Welcome back to the Articharm podcast to show designed to help you communicate with power and become unstoppable on your path from hidden genius to influential leader.

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All right, Johnny, let's kick off today's episode with James Nestor. James is an author and journalist and his book, Breathe.

The new science of a lost art was an instant success and listed as one of the best books of 2020 by the lost gene post parade, MPR Amazon and more.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book and it really changed the way I look at my own breathing.

In this book, James explores the million year long history of how the human species has lost the ability to breathe properly.

That's right, we are not breathing properly and it's causing a long list of maladies, including snoring, sleep apnea, asthma, autoimmune diseases and allergies.

Can't wait to dig into this one. Welcome to the show James.

James's book 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 episode, I had realized and I already had several discussions of the evolution of our face with several people and 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 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.

I had no idea that anyone was going to be interested 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, psychiatrists, 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.

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