Good Life Project - James Nestor | The Power of Water and Breath

Episode Date: May 28, 2020

James Nestor has written for Outside, Scientific American, The Atlantic, Dwell, The New York Times, and more. His book Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves was a finalist for the 2015 PEN/ESPN Award For Literary Sports Writing, an Amazon Best Science Book of 2014, and more. Nestor has appeared on dozens of national television shows, including ABC's Nightline and CBS Morning News, and on NPR. He lives and breathes, surfs and writes in San Francisco. Nestor's new book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (https://amzn.to/3ekUIJS) is a myth-busting and paradigm-shifting look at how we breathe, what it does to us and how to harness breathing to transform our health and lives.You can find James Nestor at:Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/mrjamesnestor/Website : http://mrjamesnestor.com/ Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKED. To submit your “moment & question” for consideration to be on the show go to sparketype.com/submit. Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So as a kid growing up in Orange County, California, James Nestor had a love affair with the ocean. He'd find himself in the water surfing pretty much every day or every chance he could. And it was his happy place where the world would vanish away. He would settle into that hyper present state of flow or bliss, which is pretty fascinating because decades later, now living as a writer in San Francisco, that deep passion for the water and the state that it brought him to has never left him. with the rarefied sport and culture of freediving, where people train themselves to dive so fast and deep into the ocean, holding their breath, that the pressure literally transforms their physiology and brains into something entirely different as the light fades from the water. This led to his book, Deep, where he didn't just write about free divers, but also became one. And that then spiraled into a powerful fascination with how free divers are somehow mysteriously accepted

into the mystical underwater sanctuary of the world's largest mammals. And that eventually led to a more recent fascination with breathing and how the way we breathe, which has been largely ignored by modern medicine, barring treatment for pulmonary illness, how it's actually one of the most powerful gateways to health, longevity, peace of mind, even transcendent states. And he shares all of his discoveries, now years of research, in his latest book, Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art. We dive into all of this, including some things that are really going to invite you to completely re-examine how you breathe and why, and how it might unlock some powerful things in your own life. So excited to share this conversation with you.

I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Tell me how to fly this thing. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary.

It sounds like the common theme in your life really has been a fierce obsession with kind of two things how things work and also the water just a lifelong attraction to the water i think that's true to to a large extent you know growing up in the oc in orange county a lot of people think or at least they have this perception that Southern California is this dreamland of convertibles and beaches and all that. But, you know, the area in Orange County, in which I grew up in Tustin, it's an extremely conservative place. I mean, it's really equivalent to Texas in many ways. So it was interesting to be surrounded by this perception of free-loving, beach vibe, carefree, no worries. And then also be within this place, which was so obsessed with worrying about everything.

Extremely conservative on every level. So it's an interesting dichotomy to navigate, especially when you're, when you're young, as a teenager. Yeah. Where did you fall on that spectrum? Cause I think also when people think about like, who's the kid who's in the water all the time, who's the surfer, they think about the hippie kid. They think about the free loving kid. But my guess is if you sat on a wave, you know, and you had a hundred people out there on any given day, you're going to get a cross section of the entire sort of expand of who's in that area. Oh, I think just everybody went to the beach. I mean, that was

really the only thing to do. The summers down there are suffocatingly hot, you know, 110 sometimes. So every single day I would get a pocket full of change and take the bus to the beach with my friends. We'd stay out there all day. We'd come back in the evening, wake up and do it again. So you, you did have an incredible cross section of people. I mean, every walk of life, everyone was out there all the time. And being that I didn't grow up on the beach, I grew up 15 miles from it. That meant I was an outsider, you know, so not, not a local at 32nd street. So that was always interesting to navigate, but you know, I found once you're in the water, everybody becomes a lot more equal. It depends how respectful you are, how good you are at surfing or at swimming. And

all of that really fades away. There's any, any mark of status, the car you you're driving or, or your watch or whatever, you don't have that out in the water. So it's a great equalizer in a lot of ways. Yeah. I mean, I have a lot of friends who are lifelong surfers, some who grew up around there, some who grew up actually, uh, more, a little bit South, like San Diego surf swammies growing up and, uh, and to the one, you know, they, depending, no matter how they started out, they've all kind of said the same thing. It is, it is the great equalizer. And also, you know, there's also, they're very, there's a culture around it where there, there's a very specific set of rules that you live by and that you respect.

And if you disrespect the rules or the people within that system, you pay the price. And that, that's completely true with the crowd out there from a human standpoint. And it's true from a natural standpoint. You have to respect the rules of the ocean. And if you think you're too good, or if you think you're going to circumvent them in some way, you're going to get thrown down in some very serious ways. And that's what I also liked about it so much, is there were a different set of rules that, to me, made a lot more sense than the rules on land. The rules on the ocean were applied to everybody again, beyond status or anything else. And they just seemed a lot more fair. You know, these,

these are the rules of the, of the wild in many respects and you have to abide. Yeah. It's interestingly, it's sort of like the ultimate merit-based ecosystem, right? There's no cronyism on the waves. No, it's, it's, it's true. I mean, there's cronyism between the people, the surfers out there, but there's that only lasts so long because then your friends are going to go in and then you're out there alone, you know? And, and that to me is always the most wonderful part of being in the sea is for one reason or the other, when people get bored or the waves aren't good or it's too late or it's too early and no one else is out there and you're just alone in this, the sea is for one reason or the other, when people get bored or the waves aren't good, or it's too late or it's too early and no one else is out there and you're just alone

in this wilderness. And that's what attracts me to San Francisco so much. People don't think of San Francisco as a great surfing beach because it isn't. So don't come here, anybody. But it's, it's, it's still very, very wild and you can still find a peak all your own, no one around and really have that connection. Yeah. It teaches you how to be with yourself. And it also teaches you, I think a lot of people think about surfing. They're like, well, you're just out there riding waves all day long. It's like, no, you're out there waiting for waves

all day long. And you, you know, if you pick up a couple, awesome. If you pick up one or two killer runs, like that's a good day. And it's like, it's such a different mindset than sort of like the average mindset about how we pursue life. And I almost wonder if it's instills in you sort of a different approach to the pursuit of what you want from a younger age. I think it, I think it does. You know, there was one, I don't know who it was, some famous surfer that who said no one who surfs all the time that he knew of ever had a psychologist or psychiatrist. Um, so maybe either because these, these people were too deranged or because they already had their stuff together to go out there and surf every day. I don't know the reason, but I think that there is a certain truth to that.

