Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 470 - James Nestor

Episode Date: January 18, 2021

James Nestor is an author and journalist who has written for Scientific American, Outside Magazine, The New York Times, and The Atlantic. His book “Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art” was released in 2020, and 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. Subscribe to the NEW Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Special perks for our listeners below! ➢LMNT Electrolytes FREE SAMPLE PACK until Jan. 31, 2021: http://bit.ly/3bxyMND ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Sling Shot: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

Andrew, do you like free shit? I'm just curious because some people, when they see something's free, they have those like you say, this is your signature skeptical hippo eyes. Yeah. Skeptical hippo. Exactly. I have skeptical hippo eyes when anything is free, but once I find out it's legit, if it's free, it's me.

Okay. Well, let me tell you something that's legit. You know that our favorite electrolyte element electrolytes that we talk about all the time. They're awesome. You see in my hand, I have eight element electrolytes here. about all the time they're awesome you see in my hand i have eight element electrolytes oh my gosh eight right element is going to send you free electrolyte packets eight free packets and all you have to pay for is five dollars shipping five dollars shipping but is there any hoops any weird things if i've tried it before like anything weird nah literally they're just they just want to give you eight packets of these awesome

electrolytes and you just pay for the damn shipping there's no way that any of you can say i've never tried element electrolytes because right now you're gonna get it for free absolutely free yes that's right all you have to do is go to drink lmnt.com slash power project and claim your element recharge pack absolutely free all you have to do is pay these measly $5 shipping, but you get to try all these different flavors. Head there right now. If you don't do this, you're hopeless. What's up, Mark Bell's Proud Project fam?

This episode is brought to you by Piedmontese Beef. Now, Andrew, you usually like dieting on high-carb, lower-fat, and you're doing a lot of Piedmontese. So I need you to tell me about it. Yeah, dude. So the one steak that I just, I put it above every other steak on the planet is, of course, Piedmontese flat iron steak. Now, if you are familiar with that type of cut, you might be thinking like, no, Andrew's

tripping. Like that thing is full of fat. There's no way that you're dieting on that type of steak, especially one that good. But let me tell you the nutritional facts from a flat iron steak from Piedmont Tees. All right, you ready? 23 grams of protein, one gram of fat, two grams of carbs. Can you repeat that please? Yep.

Let me, I just had to double check because even though I know this, I had to double check. 23 grams of protein, one gram of fat, two carbs. What the hell? Tell me what diet that that doesn't fit i i don't know dude so when you're looking at macros and stuff especially if you're in a more of a bodybuilding type of diet there's absolutely nothing on the planet that can fit better for you than a piedmontese flat iron steak uh on top of it being like the most amazing nutritional macro friendly uh steak it tastes incredible most amazing, nutritional, macro-friendly steak, it tastes incredible. I gave one to my father-in-law. He almost had a heart attack. It's legit. He couldn't understand how it tasted so good. The heart attack was from the excitement, not from eating meat.

That's not what this is all about. But what I'm trying to say is that it's the best steak on the planet. That's just one of the many steaks, but to me, that's like my number one steak from Piedmontese beef. For more information, please head over to piedmontese.com. That's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E dot com. Check out enter promo code POWERPROJECT for 25% off your order, and if your order is $99

or more, you get free two-day shipping. Who are these Android people nowadays? Right? Oh, gosh. Yeah, I don't know who still uses that. It's green text. It's kind of ghetto. We're rolling now.

Oh, God. Yeah. Was that on? Well, for all my Android users, I don't like you. And totally redeemed yourself. They're the same people that want to build their own computer. It's like, dude, justemed yourself they're the same people that like want to build their own computer it's like dude just relax they're the same people why the fuck you want to build your own computer just calm down over there how many fucking bits and megabits and

shit do you need i don't know god i need faster internet it's like come on bro just fucking relax just relax max good enough okay it's. It's good. It's easy. It works. It never gets viruses. I know. It works every time. That alone, the fact that it just doesn't get a virus. You can watch as much of the weirdest porn that you want and not a single virus.

Wait a second. What? I didn't say that. Porn causes viruses? I didn't say that. Does it? I wonder why all my computers have been so fucked up over the years god damn i could have saved saved myself a lot of dough probably i'm excited about today's podcast we're going to talk

about breathing which uh you wouldn't think would be a magnificent topic but when you see how many different things it's associated with poor breathing you see how many different things it's associated with poor breathing. You see how many different things it can. You see how many different things that can be attached to, I guess, is the main thing. And even things like diabetes in people that are healthy. It's really it's pretty mind blowing. And today's guest, you know, he'll explain, you know, why a lot of these things have happened. But we've had other guests on the show before people like Dr. Sean Baker, who've talked about kind of the softening of of our palates and the softening of our jaw line and things like that, because we just we're not eating meat, you know, and we're eating like hamburger or processed meats and things like that that are much softer than it used to be rather than like, you know, gnawing something off

of a bone or even like just saying, screw it, I got to try to eat that bone or break that bone apart and eat whatever's inside of it because there's not much else food around. Yeah. And so we don't eat like that anymore. And so our jaws have softened up and a lot of, a lot of, um, a lot of people have become mouth breathers, kind of a forward head posture, softer jaw line. And, um, many people just have a hard time breathing in and out of their nose and it could be detrimental to your health.

It's crazy. Like when I started finding out about this stuff, it's crazy how you see everything collapse on top of each other from when you're a child to adolescence to teenager to adult like if you if you if you legit if your face forms the wrong way because you eat all these soft foods you know you're going to be developing all these breathing problems and then now not just that but nowadays with modern technology and kids now have like looking down often having a hard time breathing down in this position if you're listening like i'm looking down like looking at a phone but being in that position and having a collapsed airway it's it's it's really really tough on kids and that's

going to develop a lot of later breathing issues so it's just like it's now the question is how do we reverse all of these things within lifestyle all of these things within diet so that they don't have these health problems in the future? Yeah. And also maybe like in a reasonable way, you know, like, am I going to, you know, grab a bone in steak all the time and try to like, you know, chew it off the bone every time? It's like, that doesn't seem like it fits into our culture. Well, you know, but there are things that you can do. And I'm interested to hear today about like if these things, how effective these things

are, because I know there's like things like mewing where you kind of chew stuff with your tongue. There's which is just like a practice to try to get your tongue to be stronger, which supposedly can also help impact your breathing in a positive way. And then there's other things of like, I think it's called mastic chewing, which is a specific type of gum. Oh, yeah. It's like there's failing gum, too.

Yeah. If I am, it's really tough gum. Yeah. Really, really tough gum. It's kind of like, I don't know if any of you've experienced this, like eating beef jerky where you're like, wow, man, like my jaw is getting like tired from this shit, you know, and you're kind of feeling the impact of that. So maybe it's similar to that. I've never tried these different gums before.

You OK with it? No, you don't. OK. Jaws getting tired. No, I just not bad jokes, man. Bad jokes or freezing like a protein bar. Yeah. Like a quest bar. That. Or like a Quest bar.

That's always fun because you end up eating those way too fast anyways. But if you freeze it, you get like a really solid jaw workout. You're trying to like chew it on the side. You guys ever had a hot dog and just had low hanging fruit? Sorry, low hanging fruit. Just wanted to see if you could inhale the whole thing. Yeah. But then,

you know, your jaw got sore and tough. See, so this is what low hanging fruit. I had to try. It didn't go, but it didn't work. Okay.

That's okay. That's okay. Hey, the podcast is young. We could definitely get in some more penis jokes later. Yes. Most definitely get them in. Hey, now.

And then we talked or then he, you know, this guy also talks a lot about just many different breathing techniques like Wim Hof type stuff. There's breathing techniques that can make you have some really wild and crazy experiences. have some really wild and crazy experiences. It's like breathing where you can, you know, I guess you breathe as hard as you can with music for like five minutes straight or something like that. And it's supposed to help your body to produce some DMT, which I think your body produces some DMT as it is. Yeah. But it helps you maybe release a little bit more of it.

There's not a, not science behind it, but they, this is just what people are starting to believe. And one of the things he said on Joe Rogan, which was funny, cause I always find it interesting. Like what's, what an interviewer gets fascinated by. And he's like, yeah, you know, we did this, uh, this type of breathing and he's like, the guy next to me turned into a wolf. And he's like, he's like the guy next to you turning like he turned into a wolf like you thought he looked like a wolf and he's like no no he thought he was a wolf and that's freaking yeah it's freaking her and he's like what does that mean like what does he mean he like thought he turned into a wolf he's like scratching his crotch and howling yeah howling

and like trying to hump people and stuff and awesome and rogan's like well maybe he's the guy's just a dick like maybe he's just maybe he's a undercover furry right trying to be that or he was just trying to hunt people or excuse himself as being a wolf he identified but i've heard you know from other people like kyle kingsbury and other people we've had on the show before that these can be uh experiences that can be game changers for you i i gotta honest. I'm kind of confused by the breathing thing. Sometimes like I'm not really, I, I remember,

um, we've had a couple of guests that talk about specific breathing before a fight and things like that. And I'm like, when do you use this kind of breathing versus that kind of breathing? The good thing about our guest today is that he, uh, is a journalist.

And I think that he, uh, represents somebody that's going to be able to explain it to us in a way that's digestible, that we can actually utilize. And weren't you saying that James was able to, like, hold his breath for three minutes or something? I think he can do. I think now he can do, like, eight minutes or something. He just holds it. Yeah.

Well, he said in one session. So he went to a session where they teach you how to breathe and how to hold your breath and stuff. He went from doing 30 seconds to being able to do like two minutes. It's pretty crazy. And you start to think about the different sports that we play, how much can it benefit you to learn how to be in control of that? Especially jujitsu, someone chokes you out or you're on the bottom and you're going against someone who's big and they got a knee in your side and you really can't afford to take a good deep breath anyway. Um, man, it seems like it's really beneficial.

I know my wife with swimming, uh, they do what they call breathing sets, which is no breathing, keep their head down the whole time. And they'll do sets like that, you know, where they go X amount of yards or whatever it might be. It's like, holy shit, man,

that sounds, and you don't really hear that in other sports. Cause it, in other sports, you know, we don't really hear in football. They're like, they'll say wind sprints,

you know, we're running wind sprints, but it's just sprints with short rest intervals. It's not really like you're not trying to run while holding your breath, which could potentially be dangerous, but could potentially have an amazing impact on your training. I've heard people mention this before, where you just, you drink some water, you hold the water in your mouth and you run.

And then you try to run X distance with that same amount of water in your mouth that way it's just training you to continue to breathe in and out of your nose and that's actually sounds a little bit uh it sounds like slightly different than taping your mouth shut you know taping your mouth shut seems pretty final you're like oh man i guess not that you can't rip it off but it seems a little different than just having the water in your mouth. But we've heard so much great conversation about the nasal breathing and what it can do for you. But there's so many people that suffer from sleep apnea that don't even really know it.

They've never really been tested before. And sleep apnea is so dangerous that it can kill you. That's big in the lifting community too. Could die in your sleep. I think that's what happened with uh the great football player reggie white he died in his sleep yeah i mean shit like you know that's that's about as extreme as it gets right there right dying from it right yeah and um no it's like that's really big within like the bodybuilding powerlifting community because like we have big necks and it like a lot of times i can actually constrict your breathing especially if you're used to not

really breathing through your nose often so it's it's pretty crazy but like things with uh breathing as far as like breathing and pain it makes a very big difference like you know using the exercise bike in here um when you like when you start nasal breathing or i've noticed this like you know your your quads burn on that bike all the time, but if you're controlling your breathing, your nasal breathing, it's like, you can handle that soreness and you can just keep that pace going. And I've never been able to do that before until I started, you know, focusing on nasal breathing makes a big, big, big difference. I remember when I was young and I was boxing and I was learning how to throw punches. I was learning some defense and I didn't spar anybody yet.

I was just hitting the bag and I was doing some other things. And it's a crazy experience to be, you know, like kind of fighting somebody else, especially I was like 15. So, you know, I'm not, you know, at 15, you feel like you got to really prove yourself. You just start forgetting all the training that you did and you start throwing wild punches, you know, at 15, you feel like you got to really prove yourself. You just start forgetting all the training that you did and you start throwing wild punches, you know? And so I'm doing all this stuff and,

uh, we're about like 30 seconds. As a guy, a guy that I'm going against his experience, he gives me a good shot to the gut, you know? And he kind of stands back. He's actually a pro fighter.

