The Joe Rogan Experience - #1506 - James Nestor

Episode Date: July 10, 2020

James Nestor is a journalist who has written for Outside magazine, Men's Journal, Scientific American, Dwell magazine, National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Atlantic, the San Francisco Chronicle magazine, and others. His new book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art is available now: https://www.amazon.com/Breath-New-Science-Lost-Art/dp/0735213615

All right, we're rolling. First of all, I really enjoyed your book. It was really excellent. I got deep into it. I listened to the audio book, and it's in your voice, so this will be weird sitting in. It's always weird when you meet somebody for the first time, and you've heard their book, and you hear them talking

for long periods of time, and then they're right there. But I really enjoyed it, man. I guess I can't change the tone of my voice then. No, don't do that. You're used to it. Okay, I'll keep it steady. Keep it the way it is. Keep it real.

What made you want to write this? Where'd this come from? It's actually two things. About 10 years ago, 11 years ago, I had this really weird experience. I was in San Francisco with a lot of breathwork yoga stuff going on there. And I kept getting pneumonia. I surf a lot at Ocean Beach. And I thought that that was the reason. So I kept getting pneumonia. I surf a lot at Ocean Beach, and I thought that that was the reason. So I kept getting bronchitis, pneumonia, year after year. It just kept happening. So a doctor friend of mine suggested a breathing class might help. I didn't know much about this, but went down, signed up, and was sitting in the corner of this studio, cold room, legs crossed, breathing in this rhythmic pattern, nothing crazy, just and then really slow. And I sweated through my t-shirt, through my socks, my hair was sopping

wet, sweat all over my face. So I went back to her and I said, what happened? Like you're a doctor, you should know this. And she said, oh, you must have had a fever or the room must have been too hot. So she had no idea. But I didn't know what to do with that story. So I just kind of filed it away. Forgot about it for a number of years until I met some freedivers. These are people who have, through the power of will, enabled themselves to hold their breath for six, seven, eight minutes at a time and dive to depths far below what any scientist thought possible. So I thought, wow, there's something in breathing here

that I don't know about. And I figured other people might not know about as well. Ah, that's, that's, that's really interesting. You know, um, I've known a bunch of free divers and, uh, I've known a bunch of, uh, jujitsu people that got really into yoga, primarily because of Hicks and Gracie. Hicks and Gracie, do you know who he is? Yeah, famous, probably the most famous of the classic jujitsu people. He's known as being the very best. He was one of the original real pioneers of jujitsu in America as well.

And there's this documentary on him called Choke. Have you seen it? I have not, no. It's really fascinating. This documentary, he's doing all this crazy stomach breath stuff, the yogi stuff, you know, because he's really into yoga as well for flexibility and balance and all those different things. And he was probably the first guy to introduce yoga to jujitsu as well. But him and his son, who's also a world champion in jiu-jitsu, just stressed constantly that it's all about the breath. And that breathing is everything. That it's everything for jiu-jitsu. It's everything for martial arts. It's everything for your mindset.

You're going to find that in the foundation of so many different sports. I think a lot of that has been forgotten. I know that coaches in the 50s used to have their runners take a big mouthful of water, run around the track, and then they'd have to spit out that same amount of water into a cup to force them to breathe through their nose, to force them to move their diaphragms up and down a little more because breathing is so essential to the recovery, their endurance and their performance. And one of the things I find interesting about your book was the experiment with plugging up the nose for, what did you guys do it for a month? Is that what it was? 10 days. 10 days. And that 10 days, my nose was broken most of my life. I

had a useless nose till I was 40. And then I got an operation to have my deviated septum corrected and the turbinates shaved down. And then it changed my life. It really did. Like I didn't realize like what, like the term mouth breather is a really interesting term, right? Cause it's a term for a moron, but I felt like a moron. Um, like after I got my nose fixed, I was like, why didn't I do this before? Like I was robbing myself of oxygen. Yeah, and there's so much science supporting how injurious it is to constantly be breathing through your mouth. There's no debate about that.

But what people don't realize is about 25% to 50% of the population habitually breathes through their mouth. And they don't realize the neurological problems that this causes, the respiratory problems this causes, problems with snoring, sleep apnea, even metabolic disorders. I mean, it goes on and on and on. So I had been talking to the chief of rhinology research at Stanford. We'd done many interviews over a series of months. He's a big nose guy. So he said, this is the most amazing organ. No one's talking about it. At the NIH, there's no school for studying the nose and its effects. And he thought that that was criminal.

So he had warned me how bad mouth breathing was, but no one knew how quickly that damage came on. So we knew that after years, it can change the structure of your face. It's so common in kids that it has a term called adenoid face. You see these kids with very long faces because they've been mouth breathing so long that their faces have actually the musculature and the skeleture have changed. It changes your skeleton. Yeah. Yeah. It creates a longer face. And that also makes these people much more apt to snoring and sleep apnea. But no one knew if a month of mouth breathing would be bad, a year, like how soon those issues came on. So I asked him, I said, well, why don't you test it? You're

one of the best universities in the world. You have the means to do this. And he thought, in his words, it would be unethical because he knew how damaging that it could be for people. And so I volunteered. I said, well, why don't you test it on me? I'll get somebody else to do it. They had no money for this, so we had to pay for this study just to experience what that was like. And the point wasn't to do some, like, jackass stunt. It was to lull ourselves into a position my body certainly knew. I think I was mouth-breathing through much of my youth.

And that 25% to 50% of the population knows and to actually measure what happens. Now, do you think there was some bacterial growth that was inside your nose as well from this? Do you think that some of that could be attributed to just the act of plugging the nose? Because you physically plugged it. It's not like you chose to breathe out of your mouth. You actually like see, you closed up the opening. Yeah, that's right. And it could, no one knows for sure, because the less you use your nose, the less you're going to be able to use your nose, just like any other muscle. So when people start habitually breathing through their mouths, their noses are going to start to close up. And we know

this from the doctor of speech language pathology at Stanford. She measured people who had laryngectomies, holes drilled in their throats so they could breathe. She found between two months and two years, their noses were completely blocked, zero air coming in. So the more you use it, the more you're going to be able to use it. So the less you use it, the more apt you will be to have problems. What is the process? Why does the nose close up?

It would seem that it's a hole. Like why would that hole close? It's not in use. Those turbinates, all those tissues just start closing up. And so using your nose actually makes the opening wider? Absolutely. Really? Yeah, absolutely.

My nose got physically wider after my operation. It's really strange. I look back on the photos from when I was 40 on my actual physical, and I attributed it to the fact that they put these big foam things and these plastic spacers in there because the doctor that did the operation, he's for, I forget the period of time afterwards, I had to have these things stuffed into my nose and this plastic that was sort of sutured in place to hold it into position and I attributed that to why my nose got wider but I noticed it like within a year or two afterwards like my fucking nose is wider

like it's different like if I look at older pictures of myself my nose was more narrow and now it's more flared out and I felt like it was because of that. But now that you're saying this, now I'm thinking maybe it's just from breathing out of it. Well, surgical interventions are going to open that airway. There's no doubt about that. But we know the more that you breathe through your nose, the more that it's going to open up. And you can see this with people who are habitual mouth breathers, who are also joggers, who have just been breathing through their mouths for decades. They start breathing through the nose at the beginning.

It's really, really hard. They say, I can't do this. This is awful. Then weeks go by, months go by, and their noses open up and allows them to breathe through the nose. And the benefits of that, they're innumerable, so many benefits of nasal breathing, not only oxygen, but it helps defend your body, humidifies air, conditions air, on and on and on. And this is something I just don't think a lot of people realize. And from the researchers I've been talking to, they were a bit frustrated too, seeing so many chronic conditions tied to mouth breathing and how so many of those could either be improved upon or sometimes outright cured by switching the pathway in which you breathe.

So does breathing through your nose make your actual nostril opening wider? I don't know that. And I haven't seen any papers on that. So my nostril holes and everything is probably just from the surgical intervention and stuffing it with plastic and stretching it out. I would assume so. Yeah. Now what Wim Hof, who you reference in the book, he doesn't give a fuck about mouth, about nose breathing or mouth breathing. He just goes, just breathe, motherfucker. Breathe. Well, that's what he says. Oh yeah. I practiced his, his mode of breathing all the time. I'm used to having, you know, his, his little voice in my

head. Why doesn't he care about breathing from the nose or the mouth? He just wants you to breathe. Because if we're breathing 25,000 times a day, if you're taking 500 of those breaths through your mouth, it's not going to really make any impact on you. I'm talking about habitual mouth breathing. No, I understand. I'm just talking about through breathing exercises. So what he's done is he wants to make this easy and accessible for people. So many people can't breathe through their noses. So they go, they can't get that breath in, those 30 huge breaths you need to take, right? They take too long to do it.

So he says it doesn't matter. Don't pay attention. You need to get that breath in. You need to expand your lungs. And for the rest of the time, you know, the benefits of nasal breathing, that habitual breathing is so important to health. It seems so strange to me reading your book that I'm just learning this in terms of like, I mean, I've been doing athletics my whole life. How do I not know that breathing through the nose is more beneficial? How do coaches not know this?

This is something I just got running up against over and over again. And when I first started writing this book, my friends who are journalists and authors, they said, you're writing a book about breathing. Why would you write a book about breathing? It's like walking. Yeah. Well, there's a good new book about walking. Really? So they were ripping on me quite a bit until they heard some of the details of it. And the stuff is like – has been right in front of us the whole time and it's so obvious that no one is really paying attention to it. And the scientific foundation, all the research is there. And that's what makes these researchers, these scientists so frustrated.

We have 50 years of rock-solid science here showing the problems with mouth breathing, showing the problems with snoring and sleep apnea. No one's really been paying attention. We're treating all these separate problems that are associated with these core issues, and we're not looking at the core issue. And I think that breathing has to be considered along with diet and exercise as a pillar of health. Because even if you eat keto, vegan, paleo, whatever, even if you exercise all the time, if you're not breathing right, you're never really going to be healthy. We know that to be the truth. So air comes through your mouth, air comes through your nose. What is the difference between the air coming through your nose? Okay. So your nose,

if you were to take your fist, you've got a really big fist. So someone with a slightly smaller fist, and to take that fist and imagine just pushing it inside of your head, that's about the volume of your nose and all the sinus cavities. So they even stretch up above your eyes. The volume of your fist, that's crazy. It's about a billiard ball. So a little, it depends on what size fist you have, right? So a little, it depends on what size fish you have, right? So all, and they call it the nasal concha because it looks exactly like a seashell. If you were to split a seashell in half and look at it, that's what's happening in your nose.

