The Tim Ferriss Show - #829: James Nestor — Breathing Protocols to Reboot Your Health, Fix Your Sleep, and Boost Performance

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

James Nestor is a science journalist and the author of the international bestseller Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, with more than three million copies sold in 44 languages.This episode is brought to you by:Helix Sleep premium mattresses: https://HelixSleep.com/Tim (27% off all mattress orders)Momentous high-quality creatine for cognitive and muscular support: https://livemomentous.com/Tim (Code TIM for up to 35% off.)AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://DrinkAG1.com/Tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D plus 5 free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase.)*Show notes for this episode: https://tim.blog/2025/09/03/dr-dominic-dagostino-all-things-ketones/For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show. My guest today is someone I have wanted to have on for quite a few years now. James Nestor. He is a science journalist and the author of the international bestseller Breath, the new science of a lost art with more than three million copies sold in 44 languages. And I mentioned this in the episode, but this book came at me from probably 20 different directions and close friends of mine, including folks who've been on this podcast. And he's learned a lot since that book came out. So we dig into a lot of specifics. I took a ton of notes. There is a lot related to improving sleep and particular ways that you can tweak and fine tune

your sleep quality. If you haven't read breath, it was named the best general nonfiction book by the American Society of Journalists and Authors and was a finalist for the Science Book of the Year at the Royal Society, which is a BFD. It's a big deal. He is also the author of Deep, free diving, renegade science, and what the ocean tells us about ourselves, and get high now without drugs. You can find all things, James, that's M-R, James Nester, N-E-S-T-O-R, Mr. James Nester.com. And here we go. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question?

Now I've seen an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal and those. James, so nice to see you and hear you. Thanks for making the time. Thanks for having me. And I must tell you a bit of background to begin. I remember when breath, the new science of a lost art first came out. And I don't know if I've ever had, maybe deep survival would be another one, I believe, but two books that have come at me from so many different vectors,

from so many friends, from so many athletes, from so many doctors. And I thought to myself, you know what, this is fascinating. I'm already really, really captured by the subject matter, but I want to let this slow bake for a while and then come back and talk to James after it's saturated the global populace a bit and talk about the stories, what has stuck, what he's using personally. And so here we are. We did it. It's perfect timing. Yeah. Perfect timing. And in the course of doing prep for this, came across the name, Maurice Dubar, my French is rusty, but I believe I'm getting that probably 50% right. Would you mind explaining who Maurice is and why Maurice is relevant?

When I was first trying to research the benefits of hyperventilation breathwork practices and sort of get a deeper story into how they worked and who was doing them, I ran across this guy completely randomly at an event and he told me about this mysterious 90-year-old who would spend hours in the snow and swimming and frozen. and lakes up in the French outs. And this was not Wimhoff. This was a predecessor of Wimhoff who has been doing this for 50, 60 years. And so I was able to contact him and learn about his path into this world and learn about how rehabilitating it was for his own health and the other people that came to see him. And I thought it was interesting that there is a long legacy of people

who have been doing these things, just like most things, right? But they're usually hidden beneath a few layers, and you have to dig a bit to get there. But he's a fascinating guy. Sadly, he passed away at 93 years old and did this almost every day, you know, as often as he could. How did he get to the breathwork? What is his story? He was extremely sick as a child had various lung infections, various respiratory disorders, and he was slated for surgery. They were going to remove a large part of his lungs. And at that time, a missionary came in to see him and said, hey, I was just in the far east.

And I heard about this thing called yoga. He said, well, what's yoga? I said, let me tell you about it. And he showed him some breathing techniques. So Dubard said, I don't want to do the surgery yet. give me a few weeks to try to rehabilitate myself. And everyone thought he was crazy. And not only did he rehabilitate himself, he gained this almost superhuman strength by adopting these breathing practices. And that was in the 1950s. So that's how far ahead of the curve this guy was.

What was he actually doing in the sense that in the course of reading up on this guy a little bit, At 71, he turned the Himalayas on his bike at an elevation of 5,000 meters. He could sit in ice water effectively for 55 minutes, ran 150 miles beneath the sun in the Sahara Desert. And it seems like these stories, if you sort of follow the ET Reese's peanut butter bits back, lead to something called Tumo. I'm sure I'm pronouncing that incorrectly, but that seems to be the spelling. T-U-M-O, what differentiates that from different or other forms of breathing? Tumo is an ancient breathwork practice from the Bon Buddhists that allows you to both generate heat

in your body and store it. So this is what the monks have used in the Himalayas for thousands of years reportedly to help keep themselves warm. So it was a survival technique. And depending on who you talk to some people say oh it's very religious very spiritual other people say it's very practical it's just a practical thing you can learn this it's a mechanical skill that you can learn where it gets a bit more fuzzy is what is tumo what is officially tumo what is the saccharin version of tumo is whimhoff version tumo and i try not to get into the weeds too much in the book but basically there are two different versions there's the traditional type in which you breathe very slowly and you reduce your metabolism and somehow the heat in your body goes up shouldn't be

possible there it is and then there's the other type which i guess isn't officially tumo but people still call it tumo which is the whimhoff style breathing the extremely intense hyperventilation techniques followed by breath holds and building pressuring your body tumo light register trademark yeah you know what i think it's still available I have all the URLs, guys. I'm squatting on them if you want any. And in the case of Tumo, is that something that you have personally experimented with? Or have you left that on the shelf? I've done the commercial version of it many times. I still do it today. It absolutely works. If you are cold, if you're in the ocean, if you're in the snow, wherever you are. If you're

cold, you can do this and you can jack your body temperature very, very quickly. The slower one is a much better kept secret. You're not going to find too many instructions for it. I've talked to a few Bon Buddhist monks about this, and they kind of smile and say, oh, you know, maybe if, you know, you hang out with us for another 10 years and spend some time in the Himalayas,

which has not been possible. But I do know some dedicated breathwork people that have gone the various levels deep into this and are now getting hints about it. But now they won't tell me, because they say, I've got the secret, you've got to do the work. Yeah, the fight club of breathwork. Most folks don't want to do the Giro Dreams of Sushi route with the breathwork, I suppose.

But in the case of what you're practicing, would it be then akin to what Wimhoff would promote in terms of the breathwork? Could you describe what it is that you do for folks, just in brief? Sure. So the Wimhoff method is about 30 very deep breaths, extremely deep breaths and quick repetition followed by a breath hold at a neutral position. And then you take one big breath in, hold for 30 seconds, and go back to that cycle. And you do this over and over and over.

So the Tumo version of this is the commercial Tuma Light, L-I-T-E- Register trademark, is you do that, those same motions, but when you're doing the breath hold, you're holding the breath in and you're creating a pressure in your body. You're also doing some different arm movements with it. So it's almost like you're creating compression. It's almost like a piston. Your diaphragm is a piston and you're creating that compression. And I'll be damned if someone does this and doesn't break out into a sweat and it doesn't matter how cold you are. I've seen it time and time again. And anyone that's done, Wim Hof can attest to it as well. I think, I think somebody on the internet's going to fact check me, but I think the first large public interview that Wimhoff ever did was on this podcast. This is 100 years ago. I will say

for folks who dive into that rabbit hole, be very cautious about the cold exposure. There are lots of documented cases of frostbite and people losing digits and so on. So don't immediately go out and hike barefoot up to elevation, up to your knees and snow. So just watch that and never practice this stuff in water also. your personal development journey look like with breathwork? I guess another way to frame that and ask it more simply is what has breathwork done for you? What have the outcomes looked like for you? I think the main outcome was at the beginning where it made me realize that there are many more things you can do with your body to improve your health and focus on food and

exercise and sleep. Those are the three big things that a lot of people have been talking about for good reason, right? They're absolutely essential. But I had all of those things pretty well dialed in around 12 years ago now. It's quite quite a long time ago. I was eating the right foods. I was sleeping eight hours. I was exercising all the time. And I had chronic respiratory issues just constantly. This was when I was in San Francisco, where I had been for a couple of decades. So I was surfing a lot, but constantly getting pneumonia, constantly getting bronchitis. And I would go to my doctor and the doctor, I didn't know better at this time, would give me antibiotics, the Z-pack. I would take them because I was extremely naive. And this went on for years and years until these respiratory

problems became so bad that I could actually hear myself breathing at night. When I was working out, I could hear like there was something very deeply wrong with my respiration. And it was from a suggestion of a good doctor friend of mine who was looking at me and she said, you need to do breathwork. And before then, I'd never done any breathwork. I had heard about it because I lived in San Francisco, but I had no interest in it. The short version of this very long story is I did it, and I haven't had one of those issues since. And so that convinced me that there was a signal here to pursue when there could be real data and science behind. It wasn't just some placebo things I had been told. It was a real biological function that you could focus on. What strikes me so strongly

about breathing also is that you have an autonomous function that you can also control. It's this sort of API, this interface between conscious and sort of automatic or autonomous nervous function, which makes it, I suppose, on so many levels, really potentially powerful for you when you began wading into breathwork, what was the first type that seemed to impart benefits to you? Do you remember what you tested? I absolutely remember it. I remember it vividly because I still do it to the day. It's called Sudarshan Kriya. Oh, wow. How do you spell that? S-U-D-A-R-S-H-A-N space, K-R-I-Y-A. Oh, yeah. Never would have gotten that right. Okay. Thank you. It was through the art of living. And, you know, you do this weekend workshop before they teach you the breath work. And a lot of the practice