And certainly the people that I know who are religiously connected to the ocean, they seem not to have so much feeling of a burden on the stresses of life on land. And I certainly feel a release every single time I'm out there, which is why I go pretty crazy if after a few weeks, I'm not able to get in the water. So, you know, I think that there's those two elements. We're terrestrial people. We evolved on the land. And yet when we go back to the ocean, we go back to our very earliest roots of before we were people. And as corny as that may sound, I really think that there's a strong connection that you feel, that your body feels, and it resonates with you when you're out in the sea. Yeah, no, I completely agree. I actually, I grew up just outside of New York City.

The end of my block was a beach. I was bay, not ocean. So, you know, we were out there water skiing and fishing instead of surfing. But it was, to this day, it's the place where I go to touch stone. You know, it's the place where I go just, I don't have to be in the water. I can just be sitting on a dock or walking along the beach, but there's, there's a down regulation of my nervous system and my state of being that happens just being in the context of water. That is so hard for me to find anywhere else. And that's, that's all measurable. You know,

it's not just psychosomatic. It's, this is stuff that has been measured time and time again of how the body reacts to either being in the water or by the water, which is why 70, what is it? 70, 80% of the population lives within 30 minutes of a coast. You know, I, I think that that's, we do that for a reason because we have that, that connection. Yeah, no, completely agree. Um, the other end of that, I have a friend who we have that, that connection. Yeah, no, completely agree. The other end of that, I have a friend who is a big wave surfer. She grew up sort of Irish surfing royalty with her, her, her dad, and I think uncle or grandfather, you know, she's East Key Britain. It's been on the podcast a couple of years back, would surf on this pink surfboard, pink helmet. She's five feet

tall, surfing these waves that are 10 times the size of her. And it's amazing to hear her describe the experience of, you know, the way she describes is you can't be afraid. You have to have the absolute respect for the power of what you're embracing, but you have to move to a place beyond fear or else it's over. And it's a really interesting training ground to move to a place beyond fear or else it's over. And it's a really

interesting training ground to get to that space as well. I think it's extremely advanced to get your mind to be thinking that way. And that's something that resonates with almost all activities on the water, whether you're sailing across an open sea or whether you're freediving, you know, you can't freedive with fear in your heart. you're going to go down 10 feet and turn around. So it almost gets to the point where you have to become delusional in your own self worth and your confidence in order to do some of this stuff. And that's, to me, what separates the people who who last in these sports and who don't is their context of where they fit in and knowing their level of just the tipping point of their level where they can make it and where they might not make it and be

able to understand and respect that is really the key. Yeah. And at the same time, you know, we're talking about an environment where every time you step into that next threshold, the stakes go up, you know, and pretty soon the stakes are life and death. So it is sort of the ultimate training ground, basically. For sure. And to me, that's in many ways is what makes it so much more real. There's so much padding around, or at least we've created in our society now, you know, even playgrounds are completely padded. They have sand or they have that weird colorful padding stuff that there's, there's much less risk in doing things

on land. But I view that a lot of that goes out the window when you, when you enter into the ocean, because we just don't have those. Yeah. There's, you know, some flotation devices, some of those surfers vests, but those are only for big wave people. If you're the regular Joe, when you're just going out to the sea, it's you and a board. And even if you're body surfing, it's just you, you and a pair of fins, and you need to figure it out. At least in San Francisco, a lot of other beaches, there's no lifeguards either. So you, you have to understand that and be cognizant of it the, the entire time you're out there, especially if the waves are big and know your limits the whole time and know that balance. And to me, that's what really centers things

because then you get in your car and you've got airbags and you've got seatbelts and then you drive home and you get a flat tire, you've got AAA. There's none of that out in the sea, in the ocean. There's no one to call except, you know, your inner strength and your own relationship with yourself and your abilities. Yeah, that's such an interesting frame, right? Because if you think about probably the most intrinsically rewarding moments of life are also the moments where we are most present

in what we're doing. And then you think about what you just described. You know, when you step in the water, you have to be there. It's not about, you know, like, because if you're not, you're going to get tossed around and you may end up in a bad place. But as soon as you step out of that environment into the car with the protection, into life with the protection, we can basically pay to buy enough protection to not have to be present in almost every other part of our lives. And you wonder, on one hand,

what are we actually buying ourselves into and out of? I completely agree with that. Even having a phone conversation, you're checking email, you're checking Twitter, you're checking Instagram. We're constantly padded. If the phone conversation is boring, we have all these other means to entertain ourselves. But, but in the ocean, again, that, that really goes out the window. And, and it's that, it's that safety net, you know, coming loose from you that I find so, so liberating. And I think that's another reason why when you're surfing or when you're swimming, you're or body surfing, freediving, whatever, you are in that exact moment. You're not thinking when you're on a wave, maybe when you're waiting for waves for half an hour, you're thinking about

work and all that. I've come up with my best ideas in those situations. But when you're actually on a wave, when you're within this activity, you are locked in to that microsecond of a moment the entire way. And I think that that absolute focus and presence, at least in my life and a lot of other people I know, is really lacking. You know, we're not going out and hunting for our food now. We have to be locked into that moment. When is the right time to, or at least a lot of people aren't hunting their food. Uh, but I think that this is something that, that allowed humans to evolve, uh, is to have pure and utter focus on a moment. And so much of society now is built on not having that focus. No, I so agree with that. For a long time, mountain biking was my jam in my adult life. And there was a time where

