A Deep Dive Into Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art For Entrepreneurs with James Nestor - Genius Network Episode #198

So breathe through your nose, everyone.

If that's not obvious from the Stanford.

Experiment, the nose is the primary pathway through which we should be taking in air. And I'll explain very quickly why. Because when we breathe through the nose, we're moistening air, we're filtering it, we're heating it, we're pressurizing it, we're conditioning it so that by the time it enters our lungs, our lungs get much more better absorb that oxygen.

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So James Nestor is an author and journalist who's written for Scientific America, Outside the New York Times and more. His latest book, the New Science of a Lost Art, was released in May 26, 2020 by Riverhead Penguin Random House and was an instant New York Times and London Sunday Times bestseller. Breath explores how the human species has lost the ability to breathe properly and how to get it back. James Nestor has spoken at Stanford Medical School, the United Nations Global Classroom, and appeared on more than 60 radio and television shows, including Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the Joe Rogan show, and more. He lives and breathes in San Francisco. His website is Mr. James Nestor. Mr. James Nestor. N-E-S-T O R.com and in terms of something that has impacted my thinking, my life, and something that has produced such an immediate result, I have not heard from any doctors, any health people, the things that I learned in this book. I mean, it was absolutely incredible. And then Dave asked where he connected us and I had a conversation with James and he's just a really helpful, caring, useful guy. And what I was most impressed with him by is he's getting a lot of offers to do TV shows and different things. And he's so focus on doing the right thing, not having it be attached to too much hype, being very helpful. So one of the journalists that I think is absolutely authentic and genuine and caring and helpful and awesome. So I not only love his book, but I think James is just an incredible person.

I'm going to have a quick talk about 15, 20 minutes where I am going to take you through a million years of human evolution and show you.

Why we are the worst breathers on the animal planet. My jumping off point was really about eight or nine years ago when I went to write for Outside magazine about the World Freediving Championship, which is this insane competition in which these divers challenge one another to see how deep they can dive on a single breath. And come back to the surface conscious. So I watched people hold their breath seven, eight or nine minutes at a time and dive down to 300 or 400ft with a single breath of air. But I was lucky enough to meet some other divers who weren't so into the competition side of this freediving, who used it to explore their own limits, to explore their connection with the body and to explore oceanic animals.

So these free divers, as I got.

To know them a little better, said that this art of breathing that they've mastered, to hold their breath for so long and dive for so deep, extended far beyond just free diving. You could use breathing to heal your body. You could use breathing to heat your body. They told me about some someone who breathed in this rhythmic way and was.

Able to fight off E. Coli when.

He was injected with it. They told me about an 80 year old who learned how to superheat his body by breathing and could sit in the snow for hours. And of course, all of this is bs, right? Impossible. But I went and spent several years in this field and found that these stories were absolutely true.

So each of us takes in about.

30 pounds of air and in and out of our bodies every single day. So this is far more than we eat and drink. And the new science is showing us that how we take in all that air determines so much of our health, our lifespan, and our human potential. So how we breathe really matters. And I learned from these researchers something else that humans are breathing terribly and this is having grave consequences. You can take a quick look at, at the data here. These are chronic breathing problems, and if you don't do anything about it, these chronic breathing problems and others can lead to so many other problems. There are direct links between how we breathe and allergies, chronic sinusitis, adhd, metabolic problems, diabetes, who knew?

So these researchers told me if I.

Really wanted to understand why humans had become such poor breathers, I needed to look at human skulls. I went here to the University of Pennsylvania Archaeology and Anthropology Museum, where they have hundreds and hundreds of ancient human skulls. It was totally creepy to be standing in these labs surrounded by skulls from 300 years old to a few thousand years old. And all of them had perfectly straight teeth. You cannot find a hunter gatherer that has crooked teeth. So this is true for skulls 500.

Years old, 5,000 years old, 50,000 years.

