Do you make better choices when you're racing around and filled with anxiety?

Or when you're feeling calm and relaxed?

Well the way that you breathe can dramatically shape whether we're feeling anxious or calm.

How might our experience of technology be different if it paid attention to how we're breathing?

Today on your undivided attention, we'll use our breath to explore how we might design more humane technology.

And here to guide us through that exploration is journalist James Nester.

James is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Breath, the new science of a lost art.

And in it, he chronicles how humans have lost our ability to breathe correctly, with sometimes grave consequences.

And he reveals how making slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can rejuvenate internal organs, halt asthma, and even straighten scoliotic spines.

You're going to hear some bold claims that James himself was surprised to find evidence for.

I'm Tristan Harris, and I'm Aiza Raskin.

And this is your undivided attention.

It's my great pleasure to have you James on your undivided attention.

And I'm very excited to get to dive into the intersection of our work now on technology and the human humane side of things.

So this could be a story about breath, and that's what your book is, the new science of lost art.

But reading your book, I was left with the unsettled feeling of an even deeper underlying story.

To me, it read as the story of how we as human beings are products of environments that fundamental parts of ourself can atrophy away within the generation.

That something so core to our identity as our face can become deranged in ways that chronically reduce the quality of our lives, and send us to the hospital without anyone really noticing.

And that we're left playing a whack-mole game of trying to fix the system of downstream problems from asthma to diabetes, sleep apnea, memory impairment,

lower mobility, childhood torment of braces and headgear, all because we don't understand root cause.

And I think our listeners now can already hear the coming analogy of the cascading set of crises in mental health,

extremism, polarization, miscientist information, isolation, all created by technology messing with our cognitive and information environment,

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