The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 262: James Nestor—Let's Talk About Septums and Scrotums

Episode Date: August 2, 2022

James Nestor, a NYT bestselling author whose book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art inspired Mike to have a septoplasty, discusses the advantages of healthy breathing, the dangers of mouth breathing, and the reasons why our ancestors had larger mouths and straighter teeth. Then we share a song written by listener Bill Dumas in reaction to Mike's request for a ballad about his deviated septum and his father's swollen scrotum in Episode 203: There's a Hole in Daddy's Arm.

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Next. Which you have here is episode number 262 of the way I heard it. It's called Let's Talk about Septims and Scrotums. And Chuck, I guess we should just start by apologizing the advertisers. They probably didn't know they were sponsoring an episode with Scrotum in the title. But you know what you get what you get on this gig? Yeah, that's true. That's very true. This is a good episode, though. We say that a lot. We always say it's a good episode. But I know you've wanted to have this guy on for a long time, James Nestor. Modesty aside, they've all been good. Some of them I think have been very good. And some of them are just satisfying in ways that are super personal. And that's, for me anyway, that's the case here. James Nestor is a writer. He's a freelancer.

He's been in San Francisco for years and he got famous not too long ago. He wrote a book called Deep and then he wrote another book called Breath. His book called Breath was the straw that broke the camel's back for me or my septum. It's the straw that broke the septum's back. It literally changed your life, didn't it? Yeah, it convinced me after 35 years of being a mouth breather to finally get the surgery I needed to fix my nose. And that happened early, early June a year ago, so about 14 months ago in real time. And it's changed every aspect of my life from the way I exercise to the way I sleep. So I feel a measure of, of gratitude to this guy, and I've always wanted to meet him. I've heard him interviewed in other places,

and I admire his stuff. You were saying before, which is pretty funny, you haven't read his book, but you feel like you have because I called you, like at the end of every chapter and said, get a load of this. Well, yeah, I mean, we talk a couple of times a day, it seems, and as you were reading that book, you would just tell me about the chapter or chapters that you had just read. I know all the stories when we were having the conversation. I just knew everything that you brought up that he mentioned because you had relayed it in real time as you were reading the book. It was cool. Yeah, I guess I'm kind of an evangelist for this topic because if you have a hard time breathing, if you have a deviated septum, if you've thought about a septoplasty in the past,

then we have a lot in common. I didn't fully appreciate just how bad my situation was until I finally got it fixed. And so for that reason, I'm happy to talk about all of this in detail. It was really great fun talking to James Nestor, who you're going to meet in a minute. But I should also point out, when I got my nose done, I talked about it on this podcast. I wrote about it on Facebook. I even filmed myself getting the splints removed from my schnaz. It was quite an odyssey. In my drug-addled prescription pain delirium that followed the surgery, I mentioned that somebody ought to set this whole hot mess to music. And weirdly enough, some listeners of this podcast sent in some songs.

Some weirder than others, some better than others. But I want to share one of those with you today at the end of the podcast. What's the guy's name, Chuck? Bill Dumas, D-U-M-A-S. Bill, I challenge the listeners to incorporate a song that somehow touched on my septum and my father's scrotum, which at the time had swollen up to an enormous size

due to another malady that we don't need to get into now. I just thought it would make for an interesting tune. And this guy, Bill Dumas, man, he stepped up with a little ditty. I'm not going to describe it. I'm just going to play it for you at the end of the podcast and let the chips fall where they may. He called it Septims and Scrotums, which is why this episode is called Let's Talk About Septims and Scrotums, because we just did.

It's episode number 262 with James Nestor. And here it is. Right after this. Do do do do do do do do. Dumb. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments. They're hysterical.

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in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Pure Talk. Mining my own business when the tiger came upon me. Naturally, I was terrified. Sound good? Thanks, Ross. What happened next, though? You can't leave us with that.

Well, I looked at he and he and me, and it went raw, and I shit my pants. Okay. I suppose that's perfectly normal, you know. I mean, encountering a tiger. in the wild. No, no, just now when I went raw, I shit my pants. Oh. It's a visual I'm getting out of my mind right now. Going to clear the mind. Going to take a deep breath. We're all good. That was from these two guys, I think they were called Beyond the Fringe, and it was Peter Cook

and Dudley Moore, and they would do these acts on stage, like non-sequiters, apropos of nothing. They cracked each other up, and they were a big deal in the 60s. And that's one of the, first exchanges. Peter Cook walks out and says, so how was your trip to India? And no, Dudley Moore asked. And Peter Cook literally talks for 20 minutes describing his search for the elusive Bengal tiger. And it ends with a bout of incontinence. It's great. It didn't end with drinks because Dudley Moore was pretty famous for that, right? Started with drinks. Okay. So how are you? Pretty good. How are you? I'm great and I'm tickled to death and maybe even honored that you would make time for this. I don't know how much Chuck told you, but your book,

Breath, was the proximate cause of one week of abject misery, followed by 14 months of complete bliss. I got the septoplasty. My life has changed. And I don't think it would have happened without you, James. Ah, well, that's great to hear. I wish I could take credit for that. But it was all the good researchers and surgeons out there that are applying these techniques and bringing awareness to people. about nasal breathing. We're not told anything about the difference between mouth breathing and nasal breathing and that's a crime in and of itself. I am newly converted and in violent agreement with you but I will say that like so many other really really important things it seems like the conversation has

existed for so long inside these verticals right where the choir preaches to each other so yeah surgeons get it and certain doctors get it but your book cut through a lot of that. And you took what I think in the hands of somebody else could have just been a pile of research and actually told a story about our species and about our dysfunctional relationship with what I guess is maybe the most fundamental thing our body does. And, you know, not to blow unnecessary sunshine, but it was already relevant. You made it interesting. And so I want to talk to you about all of it. I'm sure you're sick of telling some of these stories, but do you still feel like this is a mission-oriented thing? I mean, do you still believe that the information in

breath can fundamentally change the species? I do, and I'm not sick of talking about this stuff. When I am, I won't talk about it. I really mean that. I'm so excited to continue talking about it, because I keep hearing stories from people like you, people who had had sleep apnea or snoring for 20, 30 years. People who had chronic obstruction in their nasal cavities for allergies or for some other developmental problem. And they learned how to breathe properly and completely changed their lives. So I heard these when I was researching the book. Now I'm hearing them every single day from people all over the world. So that charges me up. Makes me want to keep talking about it. How can something so obvious have become something so oblique, so obtuse? How did we lose sight

I mean, what I think in terms of, I mean, drinking, that's a biggie. Water, that's important. But you can live a couple days without it. Food, you can go weeks without. But this is the thing we do, what, 20,000 times a day. And so many of us are just doing it wrong. I think that people, when they look at breathing, they just assume if you're breathing, you're okay. right? You're getting air in and out of your lungs. I'm breathing. I'm alive. When you're not breathing,

that's really bad because you're unconscious or dead or something awful. But what people don't seem to appreciate, what I didn't appreciate until I got into this research was it's how you're breathing that's so important, just like how you eat. What kinds of, it's not just important that you're eating food. Are you eating food or not eating food? It's the kinds of foods you're eating. And even the time of day in which you're eating those foods. It's the same thing with exercise. So I think for the past 100 years or so, that was how we thought about breathing. You know, as long as you're breathing, you're okay. Nose, mouth, whatever, breathing 30, 40 times a minute. It doesn't matter. It's just oxygen. You're bringing oxygen in, CO2 out. But as I learned, it's much more subtle than that.

