemed to be the solution.
Icy, Just let's not deal with Yes.
It's not like there was any sexis cable. I'm not saying there isn't sexism. It's more like it's not necessarily sexism that was driving it. It's more that there was a kind of unspoken agreement in biology, Oh, we'll solve this problem, this messy, messy chick problem in rats, mostly by not studying the female. Yeah, which means that by the time you get to doing biological research that might lead to pharmaceuticals, well, then it may not have been studied on females at all.
Is research getting any better with this stuff.
Yes, yes, and that is the absolutely good news. I mean it's often intergenerational. Yeah, there is some resistance from the old guard. It's not like that's new to science. That's kind of in any industry when you have a social shift, when you have a pair paradigm shift in understanding what you're doing. So there is some resistance by the people who are giving the scientists the grants. There is some resistance from the old people because it's not
nothing to change your mind. What is it to be told that for decades you may be a nobel laureate. In fact, sometimes you know we're wrong about something. That's actually a hard shift, that's hard to do. There are many older scientists who are leading the guard, but there are some who are not. So that's the thing. But no new generation coming in doing all the new science.
And it's like the wild West out there, man, Like anywhere you look for a sex difference in mammals, you kind of find one, right, which also means that we don't entirely know what's going to matter in the long run, right, you know, because it's new, it's not just cutting edge science, it's like bleeding edge science. Right, But it's cool and.
It's moving forward. It isn't necessarily gendered. It's gendered in that it's like what your sex at birth is. But like you were talking about the male and female brain and that they're indistinguishable.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Now don't do this at home. But if you do, hold two cadaver brains in your hands, if this occasion happens upon you, I can't imagine why. But if you were and nobody prepped you to say this one came from a biologically male body, this one came from a female body, there's actually no way for you to know. There may be some minor sex differences in myelination, some ratio of gray matter in one region, but in the exact same brain in another region it'll
have the opposite pattern. It's more like a sex mosaicism. The only way to tell for sure is to literally shove them in a blender, sluice them down. We've done this. Sluice them down, count the cells and sequence the DNA, and you're gonna have to do a number of them because females who have given birth to males may well have some of his cells up in their brains, just reprolac some wise like some actual wise, that's how we
know that there's chimerism. Yeah, like I have a sign and his cells are apparently probably in my brain just doing something I don't know what, right, Yeah, but that is the only way to know, just sequencing the d which is some cool.
You know, she's really cool, right, Like you talk about science, but it sounds like beat poetry. I would say, for a book that is all about the female form and the female body and all that stuff, you talk a lot about dix, Like why so much dick?
I do there's a surprising amount of dong in this book.
That is true.
It's true. I mean it's like a woman holding a cell phone, like, did there need to be that much penis in here? Right? Apparently the answer is yes, because vagina's and penis is not for your phone. But in this case, vaginas and penises co evolve in all species that have them, which means you can't like talk about the evolution of the badge without talking about the coevolution of its I don't know, excitable partner, right, maybe eager, earnest, earnest partner. Yes, they try real hard.
Yeah, I mean it's like a penis like an in and outside vagina, don't they put them in? No, I don't really know what I'm talking about.
Now. Are you actually be surprised how scientifically accurate that question is, my dear? No. Actually, when the genitals are forming in those early weeks in the wombs, they all form from the same bud essentially, and there's a diagram of it in the book, very nicely done. Yeah, and they're essentially the same thing for a long time. And what becomes the clitterists in a typical female uh it tangle when.
You said clitterish, you know, you.
Know, extends out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's not that it's an inside out vagina, but it is true that it is remarkably from the same stuff.
Yeah, but what why should men read your book? Should men read your book?
I think so for their own good. So the thing is, they can read my book and care about it to.
Learn about the human body like all the books we read.
Or we can cut off their balls.
This is a great ending point, and yet I feel I'd like to know if you would like.
To expound, I will see. The thing is, let's talk about sex and longevity. Yeah. The thing is is that there are many ways to extend a male mammals lifespan to make them live longer. We know that females generally live longer and males don't across mammals. But the one thing that you can do that's more reliable than just about anything else is castrated cut off is balls. This is and we know this because we have caught out
thousands of balls. Okay for science, right, So we have done rat balls, we have done rodents of all types. We have done dogs. You've probably done that. Well, you paid a guy, but that adds like a year and a half domestic dogs life, pigs and monkeys, and humans. We have the data. In humans, the Korean court, the Korean Imperial Court kept very good medical record and had eunuchs American men in the mid century who were hospitalized, usually for mental illness. And because the history of eugenics
is horrific, we're also castrated. Very good medical records and a central Asian tradition too. All of these castrated males lived longer, healthier lives than their regularly bald peers. And I'm not talking about a small gain. It's an average of fourteen years. So why is that.
You know your small stork is phenomenal.
