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A lot of people these days are suffering with the effects of stress, the consequences of being chronically stressed and not actually adequately recuperating from that, and everyone's looking for the hack. You know, what can I do to keep my life super, super busy, but what can I do that's going to somehow magically de-stress me? And it's fascinating for me that breathing could well be one of the simplest and one of the most accessible things to all of us, yet it's something that very few of us are actively looking at and actively practicing. Why do you think that is? I think we've moved ourselves far enough away from inside-out understanding that outside-in has become our go-to default. I look at my phone for an answer to something, right? I'm on social media for things, for answers to things. I look at heart rate monitors for things. I look, you know, it continues to add up on the outside-in, trying, so we're missing, there's a big variant in that, like there's a big variation in that because to understand how you feel, you have to go in. You have to go to the base layer of what's going on, and at the fundamental layer of all of this is breathing, and so actually taking the time to actually reorganize and feel things, I can, most people, if we were to introduce some sort of a minor breath practice like the super ventilation stuff we did yesterday, that'll stimulate anybody, right? Anybody's gonna feel that, but if we do slow, controlled breathing, a lot of people may have problems with that and not feel that just as quickly, and it's more of a long-term thing, so it's something people have to actually put discipline in, right, to understand it, but that's, and this is where that outside-in thing comes, you know, people are so stressed out and it's like, that's all just a conceptualization. That's just story. That's just a narrative. We are designed to handle stress at very high output, and maybe, and I'm stealing this from a friend of ours, David Bidler, but maybe it's not that we have a disorder. Maybe it's not that, you know, anxiety and all this stress is actually, maybe this is just a natural reaction to the amount of stimulus, to the stimulus that we're taking in from the outside and not paying attention to things from the inside, because when, I've met and worked with a lot of high-level people, whether athletes, executives, whoever, right? The people that are functioning the highest are shutting out everything else. They're in their environment and what they're in, like the conversation you and I are having right now. I'm not thinking about the drive that I've got to go do, except right now when I say that, right, now I'm distracting myself, and so this is where the context of things starts to happen, and then I start to overload more because I'm in an environment I should be paying attention to, and I'm not feeling what's going on with that and present in that situation, and so breathing is that thing that I can go and bring myself right back and start to stop a lot of the physiological ramifications of that stuff. Sure. I mean, we'll get into the mechanics of that shortly. The thing that really resonates with me from what you just said is this whole idea that maybe anxiety or, you know, a whole list of other complaints is an appropriate response to the environment in which we're living, and, you know, as a doctor, this is something I've been wrestling with for a good five to 10 years now, that actually a lot of the time I think that the body is really smart, the body is clever, the body does what it is meant to do. I spoke to Johan Hari, I don't know if you know Johan, he wrote the book Lost Connections on. Yeah, I've read. We had just a phenomenal conversation for about two hours on this podcast a few months ago. And, again, it's that whole idea that maybe the way we're feeling this chronic epidemic of lifestyle-driven disease is actually our bodies doing what they should be doing in a very toxic environment. I went on your Art of Breath course yesterday with you and Rob were teaching, and the other ... And Danny as well, which is fantastic. But I got there slightly rushed, I had to fly in from Santa Rosa to California. We had a chat when I got there, and it was super interesting that, you know, you consciously have made a decision, from what I understand, to not live in an environment where you will constantly be fighting these stressful inputs around you. You put yourself into an environment of nature, of calm, of peace. Was that intentional? Yeah. We call that, and I'll give this to Rob Wilson, paying attention. If you're paying attention to what's going on in you, you start to feel the aspects of your environment. That doesn't mean I couldn't live in L.A. Forty years I spent in this L.A. basin, right? I was perfectly fine, it's just I got away three years ago into nature out in the middle of nowhere, Oregon, and spent a year there. Like seven acres, 30 minutes from any real town, you know, in the forest, and I got to know myself, and I really got to know myself, and I had already started doing work to start to feel what was going on in me, but it wasn't until I actually understood, like, oh, this is why people actually get away or unplug, right? And you can do that in spaces like L.A., and I actually had this very conversation at a barbecue we went to after the seminar yesterday with Dr. Tonya Bentley, who runs the foundation that we work with