#641 - Breathing Expert James Nestor

James Nestor is a best-selling author and science journalist known for his focus on breathing and breathwork. The new edition of his book “Breath: the New Science of a Lost Art” is available now. James joins Theo to talk about the link between mouth breathing and braces, why he thinks the rise in ADHD cases has been misdiagnosed, and how some breathing exercises can lead to profound emotional experiences. James Nestor: https://www.instagram.com/mrjamesnestor/ “Breath: the New Science of a Lost Art”: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/547761/breath-by-james-nestor/ Tour Dates! https://theovon.com/tour New Merch: https://www.theovonstore.com ------------------------------------------------- Sponsored By: Celsius: Go to the Celsius Amazon store to check out all of their flavors. #CELSIUSBrandPartner #CELSIUSLiveFit https://amzn.to/3HbAtPJ Shopify: Go to http://shopify.com/theo to get started with Shopify. Sonic: Go out and try the SONIC $6 Meal All-American Smasher today. A juicy, delicious burger paired with tots or fries and a drink for a deal that speaks for itself! https://www.sonicdrivein.com/deals/ Better Help: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Go to http://betterhelp.com/theo for 10% off your first month. Valor Recovery: To learn more about Valor Recovery please visit them at https://valorrecoverycoaching.com/ or email them at admin@valorrecoverycoaching. ------------------------------------------------- Music: “Shine” by Bishop Gunn Bishop Gunn - Shine ------------------------------------------------ Submit your funny videos, TikToks, questions and topics you'd like to hear on the podcast to: [email protected] Hit the Hotline: 985-664-9503 Video Hotline for Theo Upload here: https://www.theovon.com/fan-upload Send mail to: This Past Weekend 1906 Glen Echo Rd PO Box #159359 Nashville, TN 37215 ------------------------------------------------ Find Theo: Website: https://theovon.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/theovon Facebook: https://facebook.com/theovon Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thispastweekend Twitter: https://twitter.com/theovon YouTube: https://youtube.com/theovon Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheoVonClips Shorts Channel: https://bit.ly/3ClUj8z ------------------------------------------------ Producer: Zach https://www.instagram.com/zachdpowers Producer: Trevyn https://www.instagram.com/trevyn.s/ Producer: Nick https://www.instagram.com/realnickdavis/ Producer: Andrew https://www.instagram.com/bleachmediaofficial/ Producer: Halston https://www.instagram.com/halstonrays/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Coca-Cola. For the big, for the small, the short and the tall. Peacemakers, risk takers. For the optimists, pessimists. For long distance love. For introverts and extroverts. The thinkers and the doers. For old friends and new. Coca-Cola. For everyone. Pick up some Coca-Cola at a store near you.

• 0:30Theo Von?

  Just a reminder, guys, you can now watch video versions of our episodes on Spotify as well. Today's guest is a bestselling author and scientific journalist. He's known for his expertise on breathing and breath work. He just published a new edition of his book, Breath. The New Science of a Lost Art. I'm gonna learn a lot and so are you. Today's guest is Mr. James Nestor.

• 1:15Theo Von?

  James Nestor. Good to see you today, brother.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:19Theo Von?

  You bet. You have a new, a revised edition of your New York Times bestseller, Breath. The New Science of a Lost Art.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 1:28Theo Von?

  And you believe that how we breathe can change every aspect of our lives.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  I don't believe this. I know this and not every aspect, but many aspects, many aspects that people would not suspect. So it can change our athletic performance, vastly improve it. It can allow us to sleep better, allow us to think better, have better sex, if you're into that kind of thing. A whole bunch of other measurable improvements to our lives and nobody's really thinking about it.

• 1:59Theo Von?

  Yeah, I guess it's something that we just don't think about very often. You know, it's just, it's, it's, it's, it's odd because it's happening all the time, but it's not on the front of our brains.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  We don't think about it because we've evolved not to think about, which is great. I mean, if we had to think about every single breath we're taking all the time, how awful that would be. But it works in the background. And the problem is we develop really bad habits. And those habits start working on the background. And we don't notice that those negative breathing habits are affecting how often we get headaches, how tired we are, the amount of cavities that we're getting, on and on and on. And so people just don't think about it because they don't need to. But if they would start to and start taking conscious control of this, we know it has vast improvements.

• 2:43Theo Von?

  Is that why you call it a lost art?

• 2:45Speaker 02

  It's a lost art, yeah, because ancient cultures, you look back in ancient Hindu cultures, ancient Chinese cultures, even ancient Native American cultures, they all celebrated breathing as a medicine. This was something they really focused on. It was as essential as the food you were eating or the amount of exercise you were getting.

• 3:05Theo Von?

  Yeah, because it really is a diet for your lungs.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  It's a diet, we get most of our energy from air, not from food and not from drink, from air. I can prove this, if you hold your breath for six minutes, you're going to go unconscious, right? Your body's going to start to shut down. But you can go without food for, for how long? Forty days, something? You can go without water for maybe a week and a half or so. But if you go without breathing for a few minutes, you're gone.

• 3:32Theo Von?

  Yeah. Why, yeah, you don't even think about that, how crucial it is, how crucial of a supplement it is to every moment of our lives. I know you have so many amazing practices that you've taught people, and I want to learn some of those. Take me a little bit through the history of breathing. Like, what were some of the first cultures that really focused on breath work?

• 3:49Speaker 02

  So around 2,500 years ago, ancient Hindus were, were doing this. And they believed that if you breathed in a certain way, then you could get more prana, more life force into your body. So they developed all of these crazy ways to breathe that we still do today in some classes. The ancient Chinese, at the same time, their practice Qi Gong can be translated to breath work. That's what it means, or energy work. And so these Qi Gong exercises were built on taking all the energy that's outside of us, deep within us, right? And concentrating it and using that energy to better our health. So these things have been around for thousands and thousands of years and probably well before that. But that's the first written document, right?

• 4:34Speaker 02

  That that established how to breathe in certain ways to have certain benefits.

• 4:38Theo Von?

  It seems like it should be something that should be taught in our schools then. That it should be just as basic as learning to spell or to read. It's like, because that's like your lungs reading the universe. It's like your body reading the universe moment to moment.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a lot of things that should be taught at our schools, right? Nutrition, exercise, like staying away from electronic devices at night. So, but I would put, we talk a lot about that, right? At least this is in the public consciousness right now, right? So we're having these discussions. Nobody's talking about breathing. And even though kids, you can look at a kid about, there's a 50% chance they are breathing through their mouths. There's around a 90% chance they are breathing dysfunctionally. And so if you're breathing this way, it's going to affect your ability to focus. It's going to affect your oral health. We've also found if you're breathing dysfunctionally at night, you have something called sleep disorder breathing.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  It affects how tall you're going to grow and affects your facial structure, all of these things. And I don't hear anybody talking about this. I thought that there would, you know, I was so idiotic when this first, when this book first came out. I was talking at medical schools. I was blasting this message all around. I was like, oh, I'm really going to make some change here. It's completely ignorant. Nothing's changed. So people have to take this information and do it for themselves. Because I don't trust, you know, governments to really get this information out the way it should be distributed and accepted and understood.

• 6:08Theo Von?

  Yeah, well, they just finished remodeling the food pyramid, you know? So I think it's like, you know, it takes a while for them to change shape, apparently. You said oral hygiene?

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:18Theo Von?

  And you mentioned cavities earlier. Take me through, take me through that.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I was reading, a lot of my job is spending time in these really creepy medical libraries, right? And looking through old literature to see what we were saying way back when, to see if it's right today. And so many different dentists and different people in medicine, a hundred years ago, a hundred and twenty years ago, were saying the number one cause of cavities wasn't sugar, it wasn't carbohydrates, it was mouth breathing. And I said, huh, I guess those guys were just old, they were stupid, right? But now, the majority of dentists I talk to who study the airway say the number one cause of cavities is mouth breathing. If you look at 50% of kids are mouth breathing. That's, that's a high range, but around half of kids are mouth breathing, especially at night. Most kids are mouth breathing at night.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  To think that this could be the number one cause of their cavities, this is information I would think parents would want to know about.

• 7:13Theo Von?

  It would be on billboards, you would think. I mean, that's huge. And the money that they would save them by taking care of their kids' breathing practices. What's causing kids to mouth breathe that much?

• 7:20Speaker 02

  So we're born as perfect breathers, right? A healthy baby, look at a healthy baby. It's a beautiful thing. Every breath, their stomach's moving out, they exhale, the stomach comes in again, they're breathing in and out of their nose because healthy babies learn how to do this because they're breastfeeding so often. If you're gonna be feeding and breathing, that's the only way to do it, right?

• 7:43Theo Von?

  Right, you have something in your mouth, you have to breathe through your nose.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Breathing, breathing in and out of your nose. So we lose this at around the age of five to six, when we start going to school and start sitting up, spend 90% of our time indoors. That environment is not conducive to breathing. It's against our evolution. It's against what we have become adapted to be doing. So one of the first thing that, that happens is our breathing starts going into the mouth because we tend to have allergies, right? Usually happens when a kid gets sick and they get congested. So we have a mouth, it's cool, you can breathe out of your mouth whenever you want. But that becomes the default. This is mouth breathing is supposed to be an emergency pathway, not the default.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  And then the kid just remains a mouth breather on and on and on throughout their youth. I was one of these kids. And they've found that if you mouth breathe for long enough, it changes your facial shape. And it doesn't allow your mouth to grow as wide as it should.

• 8:44Theo Von?

  And then I guess if like cranially or the shape of our mouths aren't growing fully, then it would affect the way that our teeth are.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, so if your mouth is open all the time, right? You have this upper palate here that tends to grow, grow up. I'm a great example, which is like completely malocclusion, which is why I had teeth pulled and braces and headgear and all that crap. So when the mouth is too small, teeth have nowhere to grow. So they grow in crooked. That's why we have crooked teeth.