Old, 5 million years old, whatever. So here is the jaw of one of the oldest Homo sapiens. It's about 300,000 years old. No invisalign for this fellow, no Braces, perfectly straight teeth. This guy's even older. This is a million years old. Look at this very powerful forward growing face, perfectly straight teeth. They all had them. Let's go forward in time here. This skull is about 8,000 years old, still very wide, very healthy, broad jaw, straight teeth. As we go forward in time, look what happens to the human skull. So it gets more narrow, there is less room for teeth to grow in straight, so eventually they grow in crooked and this is what we end up having. So there's another chronic problem with having a mouth that's too small for your face. It changes your profile. So 90%, I think over that, 95% of our ancestors about 300 years old and back were above that perpendicular line. So their chins grew forward above that line. And now 90% of us are behind this line. So it changes how we look and that's a bummer, but it also does something else, it changes how we breathe. So when the jaw is not big enough, when it doesn't develop properly, look at what happens to the airways. And this is the primary reason so many of us suffer from sleep apnea and snoring and it's linked to allergies and asthma and on and on and on. So when I first heard this, I had a hard time believing it because I had understood evolution means progress, right? We're getting better, we're getting stronger. Totally false. Evolution means change. And life forms can change for the better or the worse. And humans, especially, as far as our breathing is concerned, is changing much more for the worse. And the researchers I was working with told me if I didn't believe it, I could go look at any animal in the wild, check out their teeth. So I did. You can look at chimps, perfect teeth. Look at this handsome guy. Perfect teeth go into the water, the ocean animals, dolphins, whales, whatever, they all have perfect teeth. My mutt of a dog, perfect teeth. And yet we can have teeth like this when we're growing up. If we don't do anything, we can look like this.

The problem is, is when our upper.

Jaws and our upper palates don't develop properly, they can develop this V shape where if you have a clean thumb, you can put your thumb on the roof of your mouth and there's a good chance the roof of your mouth is going to be jutting upwards. And if it juts upwards, it can block the sinus cavities and make it harder to breathe through your nose. So you become a habitual mouth breather. But who cares, right? We have this Channel breathe through our mouth. That's just fine. It turns out mouth breathing is so injurious to our bodies, and about 25 to 50% of the population now chronically breathes through our mouths. And it affects the way we think, it affects the way our bodies function, it affects our metabolism, and it affects the way we look. This is the typical modern profile of modern humans for someone who has spent much of his or her youth mouth breathing. This is a profile I know very well because I had spent a lot of my youth mouth breathing. I thought it was perfectly normal.

As I got deeper into the research.

I met this fellow, Dr. Jayak Arnayak. He's the chief of rhinology research at Stanford. He said, yes, mouth breathing is terrible for us. No one knows this. He's a rhinologist, He's a nose guy. He knows all the wonders of the nose. But what he didn't know was how quickly the damage from mouth breathing, the neurological problems, metabolic problems, all that. No one knew how quickly that came off because nobody had tested it. Nayak said that doing so would be unethical because he knew it would be so injurious to the body. So I volunteered for a study and. And I got another friend, Anders Olson, breathing therapist from Sweden, to volunteer. For 10 days we had silicone plugs up our noses so we could only breathe through our mouths. I know this seems like a super size me stunt, but it really wasn't. We were just lulling ourselves into the position that so much of the population already knew, but we were measuring it. And then for another 10 days we would be breathing almost entirely through our noses. We would collect data sets and see what happened. Here I am getting plugged up on first day. If that looks painful, it's because it was awful. And here we are heading out on our first day of mouth breathing. Here we are in my car. Good times. Not so much.

Got home, had my blood pressure as.

High as I've ever seen it in my life. So this is about 25 points higher than I had recorded it and been recording baseline data for weeks and weeks. So that is my sleeping to the.

Left before mouth breathing.

So I was snoring about five minutes a night, which was quite a lot for me. It would usually be zero to a couple minutes. First night of mouth breathing, you can see on the right snoring about an hour and a half. So that was frightening. Here's what happened. A few days later, I was snoring for about four hours just by switching the pathway which I was Breathing air. This is Anders Olson. This guy was completely wrecked. Went from zero snoring to snoring the entire night. We got sleep apnea. We started choking on ourselves. I don't know if you can hear that. We were recording data every night. My dog got so worried, she would run into my room thinking I was dying, which I really was, but just very, very slowly from sleep apnea.

