 that this is not progress but evolution was never about progress it was change over time that's what evolution means so when people make the conflate Darwinism with survival of the fittest with progress they're getting many concepts wrong what's up everybody and welcome to the show today we drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends James this book is is one of those topics that seems to be in front of everybody and you decided to pick it up and then in doing so it took off I mean before I got into reading it and doing my research for this this episode I had realized that I had already had several discussions of the evolution of our face with several people and it was it was due to this book coming out and it was the first I was hearing a lot of this stuff so I'm very excited at having this conversation today and did you know this book was going to be one of those topics that sort of exploded no not at all and it's funny because when the book came out about six weeks into lockdown of the pandemic you know some guy said oh you know very convenient of you to quickly write this book and release it right in the midst of a respiratory pandemic I've been writing this book for it took about five six years to write it so I had no idea that anyone was going to be interested in in breathing as I had become I thought that there was an interesting story here but as a writer you release your book out into the world and have no idea what's going to happen to it well we'd love to hear a little bit about your journey into breathing for some context for us you know we've had dozens of therapists psychiatrist psychologists on the show and when we talk about anxiety overcoming fear they'll often recommend breathing exercises as one of those ways to modulate our own behaviors but outside of that breathing is sort of seen as woo-woo in a lot of spaces what was your own personal journey into discovering the importance of breathing and then getting into actually writing the book well I think that was one of the reasons this book was so hard to write is because you could ask 10 people the same question and literally get 10 different answers so people on the woo-woo spectrum think that breathing can do anything some people even think you don't need to eat or drink any water or anything you can just exist on the sun which is complete bogus and then other people on the on the very conservative medical end of the spectrum think that breathing is this autonomic function it serves no role in our health only if we aren't breathing should we be concerned about our breathing but the truth really is right in the middle of those two fields and so that's what I tried to thread the entire time in this book is doesn't matter what someone's politics are what their religion is what their background is data is data and what works works and that's what I spent years and years studying and trying to find out what really works what is supported by science and how can breathing take us to these different levels and you had your own breathing issues that you are sorting through that sort of was the genesis of this book so walk us through a little bit of your own journey and breathing yeah so years and years ago I thought I was eating all the right foods exercising the right amount sleeping the right amount all of that I considered myself pretty healthy but I kept coming down with chronic respiratory issues I would come down with bronchitis I would come down with mild pneumonia I was wheezing when I was working out and doing martial arts or surfing or whatever and whenever I went to a doctor they said oh this is perfectly fine you're just getting old deal with it but something felt really off in my breathing but I was reassured repeatedly that there was nothing wrong with me so years and years went by and I discovered a breathing class that I went to on the advice of a doctor friend and it really opened my eyes to the potential of what breathing could do and I felt significantly better after that but still as a science journalist I'm not going to write a memoir about my my breath in my journey that's of no interest to me so it was really when I met freedivers that I I figured out that my god there's something so much deeper and profound with our breathing these people are doing something that is supposed to be scientifically impossible and they do it every single day so where else can breathing bring it and with that obviously having your health guiding your initial journey in there what have been the personal benefits in your life around what this book and its discoveries for you have brought I try not to throw in too much of my personal story into my writing because I hate when authors do that when they say this work for me so it's definitely going to work for you everyone breathes in a slightly different way everyone's going to respond to breathing in a slightly different way just like everyone's going to responding to to foods and changing their diet in a different way and exercise in a different way on a personal note with that big caveat I will say it completely changed my life it can it changed my health it changed my ability to coax myself into different states at different times and this is all supported by science it's not just my personal opinion you can get various wearables breathe in a different way and watch this transformation happen inside of your body and even even in your brain and and so the idea that breathing is just some woo woo new age thing is is counter to what we know about basic human physiology how you breathe affects every cell of your body all the time and johnny was mentioning this earlier around evolution I think many of us have this idea of evolution as us a survival of the fittest and gradually becoming better as a species and a large part of the beginning of the book just argues how evolution is working against us in our breathing now in the crowding out in our mouths our inability to really engage in nose breathing so what was really fascinating for you around the evolution of breathing in your research yeah what a what a bummer it is to think that life forms don't progress that they can digress and they can get sicker and sicker and this is counter to everything I had learned about evolution and when I was in school you know forever ago and it's counter to most of what people understand about how evolution works we're repeatedly told that you know Darwinism survival of the fittest we're getting stronger we're living longer we're getting healthier we're growing taller all of this is complete garbage all you need to do is to look at