And our ancestors have known about this stuff literally for thousands and thousands of years. That was the thing that really sucked me into your book. When you started not really with an examination of the way our noses look vis-a-vis the way we breathe, but with the way our teeth look, the way our posture has both evolved and devolved. The impact on modern dentistry vis-a-vis mouth breathing has to be one of the great untold correlations of modern medicine. Listen. Yeah, when anthropologists first told me that one of the reasons we're breathing so poorly is because our airways have changed. And they've changed just over the past 100, 200, 300, 300 years. I said, well, that's not how evolution works, right? Evolution takes tens of thousands,

hundreds of thousands of years to work. And they said, well, if you don't believe me, come on out here and we'll show you human skulls from 200 years ago, 100 years ago, and we'll show you modern human skulls. So I did that. I looked at hundreds and hundreds of schools. And if you look at a skull from a society that was eating pre-industrial food, all those skulls have straight teeth, and they have a pronatic face. Every single one of them. All of our ancestors had straight teeth, all of them. If you look at modern humans today, 90% of us have some crookedness or deformation in our mouths. So if people don't believe this, if they think it's some crazy hypothesis, look at an old skull and then look in the mirror.

And you start asking yourself questions where how the hell? did this happen? And how is it affecting us in so many ways? How did it devolve? How did the holes up here in our sinuses get smaller? Was that brought about by diet or was it brought about by exercise or what caused it? Chicken, egg. That's the one thing I couldn't get straight in my mind, like the inciting incident for this mess. You can pinpoint the exact. You can pinpoint the exact moment when our teeth went to hell. And it's the exact moment when cultures adopted industrialized foods. This is not me on some soapbox against industrialized foods. It is a researcher going into this world and seeing anthropologists and other researchers and scientists who have documented this

for the last hundred years. The moment a culture gets industrialized food within the first generation, their kids' teeth are crooked. After that, about 70% of the population has crooked teeth. After that, 80%. After that, look around. That's us now. And 90% of us have crooked teeth. Can you define industrialized food?

Sure. So industrialized food, if you look at the food that all of our ancestors ate, especially hunter-gathers, you know, look at what they're eating. They're eating meat. They're cooking it most of the time. They're eating roots, berries, all that stuff. And then you start looking at food of early farming cultures. And it's still pretty whole, right?

It's whole natural foods. And then you look at industrialization, especially the industrial revolution, we got really good at putting stuff in jars, putting stuff in cans, pulverizing wheat of ripping the germ and the brand off of rice. So you just have polished white rice. And the moment that happened, our teeth went to hell. And we also had a ton of different health issues like Ricketts started taking over England. It was called the, you know, the English disease. so prevalent. So yeah, again, this is not a hypothesis. You can document this and people have done that. So our food leads to a dental sort of calamity. And did that long inning of the face,

was that brought about ultimately by the food or did that lead to the shrinking of the airways that just further exacerbated the problem? So smaller mouth, smaller airway. And what happened with the mouth when the airway and the face don't grow properly, the upper palate over your mouth there tends to grow up instead of out. And an amazing thing looking at these ancient skulls, they have these huge upper pallets and they're all flat. If you look at the majority of modern humans today, that upper palate grows up. When it grows up, it can impede the airflow in the nose. So it takes away real estate from the nasal cavities. Along with that, with this smaller mouth, you have less room at the back of the mouth.

And this is one of the reasons why so many people snore and have sleep apnea. So the reason that this all happened, it's not just because of the food, even though that's the primary driver. Soft processed foods didn't have enough nutrients in them, but mostly they did not require hard mastication, chewing, especially in our early years. Without that constant chewing, the faces don't grow properly.

That's what happened. So it's almost like we stopped exercising our mouths and all of the atrophy that you would expect to follow that kind of neglect. Like any other muscle, it was inevitable. Yeah, great summary there. I should have just said that. That's exactly what happened. And the thing is, this is very important when you're younger, but it's also important when you're older. I mean, you think go to a gym and everyone's working out every little micro muscle of their body,

but no one's paying attention to the muscle and all the cartilage and the tissues that deliver energy for you to work out. And that's the mouth. And there are exercises for the mouth that have been shown to significantly decrease snoring and sleep apnea because you're toning that muscle. You're toning that airway. These have been around for decades and people just don't seem to have gotten the message. Well, I'm leaning in right now because I know a few hundred thousand of our listeners are leaning in and they're screaming two words. Do tell. How can I stop myself from snoring? How can I stop my bedmate from snoring? I'd prefer not to murder him or her, but surely somewhere between murder and me just leaving.

There must be something that can be done. So I wish I could put on my doctor's hat and prescribe something that's going to help everyone everywhere right now get rid of snoring in sleep apnea. I can't do that. I'm not going to do that. What I can say is everybody's different. Everyone breathes slightly differently. Everyone has a slightly different breathing dysfunction. For a lot of people, that dysfunction is in the back of the mouth and in the throat. They have sleep apnea where the tongue falls back. They snore. Sounds like that. So for them, these mouth exercises, I can't take you through these because they're pretty gross to watch. And I don't think this would make for a very good audio program, just some sort of tongue going up and down,

side to side. You can find them. They're freely available online. They're called oral pharyngeal exercises. And all these are exercises for the tongue and for the mouth. And myofunctional therapists, which is getting very huge. These are trainers for your mouth. And they work specifically with kids, but they also work with adults. I know it seems so stupid that we need a trainer for our mouth. as well, but taught to someone who's been snoring for 40 years, you know? Unbelievable. Okay, so I want to talk about the experiment that you've since become famous for. But before that, I just want to kind of touch on this idea that your passion for the topic,

I mean, I know a lot of researchers and a lot of writers and a lot of very smart people who find passion in the work. And then there's this other group of people who have that quality to a degree, but they also have a personal connection to the labor. Your face looks a little like mine. You have a longish face it looks like. I have a, what do they call it, like adenoid nol almost? That's exactly right, yeah, adenoid face.

So I breathed through my mouth for 45 years, maybe 40. And it all just makes perfect sense now. But anyway, I'm just wondering what personal circumstances might have brought you to the research. Yeah, when you go out and become a science journalist, the last thing you're going to do is spend a decade, or last thing you think you're going to do is spend a decade researching something as simple and mundane as breathing. And this was not something that I, you know, a destination I wanted to reach in my career. What happened was I was suffering from a bunch of breathing problems. This started personally where I was working out all the time, was surfing, I was boxing, doing martial arts,

and I was sleeping right, and I was eating the right foods. and I just was having constant bronchitis, mild pneumonia. I was constantly obstructed. When I went to my doctor, I was given like a bronchidilator or antibiotics and sent on my way. This went on for years and years. Those things work. Like the drugs work, but after a few years, I was like, this doesn't seem right until I talked to another doctor friend who was looking at me as I was talking.

She's like, I think your breathing's a little off. You should check out a breathing class. And I did. I'm in San Francisco, so those are a dime a dozen here. and I really felt a profound change after this breathing class. It had a very weird experience. And I didn't include this in the book because I don't want to say what happened to me. It's going to happen to everybody else.