So this wasn't too much of a.

Shock to a lot of people who study this stuff. So they know that when the nose gets plugged from allergies or from injuries, snoring and sleep apnea really comes online. But what really shocked me was how quickly that damage happened, what it did to us. The good news here is that we got to go back down to Stanford, do about four different blood draws, and then breathe through our noses. Here's what happened. That was the first night on the left, about half an hour of snoring compared to four hours. Pretty good. A few days later, no snoring at all. So that was my worst. The left, right is afterwards. Here's Anders Olson when he was mouth breathing. Here is him, nasal breathing. Same exact thing happened with sleep apnea. So we both suffering from sleep apnea to zero.

And I don't think a lot of.

People really realize that snoring and sleep apnea, this is gonna crush you. If you continue to snore and have sleep apnea, it is gonna affect your body in so many ways. You're gonna die sooner. You're gonna be so much more apt to get so many chronic diseases. And it seems like that science is just sort of coming online now. So here's what happened with my hypertension. My blood pressure on the left was mouth breathing. On the right is within a day of nasal breathing. Blood pressure fluctuates throughout the day, so it wasn't consistent. But over about the course of a week, my blood pressure kept going down. This is a day after nasal breathing, when I continued to nasal breathe, so my blood pressure dropped about 40 points, and it stayed about 15 points lower than it had been when I was mouth breathing.

Overall, the point of me telling you.

All this isn't to bum you out. It's to acknowledge that there are several problems happening with our breathing. And what I set out to do is to find ways of fixing those problems and find out ways of how we can breathe better, to help heal our bodies, make us healthier, happier, live longer lives. So breathe through your nose, everyone.

If that's not obvious from the Stanford.

Experiment, the nose is the primary pathway through which we should be taking in air. And I'll explain very quickly why. Because when we breathe through the nose, we are moistening air, we're filtering it, we're heating it, we're pressurizing it, we're conditioning it so that by the time it enters our lungs, our lungs can much more better absorb that oxygen. So here is what your nasal passages are covered in this cilia, millions and millions of these little hair like structures. What these things do is they remove particulate and they also help remove viruses and bacteria. And our noses also release nitric oxide, which interacts directly with viruses. They're doing 11 clinical trials right now of giving guess what, to people with chronic problems associated with COVID They're giving them nitric oxide. We produce our own nitric oxide in our noses. So you get 20% more oxygen breathing through the nose than you do through equivalent breaths through the mouth. And if you think that's not going to make a difference throughout the day, you're not. So breathe through the nose so you want to breathe slow and steady. About 20 years ago, some Italian researchers began studying prayer. So they looked at the Ave Maria, the Catholic prayer of the rosary, and they looked at the Buddhist mantra, O mani padmi hum. And they noticed something interesting, that to recite both of these prayers, it requires you to take about 5 to 6 seconds inhale to 5 to 6 seconds exhalation. So when you're exhaling, you're talking, you're reciting. And they found that several other prayers also had this respiratory rate attached to them. Here's the study right here. What was more miraculous is they took people and they put sensors all over their bodies. And they noticed that when people recited these prayers, their heart rates lowered, their baroreceptivity increased significantly, blood pressure decreased, oxygen to the brain increased. All these good things. Here's some of the data here. They noticed something else. It seemed like the systems of the body entered something called coherence, where everything was working at peak efficiency just by reciting these prayers. But the good news was you didn't need to recite these prayers. Reciting them is fine, but all you need to do was to breathe in this pattern about five to six seconds in, five to six seconds out. And your waves in your body, from heart rate to EEG waves would look something like the above before, when we're frustrated, when we're talking right now, scattered. And they would look something more like below. So they turn to this, to this, just by breathing in this rhythmic pattern of about Five to six seconds in, five to six seconds out. Richard Brown here at Columbia has been studying this breathing pattern for about 20 years. He uses it for his patients with anxiety, depression, even nine, 11 survivors. So it's pretty amazing stuff. You can do it right here. You can follow along with this animation. You can do this for the rest of the talk. I'll be speaking for a few more minutes. And you can feel this real change happening in your body. Some researchers at Northwestern University found that just breathing in this rhythmic pattern coordinates electrical activity across the brain in areas associated with memory and emotion. So how we breathe affects how we think as well. The last thing here is breathe less. So we know that we're overeating. So in 1960, the average weight of someone who was 6ft tall was about 160 pounds. That person is now 214 pounds. So we know we're overeating. We are also over breathing.