He actually stands back a little bit. He's like letting me wear myself out he's kind of almost laughing you know and then he just gave me he just said hey you know pretend you're hitting the bag and that just relaxed me a ton it's like oh yeah when i hit the bag like my coach is telling me hey you got to breathe you know make sure you keep continue to move your head and so i just that relaxed me. And I recognize he's not trying to, he's 35 years old and he's a professional boxer. He's not trying to hurt me. He's just, he wants me to get some practice in.

He's trying to get some work in as well. And that just really relaxed me, but it got me back to breathing. It's like, oh yeah, like I'm trying to do all this without breathing. I wonder why I can't breathe. I wonder why I'm so out of breath. Yeah. One of the crazy things is, um, I noticed that in jujitsu too, but the, the, the odd thing is like, you know, when you, when you roll against someone who's really advanced

as a white belt, a lot of them are really good at just staying calm naturally. Right. But then when you see them roll against somebody who is harder than them, it's like those bad habits of breathing come out. So not only do you need to be able to learn how to breathe correctly when things are easy. So when I'm sparring against a white belt or somebody that's not that hard, yeah, I can keep calm. But also this has come into the case where, or it's coming, um, it's been a benefit when

I'm rolling with somebody who maybe they're actually better than me, but I can still focus on my breathing. And that makes that act, that process so much easier. No panicking. You're not starting to hyperventilate when they put their knee on your belly and you can't, you know, take deep breaths. It's, it's, it, if, if athletes were able to get the hang of this, a lot of them would perform at a much higher level.

Without getting soft tissue work and you start sweating and you're making all these, you know, faces and noises and then tell you to breathe through it. And you're like, Oh yeah, you know, breathe. And sometimes you can, like, you know, sometimes it's really, really difficult, but when, whenever you can, you tend to relax more and then it makes you wonder like, how much better am I receiving that versus me just kind of like being like i don't do that to me yeah like if you if your body is is signaling and it's that stressed it probably is not cool with whatever's going on i would imagine yeah i don't know if you guys ever tried like a cold shower but you know it's you know you're instructed to try to you know breathe calmly through it and keep it cold

until you can calmly calmly breathe breathe. It's like, dude, that's impossible for me. Like when is this supposed to happen? Yeah. But I was going to ask, when do you guys think that like nasal breathing will become like a mainstream thing? Um,

like even doing like, uh, like workouts on the treadmill that I have, like you have coaches guiding you through it, like on there, they will tell you in through the nose, out through the mouth. I literally just wrote that.

That's funny. And, and the thing thing is it's probably more like okay you're actually like getting a workout in you're not practicing nasal breathing but i just i just found it was odd like at every opportunity they tell you in through the nose out through the mouth so i don't know do you think like this will catch on eventually or is it just like something that'll just be you know kind of niche i think if it works you know if it's working well and you're hearing more people talk about it, it might be something that catches on. But, you know, we have a lot of great remedies for a lot of things. We got great remedies for like obesity and stuff and people are fatter than ever. So it's hard to really, you know, like how how how normal is the carnivore diet to us?

It seems pretty normal. How normal is keto diet? It seems pretty normal. But, you know, you get into like Tennessee or Oklahoma or something, you know, these people at these. That's it, Mark. I supported you this whole time. I'm from Tennessee.

I'm out. Yeah. Some of these some of these areas are probably just, you know, they're still eating their grits and still eating their whatever they're used to. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Our grits are from the South, I guess. I'm joking. That's so funny.

I don't know. You remember that movie, My Cousin Vinny? Right. And he goes to the, and Sima, you would love this movie. That's exciting. I'm going to write it down. I'm going to watch it for you. But he goes into that.

The two Utes. He goes into that restaurant and the menu just has uh well he tells marissa tomei he's like i guess i'm gonna go with the breakfast because the menu just has breakfast lunch and dinner yeah and so he asked what the breakfast is and you know explains it has grits and he's like what's a grit it was so funny dude that movie's great you should watch it i i will ralph macchio the uh amazing the the nose, out the mouth thing, I think a lot of times it's just to have people try to calm down, I think is part of it. I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with any of that. Maybe our guest today will tell us why he may think that's wrong.

You have a lot of breaths during the day. So I think that what he's trying to preach and what many other people are trying to preach is try, you know, work on breathing in and out of your nose as much as possible. If things get uncomfortable, it might be, it might be a good idea for training purposes to try to continue to go in and out of the nose. And then once you're, you know, too uncomfortable, maybe you start breathing, uh, you know, doing some in the the nose out the mouth type stuff but a lot of people are congested they don't really breathe well and so wim hof is like i don't care if you breathe through your asshole because he's like a lot of people just are not you know their noses are kind of clogged up and they have smaller nose nasal passages and stuff like that and he's like just whatever way you can because

he knows that you breathe you know probably 50 000 times a day or stuff like that. And he's like, just whatever way you can, because he knows that you breathe, you know, probably 50,000 times a day or something like that. And if it's the 30 Wim Hof breaths that you're taking that are in the nose and out the mouth or however you do it, just all in and out of the mouth, it probably is not going to have a negative impact. I do think that a lot of people want to seek what's optimal, but not everybody. So I don't think that this will be like, I don't know if it'll end up being like a real mainstream thing, unless we see more studies on it that are really showing like how, you know, how detrimental is

this? Honestly, like, yeah, like to that point, I think the only time when it's going to get mainstream is when we start seeing it on something like Dr. Oz, or we see Oprah talk about it and talk about how she has to fix her breathing. Because, you know, the whole in through the nose, out through the mouth thing is something that my old soccer coaches would say, because that like even nasal breathing wasn't like something popular then. And with all the issues that people will already have nasal breathing, like you said, a lot of people are just naturally congested, right? They can't take no breath of breath through the noses. Um, it's much easier and it's, it's much, it's a less, a lesser barrier to entry to just say, just breathe in through your nose, out through your

mouth. Or if you can't breathe through your nose, just breathe through your mouth and just try to breathe consistently, even though it's not the best thing to do. Um, it's the best way that we can, I guess, make some sort of change without having to, you know, individually see what everyone's problem is. Yeah. For me in my training, um, you know, once the training starts to get really hard, I'll do, you know, I'll breathe in and breathe out kind of what I'm supposed to, uh, in through the nose and out through the mouth. Um, but a lot of times I'm trying to push that a little bit. So like in my warmups and stuff, I'll, I'll, uh, you know, try to just go

in and out of the nose. If I'm doing, you know, um, machine type of work, I will probably try to keep it all, uh, nasal breathing. I forget here and there. Let me go back to, you know, breathing in and out of the, uh, or using my mouth more, but, um, it just depends. It depends on the day. It depends on what, you know, what I'm trying to do. But for me personally, I've found like a calming effect in my day to day. And even with using the mouth tape for sleep, which we've mentioned many times on the show, I tape my mouth for sleep. It's supposed to help you get more optimal sleep. I've noticed that when I don't have the mouth tape on, that I don't wake up with drool all over my pillow like

I used to, because I think I'm getting more used to using my nose. I don't, I don't really know, but, um, and I think it has helped my sleep. It's, it's, uh, annoying to do it. You know, I, I don't, I don't enjoy like taping my mouth shut every night to do it but uh i just i like to do things that are optimal or at least attempt them yeah i still break through my mouth tape like it's funny i guess uh so sometimes it'll like slightly come off sorry do you take this way or this it's hard this way? Oh you take this along with Yeah, I have a beard so it's got to be tough and you both you guys have hair like soon as my hair starts to Grow and then the thing falls off. Yeah It's weird because like it'll slightly come off and I'll still fight it

And so Stephanie is like you make so many weird sounds when you like are exhaling because it's like, so she gets a kick out of it. But I don't know. I've tried like doubling up on the tape and I still bust through it. I found like with my beard, like usually a lot of the times it will break this way. But if I if I take this way, which might seem odd and listeners, it's just like, actually, I don't have to explain this to you if you're not watching. Yes. Up and down.

If you take up and down versus side to side. That's why I said hot dog or hamburger style. Hot dog or hamburger. Because all you need is your lips just to be like pinched together. It's more like of a cue, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It makes, it makes a difference. It doesn't fall off nearly as much for me actually ever. Okay. Do you have just like a little thing of mouth tape or is it specific brand or anything? I got the three a micropore tape as it's like, you know, very inexpensive, like a pack of you just cut it. Yeah. And a pack of 12 of those is like 10 bucks.

It works. And it's available everywhere. Like you go to Walmart, you get a two pack for like, I think like $3. Dude. Yes. Yes. And yeah, it's perfect. Yeah Like you go to Walmart, you get a two pack for like, I think like $3. Dude. Yes. Yes. And yeah, it's perfect. Yeah.

Micro poor tape. 3M micro poor tape. Look at that up on Amazon or like you said, go to Walmart and check it out. There was one that I was getting. It was like Mike. I forgot what it was, but it was when we were in LA and I had let you use it and it like had fallen off. I'm like, yeah, that one's not as sticky.

The micro poor is way better better i will say this um before we get into this podcast uh this topic of breathing is something that i love so much because as an athlete i've i've noticed the differences i i had when i was playing sports and cardio versus the way I am now with jujitsu, it literally, no shit, feels like a superpower. That's awesome. It really feels like a superpower. It makes the biggest difference. And I always, it's crazy. So you gotta take it seriously

and pay attention to the man we have on today. Hey guys. Hey. What's happening? How are you? We're doing fantastic. Great to have you on the show today. Thank you. Thank you so much for taking your time. For sure. Thanks for having me. We've been talking about, you know, breathing and sleep and all different kinds of stuff on

this show for quite some time. We like to try to do stuff as optimal as we possibly can. In some of your experience, why do you think that sometimes, uh, like a lot of us are into lifting weights. Why do you think a lot of times, um, people that lift weights end up with sleep apnea, they end up with trouble.

Um, or maybe they run, run into some issues with breathing properly and things like that. Do you think it has a lot to do with, like for us, we power lift in particular. Do you think it has some stuff to do with, uh us we power lift in particular do you think it has some stuff to do with uh you know i don't know like the the grittiness of what it is that we're doing and maybe we never really were taught the proper way to breathe something along those

lines yeah so many weightlifters are paying attention to you know their health their metabolism their muscles obviously but they aren't paying attention to their breathing. And what happens is when we develop too many muscles around here, we can actually start blocking our airways. Our airways can get obstructed. So when you see a lot of weightlifters, traditional poses to have the neck out like this. So that allows you to get more air into your body. If you think about someone, a ENT who is like EMT rather, who is doing CPR on someone, they take their hand on the back of the neck and crane their head out to open the airway. So that's what's been happening with a lot of weightlifters. And this is one of the reasons why a lot of weightlifters have heart problems or blood

pressure issues because they have obstruction in their airways you know i'm really curious about your take on this because from what what mark was saying yeah that is a big problem within the weightlifting community but the the solution that a lot of people seem to find is grabbing a sleep apnea machine which um i'm curious on your take on it because that seems like it's just kind of a band-aid to the bigger issue. So do you think that using a sleep apnea machine can be beneficial in the long run? And if not, or if so, like what, what can they do instead to transition themselves to actually fixing their breathing? CPAPs are lifesavers. So without a doubt for people who can't breathe, who have

been suffering from obstructive sleep apnea, which is so injurious to the body on every single level, these allow you to breathe at night, but you're a hundred percent correct when you say this is doing nothing for the core problem of having an obstructed airway. You know, it's a bandaid. It's a fantastic bandaid. It's a life-saving bandaid, but it's not fixing the core problem. So just the way that we work out our biceps or our abs or whatever, we should be considering that we have this big muscle tube, right? And in our, in our throats, this is all a muscle tube and you should work that out as well. And there's a lot of scientific evidence showing that by doing simple exercises with your tongue, these things called oral pharyngeal exercises, you can influence the fitness of your throat.