But I have not had one breathing issue, any respiratory infections since I've learned how to breathe properly, not one. How long did it take you to learn how to breathe properly? It was the awareness part that was the real driver. So once I learned what breathing could do for you as far as meditation and relaxation, I said, well, what can normal breathing do for us? How can that improve our health? So I had very bad breathing habits. I'm sure I was a mouth breather my whole life. I'm sure I was a mouth breather when I was a kid. I would wake up every single night and drink a huge thing of water like what I have right here because my mouth was constantly dry. I'd be getting cavities. I thought this was normal because everyone else I knew was suffering from the same thing. So it took me months and months to learn to become an obligate nasal breather and to learn to breathe through my nose. at night as well. It took me a very long time. So did that personal journey proceed your experiment at Stanford? And like, how did you come to tie those two things together? Somewhere in my question is the answer to why your book is so compelling, because I don't think you can fake enthusiasm

merely for research. You had to live it. And clearly you have. Well, you did right through the experiment. Maybe you should tell us what the experiment was. There were two of them, right? Sure. So everything I just mentioned to you happened probably 10 years ago. And I was not going to write anything about this. I write about other stuff. And I did not even think a magazine was going to want a story about breathing. And I was told this from editors. And when I mentioned this to my agent, I said, you know, I think that there's something, this could be an interesting story. She said, that's the worst idea I've ever heard. So I forgot about it. And years went by. I got better at breathing.

I saw what it did for me. I was researching this at night just because I was curious about my own body and improving my own health. And it wasn't until years and years and years after that, once I talked to other researchers who had been doing the same thing for decades and had a lot of science to back it up that I realized there was a larger story here. So that's how it all came about. And so when you decided to, my company is called Labrat Productions, because, so much of what I've done over the years has required me to assume the identity of some kind of a guinea pig. And I laughed out loud when I got to the part in your book when the researchers at Stanford said, look, we can't ethically do what we want to do in order to prove the difference between mouth breathing and nasal breathing.

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Get good ranchers now. E-Ha! That's what happened. Once the real book research got underway, I knew the difference of malpreathing and nasal breathing. We've known this for decades and decades. But as a journalist, you know, I'm sure you can relate to this. I wanted to get down and dirty.

I wanted to get inside of it to try to understand it. a little better. And I had a strong arm a rhinologist there, Jayakar Nyak, who was the chief of renology research at Stanford. After talking with him for months and months, I said, you really need to do an experiment. As you mentioned, he said ethically, I don't want to do this. I volunteered. We had to pay for the study. Stanford did want to support this either, which at Stanford, trust me, was not the cheapest thing in the world. And the max amount of people we could do was two people. It's not perfect, you know, N2. It doesn't prove that much, but it allowed me, to truly understand what these people were complaining about for years and years about having

chronic obstruction. And I learned a valuable lesson, yeah. It was you and a guy from like Holland or Norway or somewhere over there. And you basically you filled your nose with what silicon or something? Yeah, yeah, not too proud of this. Yeah, yeah. For 10 days. People need to understand what you. For 10 days. Well, you think about it. People think that this was, they're like, oh, that's, you know, some jackass stunt or whatever. Look at the amount of people suffering from chronic obstruction. Okay, chronic sinusitis, chronic rhinitis. How many people mouth breathe right now? We were just putting ourselves into a position that millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people suffer from all the time. But we were

recording it. We were recording what happened. So the experiment was set up in two phases. The first phase was 10 days of only mouth breathing. So yeah, we jammed a whole bunch of crap up our noses, had bandage over that. and that was for 10 days. We were mouth breathers. People say, oh, that's awful. Again, look at the amount of kids who are mouth breathers. And it was so much worse than, we knew it wasn't going to be fun, right? That was a given.

But my God, it was terrible. It was so much worse than we ever thought. I was going to say, I can't even imagine it because I can't fall asleep if my nose isn't clear. I know that I breathe through my mouth when I sleep at times, but I cannot fall asleep unless I blow my nose before I go to bed every night just to make sure that it's clear because I know I won't fall asleep if it's not. So I can't imagine 10 days without that. Talk to a neighbor, talk to the kids in the neighborhood, talk to people who have severely deviated

septum, talk to people who have inflamed terminates. I mean, this is a huge percentage of the population and they're not breathing through their noses ever for years and years, decades and decades. So the first thing that we noticed, which was really frightening, is I went from not snoring at all, zero, to snoring the very first night, an hour and a half. A few days later, it was snoring for four hours a night. Anders, this poor guy from Sweden who came over here and wanted to do this, felt really guilty about it. He was snoring like five or six hours a night. We were recording ourselves, and it sounded like we were being strangled to death, which we were on our own bodies. Chuck, here's the difference. It's the frog in the boiling water. Like, for me,

I breathed fine until I was 18, broke my nose. Wasn't so good. Broke it again at 20. Got worse. Broke it again at 23, 24. Really bad. And then you just get used to going to bed feeling like there's a tiny little man up there

with a concrete mixer. And you're just completely walled off. It's extraordinary what you can adapt to. But what James did, he flicked a switch, like very, very quickly. What else happened to your body over the course of those 10 days? Well, the sleep quality, we mentioned that. Athletic performance plummeted, focus issues, plummeted, CO2 went down, cortisol went up. I mean, just basically across the board, we were doing a bunch of other measurements because we know that poor sleep, especially sleep apnea can really lead to diabetes and blood sugar problems and increased risk of heart disease. And so as we were going through this, we just literally felt our bodies breaking down because of course they were. They were.

struggling to breathe all day long. And especially at night when you're supposed to be restoring and growing, we were just waking up all the time. And you think about 20% of the population with sleep apnea that's doing this as well. What is the difference fundamentally between, like you analogized earlier air to food. But I wonder, I mean, it seems more like the way we breathe and the way we eat. There's a real parallel there. But how different is the air that goes into your lungs through your mouth versus through your nose. It's massively different. So when you take in air through your nose, you're humidifying it, you're filtering it. That's what all those structures are in your nose. They filter the air. They help remove bacteria and even viruses.

And they condition the air so that by the time that air reaches your lungs, it is so much easier to extract oxygen. And it's less injurious to your lungs. If you're breathing through your mouth, try to do this when it's really cold out. You feel what happens to your lungs. You also have to consider all the toxins and pollutants in the environment. I live in a city that stuff's all over, mold, dust, allergens, and more. With no filter, you're just taking this air in and out of your mouth all the time. And that is going into the lungs, which can lead to increased risk of respiratory infections.

And it also makes it harder for us to get oxygen breathing through the mouth. You wrote, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you said, mouth breathers might as well have their lungs on the outside of their bodies. It's absolutely right. If you think about how long it takes me to take a big nasal breath here. It takes a few seconds, right? How long does it take me to take a mouth breath? That's it.

Same volume of air. There's nothing blocking it. So we need that pressure and that resistance from the nose. This stuff didn't develop randomly. It developed for a specific purpose. And we have a mouth, we can breathe out of it when we want, which is great. We have a backup system. Use it, right?

If ever you break your nose, which I did about three or four times, just like you. But this doesn't mean this backup system should be used throughout your entire life. And that's what's happened to such a huge percentage of the population right now. So 10 days of hell, 10 days of research, 10 days of logging, every encroaching infirmary, right? You finally get this crap out of your nose. What do you do for the next 10 days? Do you limit the mouth breathing as much as you can to compare or contrast? So we expected that final moment when we went back to Stanford and removed everything.