in the workshop were not things I was viving with at all. A lot of people were getting benefits from them, but it was making me extremely uncomfortable, and I almost bailed. Wait, wait, can you give a, can you give us an example? You're not supposed to talk about it, and I'm going to respect the secrecy of this. I can talk around it, though. You can talk around have you ever sat in front of someone and a stranger and stared into their eyes for 10 minutes unblinking? No, that's counter to my evolutionary impulses. Yeah, got it. That's that kind of thing. I'm just going to leave it right there and you can draw your own conclusions for the rest. But then some people were breaking down, having these awesome experiences. I'm like, good for them,

but this was just not my thing until I did the breathwork. And then I understood why they had you do all these other practices. And the breathwork absolutely blew my socks off. It's not that intense, but my body had such a reaction that I was wearing a shirt like this and I'd sweated through everything. My socks were damp. There were sweat stains on my gene. My hair was sopping wet from just sitting in a corner of a very dark and cold room just breathing at this rhythm. And I said, oh my God, what is this stuff unleashing in me? Like what else is bottled up that I need to get out. And I don't want to sound too woo-woo, but it was the physiological reaction my body had to this. It was like a switch was just flipped on, and it made me very curious about breathing and

other breathwork practices. Just a quick thanks to our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. As many of you know, for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a midnight lux mattress from today's sponsor. Helix Sleep. I also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs, and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something they comment on without any prompting for me whatsoever. I also recently had a chance to test the Helix Sunset Elite. The Sunset Elite delivers exceptional comfort while putting the right support in the right spots. It is made with five tailored foam layers, including a base layer with full perimeter zoned lumbar support right where I need it, and middle

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m-O-M-M-O-Mentis. LiveMemorantus.com slash Tim for 35% off your first subscription or simply use code Tim at checkout, livemometus.com. please correct me if I'm getting this wrong, but there are, I believe, videos on YouTube that people can find of monks, if that's a fair description, drying, wet fabric on their baths using Tumo. And you can actually watch this in real time as it's happening. I mean, there's a lot out there that people can find. And also, from a personal perspective, I mean, years ago when I was first experimenting with the Wim Hof stuff and did some things in person with him, did some things in person also with David Blaine pretty shortly after. I think he broke the, if I'm getting the term

right, static apnea, sort of oxygen-assisted breath hold time is 17 minutes and something. It's been crushed since somebody did 20-something minutes, which is just bananas. In any case, did a lot of experimentation with breath holds. And at one point, if you were to ask me to hold my breath right now, I could probably do it for 30 to 45 seconds, which is not long. And I've historically had a lot of respiratory issues, particularly my left lung from being born premature, insufficient surfactant, had to be intubated on a respirator, et cetera. But when at one point, this was also in the Bay Area, don't replicate this, folks, do this only with medical supervision, but I did a 10-day water only fast. And that was nine days in, very, very high ketone production, which is relevant for

a bunch of reasons we won't get into right now. It helps, though, with breath holds. I'll just put it that way, went into a hyperbaric chamber, which is a hard shell, so a very hard shell medical grade up to about 2.4 atmospheres of pressure, then did Wim Hof breathing and did a breath hold on an exhale and got to about nine minutes and then stopped because I was like, I'm going to melt my brain. I didn't have the impulse to breathe, but I was like, you know what? I'm going to call it complete at nine minutes. It's really wild what you can do with gaining familiarity with techniques around breathwork. Now granted, I had a number of assists on that as well. But let's pull back for a second and look at the books. So the book comes out. You have, I'm sure, a million people coming to you

for help for various things. For you, what has evolved after the book came out? I'm just so interested to know what has developed since the book was published for you, whether it's additional insights, stories out of the woodwork that have seemed worth digging into. anything that comes to mind. The book came out in the depths of lockdown. And so I had nothing else to do, just like most other people. So I just did podcasts all day long, three or four, five a day. So I was in this little bubble for about a year and a half.

And then when it was finally time to come out and see the light, I've spoken at medical schools and banks and hedge funds and all that. And the reason I mentioned that is because every single time I've spoken, every single time, afterwards, there's a line of people, they're all complaining about the same things. And they're completely pissed off. They're pissed off that they had to learn about this stuff in a book by a journalist and not from their doctor. And they're angry because their kid is super sick and didn't have to be sick for the past three years. They're angry because they stalled asthma. there's still snoring and sleep apnea. So it was by engaging with these people and then engaging with a number of different researchers that I went on an additional learning journey, right? I'm still

very interested in this stuff. I want to know the things that I should have included in the book. I want to know how to answer questions better. So I pursued it. And I think one of the biggest things that I found, and I don't know how interesting this is going to be to talk about, but I'll throw it out there and then you can edit it out if you don't want, is the amount of kids that have sleep disorder breathing. This can be snoring or sleep apnea or some sort of dysfunction in their breathing at night. And then if you take that population of kids

who have these breathing problems at night, and if you take the population of kids who have ADHD, those two diagrams almost completely intersect. And so what so many researchers are saying is that ADHD does not exist. What you're looking at are sleep deprived kids. And the most shocking thing to me is that a kid that presents with ADHD, they're never assessed for their breathing, they're never assessed for their sleep, they're given drugs and put on their way.

And I think it's criminal. And so this is something that really sort of ruffled my feathers, and it's something that I try to talk about whenever I'm discussing this stuff, because it's vitally important. I think that we've been protein ADHD. It's a neurological condition. I think it is mostly a breathing problem. Could you give people an idea? I suggest everybody get the book, by the way. We're going to talk about a lot of different aspects of breathing, but it doesn't begin to approach what you've covered in your book. So everybody should check it out. Nonetheless, I want to make sure that people listening, for some of them, you know, they're going to be on the run. They're going to be deeply interested in this particular Venn diagram, the ADHD or other types of neuroatypical conditions and breathing disorders.

And it makes me also think this is separate, although maybe my parents have ADHD, but they've gone through sleep assessments. They are prescribed a CPAP machine, and there is exactly zero. compliance. They will not wear those things. I tried to wear a CPAP machine and I was committed to wearing it, tore it off my face every single night that I tried to use it. And therefore I'm wondering if somebody's listening and they've never had, for instance, their child assessed, do you suggest them getting a particular type of assessment or is it more a matter of testing and intervention or a type of breath work to see if there is any type of result?

Is there any research also to support the kind of overlapping Venn diagram? I know that's a compound question. There is an incredible amount of research to support this. I heard about this from researchers. I heard about it from doctors, from leaders in the field at esteemed institutions. They've been hollering about this for years and exactly zero percent of the population, either on the medical side or the general population, has been listening to them. So the research is there and you could type it up,

any search engine and find these studies. It's very, very easy to find them. As far as assessments for kids, yes, there are things that you can do in your house right now. What a lot of doctors, family physicians will do if you say, hey, I want to check out my kids breathing and say, okay, we're going to go to sleep lab and you're going to do this and they're not going to be able to sleep very well. So we're going to give them sleeping pills. And that's going to mess up the breathing. And then they're going to be diagnosed with a sleep disorder breathing and given a CPAP and say, adios, right? And 50% of people given a CPAP. And a 50% of people given a CPAP. within eight weeks, won't use them. And the other large percent will use them and it actually

makes their breathing worse in many cases. So it's not a good solution. So for those parents that want to assess their kid's breathing and your own breathing, there are a number of ways to do it. Is your kid a mouth breather in the daytime? Is your kid breathing through the mouth often? It doesn't have to be 50% of the time or 40% of the time, but enough for you to notice. And then when the kid is sleeping, wait for the kid to go to sleep, sneak into the their room and listen to their breathing. If you can hear them breathing, they are struggling to breathe. If they are breathing through the mouth, they are struggling to breathe. If they are snoring or have sleep apnea, they are inhibiting their ability to grow, physical growth. They are causing

neurological damage to their brains. They're increasing their chances of having diabetes later on in life. And there's this whole laundry list. And I'm not trying to be a scaremonger here. This is easy to look up, not controversial stuff. So I would would start with that. There's also an app. I have no affiliation with this app. I get no money from mentioning it. It's called SnorLab. There's also another one called Snor Clock. And they have free versions of this. And what it is is you put it on your phone and you place it about four feet away from whatever sleeping heads you want. And it records how you are breathing throughout the night with audio recording. And it creates a graph for you. And then it includes a score.

a sleep score. And this is a very quick way of getting an initial signal if there is a problem. And then there's a whole bunch of things to do after that. But I would start with those things. If they get a positive, what are some of the things that they can do? For instance, I don't know if this is one of them. Maybe it's not because maybe it's not curative or incomplete. But a friend of mine, professional drummer, one of the top in his field, sent me a package of what he called hostage tape, right? And it's mouth tape. And he said it completely changed his life from a sleep perspective. Ultimately, it looks like very, very, very, very expensive kinesio tape. But could you speak to what can be done, particularly with kids? They're not going to want some

Bay and Mask, Darth Vader, CPAP thing on top of their face, presumably. Maybe some will comply. but what are some of the things that you can use or do in a case of a positive? The number one thing you can do is become an obligate nasal breather. So it would be almost impossible to help to reduce these symptoms without doing that first. That includes starting in the daytime, creating a new habit around nasal breathing. And then you can allow that to sort of bleed into the night. Once you get comfortable enough with it in the day, you can then use these different tapes. You can use hostage tape. There's a bunch of different tapes. You can go down to a drugstore and get any micropore tape. There's 30 different kinds. They all work. Find one that you think is best. And you use just a little piece of tape on your lips. A lot of people think this is a hostage situation, which is why hostage tape has that name. But all you need is a little piece of tape to close your mouth. A lot of parents are going to be apprehensive about doing this to their kid.