at her house, and they live up in a canyon in what seems to be not L.A. And her husband and I were having this conversation, and he literally was just like, I don't know how you do it here outside of this. And I'm like, I get it, like, I get that, and I don't think enough people understand that there's got to be some, this is where that hack world has to come in if we're existing in these places, right? Is we have to actually start to hack things, and breathing is one of those hacks, because I actually believe that if we were still out there, meaning still out in nature, still trying to survive, right, like cave people, right, like, we wouldn't even need to be worrying about breathing, because we'd be existing in a natural environment, responding to that natural environment in the way that we should have, right, versus putting ourselves into places where comfort and convenience and the illusion of safety becomes this very, it encompasses our entire life. Yeah, for sure. I guess it is in this environment we need to think about breathing. It is in this environment we need to think about physical activity, because I guess, you know, in many environments around the world, in these so-called blue zones where people are living to, you know, 100 plus with very low rates of chronic disease, you know, they're not trying to be physically active. They're not trying to have low stress levels. They're not trying to eat healthy food. Their environment is set up where that is the norm for them. So they don't have to think about, oh, I need to go to the gym to work out, because they're moving every day. They're moving to get their food out of the ground, and they're walking around to see their friends and their family. So, you know, we have to now think about these tools that we need in this modern environment. A lot of people listening to this will probably be thinking, well, you know, it's all very well moving out to nature, but I don't have access to that. And so why the breath really fascinates me, because I've worked in many different areas. I've looked after affluent patients. I've also looked after very deprived patients. And I guess breathing is free. Breathing is accessible to everybody. And then what that naturally lends itself to is if you have control over your breath, even if you are living in an inner city where there is a lot of noise around you and there's a lot of inputs that you are constantly having to fight off, well, at least you have a tool like a shield where you can use for your body to help you survive in that environment. Is that fair to say? Totally fair. It's absolutely fair. That's where this comes in. And it even can come in when we're not even when you're on vacation and you're in the middle of nowhere nature, right, or camping or whatever. But this is absolutely where it does come in. And it's our ability to shift our state, right, to be the ability because we're not staying focused anymore. Like ADD, I've got anxiety. Well, if you've got a if you're dealing with anxiety, like you're just not responding to your current environment, you're thinking of an environment outside of your environment. And, you know, you're doing a lot of other stuff that's going on versus actually responding to the current thing that's going on. Right. And I understand this intimately is I'm that type A person who will overwhelm myself and take on bite off more than I can chew and figure that out. Right. Like, oh, OK, I overshot the mark here. I need to pull back. Like I need I need to stop with all this stimulus. You know, like I chose not to fly down here this trip because I'm on planes pretty frequently and I'm going boom, boom, boom. And I decided a five and a half hour drive both ways will allow me to decompress in a way that jumping on an airplane and being back quickly. Well, right. So it becomes what's my environment. So I can't exist in a big city or in a city or in not in nature. And I just have to manipulate my environment or listen to my environment in a way that allows me to kind of just be in that place. Right. And breathing is that one of those things that literally brings you. It's why every meditation practice has breathing at the foundation. It really brings you right to that focal point. It's funny that I think back to when I started doing things like, you know, when I was working out when I was like 15 or 16 and, you know, you'd read the magazines or you'd read what you should be doing. And they'd always say, you know, when, you know, I don't know, a bench press, let's say you on the way back up, exhale. I used to ignore that stuff. I used to just think, what's the exercise? What's the mechanical exercise that I need to do? You know, who cares if you're breathing in on the way in and breathing out on the way back up? And now with the knowledge I have now, I look back and go, wow, how naive was I? And then you can really expand that across. You know, you mentioned these ancient practices like yoga. Yoga has got breathing at the heart of it. Yet many yoga classes I've been to, certainly a few years ago, and the way I see many people around me practicing yoga is they feel it's a physical practice. I want to be able to stretch my hamstring so that I can get in this position, almost ignoring the breath part of it. And I've really gone like completely 180 on this in the sense that I actually think that breathing is at the heart. You get that right. Then the physical actions that you want actually follow