I rode from Grand Junction, Colorado to Moab, Utah along the Cocopelli Trail, which is this, at least the way that I did it, was a really... There's only one direction that you go and the entire time you're on the edge of falling off into the abyss. And it was grueling and psychologically taxing and physically taxing and one of the most incredible experiences in my life, simply because the nature of the activity demanded that you cannot be anywhere but there. And yeah, I feel like the more, whether you get it through the water, whether you go through nature, whatever is the thing that you choose, I mean, I think we'd all be better off bringing more of that into our lives. You

referenced earlier free diving, which I want to explore a little bit. You grew up in the OC, end up in the world of advertising, copywriting, start freelance writing on the side. You get into the world of magazines because that's, you start to realize writing is your jam and eventually find yourself writing full time for different magazines, doing long form pieces, short form pieces. And at some point you get a gig to cover this thing called free diving. I guess it was for Outside Magazine was the first time. That's right. Tell me how that unfolds and then what is the experience that comes out of that? Yeah. So a couple of years before that happened, I had always following the good rules laid out in the OC. I had followed this very linear path. You go to high school, go to college, get a job, get a house, get your car,

get your dog, all of that. And, you know, I was still writing on the side just because it was something I was really passionate about. By day, I was writing, copying ads and catalogs and all that stuff. But at night is when I would do freelance magazine writing. I never thought I could make a living doing it. I mean, it was sketchy back then and it's even more sketchy now. But finally, I just came to this moment where I had been working at this one place, extremely easy job and good pay assistant and all that stuff. But I remember at my four year review, my boss sat me down, you know, and he told me exactly what he told me at his third-year review, and exactly the same thing as the second year. And

that's when I quit at that moment, and it wasn't really premeditated. And so I kind of floundered. I wasn't sure what I was going to do, but I knew I didn't want to do that. So I really felt this fork in the road from that OC life to this other very wild life where nothing was planned. Everything had to be improvised. So after a couple of years of writing some magazine pieces, things were starting to pick up a little bit, not enough to make me comfortable at all. A friend mentioned, he's like, Hey, have you ever heard of freediving? And I know that this is really hard for people, people to believe, but, uh, I hadn't, even though I had spent my whole life by the ocean, uh, surfing and swimming, uh, I didn't spend too much time below the surface, but I had never heard of freediving, had never actually seen it. So I said,

Oh, this sounds like an interesting subject, right, right up my alley. I wrote my editor outside said it so happens to be in a couple of weeks, there's this international freediving competition in Greece. I thought there was no way this guy's going to send me out to Greece about a subject I knew nothing about, but I guess the, uh, the, the pitch was good enough or intriguing enough that a week later he said, okay, you're on. So without knowing much about the sport at all, without knowing any of the players, I went to Greece. And that's when a completely different fork in the road started in my life. And another door opened when I saw the first freediver take a single breath of air and upturn his body.

No fins, no anything, and completely disappear into a crystal clear ocean. And he was gone for five minutes, came back up and he just dove 300 feet. And, uh, I had never seen anything like that. And I didn't think it was possible at all. And yet the next person showed up, did the same thing, even lower next person, even lower than that. So that first day out there was, this is such a cliched phrase to use, but it was, it was life defining and life changing for me because I realized that there was a completely different side of nature and the ocean, which I thought I knew. And, uh, I, you know, I was standing right in the middle of it and the beating heart of,

of this activity. I knew nothing about in so many ways, it looked like interstellar travel. You know, if you were to flip the globe upside down, these people were floating off into this blue space, no gravity, no anything else and coming back and, um, you know, touching down to the, to the sailboat that was out there. So it absolutely fascinated me. And I called my editor that night. I was like, oh my God, this thing is just absolutely nuts. He was very excited about it. And that's really where things started in that direction. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

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And we're talking about people basically just in the water. There's no tanks. There's no anything. It's just them. It's just training their bodies, training their breasts, and then literally just starting to dive straight down, which is counterintuitive on so many levels for so many people because you're like, well, A, but the body floats. So how do you go that far down? And I guess what you learn over time is that the first, what, 30 feet or so, yeah, the body does float, but then the quality of the body's composition

starts to change and the pressure that's put on it so that you become a lead weight effectively and you just start to go down. That's, that's exactly right. And that's another thing that completely blew my mind is a lot of these people were wearing wetsuits because 300 feet down, it's really cold. It doesn't matter if you're in a tropical climate, it's usually really cold down there. So with a wetsuit, you're extremely buoyant. Any surfer knows this. You put on your wetsuit and it's really hard to dive down even a few feet.

And so to watch these people, you know, in the first like 15 feet, 20 feet, they're kicking, they're swimming, they're pushing themselves down. And then all of a sudden they just stop. And instead of getting pulled up to the surface, they start drifting effortlessly down deeper and deeper into the water until they're completely gone. And I knew nothing about this. And I learned later that it's that shift of buoyancy that occurs. What I ended up calling the doorway to the deep, other freedivers have used that term as well, in which the body stops getting pulled to the surface and starts getting pulled to the bottom. And you will just keep falling at that same rate, as low as you want to go. So it just adds this absolutely surreal aspect to watching this, especially in clear water, where you can watch these people just fade away into nothing and then come back and reemerge and be completely fine.