So some entrepreneurial, breathing people, Patrick McEwen, developed something called myotape. Again, no affiliation with this. I know Patrick, I'm a huge fan of this product because it goes around the mouth. And all it does is it gently trains a kid to keep their lips shut. They can open their mouth at any time. They can even talk wearing this. It's just when they go unconscious and muscles relax. And I think that stuff is a complete game.

changer. I have heard so many parents talking about their kids once you convert to nasal breathing doesn't work for everybody. But that as the first step, so many people have told me their kids who are wetting their beds at age 10 and 11, stop wetting their beds. The symptoms of ADHD went away in two weeks. And this sounds like some sort of sketchy, crazy talk. But if you look at the science and how the body works, if you are not getting sleep, everything's going to go, hey, And if you are, the systems are going to start to repair and heal. And that's what's happened with these kids. And I'm sure that's what happened to your friend because he was a mouth breather at night

as a life, just like I was. Is there anything else that you did to address your own mouth breathing or sleek quality? Once I sort of hopped on the breathwork wagon, I wrote it into various strange worlds. And one of those strange worlds was into the E&T, ear, nose, and throat surgery. world. And it was while I was down at Stanford interviewing one of the leaders in the field, Dr. Nyak, that I came across a breathing and sleep and respiratory therapist. And she specialized in people who had surgeries and all this. And she had this big roll of tape on her desk. And I asked her what that tape was. And she says, I prescribe it to everybody. It was sleep tape. So I thought it

sounded completely wacky. I went home and looked up online what I could about it. Everything I found online seemed insane and so I was apprehensive and I did something I don't suggest anyone do I just started wearing it immediately at night and it sucked for about two weeks it was terrible then I got over the hump and I have worn it almost every single night for the past seven years and it's really hard for me to sleep without if I'm camping I'm wearing it if I'm sleeping on airplane I don't wear it I have seen people wearing it on airplanes on long flights which is all whole other level of commitment. Only a handful of times have I not worn it, and I immediately feel it.

And I can see it in my sleep scores, right? So it's not something I'm making up. Yeah, sometimes I wear my gag ball on international flights. It makes people really uncomfortable. It's cool if you do that thing where you put the blanket over your head, then I don't care, right? But when they tuck the blanket into the collar and there's this big piece of tape, it just it feels a little wrong just tears streaming down their face all right so the the mouth tape i'm going to give this another shot because i've frequently wondered what i can do that is

also easy for travel to improve sleep quality this has been the thorn in my side since i was very very young i've always had very very challenged sleep quality and i chip away at it here there, I figured out a number of different things that are reasonably under my control, at least in a hotel room, like temperature, for instance. But I would love to segue, perhaps, from the mouth tape to the measurement of air quality that you've done, I guess specifically CO2 levels. Do you want to just take that and explain what it is that you documented? This was something I had no idea about when I was writing the book, and it's something I got glued into about three and a half years ago.

And so it's the concept that we acknowledge that CO2 is going up in the atmosphere, right? You can look at any graph. You can go out and measure it right now. It's 424 parts per million. But a lot of us aren't considering what the air quality, specifically the amount of CO2 is in indoor environments. we spend 90% of our time indoors and we're not looking at the air quality. So I had heard from a researcher, he said, you know, you're the breath guy. You should be checking this out. I said, well, what do I do? He said, why don't you get a carbon dioxide monitor and take it around with you

and just look at the air quality? And so initially I was just like, well, who cares? Who cares if there's more CO2 or not? Until I found all of these studies and there's about 30 to 40 years of studies. And they're done by governments around the world. So again, this is not sketchy stopped by some dude in a garage in tows or something. These are like real, no, no disrespect. Love that place. But this is real science, real data that anyone has access to. And what it turns out is when you get to about triple the rate of CO2 in an indoor environment,

so starting at around 1,500 parts per million, again, outdoors, it's around 425 parts per million, you start to find that in schools, certain cognitive test scores can go down about 50%, 5% by tripling the amount of CO2. And then you get up to 2,500 parts per million. You're looking at headaches, chronic migraines, further decrease of test score. And then it goes up from there all the way into like serious cognitive disabilities up into 5,000 parts per million. So that's what you're looking at. That's the chart. And I've been carrying this thing around with me for about three and a half years. I've been absolutely aghast by what I've found. I travel a lot. I travel around 100 days a year. And, you know, the average CO2, when you were entering onto an airplane and suddenly everyone just starts falling to sleep, they're not tired. It's because the CO2 levels are around 2,500 parts per million. So if you wonder why you feel like crap after four-hour flight, I think it has a lot to do with the very low amount of oxygen and the very high amount of CO2.

And it's been all of these recommendations from engineering associations saying it should never be over a thousand parts per million. That's when it's going to start to feel stuffy. I have not recorded one flight anywhere on planet Earth where it hasn't been over 1,000 parts per million. million every single flight is i'm sitting in hotel right now and i'm not sure i think they're trying to prevent suicides i may not be able to open any windows but are there any approaches that you can embrace to address this if you travel a lot what can you do yeah so i could tell you what i've done i will tell you a little information about hotels so i carry this thing around and i record every hotel i go into And some are pretty good and some are extremely bad.

And if you've noticed, and I'm sure you have, I just know you have, in the past 10 years, something very curious has happened. In every hotel used to be able to open the window, maybe not all the way, because they don't want to get sued if you commit suicide. But at least this much, six inches, seven inches, right? Almost every hotel had that. Now they're all glued up. And they are glued up because heating and cooling accounts for like 50% of the cost. cost of maintenance. So what they do to save money. Good news. We are lead platinum. Bad news. Your brain is dying when you stay here. Yeah. So what they do, instead of pumping in fresh air and heating it and

cooling it, which would cost them money, they recirculate the air from all the rooms. And you know this because you're recording the CO2 levels. And what I've found is in the hotels that have the big outside that say lead certified, green certified, that are the most expensive, have by far the worst quality year. I've recorded 2,800 parts per million waking up in one of these hotels. Wow, I was joking, but I nailed it. No. Wow. Yeah, I know this is just a bummer parade coming from me, but this is something because once you see this and carry these things around, you're like, I am so screwed because I'm stuck in here and I can't open a window and it starts to make you crazy. So my solution for that is you have yourself or your assistant, call ahead and ask a hotel,

do you have windows? Well, sir, of course we have windows. Can you open those windows just a little bit, just a little bit? And those are the hotels you stay at. Wow. What's a CO2 monitor? Do you use or what's a good option for folks if they want to embrace. I'm just thinking of how many people, we were talking about Venn diagrams or other. I mean, my like psyche Venn diagram. There's like a OCD and hypochondria and just like pushing those over and then in the bullseye is CO2 levels in hotels. And listen, I know those hypochondriacs everywhere you go, they're assessing everything. They drive, some of them are my lovely friends. I love them, but they drive me freaking crazy. I never want to be that, but this is a real, real thing. And it's something that you should pay attention

to. So I bought about 10 different CO2 monitors and assessed them against a professional device. And most of the crap you see on Amazon is worthless. Don't bother with it. There is one brand. Again, I get no money. I wish I did. Maybe I should endorse these products. But it's called an Aeronet 4, A-R-A-N-E-T-4. That's the best one. You know what? I probably even have it in my pack right now. I could show you. It's the most accurate one, and the battery life lasts forever. It lasts about three to four months. And once you start doing it, it's hard to stop. And I got so fired up about this that we're now creating, we're working on right now, creating the database. I'm trying to arm about 100 people with these things.

and then everything will automatically upload to this database so you could see what hotels have good air quality, what restaurants have good air quality. Because governments, let me tell you, governments are going to do nothing about this. It's when companies start getting outed for recirculating all of this breath backwash from all of these people in the hotel that they're going to start paying attention. Wow. How safe is it to assume that if you're in a major city, like L.A., Chicago, New York, that you're getting better quality air if you open the window in the hotel. Is that pretty much always a safe assumption? Where do you get to a point where you're like, I'm better drinking in this backwash in the hotel than opening the windows? That's a really,

really good point. Maybe Shanghai in summer. Maybe Mumbai in spring. I have not assessed that. I think that's a good point. If you're in a hotel that's very high up, right? And the CO2 level is just absolutely peddled to the metal, 3,000 parts per million. My assumption would be that opening that window, you would have, there's more benefits than harm from that. Again, I think there's a lot of variables. But the CO2, if you're talking immediate acute harm versus chronic harm, the acute harm from CO2, your ability to rebound after a long flight, not feel hungover, not feel jet lag, not feel drowsy.