That seems impossible, right?

You want to get more oxygen in. You huff and puff. But what you're doing when you're breathing too much is you're actually inhibiting oxygen from entering into your healthy cells. You are doing the opposite. My friend Patrick McKeown, breathing therapist, who's been working on this stuff for 20 years, shared with me this chart. When we breathe at a rate of about 20 breaths a minute, we can use half that air that enters into our lungs. So look at what happens when we breathe at a rate of about six times a minute. That's about five to six seconds in, five to six seconds out.

We.

We use about 85% of that air. So we increase our efficiency by 35%. By slowing down our breathing, we get more oxygen. There's been studies into this. This is by Alicia Morett, where they've used just slow breathing for asthmatics. The effects weren't subtle. They used it for panic sufferers. 96% marked much improved or very much improved. And after a year of just breathing slowly, there's the asthma study as well. So the science is very clear. How we breathe can really impact our health. The final, final thing here is awareness. So we may not be able to control our liver function the way our stomachs function, our heart rate, but when we control our breathing, we can influence all these functions. We can influence our nervous system, we can influence our immune function.

There's many people who have done this.

Over the past century. Carl Stau here used breathing for emphysemics. Nothing else worked for these people. When you breathe dysfunctionally, that's an emphysemic neck. He's not engaging his diaphragm. He can't.

The next shot you're going to see.

Here is of an emphysemic stomach. You can see other people breathing like this when they're not breathing fluidly and slowly. Now I'm going to show you a little before and after here. This is that same patient, by using nothing but breathing. So this is a couple weeks later, he's able to walk around, cruise around. There's some before and afters here. You're going to see him one more time. That is him after. This is him before, few weeks after learning how to breathe.

That's him.

Totally different person, able to leave the hospital. So breathing can also allow us to heat our bodies up. We've known this for a long time. A lot of people didn't believe it until Herbert Benson at Harvard Medical School went out and found these tumor monks who could heat themselves up, increase the temperature in their extremities by 17 degrees and do this for hours. Wim Hof, a new practitioner of this tummo. There he is sitting in an ice bath for two hours. No frostbite, no hypothermia, just by using the breath. Breathing can also directly influence our immune function. That's what's so exciting. People with autoimmune problems, with asthma, with even type 1 diabetes have found ways of breathing and ways to really improve their health. So this stuff is not new. It's been around for thousands and thousands of years. Ancient Hindu texts, ancient Chinese texts. One quote from the Dao reads, therefore the scholar who nourishes his life, reforms, refines the form and nourishes his breath. Isn't this evident? Well, I think nowadays it's becoming a little more evident. If you look at the amount of studies being done, the effects of healthy breathing. I only hope that this time around we won't soon forget it. When we use breathing, when we acknowledge it, when we appreciate it, we can really help blunt so many of these chronic problems we have and improve our health.

So there were some comments that people are like, I can't breathe through my nose. I've tried to exercise with it. What would you say to them?

Everyone's different. So some people absolutely need surgical interventions. But what I learned From Stanford, from Dr. Jack or Nyack, is most people.

Just need to breathe through their nose more.

I also learned from Ann Kearney, the doctor of speech Language Pathology at Stanford. She was slated for surgery. Been a mouth breather her whole life, been snoring, all of that. But she started Looking at the nose.

And started really understanding that it's just.

Like any other muscle. So the less you use it, the.

Less you're going to be able to use it.

And this was something I experienced as well. And it's not easy at the beginning. Like, everyone's looking for a quick fix. But adapting to nasal breathing after you've been chronically mouth breathing for decades takes a while.