A couple of things happen as you descend. Also, one, you lose light, you know, so at the top, you can see them. So them fading away into nothingness is, you know, in part there, there's distance between you, but also the light essentially leaves the water. So they're effectively in the pitch black, which is, I mean, it's got to be incredibly disorienting also. I've done a little bit of scuba diving in my past and we went night diving once. This was years back on the barrier reef. We're on a boat, you jump off and we all have these little torches and we're in pairs. And as long long as I had the torch on I could orient myself but for those who don't know about scuba diving you wear a weight vest and that helps you become neutrally buoyant so you're not floating up or down and and I

remember losing my torch and the light went out and it was pitch black we were three hours off the mainland it was a dark. And I started to freak out because I didn't know whether to swim left, right, up or down to get back up to the surface. And this is that, but amplified exponentially. Yeah. Just imagine if you're holding your breath in that situation. And these are people, these are the pros who do this. Anyone that goes down 40, 50 feet in most water, you're going to be able to see just fine. But it's not only the quality of the light that shifts, also the color of the light fades out the deeper you go, right? until it becomes this completely monochromatic world. So you're in a world of grays and blacks. That's it. That's all that's down there.

Because light, the frequencies of light can't penetrate that deep. Something else that happens beyond that is the body transforms. You become a terrestrial animal and you turn into a marine animal. And this isn't just, again, some psychological transformation. This is something that occurs within each of our bodies. And everyone has these abilities called the master switch of life or the mammalian dive reflexes. And what happens is instinctively, instinctually, I should say, your heart rate is going to lower. Your brain is going to enter a meditative state. All the blood from your extremities, your hands, your arms, your legs, you're going to start

pushing into your core to keep your organs alive. And plasma is going to enter into your lungs to prevent them from collapsing. And you really become this different diving animal. The deeper you go, the more pronounced all of these reflexes become. So by the time you've reached 300 and 400 feet, you bear maybe a passing resemblance to your form in the terrestrial world. And anyone can experience this. You can go to a bathroom right now and splash cold water on your face, and your heart rate's going to lower probably about 20, 25% just by doing that. These are the same reflexes that dolphins have, whales have, other marine mammals have, but humans have them too. We're connected to the ocean in the same way of these other animals. Just so few of us

ever use them or feel them nowadays. So it almost, it, the environment forces your body into this transformed and almost meditative state. And, you know, part of it is also, you know, as you go down, you know, one atmosphere, which is what about 30, 33 feet, when you start to go more and more with each new atmosphere going down, the pressure on your body increases more and more and more. So your body literally has to transform or else it will implode into itself. So, you know, for years and years, scientists thought the deepest a human could go down would be 100 feet. Because otherwise, your heart's going to collapse, your lungs are going to collapse, you're going to die. But they didn't know about the mammalian dive reflexes. So Greek divers have been diving to

depths below that for thousands of years. You know, there's archaeological evidence of free diving that goes back 10,000 years. So this is something that is innately part of who we are, where we came from. So it's, it's nothing that, that is artificial or forced. If you let yourself become re-immersed in the water, you're going to wake up all of these dormant reflexes that everybody has. That was something that I found most fascinating about free diving. The competitive side was interesting to see the limits of the body, but a lot of people didn't make their dives

and that was awful. They'd come out with bloody faces and it's pretty horrific. But luckily I discovered at that event this completely other side of freediving that was much more nurturing, almost like a meditation or a yoga practice underwater. And that's the side that I really went deep into and pursued. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like there's

almost a spiritual side to it. And in fact, I mean, from a state of mind, when you start to get down that deep, we talked about the physiological changes, but what about the psychological changes, the sort of like almost spiritual experiences? It's a forced meditation. And this is what any free diver will tell you. There's no way you can go out there worrying and stressed out and breathe real fast and then try to push yourself down there. You have to completely let go, which means you need to let go of your thoughts. You need to relax your body. You need to submit to this larger thing that you're entering into. So that was another aspect that really appealed to me is that you had to

really leave everything on, on land, including your thoughts about land and your stresses, think about work or flights or whatever. You have to leave that behind and just soak into that, that moment that you're in the water, you're surrounded by oceanic animals and you just let yourself be, be free and let your body do what it's naturally designed to do, which is dive deep. Yeah. The, um, as I guess has become a bit of a, your mode of writing. At a certain point, you can't just observe and write. You have to become a part of it.

It's very sort of Michael Pollan-esque in the experiential journalism approach. You know, you did it earlier with, you know, like doing a deep piece on bio-benzes and biodiesel and how people were using discarded, you know, like French fry oil to transfer cars. And then you end up driving a bio-benz. So when you're out here, you're in Greece and then you start going deeper into the story and you're seeing and talking about and

learning about all these things, something flips in you that says, okay, so I can't just be an observer. Like I need to write about this from the inside out also. I just think some of that has to do with the subject matter. You know, I wrote a lot of pieces about architects or Hollywood stars or political figures, but none of what they were saying about their world really attracted me to want to know more about it. I know that seems really crass and I'm not ripping on anyone's vocation, but there, there wasn't too much, um, that, that was mysterious enough to, to really want to invite me to spend more time in, in a lot of those worlds. But lucky, luckily enough, you know, I was able to pitch enough stories about ideas that I was naturally interested in. Like the Biobenz piece, I had a full time job at that time.