And all of this stuff evolved this way for a reason. So that air that comes in through the nose is slowed down, it's filtered, it's humidified, and it's conditioned. So by the time it gets to your lungs, your lungs can absorb that oxygen so much easier. And the nose is really the first line of defense. Another amazing thing with the nose is it produces something called nitric oxide, which is this wonderful molecule that is a vasodilator that plays an essential role in oxygen delivery and also helps battle off viruses and bacteria and other pathogens. So this is all happening in the nose and slowing down that air and all of these other functions allow us to gain about 20% more oxygen breathing through the nose than breathing through the mouth. So you can breathe less and get more by breathing through the nose than breathing through the mouth. So you can breathe

less and get more by breathing through the nose. Wow. So breathing through the mouth, even though you're filling your lungs up, even though you're taking a big, deep breath, you're filling your lungs up, you're not getting as much oxygen. That's right. Because you can over breathe when people at a gym or when people are jogging, you see them really going to get the maximum amount of oxygen in. That's not what is happening to your body. So you are offloading the CO2. By offloading too much CO2, you're causing constriction in your circulation. So right now, if we were to breathe 30 huge breaths, you'll feel some tingling in your head.

You'll feel some maybe your fingertips will get cool. Your toes will get cool. That's not from an increase of oxygen. It's the opposite that's happening. That's from a decrease of circulation. So your body wants to be in balance. You want to have the right amount of CO2 and oxygen for optimum delivery. And that's what the nose helps you to do.

That was one of the craziest things about the book where you're talking about yogis that were able to vary the temperature between each hand. No, on the same hand. Oh, on the same hand. The same hand. One area was gray, the other was red. Oh, in the same-

In the same, not even this and this. Oh my God. On the same hand. And when I came across this, people are saying, this is impossible. There's, you know, who did this study? Some guy in Taos in his garage. No, it was at the manager clinic, which was the world's, at least in the U S the largest psychiatric research facility at the time. And a Navy physicist did these tests. It was reported in the New York Times.

Have they been replicated? They haven't found someone who had the powers of Swami Rama. They found, I think, whims about as close as we've gotten to that guy. So this is something that is like, you know, like Michael Jordan didn't start out good at basketball, right? He learned, he practiced, he got better. And this, you could say the same thing perhaps about breathing? Oh, for sure. And just look at freedivers, right? He learned, he practiced, he got better. And this, you could say the same thing perhaps about breathing. Oh, for sure. And you just look at free divers, right? I was at this, my first foray into that world was at the World Free Diving Championship in Greece.

And you see these people, some of them were short, some of them were tall, some of them were large, small. I mean, from all walks of life, every imaginable country, something like 30 countries had representatives there. And these people weren't born with these enormous lungs, right? They did this by the power of will, by breathing and expanding their lung capacity. And so once I saw them, all of these people able to do this, once they explained to me, they said, you know, the benefits of breathing go beyond just diving deep. It can allow us to heal our bodies of problems. It can allow us super endurance. It can allow us to do all these things that we've been told are medically impossible.

And I heard this. I didn't believe them, but I spent several years in the field talking to people at Stanford, Harvard, you know, the best, the leaders in the field and finding this research and what they told me was absolutely true. that he can do that. It's, it's very appealing to me and very interesting to me because even though breathing has been around for a long time, you know, everybody knows that there's different styles of breathing and holotropic breathing is pretty popular.

And I, I always think even though people know the benefits of many things, very few people go all the way with stuff. Like, you know, if you, if you just talk to an average person, can someone run 250 miles? Most people would say no, but I know people that have done it. So it is possible, but you have to find someone who go all the way and do it for a long time, a long time. So this Swami Rama guy, there has to be someone else like that

out there. Yeah. And they're probably not on Facebook, right? No, they're probably in a ashram somewhere. Absolutely. So this was a guy who grew up in the Himalayas, who by the age of four was studying yoga. He was meditating. He was breathing. So he lived his entire life in that world learning these tricks. And he got so good at it that he was able, on command, to make his heart beat 300 times a minute. 300 times a minute. So it was so fast.

They were looking at the EKG readoutout and they said he stopped his heart. Then they looked at it a little closer and said, no, actually, it's beating 300 times a minute. And then he would just snap out of it. So the story sounds so impossible. They sounded impossible to me, but it's all documented. So I just don't know in the modern world, do we have the capacity? Is there someone out there who's willing to stay off their phone, stay off Netflix, and focus on one thing for 30 years? I'm not sure.

Maybe, hopefully, but who knows? That was what was so interesting listening to the book. I was like, God, I want to know what's possible, but I don't want to do it. Let other people do it, right? I don't have that kind of time, man, but I believe there want to do it. Let other people do it. I don't have that kind of time, man. But I believe there's something to it because my own personal benefits that I've gotten from breathing exercises is one of the reasons why that's what led me to your book. And especially in the sauna.

Over the last year, I got a sauna in my house and I've gotten really into, I have a sauna here as well, but I got really into doing these daily sessions of 180 degrees for 25 to 30 minutes. And as you can imagine, the last 10 minutes are really uncomfortable. You know, when you get down, when it's 15 minutes in and you know, you got 10 more minutes to go, it's not fun. But when I breathe, when I concentrate on these breathing exercises, and I have a bunch of different ones that I do, and one of them that I do is I concentrate on taking shallow breaths and holding my breath for as long as I can. And there's this panicked moment where you feel like you have to breathe,

but you really don't. You really don't. You really don't. You just got to get over that panic moment. And then there's like a weird calm that comes over and you could last much, much longer than you can. And then when I do breathe in, I just concentrate on doing it slowly. Don't, don't, don't, don't let myself panic. And like time just flies by.

It's crazy. Time flies by. And because I'm thinking about the breathing, I'm barely paying attention to the fact that I'm profusely sweating and my body's not freaking out as much. So I do these little weird tricks that I play on myself inside the sauna. And in concentrating on breathing and long, deep breaths through my nose and holding it and then long exhales through my nose. When I'm doing that, it makes everything easier. It's weird. It makes your body, for whatever reason, more accepting of the extreme heat. Well, that's what I love about breathing is it allows us these levers in the systems that we can't otherwise control.

So the autonomic nervous system is supposed to be beyond our control. It's called autonomic, automatic. Can't control it. We can through breathing. You may not be able to control your liver function or your stomach or your heart. But when you breathe a certain way, you can influence all those functions. And you can start taking control of these other elements of your body as Wim is showing with not only the nervous system but with immune function. So all of this was supposed to be impossible until he showed up and said, you know, why don't you test me?

Instead of just talking, we have measurements. We have equipment to test this stuff. If we can measure it, we can study it. If we can study it, we can prove if it's right or wrong. And that's what I find is so interesting and accessible about breathing as well. Even if someone has a pulse ox or you have a heart rate variability monitor, you can breathe in certain ways and instantly see what it does to your body. So people who say that this is a placebo effect don't understand that this is a biological

function that you're taking control of. And if you can elicit such a strong response in a couple of minutes, imagine what you can do in a couple of days or a couple of weeks or a couple of months. And we're starting to see that with Wim and some of his minions and other people who have been breathing as a way to heal themselves of chronic conditions. Yeah, Wim is a really interesting sort of – he's a great spokesperson for it because he drinks Heineken and eats spaghetti. Like he's a weirdo, you know what I mean? And he swears a lot and he's fun and he's silly. What I like about him is the fact that he, he doesn't seem like this mystical person that you'll, you can't relate to. He's very relatable.

Yeah. And I think that that's where breathing really needs to move from this, this new aginess in, into more pragmatic and practical area. And he is, Wim is like the everyman, right? And he's, he's gone and discovered these things and now he's showing people how to use them. And he's very clear that he did not invent these methods. These methods have been around for at least 1,000 years, especially TUMO. And there's documentation that goes back 1,000 years, 1,200 years of people doing this to heat themselves up.

They're like, I don't have a jacket. I don't have anything else to wear. I'm freezing. How do I keep my core temperature warm in these freezing temperatures? Can you explain tummo to people? Yeah, sure. So tummo is a breathing practice that is used to build heat in the body, build inner heat. And it was, the first documentation was from this guy Naropa, And it was – the first documentation was from this guy Naropa who about 1100 years ago went off on a spiritual pilgrimage, ended up in the Himalayas, needed to heat himself and use this practice. And it stayed in the monasteries for hundreds of years until this Belgian-French opera singer anarchist around the 1900s. That's a mouthful.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to include a few more because she did a whole bunch of, she's into free love, feminism. I mean, you name it. She ran the gamut. So, but she went on a spiritual pilgrimage for 14 years in the Himalayas when she was in her 40s.

This is in the 1900s, which was just like unheard of at the time. And she discovered this thing. hundreds, which was just like unheard of at the time. And she discovered this, this thing. She said she was able to use this to not eat or drink anything at elevations of above 18,000 feet and walk for about 19 hours at a time. There are no fact checkers there to prove it. And nobody believed her until Herbert Benson at Harvard had heard enough of these stories in the 1980s that he went out and tested these monks and found out that they could do exactly what they had been told that they were supposed to do, you know, for thousands of years. And what is the technique of TUMO? The technique is it's very similar to Wim Hof's version of TUMO. The monks do it in a slightly different way.

They slow down their nervous system. And Benson found that they were able to slow their metabolism by 60%. So it's lower than anything that has ever been measured before. So they just do the, and focus on a fire within the body and breathe out. Sometimes they breathe a little more. You can see videotapes of this for people who don't believe this stuff. A little more. You can see videotapes of this. For people who don't believe this stuff, you can see videotapes of this guy in a cold room, no shirt on, sweating.

They put a wet sheet on him and he dries the sheet within about a half an hour because he's so hot. And he's only doing this through breathing. And when you're making this noise, what is the technique? Like you're breathing. Is this like an 80-20 thing where you fully fill the lungs out and let 80% or let 20% out and then breathe in again and let 20% out, like that kind of thing? That version is much more complicated, the type that the Bon Tumor monks use. So Wim's method does the exact same thing, but he's stimulating the nervous system. So his is 30 huge breaths, breath hold as long as you can, one big breath in, 15-second hold, and then out. And what are these monks doing?