I know this seems totally crazy, but this has been proven and studied for years and years. So I would put in 15 minutes of throat exercise they look really weird i won't demonstrate in front of you guys right now but uh but they work so so like do you just like should we just look up oral phalangeal exercises and on youtube and something might pop up yeah don't look on You're going to get a bunch of garbage. In the scientific literature, there are various studies. There's one that was put out in Chest Journal, very respected scientific journal, that found it significantly decreased snoring and sleep apnea.

I'm not saying this is going to work for everyone. Apnea can occur in the nasopharynx and the hypopharynx all over the place, but it's free. And if anything, it's going to allow you to breathe better throughout the day. And who doesn't want that? I've heard you discuss on some other shows, you know, how you got into, into some of this, how did we get to this point where we even need your services, where we even need a book about breathing? How did we end up here? Yeah. You know, as a science journalist, the last thing I ever thought I would be doing was to be writing a book about breath. And a lot

of my friends gave me a bunch of crap about this early on. You're writing a book about breathing until you start really getting into the nitty gritty of it. Where I became convinced that there was a larger story here was to learn that the human face has been evolving characteristics that are not at all advantageous to our health. By that, I mean, for the last 300, 400 years, our mouths have been growing smaller and smaller and smaller. And what happens when you have a mouth that's too small for your face, your teeth grow and crooked. Teeth have nowhere to grow in straight. So they grow and crooked. Another thing that happens, and I'm a great example of this, is the upper palate here

of your mouth, which is right here, can push into your sinuses and can obstruct your breathing. So we become the worst breathers in the animal kingdom just in the past 300, 400 years. And other animals don't have crooked teeth, right? No. I mean, unless you've got like some bulldogs or pugs or these highly inbred brachycephalic dogs, they breathe terribly. And they suffer from a lot of the same problems that we do.

If you've seen a bulldog breathing, it's just... I mean, it looks like a lot of people, you know, working out around the park where I live. So beyond these highly inbred dogs, any animal in the wild is going to have perfectly straight teeth. And all of our ancestors had perfectly straight teeth. So we're the only ones, modern humans, that suffer from these problems. When it comes to exercise, you know, we were talking about a little bit earlier on the show, like when it comes to something like running, we've heard over the years, you know, breathe in the nose and out the mouth. Do you feel that this is wrong? And if it's wrong, what are some reasons on why it might be wrong?

So the exhale is less important, but we lose 42% more moisture breathing out through our mouths. So I live in a city here and because gyms are all closed, everyone's out running all the time. I see these people running around with their mouths wide open and they're also maybe carrying a water bottle, you know, 16 ounces of water here. And sometimes they're wearing a little belt or a little backpack and hitting off this water. But their mouths are open. I mean, you might as well just put a little hole at the bottom of this water bottle and just spill out this water because you're just losing so much of your moisture. So from what I've seen, from what I've researched, inhaling and exhaling through the nose is the way you need to breathe. And you see this from top runners. You see this from sprinters.

They're inhaling and exhaling through the nose. To be clear, if if you're like about ready to dunk a basketball, you look at Michael Jordan right before he dunks on someone, he goes, takes this huge breath of air. That's totally fine. He's about to dunk on someone, but I guarantee the rest of the time he's breathing through his nose because it's really hard to be healthy if you're a mouth breather. So this makes me really curious because I've heard you talk about your transition, right? I think you've mentioned that you were breathing the wrong way for much of your life and it was a little bit hard for you to actually start breathing through your nose, especially as an adult. So when someone's trying to make this

transition, what type of journey should they expect if like their nose is clogged up, their nasal passages are maybe smaller than they actually should be? Can someone actually make a full transformation as an adult as far as being able to fully nasal breathe and take advantage of their nose? Well, when you switch over from being a mouth breather to a nasal breather, it sucks. It takes a long time. It's miserable. You think it's not going to work out. That was certainly my story.

It was the story from so many people that I've heard with heard from. So, you know, breaking a habit takes a long time, especially if you've been doing one for for decades and you think it's just normal. I would go to sleep every single night. Didn't matter if I was in a hotel room or if I was camping or whatever with a huge glass of water by my bed, because I would keep waking up with this dry mouth. Hit some water, go back to sleep, wake up, dry mouth, hit some water, go back to sleep, wake up, dry mouth, hit some water, you know, on and on and on. So everyone's got a slightly different problem. So I can't offer a blanket prescription or blanket guidance. But what we do know is you have to breathe through your nose, period. You're never, your body is never,

ever really going to be able to operate efficiently or correctly if you're a mouth breather. So how you get to that is really up to you. I found that just training myself using a little piece of tape during the day, I know this sounds stupid, but it's no more stupid than mouth breathing, helped me train to become a nasal breather at night. I'd use the same little piece of tape. I learned about this from a Stanford doctor, and I learned about this from several other doctors who had been suggesting this to their patients for decades. So some people can do that. Some people do need surgery. A small percentage of people

absolutely need surgery, and surgery is life-changing for them. But what I've found is we've got a pretty amazing body that is so adaptable if we just learn how to use it in the correct ways. And so start with these easy, free steps first before you go directly in and get your nose drilled out. What did your own study show when you get your nose drilled out. What did your, uh, your own study, uh, show when you stuffed your nose, you packed your nose for a while. And I think you maybe had a couple other people do it as well. Uh, what did that show? What negative impacts that have on your health? Cause a lot of times we're talking about performance, um, but you're talking about

just like overall health and your blood sugar and how, uh, breathing, um, breathing improperly can negatively impact all these things. Yeah. So I had been talking with the chief of rhinology research down at Stanford, this guy named Dr. Jack Arniak, one of the world leaders in this field, big nose guy. And so he knows of all of the advantages of breathing through the nose. The nose serves something like 30 different functions. It's the way for us to filter out crap in the air. It's a way for us to slow down air, to heat it, to moisten it so that when that air reaches our lungs, our lungs can more efficiently extract oxygen. This is important when you're just sitting in front of a zoom call. And especially

when you're working out, you want to be operating efficiently. You don't want to be spending unnecessary energy doing something. So we know all that. It's not controversial. And we also know all the damage caused by mouth breathing, increased risk of respiratory problems, neurological problems, developmental problems. When your mouth breather is a kid, your skeleton can actually change. It's so common. It's called adenoid face. You see these kids like me, I'm a great example with a long face, small mouth. This is because I was breathing through my mouth when I was a kid. I didn't know that it was a wrong thing to do. So we know all that, but what we didn't know is how quickly the damage from mouth breathing

came on. And so through various conversations, I said, Naya, you're at Stanford, man, one of the top research institutions in the world. Why don't you study this? And I finally convinced them and we put together a 20-day study in which me and one other person were to be obstructed for 10 days just to become mouth breathers. And then for the other 10 days, we would just be breathing through our noses and we'd be collecting data the whole way through. And I know that this sounds like some sort of supersize me jackass stunt. It really wasn't considering that 25 to 50 percent of the population habitually breathes

through the mouth. So we were just lulling ourselves into a position so many people already know. We were measuring it. That's the difference. Dr. Justin Marchegiani And when you guys did that, like when your noses were plugged, what type of issues happened to you? And before that, were you already practicing nasal breathing or were you like doing, were you doing mouth breathing before?

Dr. David Jockers Yeah, I had become aware of all the damage caused by mouth breathing. So I had been adjusting my breathing for a while before then, for sure. So that's what made this even more difficult to do. It sounds bad. It sounds like it'd be a real pain. You have no idea. It was so awful. And we knew it was going to be awful.

So that was no idea. It was so awful. And we knew it was going to be awful. So that was no surprise. But what we didn't know was how quickly the damage was going to occur. And we didn't know what the data was going to say. And, you know, my blood pressure went through the roof. I went from not snoring at all to snoring. After a few days, I was snoring for four hours a night from zero. We both got sleep apnea. We were fatigued

we're miserable athletic performance went down i mean the whole laundry list of problems it was a long 10 days it was it it was awful and in every you know at the beginning we're kind of cracking out we're like ah this is so stupid haha you know but by day eight we were not in a good way so so when we flip that that was a good thing. Then we had 10 days of like breathing, healthy breathing through our noses, blood pressure went down about 25 points, right, right off the bat. Um, snoring decreased in the first night, a few days later, zero snoring. So we went from at our worst snoring four hours a night to zero to zero sleep apnea. And, you know, I just don't hear a lot of people talking about the difference between the pathway through which we breathe air and how that affects our snoring, how that might affect sleep apnea, how that affects our blood pressure.

You just don't hear about it. And it's one of the simplest things to do. Were there some other things that you guys were able to record? Were you able to record like blood glucose? And was there any, did you have any evidence towards like noticing more cravings? We talk on the show about sleep quite a bit. And we noticed that when we fall behind in our sleep, our decision-making isn't as good. And for us,

that sometimes ends up us eating pizza or ice cream or something like that. So what are some things you might have noticed along those lines? Yeah, so we had continuous blood sugar monitors, glucose monitors on the whole time. We took 60 different blood markers before, during and after. And we know that sleep apnea is directly connected with adult onset diabetes. Direct relation there. So when you're choking on your breath, on your own body, you're stressing yourself out. Adrenaline shoots up. Cortisol shoots up.

Blood sugar shoots up. Insulin resistance can come as a result of that. And we know all that, but that probably will take months or even years of dysfunctional breathing. So we saw no difference on blood sugar at all. It was consistent. And a lot of the other blood markers, ionized calcium, all this other crap. We didn't see any difference. But with stress markers, with cortisol, absolutely. And with some other blood markers, for sure. But I think a lot of that, this was only 10 days. And to see how it affected our ability just to think, I mean, Anders, who was from Sweden,

came out here, paid to come out here and do this study because we had to pay for this at Stanford. He actually got lost when he was mouth breathing. He couldn't make his way back to his apartment that he rented across the street from my house. He was really embarrassed about it. He didn't have that problem, nasal breathing. So I'm not saying mouth breathing is, you know, it's going to ruin the health of everyone instantaneously. I'm not saying that nasal breathing is going to cure all your problems, but we absolutely

know that there's a huge foundation of science showing that just the pathway through which you breathe is going to affect you in the long term for sure. Have you noticed anything in regards to nasal breathing helping with something like allergies? I know for myself, if I'm out and about and then I get home, my nose will be stuffed up. And so when I hit the bed, I'm like, oh, there's no way I can take my mouth right now. But then I focus on just breathing through my nose. And then like those those pathways kind of open up and it's like, whoa, like what changed? Like something weird happened. And then I can, you know, take my mouth for the rest of the night. But have you

been able to kind of find a correlation between those two? Yeah. So the nose is a use it or lose it organ. The less we use it, the less we're going to be able to use it. So much so that down at Stanford, I was talking to Dr. Ann Kearney and she had gotten curious about this as well. So she had chronic nasal breathing problems. She had allergies, a bunch of other issues, and she was slated for surgery. And this is a clinician, you know, that this is an expert in the field. And she thought, hmm, I wonder if I just start to breathe through my nose a little more, what would happen? So she looked at records from people who had laryngectomies, which is a hole drilled in their throat because they had mouth cancer, some other issue. She found that between two months and two years, their noses were 100%

clogged. And she thought if that were the case, if she just conditioned herself to breathe through her nose more, would it open? And she became an obligate nasal breather after a couple of weeks. Again, not saying this is going to work for everyone, but our noses are covered with erectile tissue. They're covered with the same erectile tissue as you know where, and it responds in the same way. So the more you use your nose, the more it will become conditioned to breathe more easily. And next time you have allergies to answer your question directly, absolutely breathing, breathing techniques, breathing through the nose, breathing slowly, breathing in a paced manner can definitely have an effect on allergies.