And that was so boring. And so writing these magazine pieces, I would just pick things that I was interested in. And it turned out that that, yeah, I was like, this makes total sense. Why not run an old Mercedes off of use vegetable oil? And, and so once I saw how to do that, I said, oh, I'm going to buy one of these cars and do that. And I still have the car it's out front of my house right now. So freediving was the same thing, even though I had never heard about freediving, didn't have any experience in it. It was something that immediately mystified me and attracted me to

it. And, you know, it's a little tricky when you're a science journalist, you have to be an objective observer into these worlds. Otherwise people think you're slamming it in some way, but there's only so much of this, this stuff that really interests you that, that you can hold back from. I had no intention in deep of freediving, zero. I had no intention of having myself as part of that book or as part of that story. But on my third expedition, seeing these freedivers, you know, at this time I was out in Reunion Island off the coast of Madagascar, like very distant, weird location and watching these divers go down. And their job was to sneak up behind sharks and to tag their back fins with these little, uh, trackers,

uh, because sharks kept attacking people and eating people off the coast. And, uh, just watching this activity and their relationship with these animals, because something else really interesting happens when you're freediving is you're not an observer into the oceanic environment. You're a part of it. And animals immediately recognize that. Their prey doesn't swim down to them and look them in the eyes and hang out. Their prey is up at the surface, not looking at them. So to see that dynamic, I thought, wow, this is something I want to learn more about. And I also thought it could allow me better access to be able to write about these worlds and what it was like to go down, you know, 50, 75, 100 feet on a single breath and focusing on that moment and that place in time.

Yeah. I mean, was to the extent that you had an expectation of what you thought it was going to be, how did the actual experience, and I guess I'm most curious about the first time, how did it compare to your expectations? First time was awful and it continued to be awful for months and months and months. You know, you have this dream vision of, you know, I'm just gonna practice a little bit. Then I'm going to be swimming around with whales and dolphins and sharks and everything's going to be cool and beautiful. And I found this new hobby in life. And then you start to practice doing this and it was violent and suffocating and totally miserable. I picked this school, I was in Florida on some other research. So I picked the school in Tampa and instead of freediving in the ocean,

they had you dive in this, this former quarry, this, this mine that had just filled up with water. And so within 10 feet, you couldn't see the surface. So they were trying to train us to go down 50 feet along this rope. And so I had my breathing, you know, I had my lungs pretty well acclimated to doing this, really focused on that. I had not focused on the psychological part of what it would feel like to push yourself down 20, 30 feet, turn around to look up to see the surface and see nothing. So that was something that took a long time to get my head around. Also, it didn't help that at this freediving competition, I saw a lot of reckless people doing reckless things and had a lot of bloody faces and passed out, you know, passed out

people in my mind. I guess you could say I was going to mention their eyes because a lot of these people when they're passed out, their eyes are open. If you ever look into someone's eyes, when they passed out, you're, you're looking into the true abyss. And so that's something that still gives me the chills. So I had all these psychological hangups about it, not physical, but psychological. Yeah. What turns, I mean, I'm curious when you go from something like that. Yeah. I have a friend who has done a whole bunch of plant-based medicine and, and probably a hundred journeys. And the

first third were described as the most horrendous experience of their life. And then something happened that made them say, I can't not do this. It is so profound and transformative. There was a, you know, something happened. I'm always curious when, when you start something like that, and it is kind of more on the horrific side and the brutal side, and then it becomes something that becomes much more on the almost spiritual and opening and expansive side. Is that a gradual evolution for you or was there a moment? It was being around the right community. Number one, to seeing these people do these dives responsibly over and over and over and to see them interact with animals that I access to if you got over that hump, over that hurdle. And so it was months of training. Again, I want to reiterate that the physical side was actually pretty easy.

There's a pool near my house I would ride my bike to and just swim underwater laps, really condition my body at around 15 feet, just went back and forth. So that part of it came, came calmly and easily. The, the mental part took a while, but I finally got there. And I think that at the time, I'm trying to think if there was one pinnacle moment, it was probably at when we were in Sri Lanka and, um, trying to dive with sperm whales, the largest tooth predators on earth who also share this amazing, sophisticated form of communication and seeing the other divers having these experiences and seeing the whales react to these divers, right? So the whales' perception of humans is on boats or hunting them or polluting their homes. But to see whales have a different perception of humans and to want to in that environment and with everything that comes with it,

including being possibly eaten by a 60-foot-long sperm whale, you know, with 8-inch-long teeth. And I know that I'm not trying to make it sound callous in any way, but there's a complete knowing when you're there with this animal that can destroy you at any second by myriad means, and it decides not to, and it decides to turn around and click at you and be curious about you and want to interact with you. So that's when a lot of my fears, both about free diving and about everything else it encompasses

really went away. Yeah. I can't even imagine that moment. I mean, I've, I've seen video of these animals. You actually, um, did a Ted a TED Talk, which showed some stunning footage of this. And it's just breathtaking. I can't even imagine being in the water, literally feet away from these. It's interesting because, like, as a journalist, I've been lucky enough to go to some pretty weird places, write about some interesting subjects and interesting people. But whales and freediving, but whales and free diving. This was years ago that I had this experience. I think about it all the time. And I was literally

just on the phone this morning with a friend. We're waiting for travel to open up again, because we're going to go dive with whales without any cameras or notepads this time, just to do it. And this is a reaction that every single person I know that has, that has gone diving with whales, have that face-to-face interact, like they are completely changed after that. So it's something that, that I will keep with me and in free diving, I'm more excited about doing it now than I've, I've ever been. So it's, it's nice to find something that was a very interesting subject from my perspective to write about, but also could be incorporated into my life that would continue to nurture me after the book was out. ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch,

getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The story stopped. And part of that exploration too, part of the training that goes into free diving is it's physical, but it's also, it's, it's breath oriented. You know,

there, there you, you learn to train, to breathe certain ways, to regulate the, the balance of gases basically in your body before you go down, which, which I guess laid the found work for your most recent book breath to a certain extent. I mean, I know part of it was that, and then part of it was this experience that you had through the art of living. That's exactly right. Um, you know, when I mentioned that fork in the road in, in, in my life in Greece, uh, that fork had many, many tongs to it, or I guess they're tings. I guess that's the proper, proper word for forget. But um, I was talking to free divers who were not interested in competition and they were

just interested in free diving. And of course I naturally asked, I said, well, how do you free dive? How do you, how do you do this? How do you hold your breath? And they said, the only way to hold your breath is to learn how to breathe and learn how to breathe properly. I said, the real cool thing about this is you don't only have to use this in the water. You can use this in everything in life. And they told me crazy stories about people who were heating their bodies up in snow, melting circles around their bodies at night, just breathing for eight hours.