They're doing a slower version of it. So I have not practiced that version of tummo. Why not? Because it's really complicated. And to do it right, you need to get the master there. And I tried to contact these guys, and they did not want me there reporting on what they were doing. God, I would feel like if they knew the benefits of this, they would want the world to know. You would think so, but what would we do with it? Right? We'd find it, we'd commercialize

it. And so maybe they don't want the world to know. Maybe they want to keep a few things in their back pocket. So what do you know of what they're doing? Why is it so complicated? Because so much of this is a mental practice. Okay. So it's not just the breathing. There's some sort of a thought process that goes along with it. Absolutely.

And to get that visualization and to be able to focus for that amount of time takes a lot of time. I think one of the reasons that WIMS process is so easy and accessible, you can think about whatever you want while you're breathing that way. You think about emails, think about what you're going to have for dinner. And as long as you're breathing that way, it'll do what it does. And their method requires you to think about very specific things. Think about a fire inside of your belly, moving your belly in and out. But you, so you know this. I don't know every single step. No, I do. Think about a fire inside of your belly, moving your belly in and out. So you know this?

I don't know every single step. No, I do not. What other steps could there be? There's fast breathing. There's slow breathing. And there's a ton of mental focus. So there's like 20 steps that you have to go through to really get this right. Are we in danger of losing this? It seems like you know about it, but you don't know how to do it.

I don't know. I know the elements of it and what I've read online, and who knows how true that stuff is, right? There's a few guys teaching this. One's in Colorado, and the others are in India. Is he in Boulder? He must be in Boulder. He has to be.

Where else? But you think about how many languages that we're losing, right? Along with those languages, we're losing knowledge very, very quickly. And this is happening every decade. And so especially if you consider what's happened to Tibet,

to these civilizations that have been there practicing this technology of breathing for thousands of years. A lot of it's just disappearing. Yeah, that's a shame. Have you thought about going there and like hanging out with those guys? I'd love to. Can't do that now.

Right, of course. I spent some time, you know, the book, I talk about Tummo in about half of one chapter, and I wanted to cover it. Wim's been written about all over the place. People know his method, but I wanted to look at the science from it and look at the history of it because the how was one story, but to me, it was more interesting to find what's happening to the body. Why does this happen? Where does it come from? So that's what I focused on. So this gentleman that teaches in Colorado, where did he learn it from?

He must've learned it from the great sages, you know, in Dharamsala or Tibet. Or maybe he's like one of those Kung Fu guys who just fakes it. Or maybe he's just, yeah, a faker, a faker, you know, just made something up. Could be. I don't want to accuse him. But in the martial arts world, that happens a lot. At least it used to happen a lot there's a lot of fakers that have you know the the thing in martial arts world was always uh chi and uh you know you talk about that in the book as well um about people having this this power this chi touch and it was 99.9 percent horseshit meaning that most of the people that

were talking about it were really teaching sort of a fraudulent, made-up version of martial arts. And there's a bunch of Instagram pages that are dedicated to these people. It's really to make fun of them because it's so strange. It's such a weird thing that these people do where they have huge classfuls of people and they pretend to have this death touch and they touch people and the people are they're essentially in a cult and so they spasm they fall to the ground and it always made me laugh but there was a part of me that says there is a there's a thing in the body and this thing can be activated whether it's whether you want to call it energy or spirit. There's different mindsets

and inspiration. And through these different mindsets and inspiration, you can achieve some pretty spectacular results, physical results. And people that are in this mindset, they can perform better. There's something about them in terms of martial arts. There's something about that. So I've always wondered, like, if someone really pursued this, without all the nonsense, without all the chicanery, if you really pursued this, what could be done? I think the first thing you do is get these people in a lab. If they're claiming to have these skills that are incredible,

why not measure it? I mean, it's not that hard to measure stuff. And so if they deny having any lab work done or having it being measured, then I think you have to be a little apprehensive. And that's something that so much of this technology is cheap now to get. So even if you were to show up with $2,000 worth of equipment, you could see if there was some scientific basis to what these people are doing. But from my understanding, I didn't go down the chi hole too deep, but a lot of these people aren't showing up and offering, volunteering to have their skills tested. And that's how science works. You have to test it,

right? And it has to be replicable Well, it's everybody wants to be Swami Rama, but nobody wants to do what Swami Rama did right? Yeah, who wants to sit in a kit? Well, some people do sit in a cave for 30 years Right. He would go away for four years at a time in a dark cave and just sit there and breathe So I just in the modern age. I just don't know God I would love to talk to him. He, he had it all down. Cause there are people that can do that. You know, they're like the Unabomber of breathing. You know, they just moved to the woods and just, just without the negativity. But, but what was,

what was cool about him is he wasn't the only one who could do this. So there were researchers in the twenties and in the forties who went do this. So there were researchers in the 20s and in the 40s who went out with a bunch of equipment, whatever equipment they could cobble together, and tested other yogis who were able to do this exact same thing, right? So Swami was part of this long lineage of people who had this knowledge. Is it still there? It could be, but again, I don't think it's online. I think you really have to get out in the weeds and earn these people's trust in order to get that story. And what is the history of these people doing this? Like what was their initial motivation?

I mean, is there a written history of this? The earliest evidence that we have for breathing practices dates back about 4,000 or 5,000 years from these little statuettes in the Indus Valley, which is in northern India. So there was this huge thriving civilization. They had paved roads. They had running water. They were dealing with tin and copper. And they had no – in this whole civilization, they still have not found any political or governmental buildings. They haven't found any religious iconography.

So these people in some ways could have been more advanced than we are now. And they had all of these figures of these people in these yoga poses with their stomachs out. So that's how they date the earliest archaeological evidence of that. Stomachs out. So that's how they date the earliest archaeological evidence of that. And since then, then all of these practices were moved into the Rig Veda and all of the earliest yoga texts. And they were codified in the yoga sutras of Pantanjali. That's where a lot of the yoga methods come from. And that's about 2,000 years old. So the methods predate all that. Oh, I'm sure they predate probably anything that has been in writing.

That's what's so curious to me, what makes me so curious. If you really think about what life must have been like back then, when they were creating this, you would think that people were hunting and gathering, and it was probably a very hard life. Well, not in that civilization. Right, but they got to a point where they had some sort of agriculture or some structures and buildings. But how did they get to the point – because the rest of the world obviously didn't do this. This is not like common practice in Germany or in Italy or in all these other civilizations.

Like what made these people focus on breathwork so much? Well, it could have been, but we just haven't found anything related to that yet. Right. So if you think about hunter gatherers, we're imagining them as, man, they're just working all day. They're hunting all day. They're gathering. They weren't from what I know and from what I've seen of the science there,

probably three or four hours of work, you know, and then you have no other distractions to spend time and build these systems of breathing and health, which is what started in ancient China, which is what started in India, which is what started in ancient Greece. Think about all the distractions we're dealing with today, constant interruptions. If you've already done your work for the day and there's nothing else to do, you're going to get more interested and you're going to have the time to do some empirical studies to see what works and what doesn't. It just seems to me that like learning something like that, learning something like prolonged breath work and the benefits of it. I mean, it seems like this is a really long-term practice that doesn't show you immediate benefits. Yes and no. I think that you can take someone who has a serious problem, maybe someone who's already very fit. It's going to take a while to really see those big benefits. We see that with athletes with nasal breathing. It takes them weeks or sometimes months to really see those big benefits. We see that with athletes with nasal breathing. It takes them weeks

or sometimes months to really see gains in performance. But if you've got someone with a chronic condition like asthma or anxiety who are struggling to breathe every single day and you teach them some basic breathing, some normal breathing patterns, their lives can be absolutely transformed. And we've seen this in study after study. So these people, their breathing has become so disrupted. They're breathing in such an unhealthy way that they don't know what proper breathing is. And just shifting that has a tremendous impact. So for people like that, they can see the benefits in a couple of hours, maybe even less than that. Someone with high blood pressure right now, if they're sitting at home,

they can take their blood pressure and then breathe at a rate of about six seconds in, six seconds out, take their blood pressure after that. And there's a good chance their blood pressure is going to go down. I've seen mine go down 10 or 15 points just by breathing because your body is operating in its most efficient way that way. And over how long a period of time would it take your blood pressure to drop that much? After a few minutes, I've found it about three or four minutes of breathing this way. And they've found there's devices that they sell now, which trains people to sit down, take a seat, and breathe in a certain pattern for 10 or 15 minutes. And they've shown marked decreases in blood pressure

by that. You don't need this device to do this. It helps. It reminds you. All you need to do is focus on your breath, right? We have the technology in our heads. We have lungs. We have a nose. We can use that to really help optimize our health. And what is the benefit for asthmatics? help optimize our health. And what is the benefit for asthmatics? The benefit for asthmatics is they traditionally, oftentimes mouth breathe, not all the time. They very oftentimes are breathing too much. So you see an asthmatic, that's usually how they breathe because they are offloading all of the CO2. By offloading that CO2, they are causing constriction. And they're so paranoid that they're going to have an asthma attack that every time they feel it coming on, they go.

Guess what happens when you start breathing more and more? You're causing more constriction. So they teach them to take control of their breath to relax at those times. So that's what hyperventilating is. Yes. And there's a study done about 10 years ago. It was one of the best studies I came across where they took 120 asthmatics and the technology they used to treat them was breathing. They would have them bring around this

capnometer, which would gauge their CO2. Every time their CO2 started getting low, which meant they were breathing too much, they would have them slow down and slow down their breathing. Within a month, they had a significant effect on asthma attacks and also respiratory health. Their airways got larger. So just by breathing, and this is a well-known study. It's available for anyone to look up. So do you know what causes asthma? Is it just a genetic? It's an allergic reaction. It's an inflammatory reaction. So there's different types of asthma. There's allergic asthma. There's exercise-induced asthma, which is caused by breathing too much. And a lot of people think, oh, I was born with asthma. I'm stuck with asthma. That could be true for a lot of people who don't want to take some additional

measures to help abate the symptoms of that asthma. And I think we're just finding now a lot of really legit, solid science showing that breathing is implicated both in the onset of asthma, but it can also be used as a tool to help attenuate the symptoms of it. So when you're, it's like if you're talking to someone with asthma, what would you, like my friend Hannibal, he has, he was here yesterday. He was telling a story about freaking out on mushrooms and hyperventilating and had to get his inhaler. What would you tell someone like him who's an asthmatic? I would first tell him I'm not a breathing therapist.

I'm not a doctor, and he should continue going to his doctor and taking his bronchodilators. So I'm a journalist who went into this field with zero slant, with zero objective. Then I would tell him after that disclaimer that I would seek a therapist who has experience dealing with asthmatics and using breathing to help them. Is that common? They are out there and they're starting to grow. Papworth method was developed in England in the 1960s, really effective. A system called Buteyko breathing has shown there's a lot of quackery in Buteyko. So be careful who you're using. A lot of people have taken up Buteyko techniques and appointed themselves as breathing therapists and they don't know the basis of how exactly it works.