I think that's a big one. You know, I don't know if this is true. People can do their own due diligence. I wish I knew the answer offhand. But I know that ketones, exogenous ketones, for instance, I mean, there are many different types, ketones, salts, ketone, mono esters, diesters, et cetera, but have been developed to protect divers, specifically military divers. from oxygen toxicity.

But I wonder if it increases CO2 tolerance. I wonder if that might have a place in the travel kit. I'll let people do their own research on that. But what else is in your travel kit, given how much you travel, whether it's related to breath or not, is there anything that is non-obvious like the CO2 monitor that you can speak to? Right when I was ripping on hypochondriacs and people obsessed. We really want to go there.

You're like, I have a gallon of Purell. In three-ounce packets. Yeah, exactly. I didn't used to be one of those people until I just got completely drained after doing too many tours. And they got older, right? And now I'm kind of one of those people-ish. I have a couple nightlights that are red lights. And I'm very typical.

Everyone's just like nodding. Tell me something new. Those are the only light source that I have in hotels and especially important after a long flight. So I have this CO2 monitor. If there's a window, I will absolutely open that. I'll try to take a cold shower before bed, you know, especially if I am very jet-lagged. As far as the other tech, I carry, you know, a lot of vitamin D, K2, vitamin E in case I feel something coming on. I have some other supplements.

I carry around as well. And without getting too weird here, I have this very small electric. device, that a frequency device that I am currently assessing its validity. Anecdotally, I could say it's been a complete game changer for me. And what I usually do at night is I plug into that thing. And I really feel a difference. I know about six other people that have these. And so we're starting to sniff around it, collecting some real data about it.

So that's the main thing. In that little zip pocket that you have in suitcases, this stuff just stays in there. It's more important than a toothbrush. You can get a toothbrush anywhere. You can't get a frequency device anywhere, and you can't get a red nightlight anywhere. So I just keep this in there, and I carry it with me wherever I go. All right. So a couple of clarifying questions, since all of my listeners are denizens of Weirdville.

So the red light, is that just looks like a children's nightlight that plugs into an outlet next to the sink? Or are we talking something more substantial so that you can actually operate and walk around your room? I have two that are able to fade up and fade down in the bathroom. You usually don't need anything. I can keep the door open at night. And I also will often carry a light bulb, a small, not a big one, because those are paying, but I have these little light bulbs. One of the most important things I didn't mention is the sleep tape thing.

And if I don't bring that or if I've forgotten it, I'm the guy at 1230 a.m. walking down the street looking for a liquor store that had some sort of packing tape or something. It's that critical to me. but for the red lights they have little bulbs and also these night lights are bright enough at night I try not to be too productive especially if I'm tired I want to sit maybe I'll listen to something but I want the light to be very low and I think that there's plenty of good research on that not disturbing your circadian rhythm so we won't need to get into that just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show many of you know how deeply

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And now I'm just envisioning a normal old light bulb. I imagine there's a little more to it. But how do you pack that? These are these small LED ones. So the bulb is actually plastic. It's plastic. I would love to find it. incandescent one because now I've been hearing about flickering. And I'm starting to notice that a bit because I'm going clinically insane. And you have just, you've just outed me, unfortunately. So any of you inventors out there, since now incandescence, you don't have to get, you know, charge $400 if they find one in your house, need to invent a small little red incandescent bulb. And I'll buy a dozen of them. So there you go. All right. This stim device, that's two,

tantalizing. What does this look like? Because I am very much, very deep down the rabbit hole of all things kind of biomedical, not to say this is medical, talk to your professional, entertainment and informational use only. But what is this thing? And where do you apply it? How do you administer it? I'm in about a six-year journey into this world that's led me down. I would say the vast majority of the past has led me down to have been complete BS. There's so much stuff if you look up online that is just absolute garbage. If they haven't even tested this stuff on biological matter, on cells at least, don't buy it. Who cares what their claims are? So that's the most important thing if you're starting to look at electric medicine. But it is a real thing. PMFs,

which were considered quackery, you know, 30 years ago, are now becoming a staple. of many offices. What are PMF? That's pulsed electromagnetic fields. These devices that you can plug into, they're amazing for pain. But it turns out that the history of these devices is much deeper than that. It goes back to the 50s and 60s, and Russia was doing a ton of research into this. So to answer your question, this is a somewhat Russian device. It's about this big. I won't say it's officially Russian. It's more Soviet than Russia, to be honest. You'll get what I mean. The aesthetics of this thing are so like Atari 2,600, that it's just so, I just really

dave myself with that one. Anyway, so it's about this big, and it has all of these different. So it's like 10 inches or so for those people who can't say. Okay. I'm sorry. I was holding my hands too close to the, like when you catch a fish, right? Yeah, I was just going to say. So it's about five, okay, you want specific.

It's about five inches wide by about four inches tall, and it's about an inch and a half thick. And it has about 40 preset programs on it. And programs for grounding when you're not able to ground, programs for human waves, programs for cardiovascular health, programs for respiratory health. And I will be damned if this thing hasn't really fixed a lot of issues. And again, this is 100% anecdotal. You name it. You name it. You start getting into this. Unpaid bills. I have a PMF device for you. It's just you manifest money, everybody. You plug this thing in and you can't keep it out of the doors and windows. It just starts coming in. Another reason to have your hotel window open. Yeah. There are many reasons. That's one of them. But it sends out, we're really going to get in this. It sends out certain frequencies.

that have been studied, that have been found to reduce the loads of viruses and bacteria and fungi and more. And I know what a lot of you are thinking, this is completely based on zero, but I'm here to tell you there's a lot of legit research. And if I was going to place my money on anything, this is where things are going to go. We have exhausted chemicals. We've reached chemical overload. Chemicals are fantastic. They're great. They can do so much. There's this whole other layer to health, and I really feel like this is where stuff is moving. So we're on the same page there. I mean, I recently interviewed a scientist by the name of Dr. Kevin Tracy, who's, I would argue, the most cited, most credible, or certainly one of the most credible. I mean, he's

incredibly well-published researchers looking at legitimate vagus nerve stimulation. And then you have researchers at Tufts, like Professor Levin and others who are doing incredible things. I mean, ranging from looking at salamanders and axelotles, I want to say, for regeneration and how electricity can be used in cancer applications. I'm very much looking at this incredibly closely as it sounds like you are. For people who want to specifically, was it PMF or P-E-M-F? P-E-M-F. P-E-M-F devices. For people who wanted to learn more about this, what should they search online if they wanted to read up on the type of thing that you're using? They should read my new book coming out next year. No, no, no, no, no. This is actually not in my new book.

So what I would do is 100% don't go on Amazon and look up these devices. Some of them can, I keep saying don't go on Amazon. Have you heard that three or four times? Because I certainly have. Amazon's great, just not for certain things. And this is not one of the things you want to go on it for. Because the problem is some of these devices can put out the specific frequency that has been studied to be beneficial, but they're not putting it out at the load.

the power it needs to be. So they're paying lip service to the science without actually going deep and providing the therapeutic effect. So some of these devices are very expensive, you know, up to 20, 30 grand, some of the smaller devices. That is expensive. But those are the ones used in clinics. These are the ones used for people with severe chronic pain issues. For everyday devices, there are some cheaper ones. I don't want to endorse anything. I don't want to name them by name because I'm not done studying how legit they are. But once you start digging in a little deeper, you start to see that in Eastern Europe, these things have been used continuously for 60, 70 years. And maybe they're all crazy and are suckers for a placebo effect or maybe these things work. And so that's where I've started snipping around. And this thing I got, that I've convinced a few other people to get. I mean, we've seen just some extraordinary stuff that doesn't make any sense. And so I'm just trying to parse how much of that is, you know, a placebo-ish effect,

and how much of it can be measured and repeated in animal models. If somebody just wanted to read up on the research or learn a bit more about this without selecting a device necessarily, where would you suggest they start? I would say, read the body electric by Robert O. Becker, doctor who basically paved the way for Michael Levin at Tufts. Yeah. And if any of this sounds crazy, all you have to do is read any of Michael Levin's papers. And you're like, oh, my God.

Your head will explode. Yeah. With electricity and specifically frequency, you can grow two heads on a salamander. You can regrow another leg where it's not supposed to be. You can grow with the frequency of eyeballs, an eyeball on an animal's back. So it just shows you that there's a lot more to the story than chemicals. And if you can do that to a salamander and to a frog, then obviously we're going to be affected by these frequencies as well. Thank you for that.

Now, you also glossed over other supplements. I recognized D, K2, E. what's in your etc other supplement bucket oh boy um again i never thought i'd be one of those guys carrying around the granny vitamin packs filled a supplement oh i've got two of them 10 feet from me and can i tell you i just to endorse the the granny pill packs i thought those looked so ridiculous added more labor so i would carry around basically a pharmacy of bottles with me and then when i started using the granny packs. I was like, why did I not start doing this 30 years ago? It saves so much time on a daily basis. So just to give you permission to use the granny packs. Yeah, I've got the

granny exiles going on and those are also in the suitcase. So I mean, everyone talks about supplements, but if you want to go there, we can go. I've got all the typical stuff. I wish I had some cutting edge new thing you've never heard of, but all of you will be yawning in unison if I told you. There's a little co-Q10 in there. There's a little natokinase. There's the old classics that are in there, nothing cutting edge. Okay, got it. So the natokinase, that's going to have the K2 in it, presumably, right? That's the source? It will, but I have this special pack in case I get sick. In case I get COVID on the road, I have a special pack because if you're taking heroic doses of D, then you need to be taking E and A and extra K2 with that.