• 9:13Theo Von?

  Wow.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  People say, oh, it's a tooth problem. It's a mouth problem. And if you have a mouth that's too small for your teeth, what's going to happen to the airway? It's harder to breathe. Meanwhile, that upper palate of your mouth keeps growing up. And it takes away real estate from your sinus passages, which makes it harder to breathe through your nose. So all these things happen at once. This is not some crazy hypothesis or whatever. This is documented research. This is data. And if you don't believe me, go look at an ancient skull from a thousand years ago, 2000 years ago, 10,000 years ago. They all have perfectly straight teeth. All of our ancestors had straight teeth.

• 9:50Theo Von?

  That's a great point. You never, you never see one of those like archaeological digs and they dig everybody up and they're all wearing braces.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  You have braces, crooked teeth, mouth breathers.

• 9:58Theo Von?

  And the big headgear like, yeah, you would be, it'd be, look at this guy right here. This is just random skull, first one we pulled up. Beautiful grill.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, beautiful. And check out his, I mean, not only are his teeth straight, but look at the jaw size. So this is an enormous airway that this guy has.

• 10:15Theo Von?

  Big Macs only in there.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  It would be, it would be hard for, for him to suffer from snoring and sleep apnea, even some forms of sleep apnea, unless he was morbidly obese, which he wasn't because our ancestors weren't morbidly obese.

• 10:31Theo Von?

  And so what would, what could a parent do, right? A parent that's, their kid is getting to that five, six year old age. What could they do in order to keep their child breathing through their nose or to help encourage that?

• 10:41Speaker 02

  The smartest thing to do is to look at your child sleeping. And it doesn't matter if this kid is three months old or a year, a year and a half, two, three, whatever. If you can hear them breathing. There is a big problem. That means the child is struggling to breathe. And if a baby is sleeping 12 hours a night, right? That's how, how a good baby, that's how often they're sleeping and how much they're sleeping. If they're struggling during that time, it is going to have downstream effects on their brain development, on their physical development, on so many other aspects of their health. And we know this, this is, these are facts. So first of all, listen, if you can hear the breathing, huge red flag.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  Another thing you can do is you can creep up to the bed or the cradle or whatever and see if they are breathing in and out through the mouth. That's a problem and you have to figure it out. So I can't offer a blanket prescription because every kid is different, but I would highly suggest parents go see a pediatric dentist with experience in airway health. They can assess the kid's issue and they can fix it. And what I've found is if you fix it early enough and allow that mouth to grow the size it's supposed to be growing, guess what happens? No braces, teeth growing straight, no other breathing problems, nasal breather, better

• 12:05Speaker 02

  facial profile, the musculature and the skeletonure develop properly and you have a healthier kid. So if you front load some of that work early, you don't have to worry about any of that stuff that I had to go through and so many other people had to go through later on.

• 12:19Theo Von?

  Yeah, some people have to get the real, you know, they'll get the big braces they'll get. I had a dude, they had like braces, they knew hooked even to his suspenders, it seemed like it was like this kid is, they're pulling him up and down.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  And you, you think about what those things do too. And this is some, I never thought about it before because I always thought like science research, it's always moving forward, we're getting better and better and better. But what they used to do for kids 100 years ago, 120 years ago, is with a kid with a mouth that was so small that the teeth were growing and crooked and they had airway problems, what would you do? You would expand the mouth, right? Bigger mouth, teeth growing straight, you can breathe better. But when I was growing up around the 1940s, they industrialized dentistry. And what they did was the same treatment for everybody. Bring you in there, we're gonna start pulling teeth. And then we're gonna take those remaining teeth and we're gonna crane them.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  It's like foot binding, like that old Chinese practice of foot binding, right? We're gonna crane them in. So as the rest of the head and face is growing, the mouth gets smaller and smaller and smaller.

• 13:26Theo Von?

  That's a great point. If you have braces on a young, youngish child, it's holding their teeth in one space while the rest of their face is growing.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  It's exactly what's happened. And that's why you have so many people with these retro nathic profile. I'm a perfect example of this.

• 13:39Theo Von?

  Baby mouths, they call them.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  My brother never had braces, right? And he has a completely different profile than me. He has a completely different mouth than I do.

• 13:48Theo Von?

  Oh, he can probably get through a salad in six minutes.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  He can, he can chomp away, you know? Me, I'm taking a long time, 30, 40 minutes, pissing off everyone around me. But that's just how it is. So, you know, you can't go back in time. I can't do anything about this now. But what you can do is educate people now so their kids don't have to go through the braces and headgear tied to your suspenders or your pants or whatever. You don't have to do that. Like, this is a choice.

• 14:14Theo Von?

  Yeah, this kid was very dangerous. I remember if he sneezed, he would moon everybody.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Like, what's wrong with our species that that's what we've come to? And if you look at 200 years ago, no one was getting that. If you look at indigenous cultures right now, people say, oh, this is just human evolution. Our mouths are growing smaller. Look at the Hazda, right, in Africa, who have never had anything industrialized. They eat a lot of meat. They drink cow's blood. This is, this is their main thing. Their teeth are perfect and their facial profile is perfect. And their mouths are wide.

• 14:48Theo Von?

  Bring that up. When did we start to put braces in the children's mouths? It's pretty fascinating. Thank you so much for coming today. Because you never, you never think about this stuff. But once you're saying that to me, that now you have a growing human and you have their teeth that are confined. It's almost, it almost seems baffling that you would do that. It almost seemed, I mean, it's so restrictive. And also the nervous conditions it must create inside of your body, the stress it must put on your gums, and then the rest of your face, your brain is right there.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  And you think of at any time to get this procedure, like the worst time to do it is when you're a teenager, you're so screwed up already as a teenager, then you have to go to school like that guy, you know, with, with all this headgear. So I, I don't know why they did it. I mean, I think it was economical because you can just bring kids in, you do the same thing over and over and over and over. You also have to think about like, I had my wisdom teeth removed. I don't know if this was just something, you never question it.

• 15:43Theo Von?

  Yeah.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  Some, just something they did. Why? Why? No other species has to have wisdom teeth. None of our ancestors, if, if that were true, that our ancestors were getting impacted molars and dying of infections or whatever, we wouldn't be here today.

• 15:58Theo Von?

  Yeah. The practice of using braces to straighten teeth began in the early 19th century. French dentist Christophe Delibert invented the first modern braces in 1819. A flat metal strip tied to teeth with thread to gradually align them. The term braces emerged in the early 1900s, coinciding with improvements like Edward Angell's brackets and wires. Wow. Oh, that's fascinating.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  You, you see that all of these inventions came about at the exact time that industrialized food came into cultures. And this is why our mouths are so small, because we stopped chewing. And so right at the time, you, you always talk about, at least back in the day, people would talk about like British, British people and their teeth, right? This was, this was some terrible joke people used to make.

• 16:47Theo Von?

  Oh, yeah, we still make it.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  You still make it. The kids today are still, still doing this. But it turns out that England was one of the first countries to adopt an industrialized diet. So their teeth went to hell right, right off the bat. 50% of a population, five zero percent will have crooked teeth after adopting an industrialized diet in a single generation.

• 17:09Theo Von?

  Unbelievable.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  People say that evolution, oh, it takes a hundred thousand years. Like it takes a million years for things to change. It happens in one generation.

• 17:17Theo Von?

  Well, if you even look at some of these primordial humans like you're talking about, or primordial might not be the word, but if you're looking at some of these early human skulls, yeah, you can easily see the difference. And that's fascinating about the group in Africa. Yeah, it's like, it's like they're running around complaining about cavities.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  No, they're not complaining about heart disease. They're not complaining about diabetes. Like, none of these things exist. So all of the modern diseases, not all of them, most of them, because there are some genetic diseases, most of the diseases we're contending with today are diseases of civilization. These are diseases that have been brought upon us by industrialization. And again, this isn't some crazy conspiracy theory. This is standard knowledge. And if you talk to somebody who studies these things in evolution and biosciences, then this is, this is what they say. And I'm a journalist. I had no idea about any of this. I'm a journalist. I went out and talked to people. And that's how I learned this. And if people have a problem with what I'm saying, go back to the source. These people are at Harvard, they're at Stanford, they're at Yale.

• 18:15Theo Von?

  Well, what you're saying makes perfect sense to me. It doesn't sound like it's like, you know, you're like, you're trying to convince me of some astronomical idea. I mean, once you sound it out and you put it in front of me, it gets clear as day for me. In, in different interviews, I've seen you speak a lot about different breathwork exercises. What is a simple breathwork exercise that I could start with that would help me overall?

• 18:37Speaker 02

  It will bore you to tears if I tell you what it is. And that's the problem with so much of this stuff, is it so simple? That anyone can do it at any time. People are like, hey, I want the secret, man. I want the medicinal stuff that you discovered in a cave in the Himalayas. I wish it were that easy. So I can give you a very simple one. That's probably been the most studied out of any of these. Most of us tend to breathe too much. We tend to breathe up into our chests. We tend to breathe through our mouths. And when we breathe this way,

• 19:10Speaker 02

  We send stress signals to our brain. And so we stay in this state of sympathetic stress all day long. So that increases your risk of diabetes, all of these other heinous problems, autoimmune issues.

• 19:23Theo Von?

  What inflammation you're causing yourself, for sure.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Constant inflammation, right? Constant, constant stress. So what you have to do is go back to the way that you were supposed to be breathing, to the way that nature intended you to breathe. And so, very simple practice that a lot of people start off with is you can place the palm of your hand just below your belly button, right? And you're gonna breathe in through your nose. And you wanna feel your belly expand. And as you breathe out, you wanna feel it come back in.

• 19:58Theo Von?

  Breathe out through my nose?