What is Buteyko? Buteyko is a system of allowing you to help you to breathe less and to breathe slowly, and it's been pretty extensively studied with asthma in particular. It's good for hypertension as well. So I would find a therapist who has a knowledge of this. Patrick McEwen has been doing this for 20 years. He's rock solid, he's done the science, and he cured his own allergies, severe asthma and allergies.

And he said, why the hell isn't anyone else doing this? And so he stopped when he was a business major and stopped. And he's written like four books on this stuff. So it's- Sorry, what's his name again? Patrick McKeown. Patrick McKeown. Yeah, Irish dude.

And breathing less, see, that sounds very counterintuitive to people. When you say breathing less, they're like, what are you talking about? You're supposed to breathe a lot, right? More you breathe, the more air you get, right? Yeah. This is such a contrarian concept. It took me months to really figure out what was going on here. So most of us breathe too much, just like most of the population is eating too much. When we're taking in that much air, we're just breathing it back out. So 75% of the oxygen we take in, we breathe back out. So if we're breathing, if we're just sitting here now and I'm doing this, I'm not gaining any oxygen.

I'm actually making it harder for my body to offload oxygen into the tissues, muscles, and organs. Is that because it takes time for your body to take the oxygen in through the breath and disperse it through the body? Yeah, it's two things. So it's the CO2. When I'm breathing like this, I'm offloading too much CO2. And without that CO2, I'm not getting that vasodilation. I'm not getting that circulation, which is why just doing that got a little lightness in my head. My fingers get a little tingly.

Just doing that? Just from that. Try. Keep going. So as you're doing that, you're going to feel a little dizzy. You'll probably feel some circulation problems in your hands and fingers. You can do this for two hours and you'll really see what I'm saying. So the point by breathing less and deeply is to optimize each of those breaths as

much as you can to give your body more time to extract that oxygen. And you want to do that through the nose because that pressure of breathing in helps the lungs in that gas exchange. So if you know someone that has a deviated septum, you would instantly recommend them get that fixed. This is what I have. So 75% of the population has a deviated septum that is clearly visible to the naked eye. So I've had my nose broken two or three times. So I'm as when they took a CAT scan of my head, I'm as more messed up as anyone. NIAC said, you are the perfect candidate for surgery. But I tried to see what I could do outside of surgery. I know people who have been just like you, who've had their health transformed by it. It's very important. But there are also people who don't necessarily need it and should start by practicing some

breathing methods or some other- So you didn't get surgery? I did not, no. Interesting. also people who don't necessarily need it and should start by practicing some breathing methods or some other. So you didn't get surgery? I did not, no. Interesting. And I changed my airways and I changed how my nose worked over the course of a year. We took CAT scans before and after just by breathing. You know how people get cauliflower ear?

Do you know that? From calcified blood gets trapped inside the tissues. My nose was filled like that. So I really did need surgery. And my nose had probably been broken. I broke my nose the first time when I was five falling down a flight of stairs. And then a lifetime of combat sports. I don't know how many times I broke it.

It easily could be more than a dozen. And that's why you are a perfect candidate for this. And it changed your life. Yeah, but it was surgery. Yeah. No, but that's what I'm talking about. Surgical interventions are absolutely necessary for a large part of the population. I had one quarter of one nostril that was open.

My right nostril was useless, like totally closed up. I mean, when I would try to breathe, it would be like, nothing would go through. That's bad news. Yeah, I'd go to yoga class. They'd go, breathe through your nose it would be like, nothing would go through. That's bad news. Yeah, I'd go to yoga class. Then you go breathe through your nose. I'm like, my nose is useless. And if you listen, like if someone hears me from like the Fear Factor days and you listen to my voice, it's a different voice. It's a more nasally voice.

It's because my nose is stuffed all the time. I had to breathe out of my mouth. Yep. But for someone like you, now you know the benefits of nasal breathing, right? Well, just the cardio benefits alone was crazy. It's like I gained 10% cardio instantly. Yeah. And I've heard this numerous times by so many people.

So what you're doing when you're breathing through the nose is you're slowing down that breath. You're taking in less breath, but you're using more of it. So by breathing less, you're going to be able to lower your heart rate. And we know this. If anyone has a pulse oximeter at home, you would think that breathing six breaths a minute, which is about a third of what's considered normal, you think there's no way I'm getting enough oxygen. That's impossible. Put on a pulse ox and watch what happens. And what I've found is your oxygen is either going to stay the same or sometimes go up.

We even got on stationary bikes on the Stanford experiment. And we were trying to see if we could breathe six breaths a minute while going as hard as we could and watching what happened to our oxygen. And our oxygen did not go down. Once we got to about three or four breaths per minute, it started going down. As long as you have these huge breaths, right, this huge circle, you're – and you can work out that way. And they found – Dr. John Duyar did a bunch of studies of this in the 90s and found for cyclists who were normally breathing 47 times a minute, they were able to breathe at 14 times a minute by nasal breathing.

So their endurance increased, their performance increased, and their recovery increased. The instinct when you're exhausted is to... So what you're saying is you have to fight that instinct and breathe through your nose, and you will recover just as well. I'm saying you need to slowly acclimate your body to this. That need to breathe is not dictated by oxygen. And this is another thing that's really hard to get your head around. It's dictated by carbon dioxide. So if you were to hold your breath right now and you feel that need to breathe, that's dictated by rising levels of CO2, not by oxygen.

That was another really fascinating aspect of your book, the importance of carbon dioxide. I had always thought of carbon dioxide as a waste product. When you were talking about that, one researcher that was saying that carbon dioxide is probably more important than oxygen for life. I was like, what is this? That guy's from Yale, too. Yandel Henderson. Check out his work. It's rock solid.

But that's so counterintuitive, right, to what a normal person believes to be true. Yeah, and I wouldn't pick between oxygen and CO2. You're going to lose either way. But CO2 is not just a waste product. No, you need a balance of these two things. Everyone's focused on oxygen, which is why you see at an airport in Singapore an oxygen bar. You see a linebacker on the side of the field huffing pure oxygen. That oxygen for a healthy body is not doing anything.

You're exhaling it back out. So when you go to a high-altitude place and they give you oxygen, that's nonsense? healthy body is not doing anything. You're exhaling it back out. So when you go like to a high altitude place and they give you oxygen, that's nonsense? No, that's completely different. High altitude, there's less oxygen. You absolutely need it. No, at sea level for health, right now you probably have 97% O2 blood sats, right? I probably do too. If you think about that, huffing pure oxygen, it might bump you up one or 2%, but that oxygen has nowhere to go if you don't have CO2 to offload. Those bars kind of disappeared, didn't they? They used to have those in Vegas. You put tubes up your nose and sit there like an idiot. I remember doing that and trying to convince

myself it was doing something. Well, the low lights are doing, the air conditioning is doing something. The chaise lounge that you're sitting on is doing something. Relaxing you. Yeah, it's relaxing you. But I was completely stumped by this. And I'm not talking about people with emphysema or at altitude. I'm talking about healthy people at sea level or around sea level.

And I kept asking pulmonologists. My father-in-law is a pulmonologist. So I asked him all of these questions and he's just like, it's the biggest placebo effect in the world. And so I'm sorry if people are out there, oxygen bar owners, hearing me say this, but. I don't know if they're there anymore. Like when was the last time you saw an oxygen bar? It's been a while, you know, but who knows, maybe they're going to be coming back. Someone's investing money right now as we speak, listening to this podcast about the sign on the dotted line.

What? Wait a minute. That shit's not real? Hold on. I did see in a gift store, though, a bottle of oxygen. Yes. Like literally you screw the cap off. What?

Like a bottle where you screw the cap off? A bottle. Aluminum bottle of oxygen. Those people, that's like a pet rock, right? Those people are assholes. Yeah. I'd love to say they're laughing all the way to the bank. I'm not sure about that.

I don't think they're making that much money. But whatever money they're making, they're stealing. Now, why don't we have this? Why is it not generally acknowledged that carbon dioxide is very beneficial to life? I think CO2 has gotten this really bad rap. We talk about CO2 increasing in the atmosphere, acidification of the ocean, global warming. It's the stuff that comes off a rotting fruit. But we're not looking – a pulmonologist is going to know the importance of a balance of CO2.

So people in that field absolutely know it. And so they've written, they've said, thank you for getting this out in the open because people don't realize it. You can go outside right now, see people jogging, got to get more O2 in. And the fact is, not only is that not doing anything for them, it's actually making their breathing worse and making it harder for them to offload oxygen, which is just something I don't think a lot of people realize, like slower, deeper breaths can be so much more efficient, going to allow you to go further for longer. And that's really what you want.

So for athletes that are accustomed to having these really hard workouts, say like they're doing interval training and they're sprinting and things along those lines, CrossFit style workouts, and they're used to going, what they should do is train themselves to slowly take in air from their nose. And how would you recommend someone doing that? There's some great therapists who can show you all the wonders of doing this. And by practicing these breathing techniques, you're going to increase. They've shown that you can increase red blood cells. So it's just like altitude training. And you can increase your VO2 max as well. So I don't know what sort of exercise each person is doing. And so you can't give a blanket prescription to everyone.

So someone would have to be there and be, what's your heart rate? Let's say running. What if someone does like hill sprints or something along those lines? What I've found is nasal breathing is the way to go. You can see what Sandy Richard Ross, who for 10 years was the top sprinter in the world, obligatory nose breathing the whole time. And to me, the pictures just say everything. She's in these races.

The people right next to her look like they're dying. She has the most placid look on her face. Mouth is shut, kicking everyone's butt across the finish line. So there's tons of research. There's tons of therapists that can work with people individually because you just don't know how old is the person? What's their maximum heart rate, where they're going. But we do know that nasal breathing is a more efficient way of breathing, and you're going to be able to go further and perform better once that becomes a habit.