So very important. So that's why I have that in its own separate little container, the sort of emergency pack. And if anyone out there is thinking, you know, I'm looking for the next way to prove that I'm really tough, well, forget about doing breathwork and freezing cold water. If you've never had Nato from Japan, then just, eat a bowl of that dish. And that'll be the new tough man TikTok challenge for people who have never tried it. You know, speaking of that, like, I was like, screw this. I don't need supplements, man. I just need to eat better. And then you start to do the research and realize that no vegetables

contain the minerals that they used to, right? It's virtually impossible to get all these things the way our ancestors did. And Nato was one of those things. I went down to a Japanese market. And I said, I'm not taking these pills, man. I'm going to start my morning. How many, Japan's awesome. That place is perfect. There's no crime. It's beautiful.

I'm going to start my day every day with this. Wow. You know, day two, no way. It's the stringiness that will really get you. Yeah, so people can try that out if they haven't tried it. That'll be the podcast challenge. Let's, I appreciate you indulging me on all those questions since I pay attention. into my travel kit. I do. And I've got all sorts of electronic devices all over the place. It's

kind of absurd. I literally have an extra suitcase for all my blood flow restriction stuff. I did just have elbow surgery. So granted, I have kind of an excuse. My e-stem for lymphatic drainage. I've got so much crap with me right now. But on that note, I guess this is a bit of a kind of an awkward sequitur, I suppose. But my surgery came from a sports injury. So I'm thinking about athletes. And there were a few things in some of my prep materials here that I wanted to touch on because I hadn't seen them before. So for athletes and professional athletes, so on, we see nasal breathing during training, breath hold sprints, which I first was exposed to way back in the day with Laird Hamilton at his house. One of the kings of big wave surfing, surfing giants, I think riding giants is the documentary. What are the two?

People should watch. It's insane, especially for people who don't know the name, Laird, if you've ever seen Toe in surfing, Laird, help develop and popularize that. Stand up paddle boarding. He kind of resurrected it and helped make it popular. Just a beast of an athlete. And so I remember seeing him on an assault bike, one of those bikes where you're also pushing with your arms,

where he would do long exhale breath holds and push basically until he would pass out and fall off the bike. I'm not suggesting anyone do that. But there were a number of other bolts. I won't go through them all. But could you speak to bolt score tracking? All caps, B-O-L-T, presumably an acronym, I'd never come across this and anything else that you'd want to add.

Yeah, if there's one population that has actually paid attention and started to get much more serious about looking and focusing on their breathing, it's athletes, right? Athletes aren't scared of a little inconvenience or a little discomfort. This is what they thrive in to get ahead of everyone. As a big wave surfer, you have to focus on breathwork. you have to focus on your breath hold. If you don't, you die, which is one of the reasons why Laird is 60 years old. It looks like he's 30. The guy is just constantly focusing on his breath because he wants to stay active in the field at the top of his class. So surfers have known this for a very

long time, but a lot of runners and rowers and baseball players and football players and soccer players haven't been clued into this. And so the elite trainers that I know, they said, this is the number one thing that they do for athletes right now is to focus on their breath. And what they've found is the vast majority of athletes, you would think that they would have their breath completely focused, right? That they would be the best breathers in the world. But they absolutely are not. They're as dysfunctional as everyone else. They've learned how to push through the pain to win the game, but that doesn't mean they're breathing properly. So the first thing they do is retrain their breathing. And what they find with almost all these athletes is the majority of them are

not engaging their diaphragm. The diaphragm is this muscle organ that sits beneath the lungs. And when you breathe in, the diaphragm goes down. When you breathe out, it relaxes and comes back, up. What they've found is most athletes are just breathing into the chest. Very limited diaphragmatic movement. And if you do that, it's a complete waste of energy and it's not efficient. The reason is you are just able to take little bits of breath each time. So that requires you to breathe so much more and it jacks your heart rate. If you were able to breathe 10 times a minute or 20 times a minute instead of 40 times or 60 times or 100 times a minute, then your heart rate will go down, which means your tolerance for whatever thing that you're doing will go up and your recovery time

goes down. So it's basic math here, but so many people aren't clued into it. And once they start focusing on the breath and adopting these better habits, I mean, these trainers are just making monsters out of these people. Their performance goes through the roof. Recovery times go down. It makes a huge difference. Still, I can count on one hand how many joggers I see out running in the morning that are breathing in and out of their nose. And that's the number one thing, at lower zones to be breathing in and out of your nose and just no one's doing it.

And is Bolt's score tracking a shorthand, simple way of tracking breathing efficiency, or what is that? It is the body oxygen level test. It used to be called the blood oxygen level test, but Patrick McEwen changed that because he got some flack from some pulmonologists. What this is, is you take, we're all going to do it. I'm not going to tell you. I'm going to show you like a good writer.

That's what they do. So we're going to relax your shoulders a little bit. We're going to relax the space between our eyes, relax your tongue. You're be breathing in and out of your nose. And you're going to take an inhale in, just real calm and out. We're going to do this two more times. Inhaling and out. inhaling and out let that breath naturally come out hold your breath hold your nostrils hold your

nostrils so on that exhale you're holding your breath in your nostrils and you're going to hold your breath until you feel the first urge to breathe this is not a competition so if your diaphragm quivers if you swallow if that urge to breathe is palpable and you're aware of it you stop and you calculate how much time has passed. That's it. So it's three normal breaths or are they deeper than normal? No. And this is where people try to cheat because they're athletes and they're competing, try to get ahead. Normal breaths. And then on the exhale, this is not a layered Hamilton. This is down to neutral, hold your breath. Down to neutral, hold your breath. And then you start the timer. And what you're going to find is the more you focus on your breath. And you're

the more you learn how to take fewer, deeper, slower breaths, which oxygenate your body so much more efficiently, which lower your heart rate, which also increase your heart rate variability, all of these other benefits, you're going to watch that bolt score go up and up and up and up. Usually after about maybe a week or two, you could see it double.

And then after that, you would see it triple. It depends who you are. Okay, I don't want to make blanket comments. for everyone. And it also depends how honest you are with yourself. Right. If you're gaming the system. Yeah, if you're gaming. And if no one's looking, why would you want to game the system? Be honest with yourself when you feel that need to breathe to stop. You're also going to notice it changes throughout the day. So if you're very tired, if you're coming off of a long flight, if you're stressed out, your bolt score is going to suck. If you're very well rested and you're in a good zone,

your bolt score is going to be three times what it was before. So there's a lot of variability. And I'm reading here, AI overview, so caveat, but a higher score indicates better carbon dioxide tolerance and efficient breathing, which you can improve with breathing exercises over time. Is there anything else from the world of sports that you've seen that has been particularly impressive or surprising besides the fact that most athletes just likes normal civilians are suboptimal in their breathing? I think the other important thing, and this really goes

hand in hand with what I was just talking about, is proper breathing biomechanics. A lot of people have lost the ability to breathe properly, and that includes athletes. So what you can do is you can train, learn how much you can expand your rib cage down here. Learn what a really a full, deep, enriching breath feels like learn how that changes your posture and then start adopting and adapting your body to these biomechanics when you are practicing whatever sport and there are a bunch of trainers that do this now if you look at lebron now you know waiting in between plays what's he doing most of the time he's doing breathwork and he's doing it properly he's doing alternate nostril breathing you look at his diaphragmatic movement because you can see his chest and his abdominal area.

So this makes a huge difference. This is biology. It's not psychology. And I think athletes can benefit the most from it. So two questions, and these may be dead ends, so I apologize if they are. But two questions related to the diaphragm and also inspiratory muscle training. So resistance at the mouth for building. well, effectively training the muscles involved with respiration.

The first question around the diaphragm is, and I'm not sure if you've dug into this, I guess pun intended, but is any type of soft tissue treatment or manual therapy sometimes helpful for people to get better at diaphragmic breathing? That's kind of number one. The number two, do you have any thoughts on the various training devices that can be used for developing actual muscle strength or endurance for the respiratory muscles? Yeah, so the first part of that, absolutely find a good physio or find a good masseuse who knows what they're doing and to loosen up this area because for a lot of people, it's frozen.

And what's really sad is for a lot of older people, when the bones and the muscles start to atrophy a bit, things get brittle and you just lose all flexibility. So to find someone that can loosen up the rib cage around here, you can do it yourself. There's a bunch of different exercises you can do to help facilitate that process, but it's kind of better having someone who really knows how to do it, help to open that up. And then you can start playing with your breath. And after an hour of this, you can feel what a difference it makes, right? Everything just starts to open up. And now we're talking about those different devices that the air resistance, the breath resistance,

devices. They work great. There's a bunch of different brands. They all basically do the same thing. And what they do is they just create extra pressure to allow you to develop that better muscle memory. It's like putting a donut on a baseball bat. That's probably a very aged way of saying it, too, but that's what we used to call them, right? So you swing that bat around a few times. It feels very heavy. And then when you take it off, it feels so much lighter. It's so much easier to use it. So that's essentially what these devices are doing. And it doesn't matter if it's a mask. It doesn't matter if it's one of those inspiratory muscle trainers, which is just one of the things that you put in your mouth. It almost looks like the end of a snorkel without the two. They all work. They all work.