Why are so many men smuggling too little death nuggets? You know, like, why are these the ping pongs of destiny? Why are these the actual grapes of wrath?
Yeah?
So, And the answer is we are not entirely sure. We have some models, some scientists are doing the work, but this is the actual future of j intology. Figuring out why there are sex differences in aging and why cutting off balls will make men live longer is how we're going to provide better medicine versus men. And I think we can all get on board here. American men deserve better from medicare than a mass castration plan.
Yes, it's a very good point. I mean mic drop right. Great, let's talk about technology. It's great. It mostly makes life easier for humans, and in exchange, we humans try our best to not drop it into the toilet. But right now, the technology we're talking about is artificial intelligence. Since into our lives, we've all been trying to grapple with its larger impact. We're seeing kids use it to cheat in school.
We're seeing shitty partners use it for breakups. Chat GPT is even able to pass the legal bar exam meaning it'll be the first AI to develop an addiction to cocaine. But it might be a good thing that chat gpt could be a lawyer, because a lot of people are taking its ass to court.
This morning, a game of Thrones erupting over the rights to some of the most popular works in the world.
George R. R.
Martin and more than a dozen other authors now suing open ai, creator of chat gpt, Martin joining forces with authors like Jody Pecoe, John Grisham, Ellen Hildebrand, Michael Connolly, and David Baldacci to take on the AI giant.
And comedian Sarah Silverman is suing Open AI and Meta.
She claims the company's developed artificial intelligence tools that freely copied her memoir Bedweather without permission. That's right, mother, stand writing. Luminaries like myself and George R. R. Martin R are suing AI, and I'll tell you why in another installment of Long Story Short. For as long as we have had civilization, we've also had art. For over forty thousand years, artists have had a sacred creative process. They sit down to ruminate on the human condition. They pace, and they
struggle to focus. They get up to get a snack, maybe take a nap. Then they work a bit more, so they reward themselves by scrolling Instagram on the toilet for so long they shit again. Then they finally get something on the page, and when they ask their partner for feedback, they get mad when it isn't what they wanted to hear because their partner doesn't get me. Why do I even ask you? You're supposed to support me. Then eventually they buckle down, really do the work, and
finally voila tub thumping. But now generative AI can eliminate that entire creative process in a matter of seconds.
Dolly two is artificial intelligence software that can turn anything new type into art in any style. Portraits of a panda in the style of Renoir and.
Boom.
While Game of Thrones author George R. Martin has had fans waiting years for his next novels, one programmer used chat GPT to generate the longer waited installments in mere minutes.
A programmer generated his own shitty ending to Game of Thrones. Why waste your time? HBO already did that for you. Here's the thing.
Well.
AI has helped open many avenues for new works There's just one problem. They're not new works. What these programs do is scrape text and images from existing works and feed it into their system in order to create copycats. So when someone wanted to know what a modern Mona Lisa would look like, they just typed it into an AI program and seconds later it pumped out this. That's right. We used this ultra powerful technological tool to put titties
on the Mona Lisa congrat Society. We did it. And for the record, if we're gonna add sweater puppies to a Da Vinci painting, it should have been the last supper. I mean, look at them. Who's going to crucify these melons? Anyway? These programs are not just pumping out busty, derivative works of art. They're also printing money. Chat GBT is on track to make a billion dollars just this year alone,
which is great for them. But the problem is that these companies are using artists work without consent or credit or payment. And I've had first hand experience with this theft because one one of the one hundred thousand books used to train chat GPT was my book The Bedwetter, available wherever books are sold, and by the way, that book is about my actual life, my jokes, my experiences, my pain and chat. GPT stole all of it and didn't even have the courtesy to give me Mona Lisa Tits.
I haven't seen that hard work, and surprisingly many of the owners of these AI companies don't seem to be in a giant rush to unpack the moral implications.
I bought this for seventy nine dollars thinking it was the work of a talented artist, but a robot made it AI software called mid Journey, created by David Holst. How do you respond to the idea that this is somehow a counterfeit form of artistic expression.
Well, we're not really selling art where just we have this community that's playing with this technology. Like the art comedy already has issues with plagiaris. I don't really want to be involved in that.
I think.
I might be maybe you know what you made? Oh no, you guys aren't going to use the atomic bomb I made to hurt people, are you? When did humanity's villains start looking like such beta cooks? I mean, say what you want about Genghis Khan, but at least he looks like his stomach could handle milk. And this is precisely both. Thank you. This is precisely why you are seeing artists filing lawsuits to protect not only their creative work but
the work of future artists. And just to be clear, I'm not looking to shut down AI or turn the clock back. I just want guardrails so that AI fairly compensates the people whose work comprises its entire brain. This is not anything new. Technological advancements will always require regulation. For example, when technology brought us turntables and music sampling, it helped launch the genre of rap music and brought us lyrical wizards like Biggie and Tupac and chet Hanks.