the rates of modern chronic diseases and in even lifespan with all the medical interventions we're actually starting to die sooner now than we were 20 years ago that this is not progress but evolution was never about progress it was change over time that's what evolution means so when people make the conflate Darwinism with survival of the fittest with progress they're getting many concepts wrong we drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends well certainly the details in your book and conversations that I had with folks which once that idea that we're not especially in our face we're not evolving in the in a proper manner in fact it's getting flatter it's constricting it's our mouths are getting smaller I mean that opened up the doors to evolution going in the wrong way on many aspects of our human lives but it was it was certainly an eye-opener for me in fact the first time that I had ever had come in contact with anyone talking about breathing was was I was taking singing lessons in my 20s and it was all about breathing from your diaphragm and that was the first time that I had ever realized how I was breathing and there was other ways of breathing in fact and that might breathing in certain ways would help this wonderful voice carry a tune yeah so a lot of people don't ever think about their breathing because they don't have to the breathing is something that happens unconsciously and how awful would it be to think about that we need to breathe 20,000 times a day I'm so happy that we've evolved in ways so that we don't have to think about all this stuff at the same time if you're breathing in a dysfunctional way that becomes a negative habit and no matter what you do to improve your health you're always going to be pushing with your back against the wall and this is something researchers told me early on that I had a hard time believing they said you can eat all the right foods you can exercise all the time you can what do you know flotation therapy you can take supplements if you have a serious breathing dysfunction you will never ever be healthy no matter what you do so we take the majority of our energy and through air not through water not through food not through anything else through air and if you don't believe me you can just hold your breath for three or four minutes and see how much energy you have so how we take that air in how we exhale it throughout the day of course it's going to make a huge difference to singing and and so much more well the subtitle for the book is the new science of a lost art why do you consider breathing a lost art I consider a lost art because if you look back in history and you study ancient hindu texts which is something I did for quite a while and you study ancient chinese texts and you study greek texts and you study texts and traditions and native american cultures and if you study Polynesian culture you get the idea so much of what they were doing was focusing on the breath and they realized and appreciated breathing as important to human health as as what you ate or how much you exercise there's a dozen books in the chinese dow dedicated to breathing all the awful things that are going to happen if you breathe through your mouth or breathe in a dysfunctional way and all the good things that are going to happen if you take control of your breath so we've known this stuff for a long time but luckily we live in an age now where we can objectively test it it's one thing to say oh I did a breathing class yeah I feel better it's another thing to look at numbers and to look at numbers across wide populations of people and if all those numbers are pointing in the same direction then you know something yeah it's interesting in the book all of these cultures put focus on it and even in my case so I was diagnosed a few years ago with high blood pressure I'm just turned 40 so relatively young for someone to have high blood pressure both my general practitioner and all the cardiologists I I met with all said the same thing surprised at my age that I was dealing with this and we looked at my diet we looked at my weight we looked at my exercise and of course their response was well let's get you on some medicine never once did they discuss my breath they didn't ask me about mouth breathing nose breathing there was no exam around my breathing at all and yet here in the book there's so much science linking breathing to blood pressure to cardiovascular health so do you feel like modern medicine is is missing this component why is this not more publicly talked about and spoken about or why are we not even hearing about it from many doctors that we're visiting so there's doctors in my family my father-in-law is a pulmonologist so a specialist of the lungs he's been a pulmonologist for 40 years my brother-in-law is an ER doctor we talk about this stuff all the time they read every single word of this book and said wish I would have known this a few decades ago it would have helped me out so this isn't pointing fingers or blaming anyone I want to be very clear these people on the front lines dealing with acute serious problems so if you get in a car accident don't go to a yoga workshop and you learn pranayama like go to a doctor and get some surgery right and so this is what they're dealing with they say we basically deal with walking dead you have to be so bad to get treatment here and they do an amazing job like western medicine is an amazing thing but it's extremely bad at dealing with lower grade chronic issues and you can see that with hypertension with asthma with even diabetes yeah we have things that can take care of the symptoms of these problems but not things that can take care of the core issue so I have high I had past tense high blood pressure my dad had high blood pressure my mom had high blood pressure and I heard the same exact thing as as you heard and immediately I was I was given the this prescription I said whoa whoa whoa and this was years and years ago I said isn't there anything else I can do they said we're sorry it's genetic which is this is not true so there are ways around this that that could be another episode I could get your blood pressure down about 20 points in about two weeks I'm I'm absolutely sure of that that's what happened with me breathing is a component of that breathing can work with a lot of people but it is not a blanket prescription so I would never say that just breathe this way your blood pressure is going to go down you aren't going to have any other problems there are too many variables but breathing is part of that foundation of how to get yourself well