And a little trick next time your nose is stuffed, calmly exhale. Hold your nose, your nostrils shut, hold your breath until you feel a pretty potent sense of air hunger. When it's time to breathe again, breathe through your nose and then take about 30 seconds worth of breaths and repeat that about five to six times. And I think you'll be amazed how quickly your nose will clear up. That congestion will go away. Awesome. Thank you. I was really curious about this. You were mentioning how, you know, our face has changed because of like a lot of things currently could be our diet could be, you know, looking down all the time, but for you yourself, have you done other things as far as the realm of the foods

you eat and the type of foods you eat? Since, you know, modern individuals, we eat a lot of soft foods that mess with the structure of our face over time. Have you changed your diet in any way that has allowed you to, over a longer period of time, see a difference in your facial structure. And also, I mean, from your years of, I guess, starting to focus and practice nasal breathing, have you noticed a visible difference in the way your face is structured? Just because, you know, when you're reading on forums about things like mewing and all of this stuff, people tend to say as an adult, it's very hard to do that. tend to say as an adult, it's very hard to do that. It is hard to do that when you're an adult because things are more set, right? Your, your skeleture is, is much more set, but that doesn't mean you can't do it. So a lot of these problems, if we were just able to diagnose them and intervene

on them early, we wouldn't have these issues, right? A lot of this is tied to chewing stress when we're young. Infants who are breastfed versus those who are bottle fed will have very less, be much more less apt to suffer from snoring and sleep apnea. We know this. Their faces will grow differently. If you are pulling like

breastfeeding takes a lot of stress, right? So, and when you are quickly developing, if you're doing that every two hours or whatever, you are literally pulling your face out. You're allowing your mouth to grow wider. So anecdotally, I've heard from so many friends who've had a few kids and some of them were bottle fed. Some of them were breastfed. The ones who are breastfed don't need any braces, perfectly straight teeth. The ones who are bottle fed all need braces. So I was bottle fed. I asked my mom about it. She's like, no one was breastfeeding when, when you were born, you know, so this isn't pointing fingers or blaming anyone. I'm a dude. The last thing I'm going to do is tell people that they need to breastfeed, you know,

every two hours, not going to happen. But what, what I am going to do is tell people that they need to breastfeed, you know, every two hours. Not going to happen. But what what I am going to say is that, you know, if you think about it, the body, when it's young, is developing. You're creating the foundation for how you're going to look and how you're going to form later on. And so the more positive impact inputs you have, the better you're going to form. And that's certainly the case with, with breathing. So now more, more directly to your, to your question, really rambly today. Sorry about that. Um, so when, when we're adults, like everything's set, nonetheless, we can still change our facial structure. We can influence the bone mass in our faces through chewing stress.

And if you have a thumb, if you have a clean thumb, no COVID thumbs here, you can place your thumb to the roof of your mouth. And right in the middle of your roof of your mouth is a suture. So it's a crack. It's the same crack that's in your head, right? We have all these different cracks in our head, which allow our skulls to expand. We have one in our mouth. And at virtually any age, you can influence that to open up a little more and you can widen your palate. So when you talk about these people who are mewing, I've seen some of that crap on YouTube and some of it's lighting and, you know, some of it might be even

digital manipulation. But but I'm I'm convinced that that some of it is actually happening. What you're doing is you're building musculature, but but you're starting to influence the size of your palate. So it's an easy thing to do. Just measure before and after doing mewing. Instead of saying I look look better, I breathe better, measure it, and then it's objective. And that's one thing I wish more people would start doing. Do what I did and take a CAT scan a year before and a year after, and then you have measurements. I gained about 15% more space in my airway after a year. And I'm middle-aged, I'm old. So that's inspiring that anyone can really do this if you spend the time to do it. Is there some particular techniques that you utilize, like upon waking up every morning or before going to bed?

Is there anything in particular that you practice in terms of breathing or are you more kind of along the lines of just continue to work on nasal breathing throughout the day? Yeah, it's more has to do with the latter of the two. I've been super insanely busy. When I calm down, I'm going to be incorporating more breathing exercises throughout the day, throughout the week. I still do it about I'll do Wim Hof method, which you call it Wim Hof. This stuff's been around for thousands of years. I'll do that about three or four times a week. I'll do some Sudarshan Kriya. I'll practice breathing slowly. But most of all, most benefits come from breathing normally. What I mean by that is breathing through your nose, not over breathing, focusing your breath, breathing deep, breathing light. You know, that's where most people are going to get most benefits. You can do these

other practices and there's, there's definite benefits tied to those as well. But the point is we've been breathing so dysfunctionally for so long and people don't realize it because this is an unconscious act. But once you take control of it, it's, it really transforms your body and your life in so many ways. You know, I had a, I had a thought about, and I'm really curious what your take is on this, um, like a while ago. And I was thinking about it again today when you mentioned how, uh, babies that are breastfed, you know, they tend like you had that, that family member or something that said that none of the babies that were breastfed had to get braces, but the ones that were bottle fed did. And do you think that if we were to figure out a way to massively change the structure that like, you know, children are raised, the food they eat, the habits they have,

as far as, you know, sitting down and staring at screens constantly. Do you think that dentistry would at some point become slightly obsolete, not totally gone, but obsolete because even having wisdom teeth pulled, um, I have a lot of relatives who are in Nigeria and, um, you know, they,

I guess they don't do things like they, they do here, but none of them, because, you know, they were breastfed. They were active. They were outside a lot. They weren't on phone screens because they didn't really use phones like that. No one had to get their wisdom teeth pulled and no one had dental issues. But I do have some cousins that did a lot of the things that you were mentioning and had a lot of those habits and they had all these dental issues so there seems to be something there where i'm just like dentistry seems to feed off of

a lot of modern problems yeah isn't that creepy once you start noticing this stuff yeah and i really became uh interested in this stuff about four or five years ago you know looking at ancient skulls and seeing how perfect our our ancestors were. And there's just such this clear line between when we were perfect, at least our skelecature and what's happened to us today. But there is this huge movement in dentistry that's happening right now. And it's a bit of a show to watch it from the sidelines where people are saying this exact thing you just said. They're saying braces, these are preventable problems. The vast majority of diseases and problems that are afflicting modern humans today are preventable. So I'm not talking about genetic neuromuscular issues you know those aren't

preventable that's something that's passed down but the vast majority of if you're looking at diabetes if you're looking at obesity if you're looking at even crooked teeth these these are preventable problems so this new branch of dentistry which isn't new at all dentists have been doing this for a long time but now it it's really coming up. They're looking at kids who are like one year old, two years old. They're looking at their breathing. They're looking at their mouths. They're looking at how they're developing and they're creating interventions at this early age to widen their mouth. So their profiles grow properly, so their airways grow properly. Because again, it's about building on a foundation that's already healthy.

Once that foundation is screwed up, it's harder to re-edit it and influence it. But it's much easier, preventative maintenances. And this is what they're doing. It's called functional dentistry, myofunctional therapy. And I've seen some of their case studies of kids who are like four years old, had extreme sleep apnea, snoring, allergies, asthma, because they couldn't breathe. And they would take scans of their heads and their airways were the size of a drinking straw. And then a couple of years later

with these interventions, they've gained like twice the amount of space in their airways, no sleep apnea, no snoring, no ADHD, no asthma, no allergies, which makes perfect sense. But instead, you know, we're more conditioned here to give a kid five different drugs for five different problems without looking at the core issue. And the core issue is is often not all the time, but it's often tied to breathing dysfunction. It's crazy. You guys are pointing out, you know, with everything. And of course, you guys, I have a baby on the way and I do have an older daughter. But, you know, I remember in school looking around and seeing like, oh, like, man, that kid has to wear braces. Like, I got lucky. Like, I don't have like, I thought it was

just like you were predestined to like as soon as you were born. But in some of those studies, did they have did they share any techniques on how they were able to get some of the kids to kind of transition over to nasal breathing? Because like I said, I have one that's due technically any day now and I have an older one and I do my best to try to, you know, encourage her to breathe through her nose. But every now and again, I'll look over and I'll be like, hey, chin up and close your mouth. But, you know, obviously I'm not like, you know, I'm not great at it because she'll still do it. But do you have any advice for some of us parents that do have some older ones that, you know, we're kind of like, weren't paying attention and they've gone to the, uh, the way of the mouth breathers. Sure.

So, so first of all, one, one thing that I learned from the biological anthropologist I was working with at university of Pennsylvania is these are now becoming heritable traits. Um, so, so sometimes right out of the gates, a kid has a mouth that's too small for its face, regardless of breastfeeding and bottle feeding. And they have breathing problems right out of the gate because this is this is what's happened to our species. So the important thing is, is to recognize that issue and to make immediate interventions to it. And you do that by finding a qualified person, a pediatric dentist, who this is what they're looking at. So dentistry is moving much more, at least this one segment of

dentistry is much more moving into the direction of airway health as well. Who spends the most time looking at airways? A dentist does. And yet dentists haven't been empowered before to prescribe different interventions for airway health. So my father-in-law is a pulmonologist. And I thought, you know, pulmonologists, they spend the most time looking at breathing. They do not. They spend the most time looking at breathing pathologies. So if you get, you know, shot with an arrow through your lung, if you get in a car accident, if your lungs collapse, go to a pulmonologist. They're going to fix you up.

They're going to do some incredible stuff. But if you're looking at regular breathing health and airway health, no one has really taken that under their arm in all of these different medical disciplines. And dentists are the ones that are starting to do that. So now to answer your question as far as what you can do, the first thing I would do is have one of these qualified straight teeth and these huge airways? Because they were breastfed. That's, that's one thing. Because when they moved from breastfeeding, um, to eating, they weren't eating Gerber's, you know, canned stuff. They went straight to hard food. So it's called baby led weaning, where you just go directly from, from being fed to, to eating hard food. It's pretty sketchy because the kid's like choking and all this stuff at the beginning.

But this is before their larynx has really fallen. So it's much harder for them to... And anyway, there's this whole school called baby led weaning. And so that allows them at this early age to really start grinding it out, right? them at this early age to really start grinding it out, right? And to start using their jaw muscles and developing this good bone structure. And then for kids later on in life, it's all about creating positive habits, as you mentioned. It's one thing for, you know, you'd be the dad and be like, shut your mouth, sit over there. It's another thing for a kid to want to do this. I've found that the most effective thing is to show them pictures of kids who are mouth breathers later on in life and kids who are nasal breathers later on in life. And mouth breathers will have a different facial

structure. Just tell them they won't be as popular if they're a mouth breather later on in life. Another thing you can do, this stuff is created by Patrick McEwen. I think it's fantastic. It's called myotape. This sounds super weird, but if you don't want to put tape on a kid's mouth and maybe you do sometimes, and that's up to you, um, this go, I'm not going to demonstrate because that's, that's just getting a little too weird. This goes around the mouth, right? And so that kid can open their mouth at any time. It just gently trains them to keep the mouth shut. And some of my friends use this for their kids. They say, you can watch TV, but as long as you're watching TV, you're chewing

gum and you're keeping your mouth shut, you know, with biotape or otherwise. So that those are a few things you can do. Like a muzzle. That's a great idea. A little bit, a little bit. Have you noticed any positive impact from chewing any of these? Like, I think it's called like mastic chewing or these types of gum. Have you utilized any techniques like that or noticed anyone getting any benefit from anything like that? Yeah, it's hard to say because there, you know, if there were two versions of me and one of them didn't chew and then the version of me who did chew, we could compare them. But I'm a big fan of this freaky Turkish gum called

Faleem sugar free gum. It's hard as a frickin rock. It doesn't taste so hot, but man, it gives you a workout. And Philem's been sold. I think Philem is wondering what the hell is going on because they were sold out on Amazon for a couple of months. But I think they're back in stock now. So but all you need is, you know, you don't need this stuff if you just ate normal food, if you just ate whole foods. And this is something that I find is so funny. It's like, you know, we put treadmills in our houses to exercise, which is good to move around, to walk in one place. We put weights in our houses to pick up a weight and put it back down. We

create supplements and goo powders and all this other stuff. But we wouldn't need this stuff if we just lived in a lifestyle like our ancestors did. Right. So so there's a reason why you look at hunter gatherers. They're ripped, man. Great abs. They're muscular, perfectly straight teeth. So they're not doing pushups. It's just part of their lifestyle in which they're walking around a lot. They're chewing real foods all the time. They're sleeping eight hours a night. So I know that's not possible in the modern world where a lot of people live. And I'm a huge fan of exercise. I have all this crap in my house as well. But it just goes back to the basics. Eat carrots, well but it just goes back to the basics um eat carrots right eat celery eat chewy stuff eat stuff our ancestors would have eaten and if you can't do that if you're in airport land or whatever

uh i'm a fan of this this gum um philem gum is what it's called and it comes in such delicious flavors as carbonate and mint grass. Have fun with that. Quick question in terms of because I have that gum. I've been I had it for a while now. When you chew it, do you try to because maybe this might sound stupid, but I'm kind of wondering, you know, if you tend to chew more on one side than the other, if you'll start to develop more on one than the the other if you'll start to develop more on one than the other like do you pay attention to how many times you chew on each

side or do you put gun on each side and go down what's the set rep scheme what's the set rep scheme well i will consult the uh phileme interval training um requirements here uh so what what happens naturally is the body builds to symmetry. So there are no genes designed to build to asymmetry. The body's going to build to symmetry. So as long as you're not grinding away for eight hours a day, just only on one side, you're going to be fine. If you think about eating a big piece of steak or even eating a carrot or filet, you don't chew with both of sides of your back molars. You're not chewing steak like this. Unless you've got like some serious problem, you know, you're chewing on one side and then

you're switching it and you're chewing on the other and then you're switching it. So when we chew this way on one side or the other, we elicit a parasympathetic response, which calms us down. It allows more saliva to enter our mouths. It allows us to digest more easily. So, you know, I would suggest I wouldn't freak out about it if you're like, I did 12 chews instead of 10. I need to do 10 on the other side. Your body's going to figure it out. Just be sure that you're chewing normally and you're not trying to focus. If you think you're underdeveloped on one side, don't go overboard. The body will build to symmetry if you let it.