But the benefits are not subtle. They are huge from an athletic perspective, from a health perspective, from a sleeping perspective.

And so the science is very clear on that. It's just, it's not a fun journey.

You'Re taking adapting to nasal breathing, which.

Is why these little tweaks, these training wheels, breathe, right. Strips and insert are great as training wheels, right? They allow you to become more comfortable with it.

But the point is to use them for a few weeks or a few months, and you don't have to use them afterwards. They can increase airflow and make it easier when you're doing that. Adaption to nasal breathing.

The biggest evidence of this too is the energy level and my aura ring. I was always like, literally at low levels. This has probably increased the quality of my sleep by at least 20%. I mean, night and day.

We know that there's a huge difference.

Of nasal breathing versus mouth breathing. And for a third of your life, you're breathing through your mouth. The science has been very clear that you're going to be more apt to.

Snore, you're going to be more apt.

To have sleep apnea. And I'm not saying that this stuff is going to work for everyone. What I'm saying is I heard about this from Stanford. It's worked for me, it's worked for other people, and most importantly, it's free. You don't need to go into a clinic or get a prescription for this, so why not try it? And if you're like Dave or if.

You'Re like Joe, you can calculate the.

Quality of the sleep you get doing mouth breathing regularly and using sleep tape. So I found it was a tremendous difference. And I'm getting hundreds of emails of.

People who are completely pissed off, who.

Have said, I've been snoring for 30 years, my wife has to sleep in another room. I use this little piece of tape.

And I'm no longer snoring.

So it's worth giving it a go.

Mouth tape is a good idea if you've already been tested for or had a doctor look through to make sure that you're not a candidate for a.

High level of sleep apnea.

But I do love the idea of breathing. And actually I'm wearing a mute right now as we speak. I do Wim Hof every morning and I use the mute when I do it. And it's incredible.

What is your drive to explore such seemingly different topics? Because you know a lot about a lot of very interesting things.

I will. First, I want to address one little hack that people can do for sleep apnea. It's oropharyngeal exercises, which have been shown to be very beneficial for some people with mild. It's not going to work for everyone for some people with mild or moderate sleep apnea. And this is just exercising the back of your mouth, exercising your tongue. The tongue is this very powerful muscle, right? And it's about pushing it to the roof of your mouth, swirling it around, moving it back. Because the less we use this, the more soggy it gets. The more saggy that tissue gets, the less we're going to be able to breathe more freely. So that's an interesting thing that Stanford is now working on, which is fascinating, and I am a big fan of that, having seen several studies on it. My book Deep, is in some ways conjoined to breath because it's looking at the human body's potential, how we've been told we can't do all of these things. We can't dive down to 400ft in a single breath. We can't hold our breath for 12 minutes at a time. And all that's BS because these people.

Are doing it right now.

So I think part of what drives me and what drives my work is to look at conventional wisdom and to look at the real science behind that and to see how that conventional wisdom was formed and what we can do to understand it better and see what the science is actually saying. This is exactly what Dave has been doing with all of his books as well, after he had gone through so many different ways and practices to get his weight down and found that so many of them were BS and had.

To find his own way.

But there have been some very interesting studies looking into hypoventilation that is extreme under breathing and weight loss. And it's not subtle, you know, 30% more weight loss with these controlled studies, also for cardiovascular issues, for fitness. So in my mind, the next few years, this hypoventilation training is going to totally take off. It's already been taken off with altitude mass, which don't train you for altitude, they train you for CO2 tolerance. That's what they're doing, and this is.

Very similar in the same way.

Go ahead, Dave.

James, you're sitting in a room full of people who spent an ungodly amount of money to be here. Listen to Joe's bad jokes. If you had stuff that we could do that was way more expensive than you recommend in your book, essentially with no budget to worry about, what do we need to know about that you didn't put in the book?

I focused on things that almost everyone could do that were easy and accessible. So I would get a top breathing trainer, a top breathing therapist. I think Patrick McEwen is probably the best in the world. This guy has healed innumerable asthmatics, people with autoimmune problems, people with depression. He's worked with people with sleep apnea and found a lot of improvement from that as well. So I think that that would be the direction. All these little knickknacks that I sent Joe.