People put diseases in remission, people who were losing weight just by shifting their breathing. So I remember that conversation and I put it in the back file of the big file cabinet, a bunch of weird ideas. And I kept going back to it because I kept seeing articles and kept talking to people who kept adding other little tidbits to that story. And I thought, huh, you know, I've written a book about holding your breath. It would be interesting to see what breathing could do, both scientifically and the history of this, the medical history of it and all that, for the rest of us, for land lovers.

So that sparked that idea. And in nonfiction, you submit a proposal, then you get an amount of money to go out and write the book. So I wrote this proposal pretty quickly. I thought, Oh, I have this thing figured out, you know, wrote it in about a month, said nailed all the proper characters and all that. And it wasn't until about six months, eight months in to actually writing the book that I realized every direction I thought I should go into was completely wrong. So I had to ditch the entire proposal and start over again and breathing ended up being bar none, the weirdest and most fascinating subject I've ever gone into. And I'm still in the midst of it right now, even after

finishing the book. It is. It's really incredible. So I have'm still in the midst of it right now, even after finishing the book. It is, it's really incredible. So I have a background in the world of yoga and, but my one, really the entry for me to yoga was actually breathing. It was pranayama. And I was, I got really curious how, when you look at, and it's not just yoga, if you actually go back and you look at every single spiritual or healing tradition in every single culture over generations and thousands and thousands of years, they all reference breathing as sort of like the fundamental modality to regulate or mediate everything, like your psychology, your physiology, your well-being. everything, you know, like your psychology, your physiology, your wellbeing. And yet when you bring that up as something valid to explore, especially in sort of like Western culture,

people kind of tip their head sideways and they're like, what? And that's exactly what I was doing when I first heard these stories, right? But it was interesting enough and it was valid enough just barely to make me want to pursue further research into it. And once I started really getting my feet wet and talking to real scientists at top universities, you know, Stanford, Harvard, all these people had been saying this stuff for decades and no one was really listening. And so I started a real deep dive into history and just echoing what you just said. Breathing was an essential part of health throughout for the past few thousand years in medicine. If you did it poorly, you were going to get sick. If you did it properly, you were going to live long and have a healthy life. So even the first yoga that dates back 5,000 years was a technology of sitting and breathing and nothing to do with movements or

poses. It was sitting and breathing. And you look at the Chinese Tao, they have seven books dedicated entirely to breathing. What happens when you do it improperly? What happens when you do it properly? So I think that Western science is now just really starting to get caught up with this, especially with all this COVID stuff. But what I found so frustrating, but also so fascinating, is that this research has been there the whole time and no one's really looked at it from a scientific perspective on how well it looks and taken all these disparate fields together and put them into one place. And I think that some of that is because breathing is a tricky thing in medicine. There was one researcher who said it's in this no man's land between

physiology and biology. So nobody's really paying attention to it. Pulmonologists pay attention to diseases of the lungs. They're not looking into the benefits of healthy breathing, even though the benefits of healthy breathing. Even though the benefits of healthy breathing from what I've found are more important or as important as what you eat or how much you exercise, it all comes down to breathing. That's the first thing you have to start with. Yeah. I mean, I think there's such a fascinating parallel between that world and psychology and that for generations, psychology was focused on bringing sick people back to baseline. And then, you know, the positive psychology movement comes along and says,

okay, so baseline is actually not enough. You know, like what if we could bring people from baseline, you know, from instead of not sick to actually flourishing in the world, you know, and I feel like breathing has a really similar car with that. But that's what yoga was too. It was not intended to be used for sick people. It was intended to be used for healthy people to bring them up on the next level. In all of Eastern medicine, if you look at it, it's all based on prevention. You go to your doctor when you feel good, so you can keep feeling good. And all of Western medicine is based on therapy. You go when you're feeling sick, you know, and which is why, in my opinion, I don't think a lot of Eastern medicines are too effective in fixing big blown up chronic diseases that have been going

on for years and years and years in someone's body. You know, you break your leg, you don't really want acupuncture. You want to go to the ER and have that dealt with properly. And I think it's the, it's those blind spots on both sides of medicine that really need to be bridged to use this Eastern medicine as a way to not get sick and to use Western medicine for when you're really sick. And, and, but, but again, the whole point is to not lose the balance to begin with. It's to constantly stay in homeostasis. One of the things that you discover early on is where most people just are relatively agnostic as to what pathway air takes into your lungs and out of your lungs. You discover that whether you're breathing through your mouth or whether you're breathing through your nose actually has a profound difference.