He took samples. I thought this was going to be just the celebratory awesome thing. But our noses were so messed up. That took hours and hours for that obstruction to really clear. But the first thing I noticed is the very very very. very first night, my snoring went down several hundred percent. It was down to about 20 minutes as opposed to four hours. And then after that, went down to zero. It's been zero since. So the way you did it, at least nasal breathing, the way we did it was we just shut our mouth. So when you're at,

if you're not used to doing that, you can use a teeny piece of tape. When you're working at an office, we tried not to talk that much because when you're talking, you're breathing through your mouth a little bit. And at night, we used a little piece of tape. I know this seems insane, but this is what a respiratory therapist at Stanford told us to do. And that's why our snoring went down back to zero from four or five hours a night to zero, both me and Anders. And this is the one thing I've heard more from people than anything else is how shutting their mouths at night has transformed the quality of their sleep. Well, you can put me on the list. Part of why I got the surgery is I have a couple of recurring dreams, all of which involve various levels of claustrophobia. But the most terrifying thing,

every time I see somebody's mouth like duct tape shut and their hands tied, they're thrown in a trunk or they're just left alone to breathe through their nose, it freaked me out so badly because you might as well kill me. I'm not going to be able to breathe through my nose in my former life. And so when I got the splints removed after a week of that, the first thing I did, James, I went to bed and I taped my mouth shut and I breathed all night through my nose and I did that for the next maybe week and a half. And the thing I noticed more than anything else, I was waking up with five and a half six hours of sleep feeling completely rested. And that was new. Yeah.

And what's great about this and living in the modern age that we live in is there's the subjective experience that you had. But you can also record your sleep quality so easily. easily an aura ring, whoop ban. I don't care what to use pulse oxymeter. And this is what we did during the experiment. And this is what so many other people are doing. So it's one thing to feel great in the morning. That's good news. That's where you want to be. It's another thing to see the data back up everything. And this isn't a big mystery to the people who study this stuff. I mentioned this to the sleep doctors down at Stanford. They're like, of course, you idiot. You know, of course you're going to be sleeping better.

Your body's going to be more rested if you're breathing the way you were naturally designed to breathe, which is through the nose, in and out through the nose. The impact on Joe Citizen from your research is obviously the fat part of the bat and the most important thing. But what about athletes, high-performance athletes, whose entire, I mean, everything starts and finishes with their ability to control their breath? You see these guys running and gasping, you know, just gasping. And you write in your book about a story of a guy who trained, more or less exclusively,

and he's breaking all kinds of records and looks almost relaxed at the finish line. His mouth is closed. I mean, is that typical? This is what's really been sweeping into athletic performance right now. And I know a number of people who have been doing this for years and years. And this is the very first thing that they fixed with their athletes. And you would think that athletes would be the best breathers in the world. They aren't.

There's a reason why track runners have a higher incidence of asthma and chronic sinusitis and respiratory problems because they, when you're young, you can get away with it. You know, you can push your body until it breaks. But what these guys are doing is assessing breathing and then teaching people to convert to nasal breathing. So there are some levels, zone four, zone five, when you're really going for it, that you can default to mouth breathing consciously. take a big breath of air, reset yourself. But otherwise, you should be considering the pathway

through which you're breathing air as different gears to your exercise. And all the way up to zone four, especially when you're jogging, you should be breathing in and out of your nose. It is going to reduce recovery times and is going to increase your athletic performance. And this has been studied again for decades and decades. But I'll be damned walking around San Francisco. I can count on one hand how many of the hundreds of runners. Every single one is everything they do. And you're not doing your body any favors by doing that. I find it really hard to do.

I recently visited Mike and took his walk with him. And at the end of the walk, there's a really steep hill. And I am just like, hey, hey, hey. And Mike is just kind of like, hmm, hmm, he's just breathing out of his nose. I don't know how he's doing it because he didn't used to be able to do it. do it. But how do you tell someone, what do you have to do? What do I have to do to get to where he is without having a surgery? Baby steps, you know, as Westerners, we just want to go and kick everything's ass immediately. You talk to people here about a new diet and they go from vegan to keto in a single

day and they're like, this isn't working for me. So just like with breathing, you have to go very slowly. If you've had a habit for 30 years, it's going to take you a really long time to break that habit and slowly acclimate your body to this. You have to go into this slowly. Try nasal breathing for five minutes a day, then 10 minutes a day, then 20 minutes a day. Try nasal breathing walking and then trinatal breathing, slowly jogging. What I heard from a few different breathing therapists and athletic trainers, they said, the moment you're breathing dysfunctionally when you're working out, you have to back off and go back to breathing normally and then slowly push that envelope slowly. It can take months and months for some people. It took months for me, but once you convert, you'll never go back.

Is it a fair rule of thumb to say that if you're exercising to a degree where you can't breathe through your nose, then you're probably exercising beyond your logical means? You're too far over your skis, in other words? Not necessarily. I think that once you are well trained at nasal breathing, you'll know that limit. But for people who just default to mouth breathing too soon, which is the majority of athletes, they need to be better trained to do that. There's a time and place for everything. Like when we laugh, we breathe through our mouths, right? I'm breathing through my mouth a bit as I'm talking to both of you. And that's fine. What I'm really talking about is the majority of the time, that 95% of the time. And most exercise, especially if you're doing interval training,

between those reps, don't sit there and huff and puff through your mouth. That's a moment to bring your heart rate back down. Breathe through your nose. Get more oxygen to all of your hungry cells. I think, too, Chuck, part of the answer is you kind of have to embrace the suck. You know, it's uncomfortable to feel like you need air and deliberately withhold it from your body. It goes against every synapse. It goes against every bit of muscle memory that you have.

but you're not going to pass out, right? You're not going to fall down because you're not getting enough air. In fact, so much of what you talk about, James, is not contradictory, but dichotomous. Like there's a chapter in your book called More, where you argue very persuasively that we need to get more air into our bodies, stat.

And the next chapter is called Less, where you argue very persuasively that we are breathing way too much. And at a glance, those two things seem like the work of a madman. But a time and a place. There is no cookie cutter advice really for any of this. And that's what makes the book such a challenge, I think. Yeah, tell me about it.

And that's why this book took so long because I was hearing those two different things from different people. And then I was looking, I was like, damn, they both have great benefits. So who's right? And it turns out they're all right. But it's all about context. When I'm talking about less, the vast majority of us are breathing too much. By breathing less, you're breathing normally. And you want to be breathing normally. When I'm talking about breathing more, that's for a very short amount of time. You wouldn't go to the gym for 24 hours a day, right?

You wouldn't be sitting there doing curls that would destroy you. These more exercises, Wim Hof method, Kundalini, Pranayama, whatever you want to call it, are designed to be done for about 15 to 20 minutes, a very controlled state, and they stress your body out on purpose. Just like the gym stresses your body out on purpose. When you leave the gym, when you leave these breathwork techniques, you feel extremely relaxed and calm because you've gotten all your stress out. And so that's what that more breathing is for, very short amount of time. You don't want to be doing that all day long.

It would destroy you. So then how do you discipline yourself? I mean, from a chemical standpoint, we're talking about CO2 in the bloodstream, right? That's exactly right, yeah. If I remember right, the working assumption is you need O2. The more O2 you get, the better. But there's some inverse thing going on vis-a-vis the fact that we really need CO2 as well, and it's not actually the enemy at all.

Yeah, talk about. another one of those contradictory things that I kept running up against. So we do need oxygen, right? That's how our cells operate and make energy very efficiently off of oxygen. But I kept hearing from physiologists and other researchers. They said, well, the only way to get oxygen is through CO2. You know, CO2 gets a bad rap. There's too much of it in the atmosphere.