This stuff's 15 bucks to buy all of that.

But if you really want to go up the next rung of human potential, I think you need to find someone to guide you to these levels. Wim Hofs great as well, but if you want to look at the other side, Patrick's really the top dude. Anders Olson is also amazing. You're going to be retaining more CO2 by taping, because when we. We can tend to blow off too much CO2 and become alkaline, which makes it harder. If you're working out and breathing too much, you're going to feel some lightness in your head. You might feel some tingling in your fingers. That's not from an increase of oxygen to any of those areas, but a decrease from a lack of circulation. So when we breathe more slowly, we can retain more CO2. And CO2 is a very powerful vasodilator.

We need CO2 to exchange oxygen.

So by breathing more slowly, in line with our metabolic needs, you retain that.

More CO2, you get more circulation, and your body can function more efficiently.

Just to mention something with the alf. And palatal expansion is very effective for sleep apnea, very effective for people who. Who have asthma. And it's so ironic that right now, we are now trying to turn our faces the way that they were before we screwed them up 300 years ago. So we're just trying to rearrange ourselves to the way we were in the wild. So I had an experience with a homeobloc, which helped to expand my upper palate.

James, how many. What percentage of people benefit from that palate expansion?

I did it.

You did it? Is this the thing that most humans need or is it more specialized?

I don't think most humans need it. It depends. Depends what you want.

Some.

Some people have these big, powerful jaws, they have these big palates. They were breastfed for two years, they ate hard foods. Those people don't need it. They have naturally straight teeth. So I don't know what percentage of the population I know that I was certainly on the side that needed it. Extractions, braces, headgear, made my mouth smaller, like scrunched my profile down. I'm sure it affected my breathing. Everyone's different. So you can't make a blanket prescription. Some of these easier hacks of the tape, they're going to work for some people, they're not going to work for other people because we're all messed up in our own unique ways. And this is why you would really need an expert to look at where you're messed up to. Not to throw a blanket prescription or blanket surgery and say, I have sleep apnea, breathing problems. I'm immediately going to drill through your nose. That works for some people. It doesn't work for everyone. So which is why you need to be very careful about this. And there's a whole other subset of people who had had turbinate reduction surgeries who didn't really need it and now are completely wrecked because they're getting too much air all the time. So our bodies need the right amount of air at the right time per our metabolic needs. And as I said in the talk, most of us are breathing too much. So we're just causing all of this wear and tear on our bodies that's.

So unnecessary will eventually wear us down.

What are all the resources on your website? I mean, you have a lot of great stuff you just put out there.

I put up about 500 scientific references on the site, some with. With some X rays, with some videos. There's also expert interviews. These are not podcasts with some people from Harvard, other experts in the field, there's some breathing exercises from Johns Hopkins, and all this stuff is free. MrJamester.com breath basically, because I was getting so many questions, I could not answer everyone individually. So I had someone collect these questions. Then I would have try to find the top expert in that particular field to come on and answer them.

Do you think this is your greatest body of work so far? And what are you working on next?

Well, the, you know, the thanks goes to these researchers. As a journalist, I was not the one doing the research here.

Right.

I went into this field objectively trying to just figure out this story. So I think the real thanks goes to people who have spent 30 years, 40 years working on this stuff. No one's been listening to them. Everyone said what they were doing was complete BS and they just kept chipping along. So in many ways I think my job here was rather easy. It'd be much harder if you were getting kicked out of your institution for something that you believed in, even though the science was very, very clear. And that's what's hearing those stories was really sad. But also these people now are having their day. They're so excited to see that there is scientific validation that people are transforming their lives with something instead of just.

Taking care of the symptoms.

Why do I have hypertension? Why do I have headaches?

Why do I have metabolic problems?

Looking at the core problem and I think that breathing is. It's not the end all, be all, it's not a panacea, but it is a foundation of our health that we need to be considering just along with.