And you don't want to just research this. Again, we go experiential here, right? As this whole thing became, you end up hooking up with another guy and doing this experiment at Stanford where you spend half the time breathing through your nose only and half the time breathing through your nose only in half the time breathing through your mouth only to share more about this. Cause it's not, it's kind of crazy. Yeah. I realize I'm sounding like a broken record here, but, but the caveat again is when I started this project, this book, I told my publisher, I was like, I'm not going to be a part of this. I was a part of the last book. I've been a part of too many articles. I really want

to be on the outside. I want to be the objective observer. That's where I need to be. But then we realized once again, that so many of these, these gray areas and blind spots needed to be filled. And I was willing to put myself into those areas and to test what was happening in my body in, in labs through, through breathing. And this isn't like some, at least the Stanford experiment, wasn't a human guinea pig. Oh, let's just see what happens. You know, some people said, oh, it's like supersized me. In some respects it is, but in supersized me, you know, he's eating at the same restaurant three times a day. 50% of the population, that's one estimate, says that we are chronic mouth breathers. So half of us are breathing

from the mouth. So the experiment was set up to see what was happening to a large percentage of the population every day, what was happening to their minds and bodies. And I looked for some research on this, if anyone had done this, and there just, there wasn't a lot. So I had been in conversations with the chief of rhinology research at Stanford and about by our third interview, starting to get pretty chummy with this guy. His name is Jayakar Nayak, great dude. And I, I hatched this idea. I've said, well, you know, we can sit here over lunch and talk about this stuff hypothetically, or we can test it. What do you think? And he said, yes. So me and one other, one other guy, Anders Olson, who was a world renowned breathing coach and therapist. So I thought, oh, this is going to be interesting. What if we took one of the best breathers in the world and made him like 50% of the population,

what would happen to his body? So over 10 days, they plugged our noses with a silicone with tape over that so that we were forced to breathe only through our mouths. We were forced to breathe the way we would likely be breathing in the future and the way a large swath of the population is already breathing. So within a single night, uh, my snoring increased by 1300%. Um, we felt awful. We felt constantly thirsty. We felt fatigued. There were psychological markers, but what I found, what was more interesting was what was actually the data, what was happening to our bodies. So we took pulmonary function tests before blood work, CAT scan, I mean, anything you can imagine, 70 different markers. And by the end of those 10 days,

I was snoring and I hadn't been snoring before. The other subject was snoring through half the night. We had sleep apnea. We felt absolutely awful. Our bodies were cooling. We were losing CO2, which is an essential molecule in the body. It was horrendous. It was as awful as it probably sounds. But the good part about this is we were then able to switch our modes after 10 days. So they moved those plugs out and we put tape over our lips and we just breathed from our noses. And the first night all the snoring disappeared, sleep apnea disappeared. Every heart rate variability went through the roof. We were able to exercise much more efficiently. Um, we had more, more power, longer endurance, easier recovery. I mean, I could go on and on. I won't give

you the whole, the whole layout, but it just echoed what, what the Chinese had been saying for thousands of years. And one, one quote that I thought was great was, um, this is from the Tao. Uh, it says the breath inhaled through the mouth is called Nietzsche or adverse breath, which is extremely harmful. Be careful not to have breath inhaled from the mouth. You know, that was 1,200 years ago. So everything that we found added credence to that. It seems so obvious, but you look at any other animal, the 5,400 different mammals, they're not mouth breathing unless they're throwing off heat. They're thermoregulating.

They're breathing through their noses all the time. And humans should be doing this as well. It changes your mental state and your physiology. It also really interesting numbers around performance, you know, in terms of just the difference between breathing through your nose versus your mouth. Yeah. And trainers had been looking at this and researching this for years. About 20 years ago, Dr. John Duyard had bicyclists get on a stationary bike and then train by just breathing through their mouth and just breathing through their nose. And he found that someone who had been breathing 47 times a minute through the mouth was breathing 14 times through the nose, but getting the same amount of oxygen and was able to push so much harder with less effort. So the competitive

advantage is huge, you know, double digit percentage advantage to doing this. And it's something that is just mostly lost on us because a large percentage of the population, I would beg to say half of it or more, has problems breathing through their nose. We've lost this ability. Some of it's due to evolution and some of it's due to the environment. But I think one of the most important health hacks that everyone should do all the time is breathe through your nose. And the science certainly backs that up. Yeah. And it sounds like it's all, there's a big use it or lose it effect to that too. So it's, you may have trouble starting to get back into it because especially if you've, you're, you're one of that 50% that, you know, breathes predominantly through your mouth because it kind of gets plugged up when you don't use it. It's, you know, it's like almost like a muscle

atrophying. It's the tissues inflamed and it makes it harder to do. But then as you slowly reintroduce it, it begins to open up and you may find yourself able to do it in a way that you thought wouldn't be possible. That's exactly right. A doctor, another doctor at Stanford, had looked at the noses of patients who had laryngectomies, who had a hole drilled in their throat so they could breathe out that channel. And she found that their noses within two months to two years had completely plugged up 100% because they weren't used. And she fixed herself, her own chronic mouth breathing

by training herself to breathe through her nose all the time. And the more you do it, the more you're going to be able to do it because you are changing your physiology. You're changing your, your anatomy. You're strengthening the soft tissues on the back of the mouth and widening your airways by just breathing through your nose because of the pressure, you know, and, and a lot of people are, are hesitant to do this because they say, oh, I don't get enough oxygen breathing through my nose. Well, you're going to get about 20% more oxygen breathing through your nose than through your mouth. So, which is what makes it especially effective for exercising. Yeah. It's something,