There's too much of it in the indoor environment can make people sick. But we need a balance of CO2 and oxygen in our bodies. And this gets very complicated. The biochemistry took me a couple months to get through it. But CO2 is a messenger for oxygen. As oxygen enters our bloodstream, it goes to where there is more CO2, which is why if you work out your right arm, right, and it starts hurting, there's more blood flow that's going to be going there because you're producing more CO2.

This is a very smart mechanism developed in our bodies. And most of us, I don't know if I'd say most of us, I'd say probably half of us, have a deficiency of CO2. We don't have enough CO2 in our bodies, so our bodies are constantly having to work a little harder to get oxygen. Isn't CO2 what we exhale, though? It is what we exhale. That is the metabolic waste product, quote on quote.

Yeah, but there's a reason we're producing it in our bodies. We have 100 times more CO2 in our bodies than we do oxygen. We take in oxygen very slowly, very carefully. So in the atmosphere, there's about 20% oxygen. oxygen. And when we exhale, we exhale about 15% oxygen. So we're only taking in a quarter of the amount of oxygen in each breath. And our bodies do this for a reason. If you were to huff and puff on pure oxygen right now, you would die after a few days of just taking in pure oxygen because you have a deficiency of CO2. So oxygen is super important, okay? But so is CO2. And researchers knew this

150 years ago. And again, this is more research that's just been swept under the carpet. One of the things I also loved about the book, there are a lot of little tricks. Hacks, probably the wrong word, but just things to think about. There's a lot of counting in the book, right? Because, you know, your heart beats to a rhythm and most of us breathe to a rhythm. And just the notion of deliberately trying to exhale to a factor of two, versus your inhale. That's a game you can play, Chuck. It's a game anybody can play. If you're going to breathe in through your nose for a four count, exhale for an eight count and see what happens over the course of five minutes. It's interesting, James. It's interesting and it's also,

this is just our biology. This isn't some new technique that someone's trademarked somewhere. You can place your hand on your heart and take that short inhale and exhale very very. very slowly and you feel your heart rate lowering. This is not some placebo trick. This is how our bodies operate. So if you take that logic and then scale it out, you're like, huh, if I'm stressed out, if I want to go to sleep, what will happen if I breathe this way for a few minutes? You'll be lowering your heart rate, you're going to be delivering more oxygen to your brain, you're going to be calming your nervous system down. So this is not crazy new age stuff. This is just basic physiology. If you don't believe me, look at your heart rate variability as you breathe in these

slow rhythms. Look at your blood pressure before and after and you can see for yourself. It made me wonder, or at least think about the old, you know, when I can't fall asleep, I actually now literally count sheep. It sounds ridiculous, but I count them to a rhythm with my breath. And so the sheep go over the fence as I'm breathing in and I make sure. sure twice as many sheep go over the fence as I'm breathing out. And I just kind of play with that. And I don't know if it's the oxygen or the CO2 that's having an impact or the fact that I'm focusing on something that isn't the bad news of the day. It's not the headlines of the day. I'm just counting. There's something almost magical or at least mystical about the power of the count.

You know, that is the most charming image I have compared to the image that we started off with, this conversation. I'm going to keep this one in my mind because it is so pleasant. So however you want to count, however you want to exhale longer, whatever works for you, works for you. There is one technique that I've found has worked very well for me and millions of other people. It's to inhale to four, hold for seven, exhale to eight. So if you notice what's happening there, you're holding your breath or you're exhaling three quarters of the time. And when you do this, you send your brain and body messages to calm down. It's impossible to do this if you're panicking, right?

So you're tricking the brain to say, hey, I'm in a safe space. It's time to relax. Andrew Weil, famed doctor, did a YouTube video on this. It's been viewed like, you know, five million times. But this is a great trick that I've heard from various researchers. And again, if you have wearables, you can see what happens. You can see what happens to your heart rate, your blood pressure, and more. Shameless plug.

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Soon may the noble men come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the waitin is done, we'll take a drink and go. You're calm. You have a demeanor that's very even. You kind of live in this space, right? You don't strike me as an excitable guy. And I'm thinking of, like you've mentioned meditation once or twice, but you've also mentioned that this isn't about that hippie-dippy crap. This is psychology. This is physiology. This is biology. And yet, you know, I think about the chanting. I think about the rituals that are inculcated in so many religions. And I think about the power of repeating a thing and the rhythm of the thing and the way that breath informs that too. Forgive me, I don't know if it was your book.

I think you actually made a comparison to the rosary with some of these more new agey kind of approaches to calming down. So before there were watches and clocks and timers on our phones, how did people keep time? How did they keep rhythm? Well, they counted a lot. And that got boring. So they developed poetry and prayers that had a very specific rhythm. This allows us to be able to memorize things more easily, which is why all of these old poems were in rhythm and they rhymed. And these rhythms, it turns out, are locked into this what is called a coherent breathing rate. This is not my hypothesis either. 20 years ago, researchers were looking at this.

They were comparing the rosary to Buddhist mantras, to Kundalini mantras, to Christian prayers, to Jewish prayers. And they said, my God, these are all locking into this rate of about five to six seconds inhale. And then you recite whatever verse, oh, Manipodmaham, or you can recite the rosary or whatever. And by doing it in these cycles, this coherence takes over your body. So when people say prayer heals, it does. It probably has a lot more to do with the breathing pattern that you're doing than the words, but who knows? And so just by breathing in this pattern, about five to six seconds in, five to six seconds out, as cultures have been doing for thousands of years, is extremely restorative to the body.

What's so interesting about that is, I mean, obviously you can't exhale without an inhale, but you can't talk during an inhale. And so it's the exhaust or the exaltation, if you will. Those two things coming together in a five count or an eight count or whatever it is. Now, that is a hack. If you can lower your blood pressure, if you can affirmatively change your physiology with an exhale, Now we're getting into that space where the monk who sits cross-legged in the snow somehow manages to melt the snow around him by his breathing. And that's a pretty neat trick.

Yeah, and that was something that a lot of people called BS on for a long time. They said, okay, I can see how breathing can influence your nervous system function. I can see how it can influence blood pressure and heart rate and all that. But when people, and this started about 100 years ago, then when a bunch of hippies went over to India and Tibet in the 60s and 70s and said, there's these guys in the wintertime. They stripped down and they sit nude in snow and they melt a circle around themselves in snow in winter. Sounds like complete BS until Harvard Benson at Harvard Medical School went out there, found

these guys and tested them, put sensors all over their bodies and we can absolutely do this. So I'm not saying, you know, Joe Schmo sitting at home right now can do this. This takes years and years of learning these techniques, but it just shows you like the true human potential that's locked within us when we start to understand and utilize our breathing. It's mind-boggling. I'd like to talk a little bit, too, about the guy, the singer, the vocal coach. What was his name? Carl Stow. Stow.

This guy, I mean, Chuck and I talk a lot on this podcast about. a vocal coach and a teacher we had in high school named Fred King. Enormous lung capacity. Everything was about being on the breath. You know, every good singer that I've ever known has two things. A great constitution and remarkable lung capacity and, well, three things. A hell of a diaphragm. But talk about Stow a little bit and his impact, not just on athletics,

but on the medical community as really a vocal teacher. So this was a guy who was a vocal teacher, a choir conductor, and he got really good at re-teaching singers how to sing so good that all of his choirs started winning these awards. And he learned something that he thought the key to good singing wasn't the inhale. The inhale's easy. Everyone can inhale. It was a full exhale. Because a lot of us when we exhale, we stop shorter than our diaphragm really wants to go.