But back when it started, it wasn't clear whether sampling was an innovative art form or stealing. But eventually legal guardrails were put in place. That helps set how technology could be used to create art and compensate those whose previous works were being used. It's not perfect, but both sides can get what they want. It's why every time you listen to the jay Z song hard Night Life, those kids from Annie get money so they don't have
to live in an orphanage anymore. Everybody Winnings. So long story short, I'm not saying we should destroy these AI models. I'm just saying we also need rules to protect artists and their work, and I'm confident we can find a way through this because artists are resilient. We get knocked down, but we get up again. You're never going to keep us down when we come back. The incredible Margo Price will be joining me.
Were welcome back to the n Show.
My guest tonight is a Grammy nominated singer, songwriter, and author. She's here to talk about her latest album, Strays, and her memoir Maybe We'll Make It. Please welcome Margot Price. Hello all, So, oh my god, I thought my phone alarm was on, but it was the music from here. Sorry, my edibles are kicking.
It happened to me all the time.
So your album is about substance abuse, it's about self image, it's about abortion rights and you you wrote it on mushrooms? Was that a rebel and songwriting? Tell me spill it was?
I really wanted to shake things up, you know. I kind of got my start with this old school country album. It was called Midwest Farmer's Daughter, and Jack White put it out and things kindly kind of finally turned around for me. But yeah, with this album, I just wanted to be able to go out there and not be pigeonholed.
Yeah. Yeah, but the psilocybin opened your brain did what I'm like, so into this.
Yeah, it's been pretty transformative for me. The first time I had a psychedelic trip, I was twenty years old, and I dropped out of college and.
Moved to Nashville.
Highly suggested for anybody who doesn't want to get into a student loan debt. But then yeah, then the next time I took it, I wrote this album. And then the third time that I took it, I decided to quit drinking alcohol, which had really been a challenge for me.
It's kind of after I started reading about Bill Wilson and the work he did with AA, and he initially had a psychedelic experience on a plant called belladonna, and they were actually at the very beginning moments of AA, they were giving people asset and it was crying their alcoholism. So I don't know, if you're feeling stuck with anything.
I love say in my early twenties, ecstasy changed my life.
Yeah, m DNA is absolutely incredible. For compassion as well.
And you know you're honest and you walk the walk. You've been really vocal about gun control, which is I think the number one killer of children in this country. And boy, you even took a detour on the road to vote in Nashville for the mayor. That's right.
I was out on tour and it was just a really important election for Nashville, and so I took off at ten o'clock at night, got to Nashville at three in the morning, woke up at nine, voted, and then drove back and played a show.
And like, what is it like being a liberal in a kind of a country world?
Yeah, I mean I definitely don't get invited to all the parties, but that's okay. Their parties suck, And yeah, I think it's been I like pushing boundaries. I like pushing my limits. I think that if we can have conversations. We live in such polarizing times, and really, if we could all realize that we're more like than we think and began to talk about these things. I want to destigmatize psychedelics and just thoughts on gun control. I think that the only way to do that is by talking about it.
Yeah, I agree.
Not different.
I mean, I've never disliked someone I've actually met face to face. That's right, face, that's right. Yeah, you have a song called Light Me Up. Why don't you explain to the audience what it's about, Margo?
Okay, Well, this song was one that we wrote the day after we took a God's Toe of Mushrooms. And you know, I was just listening to a lot of songs in the country music world and even in the Americana world, and I just wasn't hearing a lot of songs about the female orgasm, and I thought we needed to change that. So it's, uh, yeah, it's just a liberating song about sex and women's pleasure.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, you lived in such a time, and I mean, and I live in a place where, you know, abortion rights and women's bodies are just they're not our own. And I've I'm here to show up and and and fight.
I love it. Ero's Kiss book. Maybe we'll make it. And what was your approach to writing a book? Is are there any similarities to how you approached songwriting? Was it a completely different daunting task?
It was daunting, and I know you know as well, laying it all out there. I started writing it when I found myself pregnant with my daughter, Ramona, and I was just at home and I couldn't tour. And through the process, it was also kind of when I decided to give up drinking. Because I was reading everything from this different place, I was able to give myself a little bit more compassion as I was reading things back.
But I was scared to put it all out there. You know.
It's everybody I've slept with, all the drugs I've ever done, so sorry, Grandma.
So it's interesting because you know, having written a book, you know, a memoir, it's you kind of have to really be a detective in your own life, and you realize that's really good just for everybody to do. Yeah, because you learned so much from it and you're I think your editor read it and said, gee, it feels like whiskey is the main character of this book.
Yeah, yeah, definitely. She said that that was like my co star, and it's true. I mean I used to drink harder than anybody, and that was just kind of.
The way that I lived.
And it was like a badge of honor. And it was kind of going through that whole time. It's been almost three years now, and it's just been completely transformative to give it up and just have all this extra everybody.
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