What's fascinating to me is the sport that I commentate on, mixed martial arts, is the sport that I commentate on, mixed martial arts, there's a giant issue with broken noses. A large percentage of the fighters have deviated septums, smashed in noses, they're clogged up, and you see them breathing out of their mouth, particularly when they're tired. You see, like, when a fighter has their nose broken and you see blood trickling out of the nose, one of the first signs you see is they breathe out of their mouth.

and you see blood trickling out of the nose, one of the first signs you see is they breathe out of their mouth. And that seems like, well, obviously it's terrible to get punched in the nose, right? You have this delicate instrument and you're using it as a target. But for someone who does get punched in the nose for a living, like what can they do if they have this other than not do it? I think do what you did, right? So if you're talking about these extreme cases. If I was fighting, I don't know if I would get it fixed. Well, I guess I probably would anyway, now that I know. But a lot of guys don't because they think they're just going to get it broken

again. Well, for those extreme cases, they're going to need surgical intervention. If you can't breathe through your nose, you have to find a way. So Nyack, the guy at Stanford told me, if your toilet is clogged, what are you going to do? You're going to find a way of cleaning it out and getting that flowing again. And when it clogs again, just fix it again. Yeah. That's one way of doing it. Or you could make a permanent fix to it, right? Yeah. So that it's always functioning. If someone's used to getting punched in the nose every month and their nose is getting

broken again, you know, that's going to be really hard to nasal breathe. So I think that either they need to stop getting punched in the nose or they have to make some other lifestyle choices. You know, if they want to continue doing that, they're going to have a hard time nasal breathing. That just seems like simple physics. But it's so crazy because it is one of the more difficult things to do athletically. And athletically, it seems from your work and the work that you're citing that it would be of extreme benefit to learn how to breathe through your nose, but yet most of them can't. Yeah, and this is, I asked Patrick McKeown this,

and he's like, when you're competing, you do what you can to compete. You do what you can to win, which is why if you see Michael Jordan, right before he dunks on someone, he goes, it takes this huge breath of air. That one breath of air is not gonna affect his endurance or his performance, right?

It's about habitual nasal breathing and breathing while you're training. If someone has a bloody nose or something is stuffed up there, you have to breathe somehow, right? You're going to breathe through your mouth, especially for boxers, you know. Yeah. It is interesting, though, you look at any other animal in the wild. Look at a horse running, like at a full-on sprint. It's never breathing out of its – ever. Look at a cheetah, like at a full-on sprint. It's never breathing out of its mouth ever.

Look at a cheetah, like hunting down some prey. It's never breathing out of its mouth. Horses, when they start breathing out of their mouths, they're in deep trouble. Right, and dogs just do it to cool themselves off. Yeah, thermal regulation. That's right. The carbon dioxide thing is a real trip. The carbon dioxide thing is a real trip.

When you're saying that this need to take a deep breath is really because your body recognizes the level of carbon dioxide is very high, what happens when you become accustomed to holding your breath? Are there physiological changes that are taking place? So this is what Dr. Justin Feinstein is working on right now at the Laureate Institute of Brain Research. He has found that asthmatics and people with anxiety have this extremely low threshold for CO2. So they need to keep breathing. They're so paranoid that they're not going to be able to breathe that they've become accustomed to, and whenever that CO2 increases, they freak out. So he is found by slowly acclimating them to have more of a, to be able to take more CO2 and become more comfortable with it. That's how they can change their breathing. That's how they can change their habits, which is exactly what those asthma techniques do, right? They teach these people to breathe less and to breathe slowly, to slowly acclimate themselves. Like someone with asthma or panic, don't go and start holding your breath as long as you can. That's a bad idea. Like let the

body adjust. Slowly. Yeah. So I was recently around someone having a panic attack, and what she was saying is, I can't breathe. I'm having a hard time breathing. Obviously, she was breathing and she was talking, but she was like, I can't breathe. What would you say to a person who's doing that? Just try to get them to calm down, slowly breathe? Like, what would you say? I would quote Dr. Alicia Murrett at Southern Methodist University who said, the idea that people should be breathing more when they have panic is exactly the opposite of what they should be doing. So they should be – what is happening is their CO2 levels are getting so low.

What they need to do is breathe more slowly or hold their breath. Can you increase your tolerance for CO2 like this? Is that like a physical thing or is it a mental thing? Absolutely. It's a physical thing. There are chemoreceptors right around here, right? And these are the things that gauge levels of CO2. So if you think about a freediver, what allows them to hold their breath for four, five, six, seven, eight minutes? They've gotten this threshold of CO2 that's very high compared to me or you or anyone else. You think about someone who's able to summit Everest without oxygen, right? They've got this threshold of CO2.

So so much of fitness, not all of it, but a lot of it is dictated by the level of CO2 that you can withstand, at least with surfing or with freediving or with alpine climbing. So these receptors, you train them or they get stronger? Is it like an endurance thing? Like, you know, your cardiovascular endurance increases, your resting heart rate decreases. Like, does that happen with these carbon dioxide receptors? You can train them.

Yeah, yeah. You can acclimate them to accept a higher threshold of CO2 so that you become comfortable with it. So one of the hard things about training to freedive is those breath holds at the beginning. You do these static breath holds, not in water, never in water, but on land. You see how long you can hold your breath. And they're miserable. People, you know, maybe hold their breath maximum two minutes. But once you get used to it, you can go four minutes or five minutes.

And what is happening when you're getting used to it? You are allowing those signals, those chemoreceptors are going off and sending messages to your amygdala, which is the area in the brain that dictates fear. And you're ignoring them or you're just accustomed to it? You're getting accustomed to it. You are becoming more comfortable with it. Because when I've heard of free divers diving seven minutes and holding their breath for that time, and they're doing it underwater. And then I try to hold my breath. I'm like, what is wrong with me?

Like, why? Do I have a weak mind? Like, what is it? Why am I giving in? What is that thing? So what he's doing, he's found that he's been trying to train people in mindfulness and trying to train these people in breathing practices. But it's really hard because he can't be with them 24 hours a day. So what he's now experimenting with, and he's got an NIH grant to do this, is instead of having them practice these mini breath holds throughout the day, he's having them come in and take a huge inhale of CO2 because his hypothesis is that that can help reset the tolerance of those chemoreceptors.

Fascinating. It's a little shortcut. Yeah. It's a little because it's the modern age. No one wants to actually put in the work, right? No one wants to be Swami Rama. I think a lot of people want to be Swami Rama, just no one wants the 30 years in a cave. Yeah. And what is his results of these people taking in the burst of CO2? It is too soon to say he's going to be publishing everything next year or the year after that. Excellent. He's in the middle of it right now. But the premise of it makes perfect sense to me. And this is why it describes and explains why so many of these slow breathing less practices are so effective for anxiety, why they're so effective for asthma as well.

Now, are there specific coaches that work with people that have anxiety and use these anxiety breath coaches? Yeah. Dr. Richard Brown and Patricia Gerbarg, a psychiatrist in New York, I believe he's at Columbia, they've developed this whole program. And most of it revolves, it's so simple that people think, oh, there's no way this can work for me until they try it. So they bring in patients, have them start with this six seconds in, So they bring in patients, have them start with this six seconds in, six seconds out. That's it. You'd be surprised how few people actually have breathed that way in the past year or five years or ten years. They've found that this method of breathing was effective for 9-11 survivors who had this awful condition called ground glass lungs.

They had a bunch of gunk in there. There was no therapy to get rid of it. But this breathing pattern was able to do what no other therapy could do just by breathing. What happened to the people that had this ground glass stuff? Their lungs were filled with garbage, and they were constantly exhaling this gunk, right? And so by breathing slowly and by helping the lungs to open up and helping with that gas exchange with CO2 and O2, they were able to help them recover so much more effectively. And this is, they've written books on this stuff. So they're a great place to start. If you want the how, they're legit too. They're leaders in their field. And so this breathing in and

breathing out cleared their lungs or just made them feel better? It had a significant benefit in clearing their lungs. Wow. And it makes them feel better. And that's the thing. There's no side effects to doing this stuff. If at the end of it, you're like, I still have asthma. I still have anxiety. It's not going to hurt you. The minimum is you're going to feel better. And that's not too bad, considering all the other side effects to so many other therapies. It's obviously, yeah, it's not a drug. What do you do? What do I do for breathing? People think that since I spent so many years writing a book about breathing, I'm going to be the best breather in the world. I'm not.

I've got a long, long way to go. My job as a journalist was to go out and report on this stuff and then as objectively as I could. And along the way, I met people who had absolutely transformed their lives. So you can't help getting a little emotionally caught up in this practice and in these stories. And I learned a few tricks along the way. I noticed what a poor breather I was. I used to, at night, sleep with my mouth open for decades, right? I thought this was normal to go to sleep with 22 ounces of water by the bed, wake up every few hours, dunk some water. It's completely not normal at all. So you recommend sleeping with like, do you use mouth tape? Absolutely. Yeah. You tape your mouth up every night. Yeah. I thought this sounded pretty sketchy until I

heard about it from the, you know, doctor of speech language therapy at Stanford until I heard about it from Dr. Mark Berheny. So what they've found and they had, Berheny's been using this stuff for decades. This is not a fat piece of duct tape. Don't go on YouTube and see what people – nine pieces of tape down. No. You need a piece of tape that has a really light and easy adhesive about the size of a stamp. You put it in the middle of your lips. You do that even with your beard and mustache?

Absolutely. It's on your lips. Okay. So it just keeps your lips closed. So many people are like, how dare you write about this? I'm offended. Meanwhile, a quarter of the population has sleep apnea. Half the population is snowing.

I have sleep apnea. Yeah. I have sleep apnea and I use a mouthpiece. I use a mouthpiece that presses my tongue down to keep my airway open. As long as you have that airway open, that is key, especially at night because sleep apnea has so many chronic problems associated with that downstream from hypertension, metabolic issues. But do you think I would still have sleep apnea if I use this tape and close my mouth? There's only one way to find out. Oh my goodness. I don't know. I'm not here to prescribe

anything, but this tape is free. You can do it. I'm sure you have some sensors to monitor your sleep. Do you have a pulse ox? No, I just go to sleep with this mouthpiece on. That would be a good thing to test it. It seems like a lot of work. Let me ask you this.

My sleep apnea occurs because I have a fat tongue and a thick neck. A lot of wrestlers get this, and that's basically probably where I got it from jujitsu. But I can breathe out of my nose. So do you think that sleep apnea would still occur if I'd breathe out of my nose primarily or only? It can because sleep apnea is caused by your tongue falling back. So my tongue could fall back against that hole anyway. It's less apt to with nasal breathing because nasal breathing is going to tone your airways more. And I know from the Stanford experiment that I went from opening my mouth the whole time.

Okay. So 10 days, I could not breathe through my nose. Right. Within two days, I was snoring, had not been snoring. Within about four days, I was snoring. Half the night, I got sleep apnea. The other subject in the study had the exact same thing happen to him, even worse than me. The day we took that stuff out and we taped our mouths and were nasal breathing, snoring went away, sleep apnea went away, my blood pressure dropped about 10 to 15 points.