I recall also just a warning for some folks. So if you use one of these inspiratory muscle trainers, I recall I had boss root in this legendary mixed martial artist on the podcast. And he has such a device that he's kind of co-developed and used constantly and his numbers are kind of mind-numbing when you see them. But if you do these exercises with a rounded back, so you're kind of quote unquote breathing through the back, the amount of back soreness that you will feel, if you have not done this before, which will last a while, is you will feel like you've just done six hours of deadlifts. I mean, it is shocking how sore you will be. So I just want to tell people, start with a lower dose than you think you can handle when you're

getting used to this stuff. I think that that's good advice for every single thing we've talked about. Like, people hear stuff. They want to go out and, like, kick its ass immediately. This is especially true for the sleep tape. What you should do is you should be wearing it for 10 minutes answering emails one day. And the next day, wear it for 20 minutes answering emails. And then the next day, wear it for an out.

You see where I'm going with this. after two weeks of acclimating your body and getting yourself used to this, then try it when you're taking a nap for 15 minutes and then eventually work into using it at night. And this is very true for these different devices. This is not a plant, by the way. I have this little desk here and this is on it. So this is a device. It doesn't need to have a ton of pressure to be beneficial. This just has slight pressure to it. And when I'm working on something. So it looks like an adult pacifier, basically, of sorts. Yeah, in other words, extremely sexy. Something you want to be bringing on that airplane alone with your sleep tape and your blanket, just a heads up. But it's a little

thing that you put in your mouth that has just a little bit of resistance. Because what I notice is when I get extremely focused when I'm writing something, my breathing patterns go to hell. And this is very common. It's called email apnea. It's so common. The NIH spent 20 years researching it, right? And blood pressure goes up. You get headaches. It can cause some chronic issues later on because you're holding your breath when you get scared or you focus. You're having this reaction. If I use a little device like this, you can even put a straw in your mouth if you want something simpler. It just reminds your body to keep with that rhythm. And if you have to work for four straight hours because you have to crank something out, you need every bit of focus.

an energy that you can get. And so that's when those, at those very intense times, I use this thing. And it works like a child. Okay. Again, I am not endorsing this by any way. People give me things. This one's by my friend Anders Olson, who was in the book. He's been studying, breathing for 20 years.

I love this thing. It's called the Relaxator. This really feels like a commercial now. It's called The Relaxator. Right. Use code, Nestor, for 30% off. Buy two and get one for free. Yeah, I've really screwed myself not getting a percentage of these things.

This thing is cool because these other devices that you see are big. Big. Yeah, that you could stick in your shirt pocket. Like bondage level big. A lot of bondage themes going on in this podcast. But this thing literally, you wear it around your neck, you stick it in your pocket. It doesn't look so, so weird. And I love this thing.

And this is one of the things I keep in the suitcase. So if you're jamming and working on something writing for four hours, do you just take a few breaths with that every hour? What does the use look like? I have it in my mouth. Oh, the whole time. Okay, I'm glad I asked for clarification. Yeah, yeah.

I should have provided you the whole time. I won't say every single minute, you know, but. Okay, so you're breathing in through your mouth and out through your nose in that case. I'm mixing it up a little bit. I know I've talked about all the wonderful things to do with nasal breathing. This simulates them in some ways, but what it does is it creates extra pressure, a little extra pressure to force you to slow down. So if you are going to be mouth breathing, mouth breathe with a device and that causes that extra pressure.

Okay. Yeah, I found it. Sometimes I breathe through my nose and I breathe out through this, right? So it just extends that exhalation. So the exhalation is twice as long as the inhalation. And that will put your body into that parasympathetic state. The relaxator breathing retrainer. Yeah. So I'm looking at Anders Olson, all those goods, I presumably Scandinavian. Yeah, he is as Swedish as you could be, yes. Yeah, Conscious Breathing Institute, A, B. All right. Excellent. I'll need to grab one of these before everyone in my audience buys an adult breathing pacifier. It's a beautiful world we're going to create out there, everybody.

You're all going to be looking good. It'll be like Fight Club. People can kind of wink and have the secret handshake when they see other people with the bright green adult pacifier. Or you just look the other direction and pretend you don't know them, you know, which is what I prefer to do. So you mentioned writing. We're going to take a little breather, pun intended, on the breath talk. I want to talk about writing for a little bit because I'm hoping you can help me sort out this 800-page draft of a book that I've got on my hands. But let's begin with something that folks may not be familiar with. The San Francisco Writers Grotto.

What the hell is the San Francisco Writers Grotto and how did you become involved with it? Oh, my God. That was a long time ago. it was a group of professional writers that real professional writers when there were things called magazines around that you could actually write for magazines and make a semi living out of that and they wrote books and Pope Bronson was one of them Julius Shears, Caroline Paul. And it was a group of writers who didn't want to write at home anymore. They wanted to write in little offices and be able to have lunches where they could complain about their agents. And this was a very sought after place and I was able to get in there and I absolutely love it. I made so many

good friends there who are still my friends. And then it got a bit diluted. One thing about writers, especially later on towards like the 2010s when the magazine industry was going through a bunch of issues, they didn't have consistent income. So they noticed that people would just stop paying rent. So then they had to get some other quote unquote writers in there basically. People who had very large amounts of money who wanted to tell everyone at parties that they were writers, they paid rent, man. And that's what happened to that place. But some wonderful people there. I learned so much being in that community and sometimes I really miss it.

What did you learn there before the trust of ferians got roped in to raise the average rent price? What are some of the lessons that you learned? I mean, because one of the major challenges that I have as a writer is that I've spent so much my time in self-imposed solitary confinement. I'm just kind of like, God, I'm just like kind of over it, right? And sometimes the solution can be going to a cafe and working at a cafe, and that's an improvement. But is there anything that you really took from that experience in terms of lessons learned, habits developed? Anything like that? So many lessons. What these people taught me was the business part of it. I know that that probably isn't something people want to hear about. But, you know, I had prized myself as a very precious artist.

that I only wanted to do certain things in a certain way. And all of that's bullshit. It's completely not sustainable. So they taught me that this was a real job that you had approached with a business mind, which I thought at the time was, you know, clouding it over or it wasn't as pure as I would like it to be. But it was a very quick heads up. So they introduced me to how to find an agent and how to talk to an agent and how to deal with your publisher when your publisher was being difficult. So really pragmatic skills and how to navigate the publishing world, which, as you know, can be extremely, extremely tricky.

And those lessons I've taken with me, and I think it's allowed me to actually make a living doing what I'm doing by applying some of those lessons to what I, to the books I write. I was reading, you sent to me some of these snippets on writing, and I want to read part of it. So this is quoting you. So I think the concept of writer's block is a convenient out for people who want an excuse to not work and complain or get attention by talking about writer's block. Every professional writer I know that writes for a living, that is writing is the only source of income for these people. I think that's actually really important parenthetical. Has never experienced writer's block. I'll just add my comment.

Or maybe they just kind of got over it when they were put in an environment like the writer's gardener. Every hobbyist who introduces him or herself as a writer in quotation marks at dinner parties has chronic writers block. So I have heard something similar from every friend of mine. Here's a distinction, though, who has written for newspapers or magazines. I do know some professional writers who focus and have focused exclusively on books who still talk about writers' block. Do you think that is just a function of in the trenches regular deadlines where you don't have the luxury, perhaps, of long lead time,

for a book? Could you maybe just speak to this writer's block term and excuse, perhaps? I have a feeling I'm going to get myself in a lot of trouble here, but I can just tell you from my own experience, the answer is yes. I think that anyone that needs to write to keep the lights on or support yourself or your family, and if you don't hand the thing in, you're not going to get paid and you're going to be in a very precarious situation, finds a way out. You can meditate or you can sit and say, I'm not leaving this chair for the next four hours until I produce the thing I need to produce. So I think a lot of that comes down to your attitude and your financial situation. I've never had writer's block because I came from a place where I cut the cord

in the corporate world and I had to do this to pay my mortgage. It was the only way I was going to survive. And there were so many times I wasn't in the mood. I wasn't inspired. The muse wasn't there. Who cares? Sit down and write the thing and get it done. And so this preciousness around writing. And this is one thing I learned a lot at the writer's grotto. Maybe one of the negative things is people just love to talk about it. Kind of like when someone's on a fast and they just want to tell you all about their cleanse or their fast. And it's the last thing anyone wants to hear about People just want to talk about Riders Block all the time because I think it's a convenient way for them not to do the thing. Yeah, there are a lot of topics that fit in that category.