• 20:00Speaker 02

  I'm sorry, through your nose, in and out through the nose. So as you breathe back out, you should feel the belly contract. So you can actually do this, around 90% of people can't. They aren't comfortable enough with their guts to do this. So if you do that at around five seconds in, five seconds out, through the nose.

• 20:18Theo Von?

  Okay, you wanna take me through it?

• 20:20Speaker 02

  I can, yeah.

• 20:21Theo Von?

  If you don't mind, James, thank you.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, just keep, keep your hand there and make sure when you're inhaling, that that hand is coming out a little bit. So you're just going to start in a couple of seconds. You're exhaling now, three, two, one, and in, two, three, four, five, and out, two, three, four, five, and in, two, three, four, five, and out, two, three, four, five. And you just keep with that rhythm.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  What you're doing is you are sending your brain and body signals that you are relaxed, that you are safe. When your body gets these signals, it can help restore itself and recover itself so much more quickly. If you have high blood pressure, there's a good chance your blood pressure's gonna go down. The stress hormones are gonna decrease. This is the way we're supposed to naturally be.

• 21:30Theo Von?

  Wow.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  In that state. We're not supposed to be hunched over with our shoulders tense. Although sometimes, you know, when you're in a stressful situation, about to fight someone, when you have to defend yourself, stress is an amazing thing. But most of the time, our bodies are built, they need time to recover and to heal all the damage that we inflict on them. And this is called coherent breathing, because it puts these different systems of your body into the state of coherence.

• 21:58Theo Von?

  Wow. Wow, then that's really how I feel right now. I almost feel like I got a little high.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, you just wait. There's some other stuff we can do that will definitely get you up.

• 22:08Theo Von?

  Yeah.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  But what-

• 22:09Theo Von?

  Crack open a twelve pack of that magic air, baby. You know, that's what I need.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  You're getting proper blood flow to your brain. So they've found that you'll make better decisions. You can regulate your emotions so much more efficiently. It's great for heart health, blood pressure. And again, this isn't like some woo woo thing. You don't need to go out and buy a pill. You don't need to subscribe to anything. This is something that is available to everybody. So people who think these breathing practices are, oh, I don't like yoga, you know, I don't like jewelry or turquoise or whatever. This is a biological function that you can do wherever. If you're driving right now, you can try to breathe at around five seconds in, five seconds out. And you can feel what happens. Like-

• 22:55Theo Von?

  I feel calm right now. And I even smiled a second ago. It just came into my face.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  Saw that.

• 22:59Theo Von?

  You know, you did? That's cool. Yeah.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  For one second.

• 23:02Theo Von?

  Yeah. But hey, that's, for me, that's a lot. That's a lot of a day where I'm just naturally feeling good. And I'll tell you this, even momentarily after, and even it started to make me wanna just keep doing it, as opposed to, like, am I breathing in my nose? Am I breathing in my mouth? Just not consciously. It started to like-

• 23:23Theo Von?

  I almost wanna do it again and again because it feels good.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Well, here's the trick with these things. Like, we don't need another box to check every day. You know, we gotta, oh, did I get my protein? Did I sleep my eight hours? Did I walk 20 minutes? All of that. What you wanna do is to practice these techniques enough, right? That this becomes your new default. This becomes your unconscious breathing. That can take a couple of months to do. They found some researchers here were helping 9/11 victims, you know, 20 years ago. When was it? 20, 24 years ago? And they had this terrible condition called ground glass lungs because they inhaled all of these pollutants, right? When, when the towers went down. And nothing worked for them. Pharmaceutical drugs didn't work.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Nothing worked. Except this practice was more effective than anything else because it allowed the air to circulate properly in the lungs and it allowed them to expel all the crap in their lungs. So not only mentally are you sharper, are you calmer, is your nervous system downregulated to, to a healthy spot, but also physically it can help your lungs be healthier.

• 24:36Theo Von?

  Can you bring that up, Nick? Wow, this is so interesting. Ground glass lungs refers to a radiological finding on CT cans, on CT scans showing hazy opacities. Is that the right way to say that?

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Opacities.

• 24:51Theo Von?

  Opacities, thank you. In the lungs, often linked to inflammation or fibrosis from inhaling toxic dust at ground zero after the 9/11 attacks. The massive collapse of the World Trade Center has released a plume of pulverized concrete, asbestos, glass fibers, heavy metals, and jet fuel combustion. Byproducts that coated Lower Manhattan. Responders and nearby residents who breathe the dust develop persistent lung damage, including ground glass opacities.

• 25:17Theo Von?

  Wow. The dust contained over 2,500 contaminants, 50% construction debris, 40% glass fibers, 9% cellulose and asbestos, silica, lead, mercury. Oh my God. The witch's brew was highly alkaline and caustic, equivalent to Drano in pH. Wow.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  So the guy who started doing this, Richard Brown, is right down the street from us here. He's at Columbia and he's the one that was dealing with all these people from 9/11 who had PTSD, who had ground glass lungs. And he published this too, you know, of how effective it was. So that when COVID came around, this was the go-to, breathing this way for so many people. I've had COVID like three times, four times, right? And this did more for me than anything. That's subjective. There wasn't a control version of me, but this is something I've heard from hundreds and hundreds of people. Is if you don't lay on your back, you get COVID, you're coughing, right? You feel like crap. If you lay on your stomach and breathe at this rate,

• 26:26Speaker 02

  around five to six seconds in, five to six seconds out, right? It can really help and it's free and available for everyone. So why wouldn't you do it? There's no negative side effects to feeling better and getting more crap out of your lungs.

• 26:39Theo Von?

  There's still something though, even when you say like, it's so funny. Some of the most simplest things, we want something, it's like, we want to, well, I didn't need to buy this or nah, but I'll go get that or I'll do a five hour energy. Like we always want something else. Isn't that kind of interesting that that's how we operate?

• 26:53Speaker 02

  I think it's, a lot of people are apprehensive by things that are free and easy, right? You think about what's happened to nutrition, which is insane. If you look at our ancestors or the people that are actually living to be 110 years old, they don't know what a calorie is. They're not dividing fats and proteins. They're not taking supplements, right? But they're eating in line with what the seasons provide for them in their backyards. So I think that breathing is the same. There are so many people that are trying to overcomplicate this thing by saying, you need to breathe these five different techniques. techniques in the morning, then do the same thing at night. And then you need to subscribe to my service where I'm going to dole out other techniques.

• 27:35Theo Von?

  Yeah, I'm gonna mail you a jar of my breath or something.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, people, people do. So I think by keeping it simple and going back to, we got so sick because we moved away from nature. And the way to get healthy is to move back into that state in which our bodies understand the world and understand the inputs. We're not used to this world. We haven't been around it long enough to truly adapt.

• 28:03Theo Von?

  Cause and it's changed so fast too. I think that's part of it.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Changing so fast.

• 28:06Theo Von?

  Yeah. And I think you're right. The, the people who are

• 28:10Theo Von?

  leading a lot of our influences, it's very industrialized.

• 28:14Theo Von?

  Which I think has had a lot of negative effects and, but I think we are at kind of like a renaissance right now where people are really focusing on this type of thing. So I'm so grateful that we're having this conversation right now. It's February, everyone, and that's when the truth shows up. January had the vibes. February has got the receipts. This is usually when the gym gets quiet, the planner goes blank. And that big goal you had starts feeling kinda heavy. Starting a business can feel like that too. You realize that the idea part was fun, but now there's real stuff. Decisions, setup, logistics, panic time. That's where Shopify helps.

• 28:57Theo Von?

  It breaks the big scary thing into smaller doable steps. If you're starting out and feeling overwhelmed, that's normal. Shopify was built for people figuring it out as they go. Not just giant companies with teams of lawyers. Shopify also lets you sell directly on social Tik Tok, IG, YouTube, Facebook. You don't have to be an expert on every platform. They make it pretty much click, click, done. Don't be the person who says, yeah, this is, this is the year I'm going to start something. And then never does. Be the person who actually starts. Go to Shopify.com slash Theo and put some motion behind it, twin.

• 29:39Theo Von?

  That's right. Shopify.com slash T H E O. Best of luck. This episode is brought to you by Sonic. Now listen, America has been asking for answers for a long time. And Sonic said, here's one.

• 29:57Theo Von?

  It's the $6 All-American Smasher Meal. Mind blown at that price. The burger is hand smashed Angus beef, fresh off the grill. Now, fully loaded with the classic toppings, nothing confusing. Just a burger that is making waves in the fast food game. The kind that doesn't need an explanation. Plus, you can get it with crispy tots or fries and a medium drink, all for just $6. I mean, it's the nicest meal I've seen for $6. And financially, it respects you.

• 30:40Theo Von?

  Try the $6 Sonic All-American Smasher Meal today. Live free, eat Sonic. Was there anything else on that World Trade Glass? That, that's unbelievable to me. And can you write down the name of that author too, Zach? Inhaling the dust led to WTC lung injury with firefighters losing up to 12 years of lung function. 70% of workers showed respiratory decline by 2004. Amount Sinai analysis found asbestos fibers and carbon nanotubes in responders' lungs. Wow, that's fascinating. What, what would be like a more difficult breathing exercise?

• 31:18Speaker 02

  If we had an hour, I could get you extremely high with something, but we don't. So we're gonna have to do some quick stuff here.

• 31:24Theo Von?

  Okay.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  If you are driving, if you are near water, do not do this. Okay, use common sense. I just want to make that super clear.

• 31:32Theo Von?

  Yeah, I want to say that too. Do not do it.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  Okay, do not do it. This is just for demonstration purpose only, right? You're sitting in a chair, we're here, it's cool, you can try this. This is a pranayama technique.

• 31:43Theo Von?

  Okay.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  That when I am really jet lagged, which is most of my waking hours, I've, I've noticed. When I need energy, when I need instant clarity, you can do this. It's a little weird, you wouldn't want to do it in public, but here we are. And I think you want to get a little weird, so, so why not? Let's do it.