very, very easily. And you have this beautiful phrase, I think I heard you say once, mind is the king of the senses. Breath is the king of the mind. That's BKS Iyengar. That's me quoting. That's you quoting him. I mean, that is phenomenal. We can maybe unpack that. Do you feel that in the West today, in the 21st century, when we think about working out movement, yoga, whatever physical practice it is, going to the gym, CrossFit, have we forgotten about the breath? I would say by and large, most people participating in yoga practice right now around the world are not participating in the way that it was designed. And that doesn't mean I understand it to its totality, but I've been teaching movement and principles of movement for almost 20 years. And we have come to the realization that the way you move is the way you breathe, and thus controlling the breath controls the way you move. And so yoga nailed this in the beginning and at the foundation with people who actually understand these deep principles. But we all kind of get lost in all these different mediums. And it's not just yoga. You talk about CrossFit, running, all of these things. Whatever the medium is, we lose sight of what we're trying to do because we get caught up in the, oh, I'm going to burn some calories. I'm going to get bigger. I'm going to get more flexible. Those are all byproducts of what this does. And why are we doing this? And it's like you brought up the Blue Zones. And what's interesting about the Blue Zones is in no Blue Zone is anybody going to the gym. So if you're going to sit there and quote, not you, if people are going to sit there and talk about Blue Zones and what people in the Blue Zones eat and do and use that to an advantage, well, you better take the consideration that these people live in nature basically. They live far from things and they're doing the work based on a lifestyle that most of us, especially using the Blue Zones as this idea, are doing. And so commit to something like that. And that's all I've done a little bit. I'm not doing that fully in any way, shape, or form. I'm manipulating the environment in order to suit for how I live a more qualitative life and feel that life. And I'm not looking for necessary longevity of life. I'm looking for quality of life because I've experienced things like this is a very big rabbit hole, but you just need an abrupt check in your life to really understand things usually. I mean, most of us, and I mean, a little over a year ago, I thought I broke my neck. Woke up on the ground and I had a massive contusion between C3, C4 that I hit my head going up a ladder playing tag with my nephews and woke up on the ground and I couldn't move. And I was like, oh, this is something's wrong. And that event altered how I started really, even though I was thinking about life being this fragile, quick thing, it really was, oh, you just don't even know. You don't even know when it's coming. And yet we behave as though, especially the hacker world, we behave like there's so much fear around dying that it's like, yo, embrace death. Everything's a death. And come to the conclusion that what you're feeling is allowing you to really experience life. And that's, in essence, why Breath at the Foundation and why these yogis and why these people were talking about this is because it is the center of what it is we're doing. I mean, we're so busy these days, right? Everyone's, nobody's got time. I really do feel, I've been asked this before, what is the biggest stress in modern society? And my view, and there are multiple ones, my view is it's the erosion of downtime. The fact that we don't have downtime in our lives anymore. Every single minute we look at these damn phones, we get up in the morning, we look at these phones, we stand in line in the coffee shop. And instead of daydreaming and letting our DMN, our default mode network kick into gear and actually start to solve problems and be creative for us, we're consuming, consuming, consuming. And you mentioned often we need something abrupt. And for me, one of the turning points in my life is when my father died six and a half years ago. And I used to help, I moved back to where I grew up to help care for my dad for like 10, 15 years. And when my dad died, it forced me to start confronting various things in my life. Was I living the life that I wanted to? Was I simply a mirror reflection of everything I'd grown up around? Or who was the real me? And I find that as I've gone down that path, and it's a big rabbit hole, but I think it's the most rewarding rabbit hole you'll ever go down, starting to understand myself better. I would have time, because dad wasn't here anymore. All this time that I previously would spend with him, caring him, sharing him, washing him, shaving him, all this kind of stuff. Suddenly with that time, I'd go for a walk. I'd just go and daydream, and I'd start to reflect. And I thought, wow, I've not had time to reflect, to self-reflect on my life, my entire life, but certainly my whole adult life until that point. And once I found that time, once that time was given to me, everything in my life started to come online. You know, I've created a life that I love. I love what I do in my career. I feel very close with my wife and my kids. I feel that I know who I am, and in the last six to 12 months, I no longer have a fear of death. And that was quite a long story to try and get to that point, but it's when you do the internal work, I feel that it leads you to your breath, actually, because after you strip away a few of these layers of the onion, you start to, you know, it takes you to your breath, and you realize, actually, for me, the next level of spiritual growth, if you want to call it, you know, or sort of self-exploration is to sort of get control of my breath and understand it and actually start to, you know, really start to play around with it and see how it impacts my mood, how it impacts my state. And I get the impression from, as I say, it's been a few months that I've come across your work, and I get the impression that underneath the breath, there's also been a lot of personal growth with you. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it transformed everything about what I've worked on. I mean, I'd been in the self-help stuff for 20 years, like looking at it, reading it, going through, seeing therapists, going to programs, workshops, you know, all this stuff, this guru, that guru, like all of it, like, hey, what can I learn here? And it wasn't really until I invested in this that any of that really made any sense. And now it's like, you know, we joke about it, but I like the real depth of things, like the true depth of it, like looking at the heart of what my reaction is to something, you know, and I think that is like, that's the gateway opening. That is the entire thing, is looking at and understanding, and we were having this conversation offline, but it's like somebody reacting to you online or something, and how it used to affect us before, you know, and I was the same. It used to affect me, and now it's like, I actually understand the behavior, and I can have compassion towards that and understand where somebody's at, because it's not actually being directed at me. This is actually something that is an internal issue and not understanding. And so somebody just doesn't have the tools quite yet to get that, and I think our job to some degree is to, since we've decided to take this exploration on, is to explain what those tools are. Completely agree. I mean, it's almost, I got that sense from you and your team yesterday at Art of Breath that there's almost a deep sense of obligation that as you have got this awareness, you've developed your understanding, it's almost like something you have to spread with the world. You have to understand it more. You have to be able to communicate it and reach people, because it is potentially controlling your breath. Controlling your breath is probably the wrong terminology. Having an awareness of your breath, understanding your breath, being able to manipulate your breath for certain situations is arguably one of the most powerful tools we have, yet most of us don't, we do have access, but we don't feel we've got access to it, and we don't have the knowledge to access it either. Yeah. I mean, Eckhart Tolle talks candidly about, you know, like, well, he just openly will just say, just be aware of your breath. Like, just be conscious of your breath. Like, you know, get awareness of that. He doesn't give anything else up, right? Like, he's not like, hey, use this pattern to do that. You know, there's none of that, right? And I'm only bringing him up because, you know, here's a guy who's really risen up to the top and some very basic, simple ideas in, you know, this self-help or even spiritual realm, right? And it's great because I think that just the ability to become aware, but most people can't sit there and be aware of their breath. And this is where practices like Vipassana have come in and done tremendous work to where it's like, hey, you're going to go 10 days, silent meditation, and you're just going to learn to be aware of your breath, and that's it. And, you know, after like three days, you've, you know, felt like you've never been through more pain in your entire life, right? And then all of a sudden you become aware of things as this 10 days comes to a close, right? And, but I don't think that's actually necessary for everybody, but maybe it is. Like not everybody should need to go run 100 miles, but I did, you know, and like I got that experience and I understand that, you know, and just sitting there and just being quiet and paying attention to your breath for maybe two minutes or five minutes, or if you can do 10 minutes and you can just continue to do that, that is enough. That'll teach you more than most things will because, and the reason is, is because your breath is connected to everything we're doing. Like it is that thing that's connected to what we're doing. So it responds to the environment. And so becoming aware of that literally opens up the doorway of, oh, I'm just not paying attention to my environment right now. Or, you know, if there is a lion in the corridor, like you should notice your, you know, potentially that's not somewhere where you need to stop and be aware of your breathing, but you'll see in those instances where breaths get hold and then, you know, breaths picks up, right? High, you know, stress situations, you know, so it's just, this becomes a very big opening if you can just be aware of it. Now, the optimization factor comes into where I start learning how to manipulate that to bring myself more present or to downshift myself more. If you want to see the recent one-on-one conversation I had with the inspirational Dr. Gabor Maté, it's a great conversation. I really think you're going to enjoy it. You can check it out right there.