It's like if someone's taking 10 minutes to tell you about their dreams, you're like, uh-huh, uh-huh, all right. That's exactly right. In any case, I could keep giving examples, but I want to try to focus here. So when you cut the sort of corporate umbilical cord, was that at a point where you were already replacing your income, or was it a leap of faith on some level? And in either case, like, how did you make the decision to go 100% into writing? At what point did you make that decision? I was a well-respected member of corporate America for a very, very long time. And I was making a living, bought me a house, all that stuff. And there was obviously something missing.

in that. And so what I would do on nights and weekends is I would write magazine articles. And I absolutely loved it because it allowed me an excuse to knock on doors that I wouldn't ordinarily knock on and talk to weirdos. So I unfortunately started off by just writing stories I wanted to write because I didn't need to do it. Right. And then the money wasn't that good anyway. But just writing things I wanted to write. And I got so absolutely absorbed in these worlds and would take months writing these stories. And I thought it was impossible for me to do this full time. And that's what I did for six, seven, eight years until I got to a point where I had several different magazine contracts. And I was at a four-year review for my work performance. And my boss was like, oh, you know,

really good and you know how this is exciting and you know what were you doing at the time in corporate america oh god uh yeah i was a the head of an editorial department and so i was doing a lot of editing and a lot of writing for a organization which shall remain unnamed at this time and that was a very easy job i had you know the pay was good all that stuff and i remember sitting in this guy's office and kind of looking at him and looking at the office. And I had the most sickening feeling at the bottom of my stomach. And I did not plan to do this, but it's like it came from another realm. In mid-sentence, as he's talking about this, I just said, you know what? I quit. I can't do this anymore. It's just a visceral. It was like animal response. It was. And it's almost like I

heard myself saying this and he was shocked i was like i'm going to go out and just kick ass and this was around 2009 guess what happened next everything imploded and i lost all of my contracts and i had a couple of extremely difficult years trying to find my way navigate my way through this but I said, I can't go back until I really give this a go. So I could tell you so many horror stories. A year after everything went wrong, everything, book contracts got canceled, magazine stories got canned. It was horrible.

But I kept with it, yeah. What kept you going? I mean, was it that the Control Z wasn't available and you couldn't go back to a corporate gig? Or was there some other internal, monologue or mantra or any type of time-bound commitment that kept you going with the writing? I could have

gone back to a corporate gig for sure at any time I could have gone back but I found another lifestyle and another feeling and another calling that felt almost illegal from my upbringing.

I was doing everything I was told not to do and there was an aspect of that and a danger to that that I liked. I was also, I didn't cut the cord when I was 22, right? I got the cord when I was like later and I said, if I don't do this now, if I don't do it now, I'm never ever going to do it. It's going to be so hard to do it now, but if I wait any longer, it's never going to happen and I'm never going to be happy. That's what drove me. when did it click when did you after the canceled contracts and the disasters and just train wreck

after train wreck was there a moment doesn't have to be a financial moment but was there a moment we're like oh okay this is starting to build some momentum or like this is giving me the spider sense which is somewhat the opposite of the quick blurting out of i quit in the corporate meeting which is like, oh, here we go, like something is here. Was there a particular moment where things started to click into gear? There was a moment. I was sent by Outside Magazine to write about the world free diving championships in Greece. And I remember being out there and sitting on the prow of this boat

and watching these people do this thing that is not supposed to be biologically possible, swimming down on a single breath of air to 350 feet for four minutes at a time coming back and it sent chills through me and it still does when I think about it and I remember writing my editor Alex heard it outside and I said there's something bigger than the story going on here and he's like okay but you got to finish the story so no writer's block there is weird how that happens so I delivered the story within a couple of weeks the story made a splash. I got a book deal out of it and was finally able to have some semblance of comfort. And that's when the lever turned on pretty big for me. It's also when things got

really serious, right? Because you're dealing with a larger sum of money. You're dealing with something I've never done, which is write a book, written a ton of articles, but writing a book was a different thing. But I love the challenge and I just went 100% in seven days a week just like I was so absorbed in it and I was so happy. I was very tired. I should have paced myself better, but every day I was so grateful not to be in an office and so happy to be doing something that was able to really stir my curiosity and my fascination with the world. When did writing become self-sustaining, It became pretty self-sustaining from that contract. It was a larger contract. But then, I won't give you the whole dirty story, but, you know, the book came out and I got quite a

large advance and the book didn't sell as much as the publisher had hoped. This is deep. Yes, yes. So within two weeks, you know, they give you two weeks to make a splash and it didn't make the splash that they wanted to make. So they just cut it out. They just sort of stop promoting it in any way. My editor at the time wouldn't call me back. I was so heartbroken by not just the financial part of that, but the fact these people that I really had these close relationships after a few years just sort of left me out there right when I really needed them. But I licked my wounds and focused a little more and got back to writing and just learned a lot of valuable lessons in that process of exactly what not to do and what I should

do more of. And the next book was breath. What were the things not to do? Are these business dimensions or were they other things? It was trusting people in the industry to do things that they are paid to do, but at the time not realizing that you are very low on their priority list. So specifically with promotion, begging people to send your book to a magazine, begging them to get you an interview and having them say, this isn't my job. So again, it comes down to my business, naivete. Had I done it again, like if I were to go back and do it again, I would have hired an agency to take care of PR and not rely on the publisher. All these things that I'm sure you already know. Well, I also had to learn a lot of these things.

But you have to learn that you're not just a precious writer writing precious books and you get to sit in a corner and tell everyone you're an introvert. You have to take this whole machine by the reins and do it all. That includes like hiring people to do things that you shouldn't have to hire people to do, but that's the reality. So the longer I've stayed in that industry, the more I've sort of been able to feel out. those areas of deficiencies and publicity or whatever and fill them in. So I want to read something. This is to give credit where credits do. It's leadersmag.com.

This is from 2022. This might take a second because it's a chunky paragraph, but I'm going to read this because I'm hoping for some advice. But we can do that, I think, sort of autobiographically with your experience. So here we go. Quote, I think of my wife who had to watch me rewrite this book over and over, but then watch my deadlines slip away by months, then a year. I was bringing in no paychecks during this process.

Writing this book was 24-7 job for several years. So now, da-da-da-da-da, like right, fourth time rewriting, being two years later on delivery of the book. She definitely got nervous when I went to the Paris catacombs on research and traveled to talk with all these dentists. She kept asking me, this is a book on breathing, right? This is like a lot of my friends who are proofreaders in my current 800-page draft.

Back to the quote, I told her, yes, and it would all make sense in the end. The truth is I had no idea how I was ever going to put the pieces of this puzzle together. All right. So I find myself in maybe a similar place. How did you find yourself out of the catacombs and into an actual coherent book? I worked. I know I know it worked, but how the hell?

I would love to say it's more complicated than that. I worked until it was done. And some of these projects, as you well know, some of them kind of feel like they slide off. Like, things find their place. They find their footing. You're almost out of control of the process. The process takes you over and takes you along for a ride. And it's a wonderful feeling, like if only every project.

And some of these, you cannot find your way out. You cannot see daylight for a very, very long time. And that was this book. So many people were so nervous. I think about my mental state, my physical state. because, hey, I'm talking to Dennis. They're like, cool, why aren't you talking to pulmonologists? I said, because Dennis know about breathing more than pulmonologists.

And I'm doing all of this crazy stuff that has nothing to do with breathing. And, you know, I would call my agent and tell her this. And she kind of trusted me, but also was just like, we have to hand in this book. Right. And I said, okay. And it was at that time, it was 290,000 words. And I had to bake it down to 85,000. Wait, say that one more time?

It was $290,000 worth. Again, that had to come down, that had to come down to 80, $85,000. The key is where I was gaining real clarity is I did something completely cliched is I got a house in the woods where there was absolutely nothing around, no Starbucks to go to, no store to go to, and I just did that thing. I thought, huh, if I have no distractions around, what will happen? And it turns out that boredom is the most wonderful muse of all. I was renting the house and all these problems of it. I don't care. I'm renting it, right? I'm just here to work. And it was through the process of thinking about it night and day, just becoming completely absorbed in every thread of the story. I started to see the matrix after a while and then it came together. And as you know, like you know when

it's getting there. Like once things start locking in and then you know exactly what your job is. But sometimes that process can take a few months or even a year for all of those pieces, those Tetris pieces, to find their way to start to make sense. What were some of the, if you remember, some of the breakthrough moments or key decisions that allowed you to go from the 290,000 words to the 85,000 words? Because you'd have to cut a lot, right? There may have been some very new structural decisions that you would have to make about the overall architecture of the book. What were some of the sort of key moments or decisions that allowed you to ultimately do that?