Can you share with us some of the experiences you've had with utilizing some other breathing techniques where you have maybe changed or offset some chemicals in your mind or in your brain, rather, and have had just some interesting experiences. The one you were telling, I think, on Joe Rogan's show where he said somebody turned into a wolf. That gives us an idea of how impactful breathing can really be and what it can do for us. So you mind sharing some of that with us? Yeah, my day job gets pretty, pretty weird sometimes. There's various breathing techniques and practices. And in my book, instead of

detailing 400 of them, like you pick up a book in pranayama and there's like 400 practices. They all have these crazy names. Like, where do I begin? I kind of put them in these buckets, right? First, there's this healthy breathing that everyone should do. It doesn't matter if you're an asthmatic

or an ultramarathon or a weightlifter or have anxiety, whatever. We're all gonna benefit from breathing through the nose, becoming aware of your breathing, breathing slowly, breathing in a paced rhythmic way. Everyone will benefit from that. Then from there, you can get a little more specific. So these more intense breathing practices like holotropic breathwork was the one I mentioned on Rogan's show. There's also mentioned with on Rogan show. There's also Sudarshan Kriya. There's also Wim Hof method. I'm sure you guys are familiar with that.

So I put these all kind of in the same bucket because they're all doing the same thing. If you look at the science and the studies of the benefits of these people are being impacted in the same way. So what these practices do is they purposely stress your body out. So they allow you to like this pressure release valve to get all your stress out in this very controlled space. And then for the rest of the day, you can chill out and actually act normally and not unconsciously like grind your teeth or hold your shoulders up really high or have high blood pressure and have your heart racing all the time. It just blows that out. I'm a huge fan of these because the science, Sudarshan Kriya, there's 100 independent studies,

some of which were done at Harvard, like legit institutions showing it's so effective for anxiety and panic and all of that. So the one I mentioned on Rogan, again, I'll go back to holotropic breathwork. This is one that people get huge benefits from it. We know anecdotally that people have really enjoyed this and used it for mental health issues. But scientifically, there isn't a lot of research behind it. And what it is, is you sit in a room with about 20 other hippies. They're not all hippies, mostly hippies. And they blast music and you breathe as hard as you can for three hours, for three hours,

as hard as you can. So obviously, something's going to happen to your mind and body during this. And some people have told me before that you do this and it hyper oxygenates your brain so you can reach different planes. All of that is complete crap. What it does is it didn't, it denies oxygen to your brain because it inhibits circulation. When we over-breathe, you get light in your head, right? Maybe your fingers go numb. That's from a decrease of circulation.

Imagine doing that for three hours. A whole bunch of weird shit's going to happen. And it happened with me. I was drifting off into the astral universe. And some people really had some severe freak outs, which was, you know, it made that whole thing that happened on Capitol Hill look, look pretty mellow compared to what was happening, you know, in the holotropic breathwork session. You know, you mentioned something at the beginning of the podcast when Andrew asked about breathing in through the nose and out through your mouth. And you said that like the exhale doesn't really matter.

I think you mentioned something like that. But what I'm curious about real quick is as far as when you see all these different breathing techniques, for example, like Wim Hof, right? We were talking about that earlier. And he says, breathe whatever way you want to breathe. Even if it's through your asshole, right? He mentions it doesn't matter, but if you're someone who is now trying to focus on being a better individual who breathes through their nose, right. In and out through their nose. Um, and you're doing

a technique like Wim Hof or you're doing anything else like this, would it still be as effective if you were trying to focus on only using your nose or with those types of breathing techniques where you're trying to exhale really forcefully and fast, should you be using your mouth with those techniques? Great question. I've heard this a few times and actually just revised a section in the book to make this even more clear. So when I was saying exhaling through the mouth, it doesn't matter as much. So the most important thing is to be inhaling through your nose. Having said that, exhaling through your nose will have many more benefits than exhaling through your mouth, but it doesn't matter as much. So if you're out jogging and your nose is getting really

stuffed up and you're getting sweaty and you're like, I cannot inhale and exhale through my mouth. You can exhale through your mouth with pursed lips or in-jive breathing, a slight constriction in your throat. It'll sound like that because you don't want that air to exit so quickly. You want it to hang around for a little longer so you can extract more oxygen. We extract oxygen on the exhale as well, not just on the inhale. So to be clear, inhale and exhale through your nose as often as you can. Now, when you're doing an exercise like Wim Hof, Sudarshan Kriya, holotropic breathwork, whatever, I don't care how you're breathing. Wim doesn't care how

you're breathing. Yogis don't care how you're breathing. This is an exercise, right? So how you're doing it for this exercise for 20 minutes, go for it, whatever relaxes you. It's like you can imagine these exercises like going to the gym you're not going to go to the gym for 24 hours a day right that's going to destroy your body you go to the gym for half an hour or an hour and it's there's going to be huge benefits to to doing that so whim just wants people to breathe to get in touch with their breathing um i've talked with him several times he He's an amazing dude. He's done more to bring breathing awareness to people than I think anyone else in the modern age.

And, you know, the rest of the time when he's not doing Wim Hof method, the only times we see him is up on stage. Breathe, motherfucker, you know, but the rest of the time he's got his mouth closed. He's breathing through his nose and he's humming and he's breathing so slowly and in such a controlled way. We just don't see that side of him because that's the boring side. We see that the fantastic superstar whim when he's sitting in an ice bath for two hours, when he's really got to focus on his on his breathing. I was going to say earlier you had mentioned those those tongue exercises um and i know this might be a huge shocker but i'm actually not as big as mark and in sema i'm a little bit skinnier um but i i am like 99 sure i have sleep apnea um

my wife will push me over even though i have mouth tape on cause I'm snoring with my mouth closed. Um, but for us, like more slender guys, like I think there's that term a nerd neck, you know, we kind of are trying to get close to the computer screen. Um, is there anything in addition that, um, you know, skinnier guys can practice on to help with their, uh, breathing techniques? Sure. Um, so I'll bring on my guest here. He's been waiting very patiently. So sleep apnea can occur in various areas of the airway, right? Nasal pharynx, oral pharynx, a little further down. Most of it occurs around here, right? The oral pharynx. So it really

depends what your problem is or where you're having that resistance. And again, I can't offer a blanket prescription for everyone. Sleep tape works for a lot of people. Sometimes it doesn't work for them. What you can do are these oral pharyngeal exercises. I know I mentioned that. Also, inspiratory muscle training can significantly decrease snoring and sleep apnea. And what this is, you can buy these things on Amazon. They're 20 bucks. It's a resistance trainer. You put it in your mouth and you...

It's fitness for your lungs. And they've shown in various studies over like 30 years, this has a huge effect on, it can have a huge effect on performance as well, because it helps grow larger lungs, more, more fit lungs. And there's a reason why there was a study put out in Lancet journal where they found playing the didgeridoo. This is like this 40,000 year old instrument. Annoying as hell.

If anyone, you know, if you ever had a roommate with one of those things, you want to just fricking kill them. But this is so effective for airway health because it takes a ton of pressure to play this thing. You're just, you know, and it helps to tone that airway. So I would, for you, I'm not saying this is, this is absolutely going to work, but use the tape for one inspiratory muscle training, raise the head of the bed about six inches. This is called incline bed therapy and try sleeping on your side. And if you could record this with

a pulse ox, I'd love to see what happens with you because of a pulse oximeter. A lot of people are doing this. They're sending me these reports and these people who are suffering from severe sleep apnea are now down to zero. Again, I'm not guaranteeing anything for anyone. This stuff is free and you're going to benefit from it anyway. So why not give it a go? Yeah, absolutely. I'll try.

I know for sure if I'm sleeping on my back, that's like guaranteed. I'm going to, you know, tilt back and end up snoring my face off. But then if I roll over to a side, if I almost go like three quarters to where my face is like closer, like aim towards the pillow, that's when I can kind of minimize it. it but you know yeah i'll look into that uh that breathing uh device me and it seemed like we both like our eyes lit up like performance like all right let's you know kill two birds with one stone what exactly was the name of that device again like on amazon inspiratory muscle training there's about 40 different devices there's the you know 15 chinese one that's going to fall apart after a week and then there's the more fancy versions i got one that's going to fall apart after a week. And then there's the more fancy versions. I got one that's like 30 bucks. It's pretty sturdy.

There's also something called Power Breathe, which is like 500 bucks, but it has a little monitor on it to show the adjustments for you. That's cool. If people get off on that kind of stuff, I found that the manual thing works just as well, but whatever works for folks. And one thing I want to mention as well is it's hard for people

when they've grown accustomed to sleeping on their backs. It's hard to sleep on the side, but what can be a benefit is they used to do this like in the 50s. They would tape a little ping pong ball or a sock to the back. And after a couple of weeks, you just don't want to sleep on your back that way. You're just like, oh, this isn't comfortable. You just learn to sleep on your side. And this can really have a huge impact on your sleep quality because you're able to sleep without that obstruction. And I can't tell you how damaging. You don't even need to be suffering from snoring and sleep apnea. Any obstruction in the airway is going to stress your body out and have downstream effects on your health.

I find this pretty interesting how you started to study breathing. But then also what we're talking about a lot of right here is not breathing, you know, ending up with like some oxygen debt, especially to get you to some of those other places that you were talking about in the brain. What can oxygen debt do for us in terms of athletes, like just becoming more conditioned to having less oxygen, I guess, or being more conditioned in our training to be able to breathe in and out of the nose. And then maybe in times of extreme circumstance, breathe whatever way we have to.

So for the same reason why a lot of athletes go to altitude to train at altitude and build more blood, you don't have to go to altitude to get a lot of these benefits. What you have to do is to train yourself. I'm not saying this is fun. I try to do it for a while, and it's pretty heavy duty. But you have to train yourself to breathe less when you're working out. And you have to do this in a controlled way. So don't just try to go out and hold your breath, lifting weights or whatever. It's going to be a disaster. But if you do it with a breathing coach who really knows what they're doing, you can create more EPO, which creates more red blood cells, which allows you to have more fuel. You can carry more oxygen. I mean, Lance Armstrong got busted for shooting up EPO.

That's what he got. He got, you know, busted for shooting up his own blood, you know, so he could carry more oxygen. We can create these similar adaptations at sea level through something called hypoventilation training. And mark my words, in about five years, this stuff is going to be huge. It was huge about 50 years ago. The Russians were into it. It was huge in the 70s. The US swim team was into it and they won more golds, more medals than anyone else at the 76 Montreal Olympics. This is what they were doing. And this stuff is just coming out right now. They've been studying it in France. And not only is it good for performance to build red blood cells, it increases your anaerobic threshold. Another thing, it allows you to pull more energy from lactic acid in anaerobic states. And it conditions you to be able to push harder using less energy.