I think we're just patterned to experience breath feeling a certain way. And it takes a little while to sort of, uh, for our brains to be like, oh, this is, it's going to be okay. It's a little while to sort of for our brains to be like, oh, this is it's going to be OK. It's a little uncomfortable in the beginning, but it's going to be OK. But your body wants to it really wants you to breathe through your nose that that's the thing. This is it shouldn't it might feel a little forced at the beginning, but it will be rewarding you 10 times over if you start breathing through your nose. Yeah. One of the other things that you explored was the effect of different breathing patterns. And you mentioned earlier that even before you got into this, you were having all these conversations with the three free diving crew about these mythical and mystical stories about people throwing heat off their body in the cold and healing everything. And, you know,

how could that even be possible? And it's funny, you reference Herbert Benson, who wrote a book, it's got to be 35, 40 years ago now, about the relaxation response. First reference these monks who part of their rite of passage was to sit outside in sub-zero temperatures, covered in wet shawls, and they would do a type of breathing and meditation where they would not just not die, but they would literally dry the shawls. You would see them steaming off them. And I remember reading that years ago and being fascinated and researching and discovering this thing called tummo, which now a lot of us know as sort of, you know, that somebody

who's really popularized that Wim Hof has sort of taken that and, and built a, a more modern artifice around this sort of technique, which has been around for, you know, probably thousands of years. Share a little bit about, about that and, and how it can actually change what your body's capable of doing. Yeah. And this was another one of those subjects, one of those areas where we've had the science, the stuff has been backed up for such a long time, but no one's really been listening. So one of the researchers that I got really fascinated with was Carl Stau, who was a choral teacher in New Jersey and found that by training his students how to exhale more and exhale properly, they were able to really gain a residence and more volume with their voices. And he ended up getting called up by the Met Opera to train their singers. And then the VA hospitals asked him to

come in and train emphysemics who had this horrendous disease of emphysema who weren't being cared for at all. They were plugged into an oxygen tank and, and basically left to die. This had gone on for, for 50 years, but just through breathing, by teaching these people how to breathe properly, he rehabilitated people more than any researcher thought was, was possible. And there are x-rays, mounds and mounds of x-rays to, to prove this, but still the second Stowell left the hospital system after 10 years of working within it, all of that research went away. And his book is now like $300 on Amazon. And it's really hard to find because nobody read it at the time. It was released in 1970. So these patterns kept repeating and especially with Tumo. So this is a meditation,

a technology that's been around for a thousand years. About a hundred years ago, Alexander David Neal, a French opera singer, traveled to the Himalayas and learned it and wrote about it. I think her book came out in 1927. So it got a little bump of interest then. And then the next big bump happened with, with Benson who had heard these stories, probably read David Neal's book and actually went out to test it and prove that these monks were able to breathe in ways to stimulate an incredible amount of heat within their bodies, and more importantly, to sustain that heat for hours at a time. They were able to sit in snow for hours and not get hypothermia or frostbite, which our

understanding of medical science, how is that possible? So then Wim Hof came out. The torch was passed to Wim Hof, who discovered this, you know, around year 2000. And now has built quite an empire around breathing and tummo and having this ability. And what's been so great about seeing what Wim's been doing is he's having this stuff scientifically tested with controlled, you know, controlled studies of these various people have been testing this over and over and finding that this incredible transformation takes place in the body by just breathing. eczema, even type 1 diabetes can either blunt or outright, according to them, cure these problems by shifting how they're breathing, which, you know, of course sounds like complete pseudoscience. But then you look at the data and then you look at the CRP profiles of these people and you find what they're doing is absolutely legit. And all of this stuff is real. So I see that this is really the moment for TUMO. Hundreds of thousands of people are doing it now. And we now have ways of measuring it to prove how powerful it really is. Yeah. And what I love about all of this,

I mean, there are so many other things that you explore in the book, but what I love about the bigger conversation around breathing is that it's accessible to anyone. It's free. You can do it for life. And it puts, it gives you a sense of agency. You know, it makes you, we're so used to going to somebody else to fix us. But when you start to explore breathing as a modality for everything from physiological changes to psychological changes to simply calming down, I mean, just the most fundamental reaction, the connection between your inhales and your exhales and

triggering your sympathetic versus parasympathetic nervous system and whether that puts you into a fight flight or freeze versus really chill common meditative you know it's it is such a powerful tool when you start learning well it's not just about getting air into my lungs it's not just about transferring you know oxygen into my red blood cells because my so my body can function it It is about that. But this process, which we all just assumed was part of the autonomic nervous system, it just happens. We actually have the ability to intervene, to make it intentional, to change the way we do it. And in doing so, create really profound changes in nearly every part of our being. It's exactly right. It's an autonomic function that isn't only autonomic, it's, it's conscious. And when we take control of it, we can actually control how our organs are

functioning and their relationship with one another and our hormone levels and our circulation and on and on and on by simply controlling our breathing. It is an absolute anchor to, to our health and to our wellbeing for, you know, from this point until, until we age. So they found in, in 1980, they found that single most important marker of longevity wasn't genetics, wasn't diet, wasn't exercise. It was lung capacity. So the more lung capacity, the healthier your lungs are, the longer you're going to live according to the data. So this is something the ancients have known for thousands and thousands of years. You know, one of the reasons that there are so many yoga poses now where you're stretching, breathing into your right side,

stretching, breathing into your left side. Guess what happens when you do that? You are increasing your lung capacity and you're buttressing your respiratory health every time you do these poses and you breathe in these ways. So, you know, I think that some of the apprehension in breathing where people kind of poo poo it is the medicine itself, which is air. Not a lot of people think that we can change the skeleture of our jaws or our faces or our ribs with just air or that we can flood our bodies with different hormones or turn on circulation or turn it off. But for the people who have studied this, who have x-rays and data, people who have experienced this, that air, and there's 30 pounds of it that enters and exits our lungs every day, is as important as the food we're eating or

how much we're moving around. And that's something I really absolutely believe in, especially after these years and years in this field. Yeah, so powerful. Something that I was so excited to dive into your exploration of it because it gave me a whole bunch of new places to sort of to go narrow and deep, which is, I think, going to be a focus of mine for a while now. So it feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So hanging out here in this cross-country container of the Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To be present, I think. Again, I realize how cliché that is. And to follow your own path.

There's another cliché for you. Might as well use two of them at the same time. But something I've learned in my life is to, you know, naturally to follow your instinct, where you need to go and how you need to do it. And to trust in that, I think is a vital to being happy in the day to day. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life?

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that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. We'll be right back. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot?

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