Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens. And I'm Jan Black. And on this episode, we're talking all about your heart with our guest, cardiologist and bestselling author,

Dr. Sanjeepe Jahar. Among other things, he's the author of the book, Heart, a history,

and the presenter of an incredibly popular TED talk called How Your Emotions Change the Shape of

Your Heart. Dr. We thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me.

Tell us why you decided to become a cardiologist. I mean, that's such a tough feel to get into.

Yeah, I mean, so there's a couple of reasons. Probably the strongest is that I have a very strong,

you know, malignant family history of heart disease. My paternal grandfather died

in his early 50s. He died in 1953, 15 years before I was born. I never met him. And, you know,

he actually died in the presence of my father. They were having lunch, and my father was only 13 at the time.

And, you know, like many people who have witnessed the sudden death of a loved one, my dad really

never got over it. There was a sort of grief that really, you know, suffused his life, and he would come out.

He was really distraught up through adulthood,

through my childhood by this sudden death. And, you know, I used to worry about my father

when I heard that what happened to my grandfather. You know, when I was a kid, it just didn't

make sense to me that you could be healthy like my grandfather and You know, when I was a kid, it just didn't make sense to me that you

could be healthy like my grandfather and die. That just seemed like such a cheat by nature or God,

you know, that there's no warning and you could just die suddenly. And the fact remains that

the heart is the only organ that can

facilitate a sudden death, sudden in the matter of, you know, seconds to minutes. And I just

remember finding that just so profound. And it just put a kind of terror in me that led to sort of an

obsession about the heart and how it worked. And then that

sort of obsession led to, you know, understanding how powerful and special the heart is as a machine.

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