• 32:01Theo Von?

  Let's do it.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  So the concept here is we are going to be breathing, uh, an inhale through the nose. Then you're gonna be holding without exhaling. Then you'll be breathing in again. Then you'll be holding, then you'll be breathing in. You see where this is going. You're gonna keep doing that until you reach the very top of your breath, until you cannot fit any more air in your lungs.

• 32:22Theo Von?

  Okay.

• 32:23Speaker 02

  Then you're gonna squeeze as hard as you can. You're gonna squeeze your fists, squeeze your toes, squeeze your butt, squeeze your stomach, squeeze, squeeze everything and try to bring it inward towards the center of your abdomen. Okay, just focus on bringing that and then we're gonna do it again. We're gonna do this a few times. Okay. Okay, the whole thing will probably take a minute. Okay. But we'll, we'll see what happens. So just relax, relax your shoulders. Take an easy breath in and an easy breath out. We're gonna take one more easy breath in. Easy breath in and easy breath out.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  And now we're gonna go, we're gonna breathe up, breathe, hold, breathe, hold, breathe, hold, breathe, hold, more, more, more, more, more, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, squeeze everything, hold your breath, squeeze everything, squeeze everything, keep squeezing, squeeze harder, let's go, keep squeezing, keep squeezing, let it go. Breathe in, hold, breathe in, hold, breathe in, hold, breathe in, breathe in, breathe in, breathe in, all the way up, squeeze everything, squeeze everything, squeeze everything, keep holding your breath, we're gonna do it longer now, keep squeezing, keep holding, keep squeezing, keep going, keep going, lift everything towards your stomach and let it

• 33:48Speaker 02

  out. We're gonna do one more, okay, ready, breathe in, hold, breathe in, hold, breathe in, hold, breathe in, breathe in, breathe in, breathe in, all the way up and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, hold your breath, hold your breath, hold your breath, hold your breath, squeeze everything towards your stomach, keep going, keep going, keep going, you got five more seconds, five, four, three, two, one, let it go.

• 34:29Theo Von?

  Can feel my heart racing.

• 34:35Speaker 02

  How do you feel different?

• 34:43Theo Von?

  Feel pretty chill.

• 34:46Theo Von?

  Overall.

• 34:49Theo Von?

  Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't take a breath a lot right now, probably. I definitely feel a little bit buzzed up.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  So what you did-

• 34:57Theo Von?

  I feel relaxed.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  Good. What you did right there, this is a very short version. It's better to have a longer amount of time. We can go through the whole process. It doesn't make for very good podcasts or radio, so we're not gonna sit and listen to you be silent for 20 minutes breathing. But the point of this is you're purposely stressing your body out. You're taking control of your nervous system and you're cranking it up to 11 and you're compounding all of that stress. Then you're releasing it. So you're letting your body know and your brain know that you're in control of that stress. You turn it on, you turn it off. You turn it on, you turn it off. What most of us do throughout the day

• 35:43Speaker 02

  is we have this chronic low-grade stress. It's always there. It's buzzing around. We never let it go. Right? So we never blow it out, but we never truly relax. And this is one of the main reasons so many of us are so sick. Again, this is not some crazy hypothesis.

• 36:02Theo Von?

  Well, stress is inflammation.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  It's chronic inflammation. Chronic stress is one of the leading causes of so many issues. So if you spend a few minutes a day, you don't have to do the weird stuff, right? There's other things you can do in public. No one realizes you're doing this. It's your own private little secret that you can do and just to have that pressure release throughout the day. A lot of people use yoga or exercise or weightlifting. All of those things are awesome. They work great. But it's not always available to you. Your breathing is always available to you.

• 36:35Theo Von?

  Amen.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  You can do that anytime.

• 36:37Theo Von?

  Yeah, I mean, I just, even just you reminding me to breathe in and out through my nose, that simple reminder.

• 36:45Theo Von?

  It just feels good. It just feels better. It's just like, yeah, no one's reminding me of that probably ever in my life, you know? It just doesn't happen. Um, I have to pee really fast.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:55Theo Von?

  I'm gonna tell you about this. I had some breathwork.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  That also happens with some of these breathwork devices. I should have warned him.

• 37:04Theo Von?

  Yeah, I just feel happier. I just feel a little bit happier even just going through this. So, yeah, thanks for the reminders.

• 37:12Theo Von?

  It's funny, I almost wanna keep doing it. It's almost like having to sip a coffee. It's like I wanna keep doing it because it feels good. Um, I, I, I took a breathwork session one time with a, with actually a comedian, this girl Blair Sochi, um, who's very funny, and she also on the side does breathwork exercises with people. And she took me through this experience one time. I was laying down. I can't remember exactly what it was. I feel like it was some of what we just did, but it was for about maybe thirty minutes. And at the end, I like, just tears were, I mean, I had like one of the biggest, like, just kind of emotional releases that I've had, um, outside of an experience with drugs, like an ayahuasca or something like that, or mushrooms.

• 37:55Theo Von?

  Um, it was super profound. Um, there's a lot of videos out there of people having, uh, profound experiences after breathwork. Videos of people were just really breaking down after breathwork. Have you, I'm sure you've seen a lot of this.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  I've seen a lot of it online, but I've also seen a lot of it in, in person. And the question from a, from a journalist standpoint that I have is, how much of this is the breathwork and how much of it is these people trying to show off that they're really having a bigger breakdown than,

• 38:27Theo Von?

  For sure.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  than the person next to them?

• 38:29Theo Von?

  Oh, and it's so funny because people get competitive. You get in those spaces, or you see a video and then you feel like you have to go replicate that. That's fast. I, I agree with that. This is one that, uh, oh, Zach just pulled one. Yeah, you wanna play this one? Here's one that.

• 38:48Theo Von?

  Oh, that one seems...

• 38:51Theo Von?

  What video is this?

• 38:54Theo Von?

  Oh, keep going. Oh, that's it?

• 38:58Speaker 02

  That's all you need.

• 38:59Theo Von?

  Okay, that one.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Do you really want to see what comes next after that?

• 39:03Theo Von?

  No, no, no, I'm not allowed. We have blockers on this computer, so, uh, yeah, I can't be watching stuff like that. Um, what are some of the experiences that you've seen with people that are experiencing serious breathwork? Sorry, I thought that was gonna be better than that.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Well, I have a... That was pretty good. If people see that, like, pretty, pretty good.

• 39:18Theo Von?

  Yeah, I just couldn't tell if that was super real or not. I couldn't tell what was actually going on. Maybe you just put that in my head too, because that does happen a lot. Um, but my own experience, from my own, it was like, yeah, it was just tears just flowing out of me, just such a release.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:32Theo Von?

  Just such a release. And I could... It felt like it came out of the fabric of my existence. That's what was really fascinating. What have you seen regarding like, trauma release and breathwork?

• 39:41Speaker 02

  Well, we all have these repressed emotions, you know, especially dudes, like, we gotta hold it back the whole time. And once you loosen up enough, once, once your body is...

• 39:50Theo Von?

  Yeah, I ain't gay, I'ma play football or whatever, yeah.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  You know, but, but that's what's allowed us to survive. You, you have to be able to kick in that mode, otherwise you can't run from a tiger, you know, or fight off a warring tribe. So that's part of our evolution. We're not meant to stay in it all day long, though. We're meant to, when we're chilling out, we're meant to be truly relaxed, and, and we don't. So sometimes in these breathwork sessions, just like in ayahuasca or, or other, um, you know, drug sessions, or, or when you're hallucinating for some other reason, you tend to loosen up, right? And all the stuff comes out. So I've seen a whole bunch of, whole bunch of stuff.

• 40:28Theo Von?

  Has it blown your mind almost sometimes?

• 40:30Speaker 02

  Well, my, the critical part of me is, is what's the physiology behind this? What's actually happening? And so...

• 40:37Theo Von?

  That's a great question. Yeah, when you're doing the breathing exercise and then the trauma release occurs, what, what is happening?

• 40:41Speaker 02

  So I can, I can tell you what, what we know. We know that when you over breathe, a lot of these, my hunch is that breathwork you did is probably pretty intense.

• 40:50Theo Von?

  Yeah.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Right, okay.

• 40:51Theo Von?

  Yeah, it was fast. It was like a lot of in, out, in, out, in, out, in, out.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  So when we're over breathing like that, we're actually inhibiting blood flow to the brain. And if we over breathe long enough, we can inhibit around 40% of the blood flow to the brain. So the brain, in some ways, thinks it's dying.

• 41:07Theo Von?

  Ah, so it's a DMT release of some sort?

• 41:09Speaker 02

  People say that it's never been measured. I tried to measure that for this book and I was told by the researchers, they could not measure it because it's so minute.

• 41:18Theo Von?

  That kind of makes sense.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  When people say, oh, this is my DMT breathing, that's not based on, it's good marketing, but it's not based on any measurements. So this is a way of like tricking your brain that that something very wrong is going on. And if you stay there for long enough, it starts to short circuit in some ways that can be beneficial. You start thinking differently, right? You start hallucinating. I don't know if you were hallucinating, but that's very common. And all of these safeguards that you have built up, especially around your nervous system and emotion, tend to release in certain ways. So we know it absolutely affects your physiology. I had the one bit of research, actually, there were many in the book that

• 42:00Speaker 02

  did not make it in, is I went to a lab at University of California, San Francisco, and breathed for an hour, just crazy hyperventilation, as they had a catheter out and were recording my blood pH. And they had to stop it because according to their measurements, my blood was so alkaline, which means I was blowing off so much CO2 that I should have been in an emergency room.

• 42:25Theo Von?

  Damn.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  This guy is just like, this is the weirdest thing. You should not be doing this. This is unhealthy.

• 42:30Theo Von?