So it's something that people can test as well. You can test the quality of your sleep and it's not asking too much. And once I learned that this did not require a fat piece of tape, that the point wasn't to hermetically seal your mouth shut, which sounds a little scary to a lot of people and it should be. It's just to train the jaw shut at night so you don't go. lot of people and it should be. It's just to train the jaw shut at night so you don't go. I saw there's a device, not a device, like a neoprene strap. It goes under your chin and wraps around your head and keeps your jaw shut. Is that dumb? There's all kinds of stuff. I'm not going to say it's, I haven't tried it. I don't know. I think, you know, maybe some people get some benefit from it and that's great. I do know that tape is almost free, and I've seen some incredible results myself subjectively, but they're also doing some studies.

And if you look at Burhenne's work that he's done for the past few decades, I mean it's a quick and easy fix that can work for a lot of people. And this is something that you use every night? I use it every night. When I don't, guess what happens? Yeah, your mouth cups open and you start snoring. Yeah. And I wish that I didn't have to. I would figure at this time that it would become habit, but I'm not one of those people who have that really strong jaw that stays shut. My mouth just opens. And the difference in quality of sleep from doing this has been profound. I'm glad you brought that up because that was something else I wanted to talk to you about. You were talking about the changes in human diet and eating soft foods and how it affects the way

the jaw develops and the size of the jaw, and that there's a way to improve that, which I found fascinating. Yeah. And this was something when you set out to write a book about breathing, the last thing you think you're going to be doing is handing, you know, around a bunch of ancient skulls and looking at teeth. But that's where this journey led me. I had heard from some biological anthropologists that our faces have changed and that our mouths have gotten too small. And that was one of the reasons so many of us were breathing so poorly. And so I thought, well, this sounds interesting. These people are legit. I want to check it out. And if you take an ancient skull, anything older than 500 years old, 5,000 years old, 50,000 years old, you're going to see by and large about 99% chance these skulls are going to have perfectly straight teeth. They never had their wisdom teeth removed. They never had braces, any orthodonture, anything.

They had straight teeth because they had these very wide and large mouths and these powerful jaws. If you start getting into the modern era of industrialized food, mouths start shrinking. So why do we have crooked teeth? Not from genetics. It's because our mouths have grown so small that the teeth have nowhere to go. So they grow crooked. And what else happens when you have a mouth that's

too small for its teeth? You have a smaller airway. So this is one of the reasons why so many people have snoring, sleep apnea, and other respiratory problems. This sounded so bizarre because it's nothing I'd ever learned in school. But all anyone needs to do is look up some ancient skulls if you're online and check out their teeth and check out how they have these huge jaws, these big, flat, wide faces, powerful faces. And they all had this. And then you go into the wild, 5,400 different mammals and check out and see how many have crooked teeth. The answer is zero. So some, some bulldogs do because they've been bred to have this flat face, just like humans, but, but animals in the wild have straight teeth. And, and we did too, as a species, we,

we have straight teeth, but, but because of industrialization, specifically because of food, our mouths have grown too small. You would never believe that. If someone told me that other than reading your book and kind of understanding where you're coming from, I would think this is nonsense. It's genetics. Just like why people have small hands or people have big feet or whatever. Well, it's become a heritable trait. So what's happened now is they've found the researchers who've done this, Robert Corcini worked on this stuff for 30 years, has 250 scientific papers on it. They found within the first generation of switching to industrialized foods, about 50% of the population is going to have malocclusion, which means a crooked jaw, crooked teeth. After that, about 60 to 70% next generation.

After that, about 80%. After that, look around. That's us now, about 90%. Jesus. So if... Sorry. No. I was going to bum you out a little more. No, go ahead. So Dr. Kevin Boyd is now doing studies where he's looking at fetuses in the womb and is seeing their mouth size is too small and

they have this backward slant to their faces, just like I have, just like so many people in the population have. If you were to measure a skull and you were to draw one line from its ear to its nose and another line perpendicular to that, almost every single ancient skull would be above that line. Very powerful jaw. Now 90% of modern skulls are below it. So they are behind it. And this is happening now. It is becoming a heritable trait. So kids are messed up to begin with,

which is why so many kids have sleep apnea and snore now, which is so injurious to their health. And this came about because they weren't chewing tougher food. They didn't need the muscles. And what can be done to sort of reverse that or mitigate that? In adulthood, it's harder. And for kids, it's much easier because their muscles and their bones are much more malleable. But that's exactly what they found is once you introduce – we used to chew for about four hours a day. That's just how it was from the dawn of time to about 500 years ago. But as wheat started getting processed into white flour, as rice became – we started taking the germ and the bran away from rice.

So it's just the polished seed as things began to get canned and bottled. If you think about even what's considered healthy food right now, smoothies, avocado, oatmeal, all this stuff is soft. Mush. Power bars. Right. So in adulthood, you can make some changes and that's what I tried to do in my own faith as an experiment. For kids, what they're finding is these problems need to be diagnosed very early, and they need to be treated. And what they do is they widen the mouth to the way that they were supposed to be 500 years ago.

So we're changing our bodies by force of will to the way that nature had made them before we messed them up. There was a doctor that you were talking about that developed some sort of a retainer that actually changed the volume of your jaw as an adult and changed the volume of your mouth. That's right. So I had crooked teeth growing up. I had braces. I had extractions. I had gear. And me and everyone I knew had the same thing. It was

never if you were going to get it, it's just when are you going to get your braces. So the point of all those things was to straighten teeth, but they're not looking at airway health, right? So what happens just as a principle, you've got a mouth that's too small for its face, the teeth are growing and crooked. You extract teeth from that, get some headgear and go. You're creating, at least there's a significant argument by many people in the field that say, you're making a small mouth smaller. And one leader in the field, Dr. Michael Gelb, said 50% of people who have orthodontics are going to have more breathing problems because of it. Orthodontics meaning braces as well? breathing problems because of it.

Orthodontics meaning braces as well? Braces or craning in. So it's a combination of braces and especially headgear. And some of that stuff is being phased out. Braces are still, you're forcing teeth into a smaller space to make them straight. So there's this, the very first orthodontics weren't craning teeth in to make them straight. They would expand the mouth because even back then, 120 years ago, they knew our mouths were growing too small. They knew that. So the first devices, I thought this was fascinating. They were using this for kids who had cleft palates,

had all of these other problems where they were having problem chewing and breathing. So they would expand their mouths with this device that went to the roof of your mouth and it had a little dowel screw and you slowly opened it up to expand the mouth. What does it feel like? It doesn't feel great. So this is where I think a lot of orthodontics is heading because it allows you to have straighter teeth, but it also opens your airway. But how long do you keep it in your mouth, like braces, all day long? No, no.

The one that I used was called a homeoblock, and this guy had been using it for 30 years. And I used it at night. So you put it on the palate, upper palate, and you slowly have this little screw thing, this little handle that every couple weeks you open it a little more, just slowly. There it is.

Jamie's got a picture of it. All right. So that you used one of those? Yeah, I did. None as gnarly as that. Yeah, that looks intense. But if you feel your head right now, you feel these sutures, right, these cracks in your head, you have one of those on your upper palate. So that can open, okay? That's what it's made to do. It can open and you can widen your mouth in adulthood. And

I showed this through CAT scans. And by that, you can open your airway and you can breathe better. And how long did you wear it for? I wore it for one year. One year to the week I took the other CAT scan. And you gained how much volume in your mouth? I gained about five pennies worth of bone in my face, which is crazy. Five pennies. So stack them up. Yeah.

Five pennies. Yeah. That's a lot of bone, man. So we've been told that we can't grow bone past 30, right? It's just entropy. We're only going to be losing. We can stop it from disappearing. We can do some things to help prevent that loss, but we can't build it.

But we can. We can build it in the center of our face, in the maxilla. So you can really change the structure of your face from doing- You can widen your face? You can add more bone. You can model more bone inside of your face from doing, you could widen your face. You can add more bone. You can model more bone inside of your face. Do you look better? While you're, well, can't you tell?

You're a good looking man. But I mean, do you think you look better? I will not say better. I won't use those. Different? No, worse, worse. People be forewarned. Don't build bone in your face. No, I did notice after about six weeks of wearing this thing, people were like, dude, what happened?

What are you doing? They could see a shift? Absolutely. And it's very apparent. And there's – you can see a bunch of case studies on this and you can see it for yourself. And the neat thing is it's not subjective. It's not, well, I think I look different. There's CAT scans and there's metrics to it. So, and it also opened my airways. It allowed me to expand. I don't know how much,

it was probably maybe 15%, 20%, but it was mostly the toning of the airway. Why did you stop using it after a year? I'm still using it. You are? So, for the book, for the research, I said, I'm going to do this for one year and I'm going to wear it every night. I'm really going to be dedicated. Even after having a few beers, I was like, the last thing I want to do is put this thing

in my mouth and go to sleep. But I did it because I was curious because I'd heard these stories. I'd seen the case studies. I'd see the data. But I wanted to see what would happen in my own body. I'd see the data, but I wanted to see what would happen in my own body. And I tell you, on a subjective level, I breathe more easily now than I could ever remember breathing. I haven't had pneumonia, bronchitis, any of those problems.

But there's a bunch of factors, though, too, right? There's the nose breathing. There's the breath work. So it's a combination of all these things. Yeah, but nose breathing wouldn't help you build more bone in your face. Right, of course. So a lot of that was due to this device not only spread open that suture in the upper palate, but also stimulated chewing stress. So on one side, there was this little bump. So every time you closed your mouth, you got some chewing stress, which would stimulate stem cells, which would go into those sutures and build more bone. which would stimulate stem cells, which would go into those sutures and build more bone.

The difference is when you clench your jaws right now, just like, you know, you're boxing, you're intense, you're clenching your jaws, that does not stimulate that good beneficial chewing stress, okay? Because our bodies identify that as sympathetic stress. So cortisol levels go up, right? That means growth isn't gonna happen. But if you think about eating a big piece of steak or a carrot, you're not chewing on both sides of your molars, you're chewing on one side or the other. So when you stimulate the stress on one side or the other, next time you're chewing on something, think about that.

I'm well aware. That's why you salivate and you become more relaxed. And that's when that growth can happen. So chewing on one side or the other stimulates stem cells that don't get stimulated if you just like biting down on a mouthpiece. Because of cortisol and osteoporosis. Yeah. Now, how often do you have this thing in your mouth now? I took a break after a year to see what life was like on the other side of that. Is it nice? It's great.