The key moments were being comfortable enough with the story and being so uncomfortable with how I had told the story that I was able to ask for help from my agent who was a master. editor, veteran in this world, and from my editor at the publisher. I gave them just this complete dog crap. And I said, the information here I think is really compelling, but there's no story. There's nothing to hold on to. As a through line, you mean? Yeah, not only the main through line, but all these sub threads that sort of need to weave together around that through line. So it feels like you're reading a book and not a Wikipedia entry of anyone can get information anywhere, right? What they're coming to you for for a book is they need be absorbed in it. I mean, as a journalist, people don't like to hear this, but you're in the

entertainment industry. If people stop reading your stuff, you have failed. So you have to keep them reading and you want to include information that's going to help enrich their lives too and you do that through stories so it was through their intervention and advice that they were able to see something i was not able to see and once we had that skeleton and i remember the day it all came to get i was sketching it out and i said oh my god this is finally it then flushing out that skeleton was just almost mechanical work because I already knew the story and I knew exactly where to go. Right. You had the blueprint. Then you could lay the bricks. Yeah. Yeah. What did the skeleton look like? I know this is very getting into the weeds, but. Yeah. So I did this experiment at

Stanford, which for 10 days, I plugged my nose. So I was a mouth breather for 10 days. And then for 10 days, I was a nasal breather. And we took all these different blood work. We did pulmonary function tests. We did testing three times a day to see how our heart rates were changing, to see CO2 level, every imaginable thing that we could possibly do. And in my imagination, this was going to be three paragraphs towards the end of the book. Because I was like, it's cool. And the results are confirmed everything I had been told, right? When I was able to feel them personally, and it just confirmed across the board,

everything about the dangers of mouth breathing, benefits of nasal breathing. So that two-paragraph section is my editor and agent. They said, no, that's your through line. Tell the first three quarters of this book through those 20 days and have all of the other stories branching out through that 20. I said, but it's 20 days. I'm working on this freaking thing for five years.

They said, nope, that's what it's going to be. And so I quickly put it together, you know, after a couple of weeks. And I went, wow, that's it. And we finally had it. And I remember that feeling, too, of just extreme relief more than anything. But there's always a way out. I know you're in the weeds right now. I can sense that you're just like, what the hell? I can't figure this. there is always a way out and you'll find it. All right, yeah, your starting point of almost 300,000 words makes me feel a lot better because I think that's roughly, I might be slightly over that, but yeah, it's a big old honkin block of granite that I need to start chipping away.

We've covered a lot here. I want to touch on perhaps one other piece that I've also explored personally, which is Now, in modern terms, worked with a woman named Leah Lagos, this is quite a few years ago now, but to use particular patterns and cadence of breathing to affect heart rate variability, to improve heart rate variability. And it would seem that using very particular cadences of breathing is not a new thing. And I was hoping maybe you could speak to press. cross-culturally and breathing practices and what you've observed or found in the literature.

Everything I've mentioned today about how to improve breathing through biomechanics, through different breathwork patterns, all of this stuff is literally thousands of years old. So we have instruments now to measure how they affect us. But back then, they were able to see this in real time by these people practicing these different methods. So there were some research being done around 22, 23 years ago in Italy, where they were looking at different prayers, specifically the Buddhist mantra, Oman, Padmi Homme, and satanama, which is a kundalini chant, and the Catholic prayer cycle of the rosary. And they noticed that all of these different prayers required people to exhale. at around five to six seconds, right? And when you're speaking a prayer, you are exhaling.

And then there was this pause where you take this about five to six second. Inhale, very slowly. And they looked at what happened to the bodies of all of these subjects, and they looked at how heart rate variability went through the roof, how blood pressure decreased,

how oxygen increased in the brain, and all of these different systems of the body entered the state of COVID. of coherence. And they called this breathing pattern coherent breathing after that. You don't need to pray to breathe this way. All you have to do is inhaled five to six seconds and exhale five to six seconds.

If you don't believe me, if you're able to track your heart rate variability live, if you have a heart math monitor or whatever, you can see this play out in real time within a few seconds of breathing this way. And what you're seeing and what you're feeling is your body working at the state it's designed to work at, at the state of coherence, at the state of peak efficiency.

James, we've talked about a lot. I'm tempted to ask you about the new book, but I don't know if you can divulge anything about it. But if we're focusing on the breadth side of things, is there anything else that you would like to mention, whether it's about technique, the book itself, plans for the book, anything at all outside of that, too, that we haven't covered? I think the main thing, and this is my, I won't call it my issue with the breathwork culture that's out there, but it's just something I want to bring awareness to. Breathwork's a huge deal right now, right? There's retreats. There's different schools. There's classes all over the place. There's breathwork fashion. You know, there's breathwork jewels. There's all that stuff. But what I think that that culture is doing is a bit of a disservice to, everybody else in that it's complicating and creating a barrier around something that already belongs to everybody. This is what my book was mostly about. It wasn't breathwork. It was about this biological function of breathing. And if you look at 90% of people on the planet right now

suffer from some form of breathing dysfunction, the most helpful thing you can do for yourself is just to be a normal breather. You don't have to go sign up for a breathwork class. And the breathwork classes that I've gone to have been amazing. They're incredible. And then I watch people walk away, mouth breathing, or complain about their snoring or sleep apnea. So it's like going to like a culinary school and just learning how to make desserts and not learning how to make entrees and not learning how to make food that is nutritious for you. I'm not saying breathworks bad. I love it. try to do it as often as I can, but you have to understand the foundations and the fundamental part of that. And the fundamental part is very basic. It's very simple. It's very natural, which is why I think

it gets overlooked. People think it's just too simple to be effective until you do it and until you look at the science. So that would be the one suggestion I would have for people. Before you go into hardcore breathwork, get your breathing to a normal place and see the benefits from that. Sage words, I mean, it's true of so many types of workshops, right? People are working on A, B, and C, and then they walk out doing the exact opposite. Just get to normal, natural breathing. Question related to sleep, because I have to make this, of course, self-interested as we start to land the plan. But I have been having this last week for, reasons I won't bore you with, but have been having a hell of a time with sleep. A lot of it to do

the environment. But besides tape on the mouth and the things we already talked about, is there anything else that you recommend to people for sleep position, head position, anything at all, doesn't have to be what I just mentioned for purposes of improving or regulating sleep. I'm sure you have various devices that measure your sleep quality, right? If you have a device that is able to look at dips in oxygen, then that's even better. I'd wear as many of those devices as you can, and then I would start experimenting with different little things that you can do around. I would start with assessing your snore lab or snore clock. They both do the exact same thing. I'd put your phone on the side of your bed, and I would record it not for one day, but for a week.

And I would start with that to see if you are mouth breathing, to see if you are snoring, to see if you are holding your breath. And then from there, I would slowly adopt nasal breathing through the methods that I mentioned. Start in the daytime, start extremely slowly. And you can try to get myotape as well. They make it for adults as well as kids. It's much more. M-Y-O.

M-Y-O-T-A-P-E. again, I have heard so many people, big fans of that. If you have your breathing locked in, you're not snoring, okay? You're not mouth breathing. Then I would start to look at physicians. So what they used to do back in the day is get a t-shirt and tape a sock or a ping pong ball or something light to the back of that t-shirt. Because so often when you are lying on your back, breathing is more difficult. This is what happened with COVID patients, right? Which is why they started proning them. They started putting them on their stomachs and sides and they were saving so many more people this way. I didn't know that. The same thing is true with breathing at night.

When you were on your back, most of the expansion in the lungs when you breathe happens in the back. It's not the front. It's the back. So you can be inhibiting that. So try side sleeping. And by placing that ping pong ball or sock, taping it on the back of a T-shirt, this, when you're unconscious, it will be so uncomfortable that you will go from side to side as you continue to record your sleep with SnorLab and with all of your wearables. After that, you can try incline bed therapy, which is where you raise the head of the bed around six inches. That can help a lot of people. And then there's several other things you can do after that. But I would start there. And for most people, not everybody, for most people, they will see a reduction and sometimes

snoring to be completely resolved. And for some people with sleep apnea, they will see significant reductions. Granted, I will say that sometimes troubled sleep is caused by stress. You're waking up and your mind is just racing. Sometimes it's not so much a physiological thing. Sometimes it's psychological. But I would want, if I were you, I would want to get the physiological stuff out of the way first. Check all of those boxes. Make sure your breathing is consistent and normal and fluid at night, and then you can dive deeper into it. Amazing. Thank you. James Nest, everybody. Breath, the new science of a lost art. Highly recommended. Man, do my friends. Just, I recall, and still to this day, just the barrages of texts that I get about it and how within grasp these approaches are for

people, right? Like you said, you don't have to sign up for a $5,000 breathwork seminar. These are very much within reach at low cost or no cost. Where can people find you online? Is there a best place for people to find James Nestor if they want to dive deeper, see what you're up to? Yeah, I took a year off of all social media and everything. I just felt like it needed to reboot. I'm crawling back into the morass right now. So I'm on Instagram, on some jerk to James Nestor. So I'm under MR. James Nestor, Mr. James Nestor. That's also my website. A lot of the stuff we're going to be giving out different breathing protocols, different breathwork audio tracks and all that stuff. So if you go to the website, you can sign up and get all these freebies that way. beautiful and we will link to everything in the show notes for folks listening and watching as usual so all the resources all the gadgets and adult pacifiers and so on that we mentioned

will be at tim dot blog slash podcast you can just search nestor on that page nestsr and you'll find everything and to everybody out there be just a bit kinder than is necessary as always to others but also to yourself, and thanks for tuning in. Until next time. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me

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It is made with five tailored foam layers, including a base layer with full perimeter zoned lumbar support, right where I need it, and middle layers with premium foam and microcoils that create a soft contouring feel. Helix offers a 100-night sleep trial, fast free shipping, and a 15-year warranty, so check it all out. And now you can get 27% off anything on their website, so site-wide. So just go to helixleep.com slash tim. One more time, helixleep.com slash tim.

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