  Chill, brother.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  And yet I felt great, right? Because our bodies are meant to be flexible. So we know something physiological is happening. On the other end, you know, our people, people claim that they're able to revert to their caveman selves or revert to different animals. I think that some of that is where it gets a little showy.

• 42:49Theo Von?

  Yeah.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  I was in one like two hour long session where you're just hyperventilating for two hours and, you know, some woman.

• 42:55Theo Von?

  Yeah, prove it if you're an animal. Get out there and eat some bird seed after.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  No, this guy was doing it. Like he went, he was, he was.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  I shouldn't laugh. He was having his, he was having his own release. Respect that. That's a beautiful thing. But some, you know, woman turned into a baby and I think this other guy was like, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna turn into a wolf. And, and he was, he was prowling the room. I'm, I'm snorting at people and they had to tackle him.

• 43:23Theo Von?

  Oh.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  Hold him down.

• 43:24Theo Von?

  Really?

• 43:24Speaker 02

  So I wanted to think in my, you know, I was watching this.

• 43:28Theo Von?

  Probably a South Carolina fan.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  I, I mean, who knows? I don't know that information. This isn't California anything goes. So, you know, it's, it's like.

• 43:37Theo Von?

  Yeah. If some guy is breath, if I'm in a breath work place and some guy's over there huffing and puffing, and then he's like, I'm gonna blow your house down or whatever. If he starts getting weird like that, like three little pig in me or whatever. Dude, I'm calling the cops, bro. Just because we're in a breath work seminar, doesn't mean you can be wolfing around and pissing in the corner or whatever.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  No, and, and what was interesting to me, I said, well, what if this is real? What if this guy's really, then full respect, like he's, he's reached a pinnacle I will never reach. At the same time, this was after like five minutes where there's not a lot going on. So part of me was, was thinking.

• 44:15Theo Von?

  Yeah. He's just a Raiders fan.

• 44:16Speaker 02

  Probably.

• 44:17Theo Von?

  Yeah.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  He probably a little, little showiness, you know? I, I don't know what's better than a wolf. Like I, I don't know who was gonna come after him to, to try to one up his, his wolfdom.

• 44:28Theo Von?

  He picked a good animal.

• 44:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:29Theo Von?

  I do remember though, my, also my extremities got very tight.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:32Theo Von?

  What is that? I, I do, when I did the breath work and I had that release, I remember, yeah, just, and I felt so great after because it was just such a release. It felt like almost the sediment, like say if you looked through archaeologically, like through the ground and you saw like this sedimentary rock, stuff that was really packed down in there. That's what it felt like. There was like fissures in that inside of me.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 44:52Theo Von?

  And I, but I do remember my muscles and everything got extremely tight after, after a lot of the breathing.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  That's a hundred percent real, right? That's not psychosomatic. What, what happens is a lot of people in breath work, at least. I was, I was told that they told me like, cause I kept feeling this. My hands like turn into claws.

• 45:10Theo Von?

  Yes.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  You're like, what the hell is going on?

• 45:12Theo Von?

  Maybe he was a wolf.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  And, and so they kept saying like, you're reverting back to your primitive self. I was like. Okay, but you know, what's actually happening measurably to our bodies? And what I found is this is a phenomenon that is called tetany. And what happens when you over breathe this, this amount, you start to lose calcium. Okay, calcium gets bound to albumin. And once that happens, you need calcium for proper nerve and muscle function. So we don't have enough calcium in order to function properly. And so things start to shut down. So at these really intense sessions, you can't open your fist. As hard as you try, you can't.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  They turn into these claws, which is really creepy. If you don't know that this is happening, it's like you're in some cult situation where everyone's reverting to some, you know, lower level of hell and developing these claws. But this is a phenomenon that is measurable.

• 46:14Theo Von?

  Tetany, it's called?

• 46:15Speaker 02

  It's called tetany. And the same thing happens to your toes.

• 46:18Theo Von?

  Tetining?

• 46:19Speaker 02

  T E T A N Y.

• 46:24Theo Von?

  That's just interesting. I never even heard of that, but I've had that thing happen to me a couple of times in breathing. Tetany is a medical condition involving sustained involuntary muscle contractions or spasms due to hyper excitability of nerves or muscles. It often stems from electrolyte imbalances like low calcium, low magnesium, or alkalosis. Huh.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  To do this on occasion is fine, right? But if you are constantly over breathing, which is a problem that so many people suffer from, they wonder why their fingers are constantly numb or cold, why their toes are cold, right? Why they are like this? They're causing this permanent imbalance, these electrolytes in their bodies. And the body can compensate because it's going to keep you alive, but that doesn't mean it's going to keep you healthy.

• 47:11Theo Von?

  Ah, I just remembered this.

• 47:14Theo Von?

  That's such a visceral thing. Try to just remember that once you did that with your hands, it brought me to so many memories. How do some of your breathwork ideas compared to like a guy like Wim Hof? Like take me, because he's a very popular figure in the breathing space, right? And he just is such a captivating figure too. And the fact that he's in the cold and he's battling something that, you know, we all want to battle something. So we all feel invigorated by his journey. And yeah, how did some of your practices compare to some of Wim Hof's practices?

• 47:41Speaker 02

  Well, most of what I studied and researched and write about is this normal breathing. It's so unsexy, right? Just breathe normal. I want to be a super breather. But what you realize is the vast majority of people are breathing dysfunctionally. And so what I'm trying to bring awareness to and to have people do first before they go and do crazy breathwork stuff is to learn normal breathing. Because you're never going to be able to get a ton out of breathwork practices unless your foundation is solid. It's like you want to run a marathon. Would you just stand up and run a marathon? Or would you try to train a little bit and get a proper foundation, get the right biomechanics? So that's what most of the book is about. Is because so many people are breathing dysfunctionally

• 48:24Speaker 02

  that they have all of these underlying issues that are tied to it and they don't realize it. Why are they getting migraines all the time? Why is their blood pressure so high? Why are they getting all these cavities? Why does their kid have symptoms of ADHD? All of this stuff is tied to your breathing. So, once you get that solid foundation, you become a nasal breather, you're able to do what you were doing, you're able to become comfortable enough with your own waist, that you can relax your gut as you take a breath in. And as you exhale, it comes back, right? You can breathe these slow, low, deep breaths. You are not mouth breathing at night. You are not snoring. After all those boxes are checked, then let's bring it on. Let's go up that next rung of potential. This is what

• 49:09Speaker 02

  yoga was designed to do. It was never intended for sick people. It's intended for people that were normal, that were healthy, to bump you up that next rung of the ladder. And so that's what Wim does, right? Wim's an amazing dude. I can't imagine a better Spokesperson for for breath work. I mean, if there was ever a cult leader, he should start as it kind of is a cult almost.

• 49:30Theo Von?

  Yeah, but like, yeah, there's definitely something about him that's super exciting.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  He, I think he's done more to bring breath work to more people on the planet than than any anyone else.

• 49:41Theo Von?

  Yeah, you need that advertising.

• 49:42Speaker 02

  You need, and you need someone that is that inspired and genuine, not someone that's trying to always sell you stuff. Like Wim wants to help people. Wim wants to see what the limits of the human body are. Wim, when you meet him, he's real. And so many other people in breath work have have hopped on the train to try to. You haven't met him? Okay, no, the guy is.

• 50:07Theo Von?

  Have you met him?

• 50:08Speaker 02

  Magnetic.

• 50:08Theo Von?

  Is he really?

• 50:09Speaker 02

  I absolutely, yeah.

• 50:11Theo Von?

  Cool. I mean, it's you can feel it through the through the screen, you know, you feel it when you watch him. And you need an advertising piece for things like that. Like, you need something like a shiny figure that's out there so that people can also then come and absorb your information. I mean, look at this, dude. Because dude, you know how many thick white dudes are just hiding in their freezers in the garage right now? All because of Wim Hof, you know, and forgetting to close the lid and the meat's going bad.

• 50:35Speaker 02

  But people were not doing this until, so we knew all about these benefits, but the people training you how to breathe properly was a respiratory therapist, you know, in a hospital. And a lot of dudes don't gravitate towards that, you know, Wim is hiking up Everest barefoot with his shirt off.

• 50:53Theo Von?

  Yeah.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  And hanging out in in ice for an hour at a time. People are like, that guy's cool. I want to be like him.

• 51:00Theo Von?

  Yes, it's exciting.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  And he's also the the other side of this is not only is he able to bring people from a state where they're normal to become better than normal, is some research is going on right now about people with autoimmune diseases with that, that ice combined with breath work can help lower all of those stress hormones and help people who are caught in these vicious cycles of chronic inflammation and some people with multiple sclerosis, you know, people with eczema and more. And this is something that's that's free. You got to buy a freezer, right? Put some ice in it. But but beyond that, it's it's a pretty, pretty low amount of cash you need to spend upfront in order to do these things.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  If you can't afford an ice bath, take a cold shower, right? A lot of the same benefits.

• 51:51Theo Von?

  Who are some other known figures or who are some known figures throughout history? That it's documented that they've practiced breathwork and it was a big part of their lives? Do you have it? Do you know any?

• 52:00Speaker 02

  There's so many and if you look at ancient literature, there were all these, these swamis. There were all these Buddhist monks. There were all these Rinpoche's that were supposedly doing things that were impossible according to our understanding of biology and medicine right now until you bring them into a lab. And so in the seventies, they started doing this. One guy was Swamirama. This guy grew up in the mountains of the Himalayas.

• 52:28Theo Von?

  Swamirama, bring him up. Sorry, I interrupted you.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  He's no, that's cool.

• 52:31Theo Von?

  The mountains of the Himalayas, go on.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Since he was four years old, he was trained to be a monk and they brought him into this place called the Manager Clinic and a Navy physicist tested to see what he could do, things that are supposed to be impossible. And he was able to flutter his heart rate on command at 300 beats per minute on command and then.

• 52:54Theo Von?

  What's our regular heart rate?