But I got curious. I talked to the guy who gave me this device, Dr. Ted Belfort, and he's used this thing for 30 years. And his case studies are pretty fascinating. And I talked to him. He's like, oh, we should do another CAT scan, see what happened. I didn't quite admit to him that I had stopped using it. So I felt a little guilty. And now for the past about month and a half, I've been back on the train to see what happened. So we're going to take another one just for kicks. I'm not going to write about the books

already done, but I just, I'm curious to see what will happen if you keep wearing this if you can really keep them if you're the Swami Rama of orthodontics if you get a hold that bad boy in your mouth for a few years I mean, I'd be really fascinating if you change your face and all sudden you have like this big Clark Kent Superman type jaw. Can you let me shack up here for a couple years? I'm just gonna focus on this all day. Just stay in the sauna too. Do what you got to do. So where would one get one of these things? There's many different devices.

So the one I use was the homeoblock. Ted Belfort can set you up with that. Would you have to go to a doctor to get measured? Is that what you do? Yeah, you have to go to a dentist or an orthodontist would set you up with this. But there's many different ones that do the same thing. What a lot of people do, instead of having this thing in your mouth for a year, they go in and the sound's gnarly. Apparently, it's not as gnarly as it sounds.

But they go in and drill in this thing. Hey. Yeah. And open it up that way. But people who have done this, and they're using this especially for kids and they're using this for teenagers repeatedly, their allergies go away. They can breathe better. They look totally different because they're expanding because growth is centered around this right here. So where are they drilling in?

The upper palate. They drill into the upper palate and they put a device in there? Yep. So it's permanent. So you can't get it out. Until they take it out. But it's much quicker. This expansion happened quickly over the course of a couple of months.

Oh. So you keep it in your mouth for a couple of months. Yeah. And your teeth start widening out, you know, and then they fix it. So Marianna Evans is an expert at this. Dr. William Hang, who's right around here. He's been doing this for 30 years. Very respected.

And he knows this stuff better than anyone. So, yeah. And what do they do for your lower jaw? Nothing. It's all about this upper palate. What if you have crooked teeth on your lower jaw? Well, they could use braces or something. But it's all about the upper palate.

Oh, okay. And there are some devices you'd have to ask, hang. They've got all the gizmos to do. The reason, I thought this was so interesting that this was how orthodontics, this is how teeth were straightened, right, 100 years ago. And then by the 40s, they found a way of making dentistry more of a production line where one size fits all. We're getting yank teeth, braces on, done, done, done. But this expansion takes a lot of expertise and a lot of focus. But what I'm seeing now within that industry, there's this huge moment of change where they've realized, so many people have realized that some of these processes might have caused breathing problems.

And so they're reassessing how they've been doing things. And one orthodontist told me, he's like, we're going to look back in 10 years and be horrified by what we've done to our breathing. Oh, man. But it's so interesting to me that breathing and breath work and knowing how to breathe properly, it's not common knowledge, but it's so critical to health. And it's free. We're not talking about something that requires devices or a long learning curve or just some of these benefits. So many of them, and especially the

most simple ones, right? Anyone can breathe in six seconds in, six seconds out. If you want to really go up to the next stage and figure out what breathing can really do for you on a bigger and more powerful level, you can do TUMO, you can do Wim Hof, you can do holotropic, you can do KRIAS, you can do pranayamas they're all doing the same thing and holotropic i haven't done it but it makes you trip right it's an interesting experience what was it like for you uh you know i know a lot of people have found profound benefits from this uh they used it um in hospital. 11,000 people were put through this thing and they showed it was more effective than any other therapy. Me personally, the science is much more thin

in holotropic breathwork. And what I had been told by the instructors kind of threw me off where they're like, they sit you in a room and they blast music. And for three hours, you breathe as hard as you can. And they told me that you're going to be able to enter into this space because so much oxygen is getting into your body. The opposite is happening. You're inhibiting blood flow to your brain. And so your brain is processing that as a threat. And sometimes you inhibit so much blood flow that perhaps your brain is interpreting this as though you are dying, which is why so many people have this reaction where they said, I am reborn after holotropic. And that's awesome. I don't want to take that away from anyone. But

what I've seen is that there's been a ton of subjective anecdotal studies, not a ton, a few of them. But the actual science behind it, no one's gone into an fMRI and looked at what's really happening. And that's something I really want to do, and hopefully I'm going to be doing in the next few months, just for curiosity. That makes sense if people are having psychedelic experiences, because many psychedelic experiences are tied to near-death experiences. A lot of people that have near-death experiences, they report these moments that mimic what a lot of people have experienced on psychedelics. So what they're doing through this holotropic breathing, they're not harming themselves, right? Or do we not know?

Not that I know of. The doctor who put 11,000 people in said nobody had any problems. There were no side effects. So I've heard that some people can freak out. I heard that there's possible bowel issues involved and some real meltdowns. In the class that I took, I wasn't sure how much was psychosomatic and how much was actually because of the breathing. I had a pretty strange experience where a guy turned into a wolf for a while. Whoa.

A wolf? Like a real wolf? Went humping around the room. Oh, so a guy. Not to you. I wish if it were a real wolf, that would have been incredible. But he thought he was a wolf. He inhabited the body of a wolf. Maybe he thought he was a wolf. He inhabited the body.

Maybe he was just an asshole. That's possible too. And just like acted out. Or maybe he really became a wolf. We will never know, which is why this stuff should be studied. You know, there's a lot of talk that breathing this way will trigger endogenous DMT. And that's the reason people trip out so hard. I tried to do a study in which I would breathe this way and they would take blood before and after. But the scientists that I was talking to said it would be such a small amount, they wouldn't be able to detect it.

So there's a lot of gray area, which to me is not a bad thing. It's great. There's still mysteries to breath. There's mysteries to the human body, right? And if people are finding great benefit from this and there's no side effect, then that's great. I just found it was a little thinner than the other techniques like Wim Hof method or like Kriya.

Now, this guy that had this experience and he turned into a wolf, did you talk to him before? Awesome guy, super solid. He was a lawyer working in San Francisco and left and went to live off the grid in a cabin in Mendocino, which is completely legit and admirable. And he was a groovy dude and afterwards really warm, welcoming guy. So I don't want to take away any process that he went through. He said it was very cleansing for himself. And I think that that's great. You're a very nice guy. I wish I was there. Who am I to rip on it, right? Right. I understand. I understand. Yeah. I'm just saying you're a very nice guy with your disclaimer. I'd like to talk to him. You know where we can find him. He's out in the tundra right now.

You got to go hunt him down. Is he? No, I have no idea. Maybe, right? Maybe he's got like a caribou in his mouth. Could be. So this guy ran around. Did he have clothes on when he did this?

Yeah, yeah. He was scratching his crotch a little bit and growling. Growling. And it got interesting. Yeah, everyone saw it. And again, you know, he was going through his process. That was cool. But the whole time I was watching him breathing, and he wasn't really breathing any differently than me.

Because what you do is you have half the class are the sitters for the people who are breathing, and you watch over these people case they have problems so i was a sitter during this process i was not breathing i was looking at his respiration really didn't look any different so i'm wondering how much of this is is the set and setting of this you're in mendocino you're at a hot springs there's really loud music fake what kind of music is this you know that's that's something I wish they could have worked on a little bit. Death metal? I wish. But it was a lot of like fake keyboard lutes and cymbal, the fake tinny cymbal crashes. The Mac Am Hall.

That's the kind of music they're playing? That kind of thing, yeah. But that would seem like, you know, when you talk about set and setting, that would seem to be like a terrible set and setting. Well, a lot of people enjoyed that music and good for them. It would be interesting to mix it up with three hours of death metal. Right. And just see where that would take you. Or Zeppelin.

Something good. Zeppelin, that would be fine. Yeah. Or Zeppelin. Something good. Zeppelin, that would be fine. Yeah. So when you did it, so you were a sitter, but then you also did it, right?

And when you did it, what did you experience? Well, it definitely affects you because you're breathing in a certain way. It's going to affect your physiology. So I got really cold. I got really hot. I got really spacey. I felt like I was kind of dreaming for a while. Three hours is a long time to breathe as hard as you possibly can.

But the shifts in temperature and in circulation, because the body is trying to compensate, right? So the more you're breathing, your pH is going to be going down. So you're becoming more alkaline. So your body doesn't like that. It really wants the pH because all the cellular functions happen at a certain pH, some point four. So to me, it was fascinating to feel my body fighting against this and constantly trying to balance itself throughout the whole thing. But it's definitely spacey. There's no doubt about it. When you say spacey, what do you mean by that?

You are extremely lightheaded. You feel very high. I was talking to Ben Greenfield about it. When you say spacey, what do you mean by that? You are extremely lightheaded. You feel very high. I was talking to Ben Greenfield about it, and he said it was the most profound spiritual experience he's ever had just by breathing. And a lot of people say the same thing. Those subjective experiences are cool, but I think it would be a lot more interesting to find out what happens to everybody, not just one person when they do this, and to look at the brain and to look at the body and really analyze that to see if there's some physiological reaction. We know what's happening with blood flow to the brain. We know what happens to the brain when it's denied blood flow to certain areas. But how does that affect us psychologically

afterwards? How does it affect us physically? I think these are good questions and it would be interesting to find out. How long did it take you to feel like you recovered from that experience? Pretty quickly. I went outside afterwards and drank a beer in my car and just sort of re-centered. But it was mostly just the feeling of extreme lightheadedness, dreaminess. Mostly just the feeling of extreme lightheadedness, dreaminess, and then everything just sort of boils back down and you're back in Mendocino at the hot tubs. And when they sell you on this, when they have a class for holotropic breathing, what are they saying it's going to do? Well, they can't claim any medical benefits because the FDA would come after them, but they say it is a spiritual journey and for many people it is. And I think that's a wonderful thing that they're getting benefit from this. And they use this fuzzy language like that

because they can't say it's going to help with your asthma. They can't say. But what's interesting is there are other methods like Kriya, Sudarshan Kriya, 60 independent studies, and it's so similar to holotropic. The difference is you don't breathe super hard for three hours. You breathe extremely intensely for about five minutes, then slow it down. But let me ask you about holotropic breathing first before Kriya. Sure. So holotropic breathing, what is the actual technique? Like how do you do it?

You breathe as hard and as fast as you are able to breathe. So you're not taking big deep breaths? Whatever you want to do. Whatever you want to do. It's hard. So you can go, you can do that. And you're breathing through the nose, through the mouth? Whatever you want to do.