So I think the real benefit here is it trains you to do more with less breath so that when you're breathing normally, your body is accustomed to this and can push even harder, can go even faster. So the science on this is clear, not only for athletic performance, but they found you're able to lose a lot more weight with this training. It's also good for cardiac, respiratory system health. I mean, on and on. I included something like 10 studies in the back of the book. There's hundreds more beyond that. What about practicing something along those lines with something that's real moderate or modest exercise, something like walking? Like, could we potentially incorporate some of this stuff with something like walking? Like maybe every,

maybe we try to walk 20 steps holding our breath or something like that. Have you found anything like that to be beneficial to be able to train? I guess kind of why you're doing something that it's less intense. Absolutely. So coaches in the fifties, and I've talked to a few people. It's cool. The book has come out and now I've heard from these people out of the woodwork, but they used to train track athletes.

They would put a cup of water in their mouths, have them run around the track. They'd have to come back and spit the water in the cup. It had to be the same amount of water to condition them to breathe through the nose. And when you're breathing through the nose, you are going to be breathing less. This is your best monitor for how to breathe, right? So just breathing through the nose, that's probably 80% of the game. But beyond that, if you want to push that a little harder, people have also been doing this for decades and decades, is you could call it a hypoventilation walking, or they have all these Buteyko training

or whatever, so many different names. But you test yourself to see how many steps you can walk while holding your breath on an exhale. And don't do this like in a public place. They say because you can get dizzy and like fall over. So I do it up in the park. I'll just exhale and walk 30 steps and then breathe again. And you'll be able to determine when you start getting really uncomfortable. You don't have to always push it to that level of extreme. I'm lightheaded. You can just do this extending your exhales when you're jogging. Inhale to a count of three, exhale to six when you're jogging. At the beginning, this is going to be uncomfortable. You're going to feel this need to breathe. That need to breathe is not dictated by a lack of oxygen, but an increase of CO2, which has so many benefits. So that's a long

way of saying there's various ways to do this. Extending the exhale, counting your steps is a great one. And just learning how to breathe less when you're working out. What I've found is helpful. I have another pulse oximeter that just fits on my wrist, but you have one of these things as well. You can see when you're breathing less, you feel like, oh, there's no way I'm getting enough oxygen. That is rarely, if ever, the case. Your oxygen levels are fine.

It's just your CO2 that's going up. And that's another reason why you start to feel warm. You start to feel this heat throughout your body. That's circulation. That's exactly what you want. What should the pulse oximeter read? You were mentioning with Andrew with sleep, what kind of numbers should you be looking at? Cause those are very inexpensive too, and very easy to order off of Amazon. I think they're like 10 bucks or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So this one's pretty, pretty clunky. You wouldn't want to wear this going to sleep. I mean, that would be a big

pain in the butt, but they have some that, that are literally just a ring. It's just like the aura ring. Um, and it's recording your, your oxygen level finger, right? They just kind of pinch your finger. Those work well too. Yeah. There's some, I found, I tried one of those. I tried going to sleep like this. I hated it. It felt like there was some i found i tried one of those i tried going to sleep like this i hated it it felt like there was some snake you know you start to fall asleep and then you're like oh there's a snake like i prefer the uh the uh ring version of it which you you don't even notice it and so this is good to work out with as as because you don't notice it. So your oxygen levels shouldn't be dropping below like 94%. Okay.

Anything below that is you're not breathing enough. It's telling you that you've got a problem with your sleep. Like when you're sleeping, you're not breathing correctly if it's dropping below 94%. Yeah. Yeah. With sleep apnea, they're basically they want to see dips below 90 percent. But but to me, 93, 94, there there's an issue there. And what you find when you're wearing these is they give you a chart when you wake up in the morning and you can see these dips where people with severe sleep apnea, they'll go down to like 80 or 70 percent.

People with severe sleep apnea, they'll go down to like 80 or 70 percent, these huge dips. And then they'll go. I mean, imagine if you were doing that when you were awake for eight hours, how you would feel. You'd feel terrible because this is not an efficient way of getting oxygen. So I find these devices are fascinating. The idea that, you know, these things would have cost 100 grand 10 years ago. Now you can buy them for 300 bucks and you can see your breathing health throughout the day. I just think is amazing. Just curious for the ones that are rings.

Do you have any brands that you know are this is a pretty good one that you could suggest to us? Yeah, I used one called the o2 vibe which i heard was discontinued um it looked like some atari 2600 game i mean the ux was not so hot led screen which i kind of liked about it it looked like something from like 1978 like logan's run um but they discontinued that and now it's just a ring and it's called like something unimaginative like the o2 ring it's made by body metrics and i can vouch for this brand this isn't like some crappy brown where they don't research this these guys have a medical background and they are precise because a lot of pulse oxes if it's 10 bucks and it's coming from china

not all these things are fda approved but but body metrics does does the work and i can definitely say that their their products uh are very accurate we've compared them with the hundred thousand model um items down at stanford and they were locked in i'm very curious about this now uh you know everyone's wearing masks we have to outside or in stores and i always get really weird looks and uh my lady says you're embarrassing me because i take my mask and i put it underneath my nose because i want to be able to breathe i find that when i put that mask over my face breathing through my nose because I want to be able to breathe. I find that when I put that mask over my face, breathing through my nose is hard. It gets uncomfortable. I don't like it.

Now, I'm curious, does the nose does have like things in it that help capture or block you from getting sicknesses or viruses, right? That and also for all of our listeners, do you suggest that if they wear masks, they should just wear it around their mouth, but not their nose? I don't want to get too deep into mask politics. That's not my jam, but I will offer some data and some science here. A lot of people wearing masks, they say, there's no way I'm getting enough oxygen here. I can't wear this thing. I'm going crazy

i need to breathe i need oxygen oxygen is not the issue i've seen various studies they've looked at i mean surgeons wear these things for eight hours a day every single day you think they're not getting enough oxygen when they're doing neurosurgery you know on capillaries in the brain of course they are. So the studies have looked at various mass from the four ply mass to the surgical mass. Oxygen is not the issue. What is happening here is you are getting a little more CO2 and CO2 is the trigger to breathe. So especially with people who have panic or anxiety problems, when they feel they're being denied a breath, they completely freak out because that reminds them of having an attack.

Right. What happens when you have an asthma or anxiety attack? So so it isn't. So we'll start with that, with with a mass situation, not an oxygen problem. And that little boost of co2 can actually have a lot of benefits now we'll get to the nose here you're 100 right let's bring bring my friend back on here if you you look at the nose there are all of these structures here right and all of these structures are coated with cilia these little hairs and and mucus and all of these other things that allow you to filter out pathogens and bacteria and pollution and viruses. So not only that, but your nose will release six times more nitric oxide than breathing through your mouth. And nitric oxide, I'm sure you guys are familiar

with all the benefits of nitric oxide. But one of the other benefits of it is it interacts directly with viruses. It kills viruses. So I don't want to say, you know, you're right and your lady's wrong. I'm definitely not going to get into that. But you can mention to her that you are able to, But you can mention to her that you are able to, it looks like you're able to decrease a viral load and fight off more pathogens breathing through the nose. We know that. Is that going to stop you from getting COVID or from getting colds? No. Will it reduce that viral load?

Probably. And this is what Dr. Louis Ignaro, who won the Nobel Prize in the 90s, has said. You need, especially now, breathe through your nose. And when yous, has said you need to especially now breathe through your nose. And when you're wearing a mask, you have to be breathing through your nose, too. You can't just default to mouth breathing. Have you kind of always been this way? Like, have you always been kind of poking around and digging around for answers? I've heard that you have a car that runs off of like cooking oil and stuff. Are you just a very curious person?

Are you kind of searching around for some maybe unconventional answers and things like that? You've always been into these kinds of things. Well, I was a respectable citizen of society for too many years. I had a job where I was like wearing a tie and, you know, had a staff. I was a copy editor and was running the writing shop. And, and I've, I broke away from that to become a freelance writer way late in life. Don't do this to anyone. It's a, it's a complete pain in the butt. In my thirties is when I said, I don't want to do this. I want to pursue magazine writing and book writing. And it was super hard to go from having a steady income to basically having no income and not

knowing where your next check was coming. But at the end of that, the reason why I did it, and here's the answer to your question, is every day I'm able to wake up and be curious about stuff. And I've always been that way, but I've never had a job that allowed me to be curious. Most jobs don't want you to be curious, right? You start asking questions at most jobs, you're a pain in the ass. But I'm in a profession where that's what I'm supposed to do. And so once I start sniffing around and sense that there's a deeper story to something, I become completely obsessed with it. So book writing is not a clocking on for six hours, clocking off, and now I'm going to watch, you know, Tiger King or whatever. All I do is read about it all night. I work on it all day, but it doesn't feel like work because one thing

leads to another leads to another. And it's just, you're on this journey of digging up all of these clues to try to find this story. You know, I can tell you guys have a lot of that as well from, from your questions where you're just like, wait, what, why did our ancestors have straight teeth? Why are we all screwed up? What caused that? And how can we stop that from happening? And you see where this goes. It's just a domino effect. And it makes life interesting to me.

And I absolutely love what I do because I'm able to ask these questions. And now I'm able to pick up the phone and talk to the leaders in the field and get the real data, get the real answers and provide it for other people, which is such a privilege. You mentioned that you're middle-aged now, and you mentioned earlier that you were 30 by the time you bounced out of that job. It must've been a rough time period in between that to make it to where, to where you're at. Where, where did some of this start when you started writing? Like, did you start writing freelance and were you like writing for free? Like how'd you pick up gigs and jobs like to get your name known? And what was your first book?

Yeah. Um, so I, uh, I was always writing, not always, but I discovered writing magazine articles as a way to sort of nourish, nourish my brain and nourish my soul. So when I got home from work, I would work on these articles on weekends. I would work on them. I thought what a cool opportunity to, it was an excuse to call random people up and to go into their worlds and learn about their worlds and come back out and to write about it. I never, ever thought this would be my full-time job. Never. Because the money is terrible. It's so precarious. Magazine stories get cut. Editors change. But finally, I got to the point where I had enough freelance work that I thought this would be the time, if ever I was going to make my break. And already I was,

I was getting pretty late in the game. I had to do it. I had to go for it. And of course, what happened right when I did that is all of my freelance writing totally disappeared. And I was like, Oh God, what, what did I do? But, but I, I kept plugging away at it. So during this time, God, the story's getting long. I'll try to speed it up here. Take your time with it. I think we talk a lot about, you know, switching, switching careers and different things like that and trying to pursue things that keep you excited so that you can do it for a long time. And eventually what we try to share with people is eventually you'll probably be really successful at it because it's something that you're highly interested in. It looks like it's working out for you. Yeah. And that's, that's the thing.

You know, a lot of people say, and I think this is bad advice. When you hear parents saying to kids, you can be anything that you want. You can be an astronaut. You can be a president. You, you know, you can be a rock star. Not true. You have to find the thing that you're, you're naturally gifted in and then go into that all the way. You know, how much would I love to play professional basketball? How much would I love to be in the warriors, the great Golden State Warriors? It's never, ever going to happen. So this idea that you can do whatever you want, as long as you work hard, garbage, you can do a lot of things, but you have to have the passion and you have to stick with it and you have to be naturally gifted at that thing to begin with.

I know this is not the message a lot of people want to hear, but you see people grinding away at something where they're just not that good, whether it's a musician or whether it's a sports person. They're never quite going to make it because that's not their their thing that they're naturally gifted at. So I thought, you know, I had been writing professionally, writing advertisements, writing catalog copy, writing all this other crap. So I knew how to write okay, but I just never thought that I'd be able to make it in, you know, actually doing this for a living. So during this time, my uncle was this like old school playboy in Hollywood who

had one of those little square houses with the little stilts, you know, in the Hollywood Hills. And he passed away and I was going through all of his stuff. And, you know, he was like a 60s, 70s, had an orange Corvette and pantsuits and all that crap. And I found a bunch of his notes on like meditation and all this weird hippie stuff. So the reason I'm mentioning this is I took all that stuff and brought it home. And a friend who was in the book business at Chronicle Books saw it and was like, you should do like a little paperback version where you take all of these different methods, like one on each page and do a little weird coffee table, like humor book about it. And I had zero money at this time. I was like, that sounds good. Well, will you buy it?