If you force yourself to exhale, the diaphragm is able to push way up higher. So he was able to teach these singers the ability to really flex their diaphragms more. So they could descend the diaphragm, which allowed them to inhale. That's the easy part. But really to then push that diaphragm back up. They got better at singing. They got a lot more volume. Their tone got a lot better.

He got so good at this that he went to the Met Opera in New York and retaught opera. singer were already pretty good at singing and they were transformed by this. So after doing this for about a decade, some pulmonologists got wind of his work and said, hey, we have some of the worst breathers in the world. They're called emphysemics and they're filling up our hospitals. We have no idea what to do with them. Do you want to come over here and see what your breathing practices can do for them? And he stopped everything and said, yeah, spent seven years in these hospitals. God, grief. That's the cliffhanger right there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we obviously can't leave it there. A vocal coach goes into some of the most esteemed hospitals to essentially do what

doctors have been unsuccessful at doing, which has helped people with emphysema, literally get back on their feet. This is how he did it. No drugs, no oxygen, even though oxygen for emphysemaics is very helpful and drugs are very helpful. He didn't use any of that. He used slight massage, he used vocal exercises, and he used these very long exhalation breathing techniques where he had these people count, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, over and over. And the more you do that, the higher the diaphragm lifts. They took x-rays of these people, and they found that their diaphragms were hardly moving. I have some of these films, hardly moving at all, which is why they had to breathe with their shoulders. Whenever

you see someone breathing with their back or their shoulders, they have lost that diaphragmatic movement. So just by allowing them to exercise their diaphragms, these people who were left for dead walked out of the hospital and lived normal lives. And I've heard some of them since the book has come out. And the shameful thing here is when Stout left the hospital system, all of his techniques completely disappeared. And emphysemaics in many ways are being treated exactly the same way they were 70 years ago. I was reminded of the story of Wilts Chamberlain, maybe one of the greatest but couldn't hit free throws for crap. Until one day he finally said, okay,

and he did the granny shot between the legs, went 98%. But the next day stopped doing it because he looked silly. And optically, it just didn't work for him. Why wasn't that embraced by the medical community and what made him a controversy? shield figure. That was a really good analogy.

I'm going to totally steal that for future. Take it. I stole it from Malcolm Gladwell, so now it's on you. So for the same exact reason. That's why it was such a good analogy. Stow was a really weird dude. He'd wear these strange suits with ascots and had this very particular manner. I've looked at his therapies and no wonder hospitals, once they actually saw it, once he started

opening the doors, we're like, no, you dude, out of him. here, even though he was completely healing people. He also thought he was, I hope there aren't stow relatives out there, but I think he was a pretty arrogant guy where he believed that he was the only one who truly was born with this gift. So when he died about 20 years ago, a lot of these techniques died with them. The closest person I could find to him was someone who worked with him for over 20 years. And I said, well, show me the magic. She said, he never taught me the magic. I picked up some things here and there. Luckily, there is one video of him doing his thing, which I happen to get my hands on. So we do know it. It's not even that complicated. What does yoga do? It stretches

out the ribcages, right? And it allows the intercostals to become looser. What a breathing exercises do, they allow the diaphragm to ascend upwards more. So I think that someone could reinvent this and help a lot of people. And I hope someone's doing this right now. I do too. Isn't it funny? how disagreeability so often accompanies visionaries and people who really have something of critical value to offer, but either get in their own way or are just possessed of some other quality that makes it hard for the average person. Like, he was a pretty handsy guy. Like, you can't talk about diaphragm. I know a lot of vocal coaches.

I had a guy giving me vocal lessons years ago. his hands are all over me. Like he stuck his hands down the front of my pants to demonstrate, you know, this area versus that area. And I'm thinking, hey, hey, whoa, you know, boundaries. Light a candle first, you know, something. But guys like style, they don't care. They don't seem to care about how they're perceived.

They just have the facts. And if you can't embrace them and run with them, we'll shame on you. I think that's another really good point is these guys seem to get. in front of themselves. They seem to be stopping themselves for some reason. Either they get too greedy with their knowledge or they get too arrogance or they just don't want to share it for some other reason. But there's also the other thing where you have a medical establishment that's very set in specific ways and things are done and step by step, A, B, C, D, that's how we treat people. When you have someone coming in and doing something in a completely different way, it's sometimes

threatening to doctors who tried to kick stow out of hospitals, even though he was completely curing these people. Repeatedly, they tried to kick him out. Also, they're like, how the hell are we going to scale this out to have this one guy come in for two hours a day, every day, dealing with this one patient? You can't scale that in a huge health care system. And that's the other problem. Do you think there's something to learn from this guy who, I'm going to say 99.9.9 of the people listening right now have never heard of, but who essentially proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that emphysema could be cured in a non-traditional way. Do you think there's something about that that rhymes today with antidepressants or SSRI or vaccine skepticism or, you know,

anything that seems to be embraced as truth is now being either looked at, with a super healthy level of skepticism, or not being looked at with any level of skepticism. Blindly followed, yeah. Yes, right. I didn't think of it when I read it in your book, but I think that's probably why I subconsciously brought it up. The truth of a thing always seems to be just under the surface right now.

And again, sorry to filibuster, but that's what I meant before when I said, you're a calm guy. That's why I really wanted to talk to you, because I think you're sitting on a Tinder box of life-changing information, but you're very circumspect in the way you share it. And you're hesitant almost to say, look, I can change you. Maybe because you know that that level of evangelism is not quite for sale anymore.

Yeah, I try to make it really clear in the book that I'm a journalist. I'm a researcher. I'm going to tell you what I've learned from other people, but I'm not going to make up my noon theories. I'm not going to be the one on a stage with a huge sign that says breathe in the background. Other people are really good at that. And they're changing people's lives, right? That's their position in life.

My job is to come in and be skeptical about everybody. That includes the knowledge that we thought was absolutely rock solid in medicine. And that also includes new age weirdos. I talk to all of them, right? And I listen to all of them. and I see where the data comes. Can it be measured? Can it be measured over and over again?

With something like emphysema, technically, and this is where Stau got in trouble, technically emphysema cannot be cured. Once that tissue is damaged in the lungs, it never comes back. What you can do, however, is access the other 95% of the lungs. And you can use that.

So you don't even need the part that has been damaged because you have all this other lung tissue to use. So it gets into some, Manics, and this is where a lot of people get in trouble because they say, I cure myself of asthma, I cure myself with emphysema. Technically that's not true. It feels like a cure to them. And that's the whole point. Are they healthier? Are they able to function normally? Sounds like a cure to me as well, but we can't use those words. As far as why this message isn't getting out to everyone, I think that some of it has to do with how simple it is. People really like convoluted answers to

things. It makes it sound more scientifically researched, right? Especially with food. There's 40 different supplements you're supposed to be taking, four ounces of protein during this meal and you have six ounces of fat during that. When you bring it on down, breathing is very simple. It's pathetic that we have to relearn how to do this thing. In the natural environment, if you look at indigenous cultures, they don't need to relearn how to breathe or exercise or anything. They don't have high blood pressure, heart disease or get strokes. But in the modern world, we have to relearn these things. And relearning breathing is simple. It takes some people a long time. Some people need surgery like you. But for most people, it's just a matter of creating different habits.