• 52:56Speaker 02

  If you're healthy, 50.

• 52:58Theo Von?

  He needed 300?

• 52:59Speaker 02

  Mine's probably 70, 67, 300 beats was supposed to be impossible.

• 53:03Theo Von?

  Shit, he's a damn Valentine's Day at that point.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  He was able to change the temperature on the palm of his hand, 11 degrees from one side to the other. One side was all flush and red and the other was like gray and purple. And in another test, and this was reported in the New York Times, he was able to enter states of deep sleep while still being conscious and repeating everything that happened in the room around him. All of this is supposed to be impossible. He proved it and it also establishes credence to all these other stories of these ancient monks doing this stuff.

• 53:41Theo Von?

  Wow.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  And he said, the foundation of all of this was breathing. You have to start with that. Then, then you have to learn to meditate and then you can do all this other stuff, but it starts with that.

• 53:51Theo Von?

  Yeah. I wonder, how would you even be able to do something like that?

• 53:54Speaker 02

  You focus on your breath, you meditate, and I can tell you, I have seen people do things that are much crazier than that.

• 54:02Theo Von?

  Like?

• 54:04Speaker 02

  I've seen people do a lot of things that I don't feel at liberty to discuss, because people are gonna think I'm insane until I get these guys into a lab, and that's what I'm working on right now. But that, that looks like child's play compared to the things that I've seen people do when you focus on your breathing, when you use your natural body to do these things that we've been doing for thousands of years, that in the last couple hundred years, we've completely forgotten about.

• 54:32Theo Von?

  Wow. You gotta come back then. You'll have to come back after that for sure. This episode-

• 54:39Speaker 00

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• 55:09Theo Von?

  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know, sometimes it can feel like everybody's got it all together in their heart. They got things figured out, they got their love life just organized to a T. Especially in February, when people are slanging chocolates and Cupids firing arrows, and everybody's eyes just are lit up with little lamps of love in them. But if you don't have someone special in your life, or you don't have it all figured out, don't get wicked about it, don't get tattered, don't, don't quit washing your hair. And if you need somebody to talk to, to help you organize some things inside of yourself so you can be a better person in a relationship, or be ready for one, BetterHelp is there.

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• 56:39Theo Von?

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• 57:24Theo Von?

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• 57:58Theo Von?

  Like, are there any presidents that focus on breath work? Even look that up, Nick.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  I bet Carter would be the only one.

• 58:05Theo Von?

  Yeah.

• 58:06Speaker 02

  That would have been cool enough to do that because he was in all into-

• 58:09Theo Von?

  He was into health.

• 58:10Speaker 02

  He, he put some solar panels up on the White House and organic garden, you know?

• 58:15Theo Von?

  Did he?

• 58:15Speaker 02

  I doubt, I doubt he would ever admit to it, you know?

• 58:21Theo Von?

  Jimmy Carter put solar panels up on the White House?

• 58:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, I believe, you can fact check that one.

• 58:26Theo Von?

  That's pretty dope.

• 58:28Speaker 02

  And then Reagan took him down, so.

• 58:31Theo Von?

  That's so hilarious. It'd be great to see a history of just all the ridiculous things that have been put up each time and then taken down.

• 58:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, and taken down again.

• 58:38Theo Von?

  Yes, President Jimmy Carter installed 32 solar thermal panels on the roof of the White House West Wing on June 20th, 1979. They operated until 1996 when the Reagan administration removed them during roof repairs and store them in a Virginia warehouse. The painters later went to Unity College in Maine for cafeteria use and influenced later White House solar efforts under Bush. Wow, that's pretty cool. Be a nice thing to just be able to buy and even in an auction, one of those.

• 59:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:04Theo Von?

  Um, yeah, I've heard there's a lot of, uh, there's like a lot of celebrities that are fans of yours, um, Devin Booker, uh, who else was I reading? Pink, the musician, Sydney Sweeney, who's probably got a set of lungs on her, I bet. Um, what is that like? Have you had celebrities reach out to you? Has there been like an interesting occurrence where one of them wanted you to come up like a private session sort of thing?

• 59:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's happened a few times and they've been just so disappointed, uh, because they want like the secret thing. They're like, oh, I bet you got into some weird stuff. I'm famous, you need to tell me the secret. And I tell them what the secret is, which is what I told you. And they're like, oh, that's, that's it?

• 59:48Theo Von?

  Yeah.

• 59:49Speaker 02

  So it's about doing the work, right? It's, it's one thing to tell people these things. You can't just like read at once, do it once and move on, right? It's like a diet. You think you're going to eat one little salad throughout the day and then be eating french fries for the rest of the day and thinking, oh, I ate my salad, I'm, I'm good to go. We're breathing all the time, right? And so you should be breathing in a way that is conducive to your body and your health.

• 1:00:22Theo Von?

  That helps you.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  During that time.

• 1:00:23Theo Von?

  Well, it makes certain, yeah.

• 1:00:24Speaker 02

  That, and so it's, it's the most unsexy thing to, to talk about is normal breathing. But I'm, I'm here to tell you, if you really want to help yourself become a normal breather, you can do some of that breath work, but, but I promise you, once you become a normal breather, then you do that breath work, it will take you places you've never dreamed about.

• 1:00:44Theo Von?

  Let's go, huh? A little lung, Narnia, homie, I'm ready. I'm ready for that. Um, there's a, there's this kind of phenomenon where it's like sometimes when I finally sit and take a breath, it feels like I haven't breathed, like breathed or breathed or whatever, uh, for, for months sometimes, you know, or for weeks, you know, you know, that feeling where you're like, like, oh, I finally got a breath. And it's something you're like, what, um, what's happened in our lives that's made it so that we've gotten so far away from our breathing?

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  Well, I think you can force yourself into pausing and resetting your, your breathing. And you can force yourself through yawning or sighing. So when you are not aware of your breath and when you are just caught in these negative unconscious habits, it gets so bad that your body needs a reset. And so what does it do?

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  It's an unintentional sigh.

• 1:01:43Theo Von?

  Wow.

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  It forces you to be like,

• 1:01:45Theo Von?

  Override the system.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  Let's start, let's start over. Do a little better this time. It's like, you know, trying out for, for acting, you know, trying out for a play or whatever. It's like, okay, or doing a different take in, in a, in a recording.

• 1:01:59Theo Von?

  Yes, like your, your lungs are reminding you, hey, brother, we're down here.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  But you can take advantage of that. It doesn't always have to be unintentional. You can make it an intentional sigh. So you can set an alarm, just a little bell to go off on your phone, three times a day, five times a day, 10 times a day. That bell goes off and it's just a moment. You don't have to stop what you're doing to be like, I'm going to check in on my breathing. Takes a second to just go.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  I'm gonna do an intentional sigh. So when that bell goes off, follow me with this one. It's easier than that last thing we just did. I promise you. Bell goes off. Just stop what you're doing. Take an inhale. Hold. Take an inhale. Hold. Take an inhale. Let it out calmly now. Let it out calmly. Do it again. Take an inhale softly. Hold. Take an inhale softer. Hold. Take an inhale softer. Let it out softly, softly. I don't want to hear you letting it out on this one. Now take an inhale. Hold. Take an inhale.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  Inhale. Silent exhale.

• 1:03:16Theo Von?

  Right on, right on.

• 1:03:17Speaker 02

  You've just reset your respiratory patterns, right? And I think you can

• 1:03:23Theo Von?

  We're back.

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  You have a, I mean, how long did that take? 15 seconds?

• 1:03:27Theo Von?

  15 seconds.

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  You can do this on a flight. You can do it on the train. You can do it in your car. And it allows you to start, start again. So what I've found is a lot of people have asked, they said, where do I start? Set those alarms. Do 10 of them a day. Check in on this. And if you do enough of these, if you go back to breathing after you've reset it, go back to breathing that five seconds in, five seconds out. Don't exaggerate it. Real soft. I shouldn't be able to watch you breathing, right? It's really subtle, really soft. This will become your default. And if this becomes your default, I am telling you, it changes a lot of things.

• 1:04:02Theo Von?

  You're gonna start cooking.

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  You could start hooking. You could start sleeping.

• 1:04:07Theo Von?

  No, cooking. I mean, if you're gonna cook, you're gonna be rolling.

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  I thought you said hooking.

• 1:04:12Theo Von?

  Oh, no.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  That this could, this could get you out on the street. So children, he said, cooking. Cooking.

• 1:04:19Theo Von?

  I just saw this.

• 1:04:20Speaker 02

  Figurative and literal language. You go to the kitchen, make something healthy.

• 1:04:24Theo Von?

  Yeah. Or just get your cooking in your body. You're making something healthy in your own life.

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  Do not do that and go out hooking.

• 1:04:29Theo Von?

  No, do not go out hooking. Take me through some other ailments that breath work can help us with, that focusing on our breathing can help eliminate or solve, or can help fight.

• 1:04:43Theo Von?

  And then, yeah, how about ADHD? Take me down some of that journey because I've heard you talk about it a lot.

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is something I learned after the book was published years ago. And I kept hearing this from people in the airway space, from different doctors and different dentists. They said, no one's paying attention to this. I didn't discover it. I spent five years researching, writing the book. I didn't discover. I thought I covered everything. I didn't. So I was able to revise the hardcover for the paperback, which is out, and I include this version.

• 1:05:15Theo Von?

  So this is in the new revision?

• 1:05:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's in the new revision because, and it's something I try to talk about every single talk I do. I want to talk about this because it's so important and nobody's talking about it. And I'm so tired of getting these letters from parents. I do these talks, right? And there's these line of parents afterwards. And they're yelling at me and they're crying because their kid isn't getting any help. They're like, you need to help me. I was like, I'm a freaking journalist, right? I'm not a doctor, but they're not getting the help from their doctor. So this is what I've learned. I'm a filter. I don't do this research, but I talk to the leading experts in the field. I spend a lot of time doing this. They have told me this, that ADHD is diagnosed as a neurological problem, right?