And she's like, yeah, yeah, we'll, we'll give you an advance. So I put that book together. It's a humor science book. The science is real, but you know but it's just sort of a silly thing. And after that, I got sort of a taste. I was like, oh, writing books is really the way to go. Magazine articles, they come out, they're around for two weeks, they're forgotten about. But books, you can focus years on one subject and really understand it. And they have a really long life. I mean, my first real book, nonfiction book, Deep Freediving Renegade Science and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves, that was put out about six and a half years ago. Still getting letters about it. It's still being published in other countries. So it just has this long life. and there's something nicer to just be able to calmly focus on one thing for a few years at a time i i love it i can't wait to go back into that cocoon and and get back to work do you have to get all weird with your writing do you need to go to like a cabin and be by yourself and like be isolated for like a year and the beard starts getting really gnarly and the hair starts going crazy i would love to say that cliche isn't true um but i i have to be honest with you

we got a little cabin up up in amador in a population uh hundred people lived in this little town it's called volcano about two hours um away from Francisco. And, you know, I always called complete BS on people who did that. I was like, oh, this is so precious that you have to go to your little cabin, your little quill pen, and you have your little writing sweater on your slippers. And I didn't go that far, but there's something about having extremely sketchy internet about being completely isolated that you're able to go very deep within, you know, uh, I was getting cabin fever a lot up there and I wasn't up there full time. I'd go up there for like a seven day stint and then come back and be normal again and go up there. But, uh, the poor people at this Starbucks, which was about 20 minutes away,

had to see me every day, sit in the same corner, you know, with earplugs in my ears and just grinding away. So whenever the pandemic lightens up, I need to go back there and give them a book and say, thanks for letting me sit here, you know, sipping one espresso for four hours every day. I recently just got a VR headset and it's freaking incredible. And once I wrap my head around how much, like, I just, I can't even explain it.

So when I do, I will talk about it a lot on this podcast. But actually one of your, the chapters in Deep turned into a VR film. How did that come to be? And was it like a pain in the ass or how was that whole experience? Yeah, wow. This is the first time i've ever been asked about this any excuse i can talk about vr stuff i'm gonna just jump on it right now but this is really cool because i did see a little trailer of it and i just like i can't wait i i'm so new to it i

can't figure out how i'm even gonna watch it but I will do it tonight because I'm excited for it. It's out for free on the New York Times website. It's out for free on a site called Within. So you can check that out. So that book Deep was looking at the human connection to the human body from the very surface of the ocean to the very bottom of the deepest sea. So not only with free diving, but with magnetoreception, this like how to sharks and dolphins and whales make their way around the planet

from one beach to the other and return again. They do so because they have these little magnetoreceptive cells in their heads, which are able to home in on the earth's magnetic field i mean this is like it sounds so fake right i mean it's unbelievable the stuff animals humans have the same thing this is not some marvel comics bullshit this is studied at caltech so that's what this book was looking each chapter um Um, and, and how do like dolphins and whales see in a completely black ocean, they see by sending out these clicks and waiting for the echo of those clicks to come back. Something called echolocation humans can do that as well.

And two of my good friends, Brian, you can check, check out daniel kish this guy completely blind he's riding his bike through la clicking and he can see with his clicks so have him on this guy's gonna blow your mind so anyway but back to the the question here about vr so So when once Deep came out, I was given the opportunity to do a short VR thing with with the New York Times to try to bring people into the water to experience freediving, because most of us when when we hear about freediving, we think of like this daredevil stuff where people are coming out with blood all over their face and passed out. And that's not the free diving that I experienced and that the vast majority of people around the world experience. This is the most deep, soulful underwater meditation you can have

because you can't free dive if you're anxious. If you're stressed out, you can only do it by controlling your breath, controlling your heart rate and allowing your body just to be enveloped in the ocean. And it's the most beautiful, calming thing. And it's the one thing I miss most about this stupid pandemic is I can't get out in the water and do this. But we were able to take VR cameras and allow people to go into this silent world where you're free diving, zero gravity. You can go in any direction you want. And when you're silent like this, other sea life doesn't look at you as a threat. They look at you as part of the natural environment. So sharks come up to you, dolphins come up to you, whales come up to you, and they start interacting.

Whales will send clicks, their communication clicks. Dolphins will send communication clicks because they think you're another marine mammal. And it's just the most, I won't get too new agey here, but it's the most sort of deeply touching and affecting thing I've ever done in my life. And so we were able to bring VR cameras down and share these experiences with people. Some people really dug it. Other people had to immediately take the headset off because the idea of being underwater 100 feet deep without a scuba tank freaked them out so completely. And the VR is so realistic that they couldn't deal with it. But hopefully that won't be your, your experience. I'd be curious to,

to know what you think about it. Yeah, no, I'll reach out. I'll let you know what I think, and then I'll bring in my headset. So Mark and Enzima can check it out too. Awesome.

Yeah. How are you able to hold your breath for so long? That seems to be, you know, like a mystery to a lot of people who have tried to hold their breath. Just as a kid, you try to hold your breath against your buddy, or you try to swim X amount of length in a

pool holding your breath. And, you know, a lot of us are lucky if we make it 15 seconds, 30 seconds, you get to a panic and you're like, I need to breathe again. How do you train that? Breath holding is not a physical thing. It's a mental thing. So you have to train the mind. Anyone in reasonable health

can hold their breath easily within about an hour of instruction, two and a half minutes, three minutes. I've seen four minutes from zero breath hold experience before to four minutes within about an hour. So you guys are fit guys. You understand how your bodies work. You guys could probably hold your breath for three minutes, four, four minutes within about an hour. It's about learning how to accept the feeling, um, and acknowledging that that feeling of that need to breathe is not dictated by oxygen. There's plenty of oxygen. It's that CO2 that's coming up and it's control using your mind to control your heart rate. So the slower your heart is beating, the less oxygen you're going to be consuming, right?

So you have to calm yourself completely. If you look at yogis or other meditators, some of these people, when they really enter into the zone, are breathing about two times a minute. So they're barely breathing at all. And once you get into that state, you feel like you can hold your breath forever because you're allowing your mind to truly connect with your body and all of its functions. So once you enable yourself to do that and land, then you can try it out in the water. And I want to be clear, I'm not telling anyone to go into your pool right now and hold your breath as long as you can. That's a recipe for freaking disaster. You need to do this in a very careful and controlled way. And if you do it with a proper

instructor, this stuff will blow your mind. I mean, I never thought I would be able to float around in zero Gs. I don't have enough money to go into space or whatever, but you can do this in the ocean. And, and to me, it's a lot more enriching than it would be in space because you're surrounded by other sea life that, that accepts you as, as one of them and comes around and swirls around you. It's just the coolest thing I've ever done. As far as that breath holding, I was curious because when you would like when people do Wim Hof, um, after you do it, there's a period where you hold your breath for as long as you can. And as you're doing it more, you'll start to be able to hold your breath for

two minutes and you'll notice you'll be able to hold your breath for three minutes. But in your case, is this like without doing those exercises, you could just sit there and then hold your breath for that amount of time? So the first part of the exercises is to really engage your full lung capacity. So a lot of us are engaging maybe 30, 40 percent, fit people, maybe a teeny bit more than that, but not much. So the first exercises are just traditional yoga exercises. The first exercises are just traditional yoga exercises. You know, stretch like this. And I'm going to fully engage this side, right? I'm going to fully engage this lung.

And then I'm going to engage this lung. And then I'm going to loosen up this rib cage. So the lungs, if we didn't have this rib cage here, they could inflate and be enormous. So it's about making this rib cage flexible. And after you do that, or while you're doing that, you condition your mind to slow everything down and to accept that what is happening, what you are doing is completely natural. There's a reason why we're built with all of these, They're called mammalian dive reflexes. So the moment you enter into water, your heart rate goes down 20%. Blood starts rushing from your extremities into your core, and you start to become a

marine mammal. And the deeper you go, the more triggers click on. Your spleen releases more oxygenated blood. So this is exactly what allows seals and dolphins and whales to dive hundreds or thousands of feet. Humans have these same abilities and it's just by becoming acclimated to how they feel and turning them on that you're able to hold your breath for so long. And let me tell you, when you start feeling your spleen releasing oxygenated blood and your heart lowering when you're in the water, you start feeling like a different animal. And it's such a complete trip.

But this is how we evolved. It's just so few of us are in touch with this right now because we don't need to be. We don't need to dive to get food anymore. We can go to freaking Long John Silvers to get caught. We don't have to hunt or do anything. And that's part of the problem. What's going on with this car that runs on your cooking oil over there? Man, we're going from dolphin echolocation. I love it. I love it. So this is another privilege and pleasure when you write about stuff here. As I mentioned before, you're able to go into these different worlds and understand a different viewpoint from your own and to look at life differently. completely freaked out about. Took me a while to write this thing. I heard about these hippies that were going to the back of fast food restaurants and taking all of their used cooking oil and then putting it in their cars. And, you know, all of these hippies were also

buying up these old 70s Mercedes, you know, which were usually associated with really snotty, rich people. I know, you know, the 300 series, 300 D's, there was millions of these things made. And I'm in San Francisco. So I'm seeing, you know, this dude with a braided beard cruising around in this really sick Mercedes. And I'm just like, what is what is going on here? You should be in a VW bus, not in a Mercedes, but, but I turned out that they were able to convert these Mercedes to run on vegetable oil. And so I contacted them. I said, Hey, I want to write a story about, about you guys. And they said, cool, come along. And they, you know, they took me along, um, stealing, uh, not really stealing because it's

just a waste product. Uh, the use of vegetable oil, the back of rest of skanky restaurants, and they pump that in, they'd filter it. And you do these slight conversions to your car. It doesn't take much because these old Mercedes that the motors are just like, they're built like fricking tanks. And so they they can run on trash. And that's what use vegetable oil is. And so after I wrote about these guys, I actually found that the first diesel motors invented by Rudolph Diesel were designed to run on peanut oil. That's what they were never designed to run on fuel. peanut oil. That's what they were never designed to run on fuel. And of course, the petrol companies said, oh, we can't have people using free, free gas. We need to make these run on diesel.

But you can still convert these things. You can still put peanut oil in a VW TDI and especially in a Mercedes because the motors are so strong. So after I wrote about that, I said, shit, I need to get one of these cars. And at that time, this was before a lot of people were hip to this. And people were selling them for like 2000 bucks for this gorgeous leather interior Mercedes diesel because no one wanted these things. And I converted the car and ran it on vegetable oil and the whole setup in my garage. And the cool thing was I was picking up my vegetable oil from an Indian food restaurant. So whoever was behind me just got this blast of curry the whole time.

That's the side benefit from it. Is there... It doesn't take any gasoline at all. Just runs off that. So the way I converted that car is I had a two tank system. Now we're really getting into the specifics here, because when it gets cold, vegetable oil can congeal very easily. So what you want to do is to have a tank in the back of your trunk and also use the original gas tank and have diesel or biodiesel in that. So at the end of driving this, you just want to flush out the motor. It's kind of like, you know, if a bunch of fat and other crap gets stuck in your arteries, it's going to, it's going to build up pressure and it's going to make it harder. The same thing can happen in

your fuel lines. So as long as you flush it out with biodiesel or diesel, you're going to be fine. But for years and years, you know, I was driving around and barely spending anything on gas. And it's just, it's something empowering to think you're able to drive and you're not having to pay X on, you know, X amount of dollars per day. You're just completely moving around the system with the technology that's been around for a hundred years, but we've just forgotten about it. Is this something that, cause I mean, honestly, this is like the first time I've really heard of this, but you know, people are thinking the future is going to be going electric.

That's what the trend seems to be. But other than gas, is this something that for a mass population could be better than gas? Well, not if the oil companies are going to have their way and they pretty much had their way. So about 10 years ago, biodiesel was this huge thing. It still is pretty, pretty big. A lot of public buses run on biodiesel. People are still running on biodiesel. But in my view, biodiesel is a great way of converting old cars to run on a much more efficient fuel, much more responsible fuel.