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what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mic. That's skillsusa.org slash Mike. I'm talking Skills, US, Skills, USA. My point in part anyway is that, yes, it's simple. So too is washing your hands with soap and water. But there was

a time when the mere suggestion of doing such a thing got Iggy Sammelweis thrown into an insane asylum and essentially disowned by the entire medical community because in part what he was suggesting seemed awfully simple, but he was also suggesting that if you're not doing it, you are the proximate cause of lots of dead babies.

And medical science doesn't appreciate that. Well, it was also a badge of honor to cruise around completely covered in blood. This was like, hey, I went to work today. What are you doing? You don't have blood on your hands? like, you're not really working. You can relate to this, Mike. We're like covered in all kinds of dirt in other Detroit. So I usually isn't blood. Hopefully, I haven't seen that episode yet. Don't do that one. Next season. That's not the good one. So if you talk about Samovice and he went insane

and died in an insane asylum and then 30 years later, they're like, oh, that guy was actually right. Sorry, but that happened to Galileo, you know, that happened to Copernica. I mean, it happens to all these guys that are completely causing this paradigm shift. And that term gets bandied around by a bunch of conspiracy theorists and all that stuff. But if you look at the history of scientific revolutions, what is happening here with breathing is the same thing that happened with food. It's the same thing that happened with exercise. The same thing that happened with cleanliness. There are these revolutions, these cycles. And I think I was able to come in and research this book right when that wave was starting to break. Because these researchers have been working.

working on this stuff for decades and decades. But it seems like people are now considering, because of COVID, I think a lot of it has to do with that. Hmm, maybe breathing is important. Like the main way I get energy, maybe that's an important thing for my health. And our ancestors have known this all along. Interesting. I hadn't thought of that, but have the lockdowns in your estimation impacted your research?

And has it got more people thinking more? more specifically about all of this? I think humans are very reactionary. So it's only when we lose something, do we start to appreciate it? It's only do we get sick that we're like, oh, I should get healthier right now. So I think it was only when people lost the ability

to breathe that they were like, my God, maybe breathing's important. And it took some people weeks and weeks and months and months to get that ability back. So I think that awareness through COVID has absolutely affected people's appreciation of what breathing is. Why did you call your book Breath instead of Breathe?

I had so many better titles than that. All of them were nixed by my editor. I mean, I had some great stuff. And after two months of arguing, I finally gave up. I said, okay, you guys know what you're doing. That's your job. And they called it Breath. And that's why.

I know you wanted another answer, but that's the truth. Well, I mean, actually, I was just thinking about, I mean, it's just an E, right? But it's the difference between a noun and a verb, basically. I think it was the ink cost, yeah, of the cover. Times are tough, man. Yeah, this is a six-letter guy, not seven. Let's not spring for it. What was your preferred title?

I don't even want to get into that right now. It's water under the bridge. But I wanted to do something more jazzy, more action-packed. I said, it's just breath. But they thought breath as in the noun, right? The thing was more powerful than just the verb. And we had a bit of back and forth. Like breathe was tilting a little into the new agey thing for me.

And breath sounded a little more solid, which is where I wanted to make sure that that messaging was getting through to readers, that this was not a woo-woo book, that it was an actual science book. Well, the subtitle does that, the new science of a lost art. That part's good. That's great. Thank you.

Had to fight for that one as well. You did? Don't get into publishing people. This is what you end up spending their days and nights. Really do. You think it's writing books? Forget it. It's battling over titles.

Believe me. Dude, I know. I know. Are you working on another one? Yeah. It has nothing to do with breathing. People keep saying like, when's breath two coming out? I can't wait.

I said, it's never coming out. Maybe someone else is going to write it. but it's not going to be me. This is it. I'm revising the paperback, which is coming out in about six months. So after a lot of conflicting messages, I'm able to shove in about 15 new pages of all the stuff I've learned since the book has come out.

So I'm putting in additional scientific studies and other conversations. Awesome. Well, I'm asking about the title because we can call this episode anything you want. And if it somehow makes you feel better to see the title you originally wanted, preserve for posterity on iTunes, I'm more than happy to commit to that right now. In fact, I feel there's a certain symmetry and justice to it. Thank you for that, honor.

I will not get in the way because I have a feeling this is just going to be more emails with your production team on what they want to call it versus me. So I will bestow this honor to you guys. Chuck, it's up to you. Don't screw it up. Okay? It's got to be real zingy. No, that's it right there.

Chuck, don't screw it up. Episode number 263. What I'm leaning toward right now is I live in San Francisco, breathing classes are a dime a dozen. You know, I feel terrible. You're right across the water. Are you in town right now? I'm right in the middle of beautiful Bernal Heights. And I'll tell you something, Mike, back in the 90s, I used to watch you on Evening Magazine.

Everyone's like, oh, dirty jobs, all this stuff. I said, no, I am an OG fan. I turn on at 7 o'clock. you'd be talking about, you know, the latest Calistoga hot tub or something, and it was awesome. So I was there early and often. Well, you will appreciate that. The Calistoga hot tub thing happened because my bosses realized that the raps that Maloo and I were doing as a part of every show could occur from any place. And it was only a question, only a matter of time until they said, well, why don't we send them someplace?

where people will pay to have them. And that was the beginning of the end. That's when evening kind of went from this charming little show about the comings and goings of people in the Bay Area to, hey, tonight we're coming to you from Futon World. And so you saw Calistoga because I went into my boss's office one day and said, look, I don't mind whoring ourselves out, you know, to keep the show on the air.

But Futon World, come on. We'll call it Pack Your Bags Friday. And every Friday will go to a great resort somewhere in the Bay Area and host the show from there. And they bought it. And that kept us on the air for an extra year. Well, I will tell you, those were actually my favorite episodes because you have the smirk on your face while you're doing it. You could see right through it. And we would laugh so hard because we knew it was going on.

I was writing magazine articles there. I know that gig. The magazine doesn't have money to send you out to write about something. So you're going to get the hotel. I get it, but that was the charm of it. So do not be ashamed. That is classic history right now. And I'm sure someone's got them on VHS somewhere.

Oh, look, they're seared into my retina for sure. But in the spirit of alternative titles, before the network signed off on Pack Your Bags Friday, which was like my fifth choice, I was pitching shameless plugs. And every Friday is going to be a shameless plug where we pay the bills with a 30-minute commercial brought to you from some fabulous resort that I can never afford to go to, but we went to all of them. It was one of the greatest, unapologetic, transparent scams of all time. I make no apology for it. It kept the lights on.

And it was in the midst of that my asthma that dirty jobs evolved when I went into the sewer one day with my cameraman. And that was one of the few times in my life, James, when I thought, I'm glad I can't smell anything. I was perfect for dirty jobs. I'll give you some of my nose floods from the Stanford experiment whenever you're going back down there. So they work great. I'll leave you with this too. I would like to see him,

but I sat right here seven days after, I wonder if I still have it around here. It's awfully disgusting, but I let Facebook know step by step what my recovery was like. And it was rough. I had a rough seven days. and I remove the splints on camera sitting right here.

I still have them. I'm going to auction them off for the foundation one of these days. Yeah, I beg you, don't do that. Although, one of our fans wrote a song about him. We'll have to play that on this episode, maybe. I would love to hear it. Well, you know what? You deserve to hear it because without your book,

I don't get the septoplasty. Without the septoplasty, that guy doesn't write the song, which mentions Fred King, my vocal mentor, who you tied in very brilliantly to a stow. And so there it is. That's the circle of life we're looking for right there. In fact, Chuck, we should play at the end of this podcast that guy's song. It's that weird and that interesting.