They say through the mouth is going to allow you to get more air in. Is that real? This was, yeah, yeah. You'll get more air in. Because you get to do. They say through the mouth is going to allow you to get more air in. Is that real? This was, yeah, yeah. You'll get more air in. Because you get larger volume. Yeah, for sure. And this was created in the 70s by Stanislav Grof, who is a psychiatrist, who was one of the first test subjects of LSD. And he started using LSD at Johns Hopkins and in other universities and found it had this profound effect for

people with schizophrenia and other serious problems. It got banned in, what, 68? And so he wanted to find a way to allow people to have these experiences without the drug. And so he developed this specifically to mimic the effects of LSD. And he's written 12 books on this stuff. Some of the science, mostly the psychology of what's happening with it. I wish that there was some more hard science to it. There's not yet, but hopefully that's forthcoming.

And that number three hours, is that consistent? They've been it's interesting when I did this and this was several years ago. It was three hours. So you had to go three hours. Now they're doing – I guess that was too hard for a lot of people. They're doing these hour sessions, which is news to me. Again, everybody wants to be Swami Rama. Nobody wants to live in a cave for 30 years.

Three hours is America, man. That's too much time, bro. You got it. But if you're going to go into that zone, I think you want the full pie, not just the peas. Yeah, I would imagine. But I guess it's pretty hard for people to do that for that long. I've had some friends who have done the holotropic breathing, one of the reasons why I asked you this. And these friends are pretty hardcore psychedelic experimenters, and they found it very profound. They said that

they could achieve states that are very similar to psychedelic experiences. You hear that all the time. But you didn't find that. I found it very lightly. I did not go into the spectral universe. And you've done that before? Have you had

psychedelic experiences before? I went to college But but I did not dabble too deeply All these disclaimers my mom's my mom oh I understand okay you can wink Okay, I got it um now crea. What is the difference in crea? Okay, so so crea is a Now, Kriya, what is the difference in Kriya? Okay. So Kriya is a breathing technique that is very similar to holotropic breathwork.

But the difference is it's much more controlled. So you're having these bursts of heavy breathing, but then you have these bursts of very slow breathing. And this was developed in the 80s. And they started opening up to studies. And there's, just as I mentioned, there's been 60 independent studies showing how effective this stuff is for, and that have been done at Harvard, that have been done at legitimate institutions, showing how effective for some autoimmune diseases, for anxiety, for depression, for other issues. And what I think is interesting is, so you've got Wim Hof's breathing,

which is very effective for some autoimmune issues, for some asthma, for anxiety. You've got Kriya, which is doing the same thing. So what I found on the book is, people have been coming at this stuff from different directions, but they're coming to the same conclusions about these breathing methods.

And these very hard and heavy breathing methods, people think, why do I want to stress myself out? So I'm stressed out enough with work, with my kids, whatever. When I breathe, I want to chill out. But that's exactly what these very powerful breathing methods do, is they focus that stress into one 20-minute time period so that the rest of the time you can actually go to sleep, so you can actually be rested and relaxed. And that's what Wim Hof's version of TUMO does, and that's what Creo does at all. Also, it stimulates that sympathetic stress. You're completely really going for it.

You turn it on specifically so you can turn it off. So what is the rhythm in terms of like hard breathing versus slow breathing? What is? In Kriya, it is a lot of slow breathing at the beginning. And then there's a medium breathing phase. When you say slow breathing, like how much time are the breaths? I have not counted. I've been following an instructor, but it's usually thinking of because this guy, Ravi Shankar, is the one who dictates this thing.

So it's only – he's the only guy who does it. And it comes – so he sends out these cassette tapes. It's so quaint or CDs. People play these. So the slower ones are about – So two, three seconds? Yeah, about that. And then after that are medium.

So – And then you go for it as hard and as fast as you can. And is there any literature on how they arrived at that specific rhythm? He had been studying. He's another guy who spent his lifetime in meditation and in yoga and went on his spiritual enlightenment quest and came out of it with this is a breathing technique that I want to help share with people. All of that sounds really fuzzy, right? Until you start studying it. Until you start doing studies to see how people have benefited from this.

And that's what I think is so important. No matter how granola it sounds, if you can measure it, you can study it. And if you can study it, you can find whether or not it works. And it certainly has worked for so many people. And these studies, like what have they shown in terms of the benefits? Like what was the duration that the people were doing it for? So even after a few weeks of doing this, this isn't the only, so there's four different tangents of this breathing. and they say that you can only really learn it in one of their schools. So there's this very soft breathing where you put your hands like this, then you put your hands like this underneath your armpits, then you put your hands like this, and you breathe in to a count of four. What is the purpose of the –

I think it's to open up the lungs. Yeah, to create flexibility. So it starts with that. There's the obligatory alms, which everyone's doing nowadays. And then there's that really intense, that cleansing breath at the end, which to me is by far the most potent. So there's almost like a warm-up. Yeah, for sure. It's like you're getting the – and what's the duration of their, their practice? Like the, the slower breathing where you have your hands on your hips, um, will probably go

on for about, again, I haven't timed this because I've been in a class, but probably seven minutes, seven or eight minutes. Ohms, you do three ohms. That's a couple minutes, but that long cleansing breath is about 40 minutes long. So the whole thing, you've done it in an hour. Yeah. Yeah. And how many times have you done this? I've probably done it hundreds of times. Really? Yeah. And do you get the same sort of trippy feeling that you got with holotropic breathing? The, uh, the body is different every day. So it depends where your mind is, depends on where your body is. But, but every single time I feel very different at the end, I feel much better, clear headed. I'm able to sleep a lot better. So, um, you know, I've done

this in the class dozens and dozens of times, and they had a YouTube video of, of this practice that I down now, now it's offline. Um, so I downloaded that and I'm able to follow along with that. Um, so what are you doing currently'm able to follow along with that. Um, so what are you doing currently? We kind of barely touched on it, but what do you, what is your daily routine? Do you have a daily routine? Um, my daily routine for the last couple of months has been awful cause I've just been on book tour, you know, virtual book tour. And, and when you, you notice something when, when you talk for four or five hours a day,

what am I doing now? I'm breathing through my mouth over and over. I think that's one of the reasons it's exhausting, you know, mentally exhausting, physically exhausting. But one thing I try to do is I set up a little timer. There's a zillion different apps you can do to focus on those six seconds in, six seconds out breaths. Because I noticed the first thing that I do in the morning, I sit down on my computer, look at 40 different emails, I stop breathing. And I know this because I put on a pulse ox

and watch my O2 just go straight down. And this is so, they say that up to 80% of office workers have this, it's called email apnea. And they've studied it, some researchers at the NIH. Email apnea. Yeah. If you think about it, next time you sit down at a computer, you've got your Twitter on, you've got your phone open, you just lose focus on your body.

You lose focus on your posture. So you're saying like this, which makes it really hard to take a deep breath. And then you lose focus on how healthily you're breathing. And so I've found that if I focus on that right from the get-go, I can sort of set myself up for some good habits. I also try to incorporate when I'm working out, I always nasal breathe, and I try to breathe less and increase my tolerance for CO2. But I do Wim Hof's tummo, I do Kriya, I do some pranayamas. I try to do those a few times a week in total. And they're offered for free. There's a free one you can do on Monday nights at 9. This guy isn't selling anything. He was a type 1 diabetic, had anxiety, had high blood pressure, had depression,

and he was able to bait so many of the symptoms of those things. How do you access this free breathing? Chuck McGee is the one who does it. It's in the back of my book, the URL. You can look up his name also online, Chuck McGee, Wim Hof instructor. And what's so cool, you have no idea this guy's even a breathing thing. He doesn't advertise anything. He does this because breathing has fundamentally changed his life in a measured way. So he no longer is on blood pressure medicine. He's taking 80% less insulin.

His anxiety is abated. His depression is debated. And these are things that have been, for the Wim Hof guys, there's thousands of these people reporting this, drops in CRP of 40-fold within two weeks of doing this. So it's fascinating stuff. So he leads a live stream. this. So it's fascinating stuff. So he leads a live stream. Is that what it is? Yeah.

And it's nightly? No, it's on Monday night, 9 p.m. PT. But what's cool is he will then send you a recording of this so you can practice it whenever you want. An audio recording that you can get on your phone or is it a physical? No, no. He'll send you. You can get it on your phone, download it, and listen to it whenever you want which is what i've done i have about four of his his different sessions here so whenever i was traveling when when people were

doing that especially if i was traveling spending a lot of times in in hotels i would do this to really reset myself and help go to sleep and you said his name is Chuck McGee, is that? Yeah, that's it. And so it was like chuckmcgee.com or something like that? His website is somethingvikingbreathworks. Oh, one of those guys. It's a hard URL. Yes. Why Viking? Have to ask him.

Because they did a lot of crazy shit, right? Yeah, they were free divers. Yeah. They were free divers. But there was a lot of weird chanting and yeah they were free divers yeah they were free divers so there was a lot of like weird chanting and stuff iced viking oh iced viking tie into the wim hof cold exposure thing okay and he's he's dealing a lot not just with people who are healthy you want to go up that next rung of human potential but with people of chronic pain who have chronic pain, who have chronic diseases. And that's an

area I think that we're just starting to learn about how effective this stuff is and how we can better treat these people instead of giving them tranquilizers, help to treat the core problem and do that through breathing properly. Well, listen, man, I really enjoyed your book and I really enjoyed talking to you. I think the information is so valuable. It's so interesting. And I know from my own personal experience that there's a great benefit to really learning how to breathe correctly and concentrating on breathing. And I'm going to start working out now through my nose. I'm going to try that now. Do my kickboxing, clench my mouth down, just completely breathe through my nose, and I'll let you know.

So the book, it's called Breath. You can basically get it everywhere. And again, I got the audio recording, and I really enjoyed it. Do you have Instagram, Facebook, all that jazz? Yeah. My website, Mr. James Nestor. I knew that these claims are going to sound impossible to people, so there's more than 500 scientific references there with x-rays, with videos, with pictures. Also on Instagram, I'm trying to get better at the social media thing.

So it's Mr. James Nestor on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, all that. I always appreciate when a journalist or an author is terrible at Instagram because it makes me think they're much more authentic. When people are really good at it, I get very suspicious. Well, I don't have to scare you off on that. I suck at it. I'm trying to get better. Good for you. Thank you for everything, man.

I really appreciate it. Thanks for being here. Thank you very much for having me. Goodbye, everybody. Breathe, bitch. Bye-bye. Breathe, bitch.