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  It's a problem with the brain and it's treated as a problem of the brain, right? So we can give kids uppers to wake them up in the day, Ritalin, whatever. It absolutely works. You can give them downers at night to go to sleep, right? And 10% of the population in the US has ADHD and around 60% are on these pharmaceutical drugs. And these drugs absolutely work. But what these guys are saying, and the story that's starting to come out is for so many kids with ADHD, it's not a neurological problem that has caused this. It's a breathing problem at night. It is a plumbing problem, not an electrical problem.

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  They said that the vast majority of kids with ADHD suffer from something called sleep disordered breathing. What this is, is when you're sleeping, you're choking on yourself, you're snoring, struggling the entire time. You don't enter those stages of deep restorative sleep. This affects human growth hormone. So again, it affects how you're going to grow. It also affects your brain development, your ability to think clearly the next day. So these kids wake up exhausted, everything around them drives them crazy, right? I mean, think of how you are when you're jet lagged after a flight that's 12 hours long, right?

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  You're anxious, like, like bright lights bother you. They have told me that for so many kids, this is the core issue. We've been diagnosing it and we've been treating it wrong, which is why these kids necessarily aren't getting better. They're on these drugs forever. So the number one thing you should do, especially for young kids, is to check their breathing at night. And if they're snoring or have sleep apnea, that could very well significantly be contributing to their symptoms of ADHD. And I can say anecdotally, I can say this because I cannot tell you how many letters parents have sent me.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  They are so pissed off now because their little Johnny, for five years, was on 20 different drugs, right? Nothing was working. He's 12 years old, still wetting his bed.

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  They taught the kid how to breathe in and out through the nose. They got rid of the snoring, the sleep apnea, and the vast majority of little Johnny's problems go away within two weeks.

• 1:08:28Theo Von?

  Wow.

• 1:08:28Speaker 02

  Sometimes within a single night, I just got a letter, within a single night, this kid who was wetting his bed from, from day one couldn't stop it, is now not wetting his bed. And so a lot of this is caused by that chronic stress.

• 1:08:43Theo Von?

  Yes.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  At night. And another reason why people wake up and pee three times throughout the night is we aren't releasing the proper sleep hormones that shut that down, right? And, and so there's another thing, I just heard today, we just got a letter today that, that some old grandma was like, I have to wake up and pee twice. And she's like, since I learned how to breathe through my nose and no longer snore, she's like, I don't have to do that anymore. And you could say, oh, these are anecdotes, these are neat stories, but we know the mechanism.

• 1:09:11Theo Von?

  That's one piss apple. I love it.

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Who, who wants to do that? Wake up at 2:30 AM?

• 1:09:16Theo Von?

  Especially with that age, if you trip on something, you're done.

• 1:09:21Theo Von?

  You know, a trip to the bathroom in the dark at 74?

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:25Theo Von?

  What are we, you're fucking Lewis and Clark.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  I mean, at, at any age, it sucks.

• 1:09:29Theo Von?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  We can acknowledge that, but, but yeah, if, if, if you're older and you're fragile and your bones are brittle, it's really bad.

• 1:09:37Theo Von?

  Bear Grylls out there, yeah.

• 1:09:38Speaker 02

  It's bad news.

• 1:09:39Theo Von?

  You're trying to figure it out. Um, so, so when you sleep, what about snoring? What about snoring? So what is snoring? What is snoring? And is that, because you see a lot of people that get like sleep apnea masks, you know, like a lot of thick, rich, white dudes, like laying in bed at night, trying to just really hide it from their wives, probably from intimacy, but also just pretending they're bane or whatever in their fancy houses or whatever. But what's really going on with snoring? What's really going on with sleep apnea?

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  So snoring has been so normalized, right, that around 50% of the population does it on occasion and something like 20 or 30% might, might do it chronically, depends on how you measure that. But it's not normal, right? That there is no part of that that is normal because if you are. Struggling during sleep during the time that we're supposed to be lights out, shut down, the body needs to repair everything in order for you to function properly and not get chronically sick the next day, the next week, the next few years, right? We have to have restorative sleep. And this is a known thing, right? Everyone's talking about sleep now. Yeah. If you're snoring, you're not allowing that to happen. So in the back of the throat,

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  those soft tissues, right? Most snoring, not all of it, is through the mouth.

• 1:11:00Speaker 02

  Some people snore through their noses.

• 1:11:05Speaker 02

  What I have learned from, from a lot of people that have helped people who have chronic snoring issues is there are a lot of things you can do at home to fix this. There's surgeries, which was absolutely works. Sometimes with sleep apnea, it's the tongue, other issues. But the first thing is chronic congestion. Because what we know is during allergy season, snoring and sleep apnea go through the roof. That's not an accident. That's because your nose gets clogged, right? And you're breathing through the mouth. Another thing is during the day, we are breathing so heavily, like over breathing all day long that we carry that over tonight. So what these people do, there's a bunch of different things. You can put a little tape on your mouth, you can sleep on your side.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  But one of the main things they do is to train you to breathe very lightly during the day, just that, that breathing that we were doing. For instance, if I were to ask you to breathe heavily through your mouth right now and make a snoring sound, how, how hard is that?

• 1:12:04Speaker 02

  Okay, you can do this without, that's a very, very rich snoring sound. There it is. Now breathe very slowly in and out through the nose and try to make that same sound very slowly with your mouth closed and try to make that sound.

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  A lot of people say this is a mechanical thing. You're over breathing. I can't do it. There's too much, there's too much air flowing in.

• 1:12:30Speaker 02

  And so you make that snoring sound. Sleep apnea is a different thing. That's when you choke on yourself. It can be from your tongue. Most of the time, the tongue is falling back or there's constriction. If you're morbidly obese, very obese, you can get this lateral compression against the throat, right? And there's some things that happen in the nose. People are given CPAPs as a cure for it. It cures nothing. CPAPs can actually make your sleep apnea worse over time. And around 50% of people given CPAPs within a few months aren't going to use them anyway. But they're too embarrassed to give them back to their doctor. So, so to be clear, if you have sleep apnea, these things are an amazing Band-Aid to get you over that hump. You can't be choking at night, but it's not fixing the core issue.

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  The core issue for so many people is that mouth that is too small for your face. It's an airway that is not properly developed. The back of our airways is covered in this flesh, right? That flesh needs to be firm, right? We exercise everything else in our bodies, right? Our muscles, our biceps, our legs, but we're not exercising our airway. So you can do this with exercises, with myofunctional therapy, very stupid name for an amazing therapy that allows people to stiffen those tissues, to allow you to take that easy breath without any constriction so that you don't snore.

• 1:13:51Theo Von?

  I guess I don't, I mean, I've been told I snore, but I think it's just sometimes, it's just kind of occasional. But I certainly understand how like, just starting to breathe through your nose and just have like a pattern that your body can rely on would make everything less stressful, you know? What about mouth tape? You hear about mouth tape a lot. Is that just?

• 1:14:12Speaker 02

  So, we do know around 60 to 65% of us sleep with an open mouth. We do know if you're breathing through an open mouth at night, it makes you more susceptible to snoring and milder sleep apnea. We know this, okay?

• 1:14:28Speaker 02

  We know that if you convert to nasal breathing, we know anecdotally at least, that a lot of people claim that they're snoring a lot less, that they're sleeping a lot better. I did a very small experiment at Stanford in which we compared mouth breathing over 10 days to nasal breathing at night. When I was mouth breathing, I don't snore. When I was mouth breathing, I snored throughout the night. And I also had sleep apnea. The moment I went to use the sleep tape, to breathe through my nose, it all went away. I've heard this hundreds and hundreds of times. Because of those mechanics, when air is coming in slower, when it's coming in pressurized, it's a lot harder to make that

• 1:15:13Speaker 02

  doesn't work for everyone. And so you see these advertisers on Instagram or whatever saying, everybody needs mouth tape. If you're part of the 40% that sleeps with a closed mouth, you don't need mouth tape. For other people, it's something you might want to explore. I'm not here to push this on anyone. I can say it's absolutely changed my sleep. I track my sleep. I have proof that it works. I can also say that thousands of other people have found the same thing.

• 1:15:38Theo Von?

  Is it hard to use? I've never used it.

• 1:15:40Speaker 02

  It's very, very easy to use. And I'm so addicted to it. This is how neurotic I've become that I have a hard time sleeping without it, which is why I travel with it when I'm camping. I bring my little piece of tape. I brought a little piece of tape today. I had a feeling you were going to ask me about this. Yeah, in the morning, I had my little roll of tape by me. And I said, no, I'm going to forget this. So I'm going to put it on the back of my watch. So the mouth tape thing, there's, there's all these, all these different brands that, that weren't around, you know, until a couple of years ago. And they're all saying mine, mine's the best. You can only use this, blah, blah, blah. Don't listen to any of that, right? So any micro pore tape, surgical tape, this is the technology I'm going to show you. This is how sophisticated this technology is.

• 1:16:25Speaker 02

  This is micro pore tape. You can buy it at any drugstore. What I do for my mouth tape.

• 1:16:33Speaker 02

  I'm done. I can talk to you. I can cough, right? If I had a straw, I could take a sip of water. Doesn't look so hot, but what this is doing is it is reminding me throughout the night to breathe through my nose. The point is not to do a hostage situation. I have found, and a lot of other people have found, it's just a reminder. And if you snore, and there's a way you can test this, I'll tell you about it. If you get acclimated to wearing this in the day, this is so important, is wear for 10 minutes, answering email, doing the dishes, sitting around, watching TV. Increase that time throughout a couple of weeks and then move on to trying it at night.

• 1:17:15Theo Von?

  It's just a reminder.