Let's do it. Well, I will just double down on that for the circle of life here. Without you being on Evening Magazine, having all those fun adventures, I probably would have never quit my corporate job because I'm seeing this guy. I'm like, God, that looks so fun. I know it's work, but he's making it work, making it happen. And that was right before I started writing freelance. And I mean that.

So that was something that got me up off my ass to quit a very good paying, respectable job to become the scumbag I am today. So thanks for that. Yep. But you know what? In defense of scumbags, what was it like seriously? Because I'm, I think the freelancer is the hope for the future. And I think this state is a.

permanently aligned against freelance work, against jobbers for the life of me. I think it's one of the biggest mistakes our politicians have ever made. And I'm wondering where you're coming from. It doesn't have much to do with breath. But my God, the stupidity of it takes my breath away. Yeah. So that was one of the reasons I had to transition into writing books. I always wanted to write books, but that's one of the reasons that really cut my,

kick my butt into it because I was writing freelance. for San Francisco Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, for their The Chronicle magazine on Sunday, for Outside Magazine, Men's Dern, all over the place. It's the coolest job. You're just sent on these missions, you know, one month in and out, get the story, come back. It's released a few months later, and there it is. Impossible to make a living doing that, especially in San Francisco. You know how expensive it is here. And so book writing is like a very long magazine article, but it takes years and years and years for it to come out. It's the same arc. It is more stable, but I could not agree with you more with the politicians of doing freelancers. It's like,

we're not bad people. Why are you making it impossible for us to do our jobs? Maybe they just want us all to get very stable, boring jobs. That's the only reasoning I could see to it. We're contributing a lot to the economy, and I just don't understand why they made it almost impossible to do this for a living. Well, look, I mean, people's hearts don't break for writers and hosts and actors, but way do you see what happens to Uber. Wait do you see what happens to trucking right now? Most truckers, they're their own company. They're their own LLC. They're simply not allowed to function. They need to become an employee. And man, I know we're far afield from the topic, but it worries me to death. Yeah, me as well. I think to have the freedom to work the hours you want to work is a real

privilege and you have to work really hard to get to that point and then to have that stripped away from you for no logical reason, I think is a real crime. So state legislators, Senate, Congresspeople, if you're listening, change this. It's not fair. And I think the world would be a better place if there's more freelancers going out there and finding weird, interesting stories. Amen. Is it fair to say that breath wouldn't have come to pass without that background, without that approach? I don't think it would have. And I think I really cut my teeth learning how to get inside of a story doing freelance writing for magazines and understanding that you really can't take anyone's word for it. You have to go out and talk to a zillion different people. And that adventure,

I love, I love getting so deep into these worlds. And now books allow you to do that for years at a time. I'm not a very, very social person while you're doing this, but it allows you just to really immerse yourself in a different world and to find things that you find interesting and to have other people find those things interesting is, you know, a real honor. Speaking of deep, should people read that one first or does it matter? You read whatever you want. That book was looking at the human connection to the ocean from the very surface to the very bottom of the sea. So it is relating to breathing a little bit.

During the research of that book is where I started hearing these crazy stories of these monks doing all this stuff. And that's what really sparked my interest in a real way to pursue this. His first book, Chuck, it's like free diving, these guys who can hold their breath for, you know, 15 minutes, go down 300 feet. It's enough to make you think that we're really like a different species, where there are different species or something. I think we've just been selling ourselves short the last few hundred years of industrialization. We're now convinced we can't do all these things. Oh, I need to eat three meals a day all the time, right at this time. I need to be very specific in my work patterns all this way.

become very pickled in our own juices. And if you look in indigenous cultures, like, we were badasses. That's how we're here today, because these people knew how to be flexible and really to utilize their body and their metabolism in these different ways. And I think so much of that is lost, but what's interesting is so much of the new horizon of health is how to get that back. And once you get that back, who would have guessed? Your body gets healthier. And you can overcome so many modern maladies. Can anybody learn to hold their breath? Any healthy person learned to hold their breath five, six minutes? You give me a half an hour.

I'll get you holding your breath about three and a half minutes, maybe even four. Yeah. Yeah. Anyone in reasonable health. Yeah, even I've seen a lot of people who were not very healthy. They were holding their breath for five, six minutes. Yeah. Wow.

Incredible. We're built to do this. We have reflexes. We have the same reflexes that dolphins and whales have to do this. We just haven't accessed them in so long. We have to be reminded of how to use these things and our bodies follow along. Well, that's probably a good place to leave it. You've written two amazing books to remind people of all sorts of things.

I'm sure I'm not the first to point it out, but if you put them together on a bookshelf or a mantle, what you really have is deep breath. So I would recommend both of them. I guess my next book needs to line up with that, right? The, it's going to be called the. The sentence is complete. Yeah. I'm so glad you made time for this.

I appreciate it. And I'm in the city a bunch. If you ever want to grab a cup of coffee, you know, if people still do that kind of thing here in our post-COVID world, I'm certainly game. I would love that. That would be awesome.

Thanks a lot for having me, guys. Great questions. Anytime. I just want to let people know that they can check out your books and your movie at mr.jamesnester.com. Mr. James Nestor. You've earned it. Wait a minute.

We didn't talk about a movie. Yeah, there's a movie that didn't it win an award or was nominated? The whale thing. Was that? Yeah, the click effect. Yeah, it's a little VR short about whale dolphin communication. Yeah, which is very interesting. I watched your TED talk on that as well, which was very good and made me think, man, these whales

are probably pretty smart and we shouldn't be harpooning them. It turns out that there is a huge initiative up through the TED Audacious Prize. This group of researchers was just awarded this. last year and they have about five years of funding to go crack the whale language right now, and that's what they're doing in the world's oceans. So we'll see what the whales say in a few years. James, you have to come back. I assume you read Phil Brick's book years ago, Heart of the Sea?

Oh, absolutely. I don't know about you, but that affirmatively changed the way I think about whales and the ocean. And I never know when to end these conversations, but this does bring it full circle because that was a story, right? There was so much history in that and so much knowledge, but fundamentally, that was the story of Moby Dick, and that's one of the

ten books when people ask me, what should I be reading? It's always on the list. Completely agree with you. And after what we've done to whales, the fact that some of these whales were around, their relatives were being hunted, they can live 70, 80 years, that they now allow us,

when you free dive with whales to come face to face with these animals that can kill you in 10 different ways. And yet they come up and try to communicate with you. It just shows, it shows me at least, who is the real evolved species here. You know, who's been around the longest and who has to teach who,

more about how to be a good citizen of this planet. Sometime in the next year, James Nestor will be back to tell us all he knows about whales, which I'm sure will be a third book. Deep breath whale. We'll figure it out, folks. But in the meantime, here's septum and scum. We're still not done.

Septims and Scrotums by Bill Dumas. Oh, that's the song. Oh, I forgot about the song. Well, here it is for the first time ever. It's not a melody that you've ever heard before, but friends, it's going to stick with you, as will the lyrics. We dedicate septims and scrotums to James Nestor.

My life is draining from my sinuses by drip, hour by hour, I'll a doctor, and it's fine, he says, as I watch my life go down the drain in the shower. It's my mother dear. Son to bat my father's. Maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility, and your machinery isn't working right.

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