How we sleep, how we eat and.

How much we exercise. Breathing needs to be a part of that. So, yeah, it's been a complete trip. We weren't even going to release the book. Pandemic happened, Distribution was all messed up. We said, let's delay a year. And then my editor said, oh, what the hell, People are talking about breathing now. We should release it. So it's been nuts. And you know, the highest compliment I know that Dave has received this as well is when you can help people, when you can help people with something that they, that is easily accessible, that doesn't require them to spend three weeks, you know, in a foreign country to get their head around that they can just use their own bodies with whatever is around them to improve themselves. That's just the best part of it for sure.

Yeah.

Awesome. Let me ask you a question that is about journalism because I actually have this. So it's a three part question on journalism and I think it'd be interesting.

To hear your answer.

A what does being a journalist mean to you? What do you learn about different magazines and outlets and their narrative requirements, for example, left wing or right wing Bens when writing for them and see what do you think about the character traits and actions for being an intelligent, moral, purposeful journalist? Love to get your thoughts on that. What does being a journalist mean to you?

I'm going to answer all three and just say yes. No, no, no. So I think being a journalist is tricky. Now I'm not on the Front lines, writing for different news sources. It seems like it's a complete mess. You can't get a straight story out of anyone anymore. Everyone's got their bias and it's so frustrating. So my job is to take these real long views and to spend a lot of time in one particular subject and to focus as much as I can on providing what I think is the most honest assessment of this. Like going into the breathing world. I had zero experience in this before I started, which was a steep learning curve. You know, my father in law was a pulmonologist, my brother in law is an ER doc. They helped me a lot along the way to try to understand these things. But I think not having a bias allows you to come in and be really objective, to call BS on the stuff that is BS and to really dive into the stuff that is legitimate that stacks up. So I think that it's tough knowing that our information right now from some from the left, some from the right is completely biased. And I don't get into the political stuff. I'm focusing on things that all unite us, which are our bodies, our breathing, our health, and how to improve that.

Yeah, yeah.

And what I found in the breathing world is it seemed like a lot of people were very focused on their specific methodology. So a lot of WIM HOF people are like, only do WIM hof man.

You gotta over breathe, you gotta do.

Cold shower, that's it. Buteyko people are like, you can only.

Breathe just a teeny amount of air all the time.

And there's benefits to all these things. These are different tools in the toolbox. So as an outsider, I found that to understand all these different modalities and to look at the science and how they were benefiting people and to put these together just to have more knowledge is always a good thing. Right? So I don't think you should be.

So cordoned into one specific corner or the other.

Different breathing practices for different people can do different things.

James, that 30 pounds of air that you mentioned, it's same thing. We don't want to eat dirty food. We don't want to breathe dirty air because it gets processed. A lot of people have a hard time like Joe. It's an issue in Arizona, surprisingly. But if you're saying your nose is too clogged to breathe at night, if you put an air filter in your room or if you did an environmental mold test, you'll find that quite often that's the trigger that's causing the chronic inflammation. It also ruins sleep. In many other ways. And it turns you into a mouth breather. It's one of the reasons I was a mouth breather as a kid and I did a documentary@moldymovie.com it is free. I'm not trying to sell you guys anything, but it'll take an hour of your life to watch it. Daniel Amen's in it. A bunch of experts are in it. And it hits nice houses and cheap houses all the same. It's equal opportunity. 100 million structures have a problem right now in the US and so if you're going to be breathing deep, for God's sake, get air filter in your bedroom. It's part of the problem. Like, you just have to do it.

This book breath is so damn valuable. What didn't I ask you? What have we not talked about that I should have that you'd like to share? Like any famous last words?

Oh, I just think. I mean, we covered the basics, but breathing is so intimately tied to everything that we're doing all day long. And if we're doing that wrong, our bodies can compensate, but that doesn't mean we're healthy.

We can sleep.

We can still breathe when we're sleeping. But if we're not doing this in a fluid and easy way, we're never really going to be functioning correctly. So it may be subtle, maybe simple, but that doesn't mean it's not influencing.

Every part of our being.

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