But if you're going to drive in a new car, I think electric is the way to go, especially if you can do electric with solar. way to go, especially if you can do electric with solar. I mean, how empowering would that be? You're off the grid. Like no one is controlling how you're driving or what you're paying for. And I think that combination, if you're able to get solar on your house and charge your car up, that's the way to go. When I wrote this story, it was damn about 10 years ago. And this was really before electric cars were coming out. A few Priuses were out, but that's it. So another thing that people should consider, the real eco thing to do is to take older stuff and convert them to be cleaner. A lot of people think, oh, I need to buy a new car, need to buy a new washer, need to buy a new this or that. But the resources it takes to create something new,

especially a car, just a new car is like two years worth of gas and CO2, right? So I'm much more interested, if we're talking about electric cars, you've tapped into another hobby of mine, and just be careful now, because I'm just going to blather about this as much as I can. The most efficient thing to do, and this is something I hope to do in the next couple of years, is to take an old car and convert it to electric. And there's a few kits coming out right now. I want to take a Mercedes, my Mercedes that's running off of veg oil, and put an old Tesla motor and Tesla battery in that to have this old car that goes to zero to 60

in about two hours to have that thing now kicking ass all over the place, I think would be, would be really fun. So that's something I was just talking to my wife about last night. She was just rolling her eyes. Why, why are you making this difficult? Just buy a Prius. I said, you making this difficult just by a pre-essence no let's get an old weird car and convert it to electric wow i guess i i do want to go back to the breathing thing for a minute um but i was really curious because in your book you had a lot of crazy breathing feats um that were done by other people but what would you say maybe it's something that hasn't been in the book, or maybe it's something that you, you found later afterwards, what are a few or, or one of the, just the wildest things that you've seen somebody be able to accomplish, um, that, and from an individual that's just focused on breathing for a long time, what are some, what, what is like the craziest or some of the

craziest things you've seen that we would think are is impossible. The most inspiring stories for me wasn't just the science and wasn't the data. It's talking to these individuals who are chronically sick for so long, for decades. They were on a cocktail of different drugs. They went and saw 12 different people, told them 12 different things. They were told that whatever they had was incurable and just to deal with it, to find these people who are able to heal themselves in a measured way to the point where they no longer suffer from any of the symptoms of these diseases they had before just blew my mind. Like the human body's capacity to heal itself is incredible and is completely underutilized. We think we're leaning on so many of these modern inventions, which are amazing, man. I'm a big fan of antibiotics and vaccines

and Western medicine. And if I get in a car crash, the last thing I want is to go to acupuncture or to breathe. I want to go to the hospital and have someone fix me up like big time. or to breathe. I want to go to the hospital and have someone fix me up like big time. But at the same time for these chronic problems, these problems that are mostly tied to inflammation, we've done a really bad job of treating the core problem. And I think one of the most inspiring stories I heard from this incredible dude, his name is Maurice Debar. He was like the Wim Hof before Wim Hof. So in the 30s, he was a kid. He was extremely sick, chronic lung problems. He was in the hospital for years. They were going in to remove his lungs, to actually clip them out.

And a missionary came by his hospital bed and said, hey, I've heard about this thing. It's called yoga. And there's these things where you can breathe and it can really help bolster your immune function and can help restore you. I've seen these people do it up in the Himalayas. And he started breathing and he said, no, I don't want the surgery.

He not only breathed himself back to perfect health, but he developed this superhuman ability to sit in the snow for hours at a time, not get frostbite or hypothermia. In his 70s, he went on a bicycling trip alone in the Himalayas at elevations of like 18,000 feet. He's 92 now. And this guy's still alive. He's basically left for dead when he was a kid. And he's taught thousands and thousands of people this, but he hates publicity, right? So he's just working in his own little corner to help change people's lives for breathing. So it's those personal stories and hearing from these people's

experiences of how they've been able to overcome, quote unquote, impossible things by tuning into their body. And I want to be clear that I'm not saying breathing is going to do everything for everyone, but it is as important as what we eat and how much we exercise easily. And so it should really be considered alongside of those things whenever we're talking about health or lifespan. Appreciate your time today. You've been very kind and generous with it. Where can people get your book?

And do you have a new book on the horizon? My website is Mr. James Nestor dot com. You can go there. I put my publisher allowed me to put all of the scientific references for free on the website because I know this crap sounds unbelievable, but you can see for yourself. There's also x-rays up there and videos and interviews with professors at Stanford and more all on the website. I'm trying to get better at this thing called Instagram, which for old guys has been a bit of a challenge, but my handle is Mr. James Nestor. And I do have another book idea. I've had zero time to research it. It's on the horizon and I can't wait to get back out into the field whenever this pandemic thing lightens up and to go speak with some freaks and get back in the labs and measuring stuff. Awesome. Thanks again for your time. Appreciate it. Have a great rest of your day.

Thank you. Thanks, you guys. Really really appreciate it take care you too and he really gave us a lot of uh like tangible stuff to do and even things to like purchase you know like uh yeah a lot of different products like the pulse oximeter thing like he did mention like they might not be as accurate if you have some of the but but mine matches up with my uh apple watch you know you have a ring? No, I just have a little thing that clips on your finger. And it was 15 bucks from Amazon. And the heart rate is dead on with the Apple Watch.

So, I mean, there's at least some accuracy to it. But I've never really heard a lot of the stuff that he said. Like some of the stuff he said was so simple and, uh, it's kind of frustrating sometimes, you know, you're just trying to get some, uh, simple answers for people, you know, uh, for people and from people. And he gave us a lot of simple stuff. Hey, raise the, raise the head of your bed. You know, what'd he say? Six inches or something like that.

I mean, just, that's so simple that why wouldn't you try it if you're having trouble sleeping or if you're having sleep apnea the pulse oximeter using that and seeing if you're uh below 94 why wouldn't you try that like if you have something that you're suffering from sometimes some of the situations are or some of the situations are well you have to go to a doctor and it's got to be a specialist and there's probably not. And you try to like, look it up. There's nobody in your area. You're like, and then you forget about it.

And then you go on suffering with whatever issue it is that you have, because it's like, uh, the air, the barrier of entry is great. But with the things he suggested, they were all very reasonable. Like the, uh, inspiratory muscle training thing that when Andrew asked that question and it's not even that expensive. I found a couple of them on amazon like 30 40 bucks dude like i want that now i want my lungs to be huge chewing on some gum doesn't seem like i mean why not just try it like how much can the gum possibly cost the gum is cheap family gum is super cheap yeah yeah just two regular gum with ice that shit gets

the uh deep throating that he talked about i don't know if i'll be working on that anytime soon but you never know could increase my stock for multiple reasons no that's no the awesome thing about this podcast or this specific one is because i i heard him on rogan i heard him on uh with patrick mckeown um i heard him on uh high intensity health what's his name yeah he's been yeah yeah but i heard all those podcasts and there are things in this episode that i haven't heard him talk about which is really awesome like there's there's so many there's like there's so many things that he knows about breathing and we're able to dig out a lot of it. So this is a lot of guys are going to get a lot from this episode. It was awesome.

Yeah. It was named that machine inspiratory. That's all I have is inspiratory muscle training. There you go. He said it right. I can't enunciate that. It seems all educated and shit. Yeah.

Well, he's been nasal breathing longer than me. So all fallen jail. Yeah. What was. Yeah. Anyway, I don't nasal breathing longer than me. So oral phalangeal. Yeah. What was. Yeah. Anyway, I don't even know what that was in reference to. Oral phalangeal. What?

He said something like that. I think that had to do with your airway. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It had to do with breathing. Yes.

Yes. But man, God, this is so good. This is so good, man. And I like that. He kind of was like ah there's some some of those techniques on youtube but it's all bullshit you know like he just straight called it out he's like go you know get the real information from these you know uh resources yeah when you look up like mewing stuff like there is some there's some cool stuff

about it but you'll see some guys on youtube okay so they're trying to take advantage of the whole mewing thing. They're like, my jaw has increased by 10%. Look at this before and after. And then their, their, their new jobs are, but I think one of the, one of the take homes from this, uh, from this podcast that I got that he did mention some things that you can buy. He did mention some stuff, but like you go back to the basics, you know, breathe through your nose, uh, eat some hard food here and there, eat some carrots, eat some celery, but like you go back to the basics, you know, breathe through your nose, eat some hard food here and there.

Eat some carrots, eat some celery, eat some steak, chew your, you know, take your time, chew your food. And even while you're chewing your food and working on that. Breathe through your nose, you know, like try to relax like I don't know about you guys, but sometimes like I'm just I'm not thinking I'm just I'm eating. So I'm so pumped about eating that I'm, you know, like eating like a dog, you know, you're kind of like ferocious over it, which there's no real reason to, and no one's going to come and steal your food, just chill. And like, you know, maybe, maybe by doing some of that, maybe you digest it a little bit better. I mean, there is research that talks about that. Chew your food until it becomes kind of a liquid. You don't need to be shoveling it down. There's no real emergency. But yeah,

just going back to all the basics that he talked about throughout the show, there are breathing techniques. There are some things that you can buy. There's a bunch of different things you can do. But if you forget to do any of that, just go back to the basics and say, Hey, you know what? I need to just figure out a way to breathe in and out of my nose a little bit more. Impeccable timing with the, um, like breastfeeding and,

you know, all that stuff. Cause like I looked up a bunch of the, uh, resources that he pointed us towards and the, uh, what's it called? Uh,

the baby lead weaning. Yeah. I can't wait to share that with stuff. Cause there's some, like it explains everything in there on that website. Like why you would want to go from breastfeeding straight to solid food. Yeah. Breastfeeding and things like that are really some weird stuff.

Like they don't, no one ever shares with you that that process, like even though the process is natural, it's not easy. Like it's hard, you know? So I like what he said. He's like, Hey, I'm a guy. So I'm not going to be like pressing people. People go through a really, really hard time trying to feed their baby that way. And, um, it's unfortunate.

Like it doesn't just boom, you know, happen real quickly for everybody. Um, but I know my wife, you know, she, she really, you know, wanted to, wanted that to happen. And so she made it happen, but it wasn't without sacrifice. I mean, it's annoying. It's you're, you're hooked to this person for X amount of hours and you have to commit to it. No one else can help.

You know, how about that assignment? Like, all right, you had this baby, like good job cranking it out there, mom. Like you went through like the hardest thing ever. Okay. Now, you know, for the next, however job cranking it out there, mom. Like, you went through, like, the hardest thing ever. Okay, now, you know, for the next however long you decide you're going to breastfeed for, you're literally attached at the hip with this person, and no one else can assist or really help with that. I mean, you can, like, pump, and, you know, they can use a bottle, and... But it's, you know, it's a giant pain in the ass giant thing to have to

commit to yeah i was thinking about that when you know our dogs still wake up wake us up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom i can do that 100 by myself but you're right i mean yeah that's that's crazy yeah if the dog comes in and bothers both you guys you can say oh i got it yeah you know kids crying in the middle of night. You can only do so much for it. Yeah. This episode is going to save a lot of parents money, though. Like new parents or parents of younger kids, if they're able to, you know, make some changes

to their diets or make some changes to their habits, you might not have to get your kid braces. Yeah. Or how pumped is, you know, or is your kid going to be? If you say, Hey, when you watch TV, you have to be chewing gum. They're going to be like,

Oh, that thing that tastes incredible. Okay. Or even just like it, you know, that's cool that you enjoy watching TV, but can you do it with your mouth closed? You know,

like sit up straight or, you know, if you're going to be upside down, make sure your posture is good when you're upside down. Cause kids would do all kinds of weird shit. They just like plop down and you're gonna be upside down make sure your posture is good when you're upside down because kids would do all kinds of weird shit they just like plop down and you're like okay that's interesting yeah like uh jasmine would like sit her back would be on the floor but her legs would be on the couch and she would just watch an entire like show that way and she's like this yeah like why don't you all alright cool yeah then you turn you turn around you look back and she's in like

you know she's hanging from the roof or something it's just they move yeah take us on out of here Andrew I will thank you everybody for checking out today's episode please share it with somebody because this was freaking incredible and I'll be really upset if this isn't one of our most listened

to and viewed episodes because this shit was amazing. Huge shout out and thank you to Pete Montiz for sponsoring this episode. Links to Pete Montiz down in the description below. Use promo code PowerProject for 25% off your order, and if your order is $99 or more, you get free two-day shipping. Please make sure you're following the podcast at MarkBilesPower Project on Instagram and at MB Power Project on Twitter. Check out the new Power Project newsletter also down in the description below. My Instagram and Twitter is at I am Andrew Z. Nseema, where are you at? At Nseema Inyang on Instagram and YouTube and Nseema Inyang on Twitter. Mark? At Mark Smelly Bell. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.