• 1:17:16Speaker 02

  This little piece of tape, we have heard stories about, including asthma, autoimmune issues. Again, this is not, these were not studied in, in an official randomized clinical trial, but it's still important that now with all these wearables, people can track everything. They have their own data and they see what works. But this is it, and it's free and it's available for everybody.

• 1:17:38Theo Von?

  That's simple. And so that's just some basically 3M medical tape?

• 1:17:42Speaker 02

  It's, I, I use, I'm not, I don't get paid by any of these brands to say any of this stuff. The stuff that I've found is pretty good is the 3M Micro pore Sensitive Skin Tape. But you can use any other kind of surgical tape. Surgical tape is made to be put on skin and off of skin. What you don't want to use is stuff that has a really thick adhesive, because you don't want chapped lips. And also important, when you take it off, use your tongue. Do not do this. If you rip it off after a couple of days, your lips are going to be chapped. You're never going to want to do it. If you use your tongue to take it off, no hand, use your tongue, then you're not going to have a problem. I've used this stuff for consistently for like seven years,

• 1:18:25Speaker 02

  and I cannot tell you what a difference this made for my sleep. I didn't think I was a mouth breather at night until I tested it, until I saw the difference, just as you saw. You're like, oh, I'm just going to take a few breaths for 15 seconds. You're like, wow, I feel so much better. Try to do this at night. If you're a mouth breather and you're going to wake up. Up the next morning and be like, oh my God, I have so much more energy. I have so much more clarity.

• 1:18:47Theo Von?

  Wow. I want to try that. Yeah. Cause I've heard about it. And I guess it also just trains you to breathe through your nose more.

• 1:18:52Speaker 02

  Trains you to breathe through your nose and that's especially important at night. And then in the morning, you're already habituated to breathing through your nose.

• 1:19:00Theo Von?

  Yeah. Does that roll over to the daytime where your brain, you just start getting used to it? Is that, is it really good practice for breathing through your nose?

• 1:19:06Speaker 02

  I was a mouth breather my, my whole life when I was surfing, when I was doing exercising, doing martial arts, whatever. I was breathing through my mouth. Nobody told me to do otherwise. Right? Once I converted, even started doing it during exercise, I had so much more energy. My recovery time was cut in half by just doing this. So I started at the nighttime, right? And then it was so much easier to do in the daytime because your nose gets used to it. It's like, oh, I can't be congested now. Right? This is the primary way in which you're breathing. And for a lot of people, things clear up pretty soon. For some people have structural issues, deviated septum, problems with their turbinates, whatever. You need surgery.

• 1:19:50Speaker 02

  You need, you need other more deeper interventions. But for a lot of people, it's just a habit you need to create.

• 1:19:56Theo Von?

  Yeah. Having some new habits for yourself. Um, yeah. Yeah. It's just, this is so good to have a nice, just like a, just a reminder, and especially right now in my life. Cause one of the big things for me is just, I just,

• 1:20:12Theo Von?

  yeah, just feel over, yeah, you just feel overwhelmed a lot. Um, what, what about nasal strips? People use those a lot. I use those sometimes.

• 1:20:19Speaker 02

  They're great.

• 1:20:20Theo Von?

  Helps me.

• 1:20:21Speaker 02

  They're amazing. Right now, if you take your fingers, right? And go like this. Is that easier for you to breathe this way?

• 1:20:27Theo Von?

  So nice.

• 1:20:28Speaker 02

  Then you are a good candidate for nasal strips, right? So many people have issues with their nostrils. Nostrils aren't big enough or they flutter when you take an inhale in. And this is called the Coddles maneuver. Some guy had to name it after himself, of course. But nasal strips will open up your nostrils to the way they were supposed to have been.

• 1:20:46Theo Von?

  God, I like that.

• 1:20:47Speaker 02

  Around 30% more airflow. And this is why they're marketed to people who suffer. From snoring, there's a brand called mute. I've tried them. I don't, again, I don't get any money from any of this. I thought they were okay. They go in your nose. I didn't like that feeling.

• 1:21:01Theo Von?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:02Speaker 02

  It's like this corkscrew thing that goes in your nose, but they're called mute because they mute you at night from snoring. Because they allow all that airflow up through your nose.

• 1:21:12Theo Von?

  Oh, and so your nose is supposed to have more intake because we're supposed to, because we're supposed to breathe through it more.

• 1:21:17Speaker 02

  We're not supposed to be this congested. No other animal is this congested. You see a bear out there that's just like, oh, I have seasonal allergies and asthma. I can't get up today.

• 1:21:26Theo Von?

  Oh, yeah. If you saw a bear who's just out there mouth breathing all the time, you're like, look at this frigging, look at this bastard over here. Yeah. And I wonder if we breathe in, if we, if we start breathing more in through our noses, or if we breathe in through our noses, do we take more or less breaths in a day than if we do in our mouths?

• 1:21:42Speaker 02

  We take far fewer and that's good because we're taking fewer, but we're taking deeper breaths. Most of us are over breathing, which is a really bad habit because you offload this gas called carbon dioxide. Right. Which causes this vasoconstriction, which causes blood flow problems. So by taking fewer, richer, deeper breaths, we're able to get more oxygen, more energy for less effort. And that's exactly what we want. And our noses are also our first line of defense. So you're, you've got nose hair, right? Most, most people do. And there's also all of these other pathways that air has to follow through as it makes it into our lungs.

• 1:22:22Speaker 02

  Those are there for a reason. They help filter out bacteria, viruses, pollutants, dust and everything else. So when we're breathing through the mouth,

• 1:22:34Speaker 02

  all the crap in the air is going directly to my lungs, which causes inflammation and which causes congestion, right? It causes other issues.

• 1:22:42Theo Von?

  I've heard you talk about how there's more CO2 in a lot of the air we breathe. Like we get stuck in places like planes, office buildings, even schools. And we're stuck breathing kind of recycled air, I guess.

• 1:22:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is something I didn't really pay attention to when I was doing the first edition of the book, which is something I learned a lot about during that time and wanted to put in a bunch of new pages about the science that I discovered. So I heard this about three, four years ago, that in indoor environments, carbon dioxide levels are through the roof. We always hear about outdoor environments, CO2 is going up every year, which is true. It's like 422 parts per million outside. Everyone's talking about the outside. No one's talking about the inside. And the reason why they measure CO2 inside is if we're all sitting here, right, and the CO2 levels keep going up in here, that's not from a coal plant or exhaust from a car, it's from our exhalations. So when you're

• 1:23:39Speaker 02

  measuring CO2, you're measuring how many other people's exhalations are in the room. So at a CO2 level of around 2,000 parts per million, which is found in a lot of schools and offices, about one in every 40 breaths or so is someone else's exhalation.

• 1:24:00Theo Von?

  No.

• 1:24:01Speaker 02

  Right? Yeah. And if you get up, if you get up to like 4,000, 5,000, it's one in every 10 breaths is someone else's exhalation. So I started cruising around. I travel a lot, like, like you do. I'm always on airplanes, hotels and all that stuff. And I always feel like crap in these hotels. If you've noticed, new hotels, they've glued up all the windows. Back in the day, you're too young to know this, but back in the day, you used to be able to open a window. Maybe not all the way.

• 1:24:30Theo Von?

  You used to be able to take your own life?

• 1:24:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I think back in the old day, in the 50s, like, you want to take your own life? There it is. Like, that's your, that's your problem, not our problem. Lawyers got involved, so.

• 1:24:41Theo Von?

  That ruined everything.

• 1:24:42Speaker 02

  At least you could open it this much, right, to get fresh. Now you don't have that choice. So I would wake up in these hotels and be, and having not had anything to drink the night before, I would feel totally hung over. My head would hurt. It's like, I wonder how much of this has to do with the air quality, how much CO2 is in the environment? Because if we're in an environment with high levels of CO2, anything north of 50 1500 parts per million, we have increased chance of having headaches, lethargy. It can cause a bunch of other issues like hypertension, which is high blood pressure, kidney calcification, if you're in it for for long enough, which are kidney stones, like like really rank stuff. This has been measured around the world. It's not not controversial.

• 1:25:25Speaker 02

  So I've been traveling with with this thing, this this little monitor, and it tells me how much the CO2 is.

• 1:25:33Theo Von?

  I just want to see it. Really? So do you have to breath? Is it a breathalyzer?

• 1:25:37Speaker 02

  No, no, it's just it's recording the amount of CO2 in this room right now.

• 1:25:43Theo Von?

  Okay.

• 1:25:43Speaker 02

  And I kid you not, this is some of the best quality air that I've seen. Usually, this shows like 2000 parts per million, which has been shown 1500 parts per million in one Harvard study showed that a 50 50% decrease in test scores at 1500 parts per million, because your body is struggling. It's placing you in that state of stress. Most airlines I've recorded are.

• 1:26:09Theo Von?

  We must have had it in my class then.

• 1:26:11Speaker 02

  So one study I read from Harvard said that 1500 parts per million, that's about three, three, four times higher than what the air is in the outside, right? The the amount of concentration of carbon dioxide can create a 50% decrease in some cognitive tests.

• 1:26:32Theo Von?

  Wow.

• 1:26:32Speaker 02

  So test scores. If you think about what we're doing to kids, we're placing them in a classroom for eight hours at a time with air quality of 2,500 parts per million. So well north of that 1500 parts per.

• 1:26:46Theo Von?

  And that could change place to place for sure.

• 1:26:48Speaker 02

  It changes all the time in areas that have nice climate, right? You have these things called windows. You could just open. You have a door you have opened up. But a lot of new schools right now, just like new hotels, new offices, you cannot open the windows. And what I've found is these offices and hotels do this to save money because it costs a lot of money to either heat up air or cool it down. So instead, they just recycle the same stale air everyone. Exhalations from room to room to room. And I can prove this now because I cruise around with one of these things and I've got a small army of 20 other people collecting data and we're going to put all this data available for free that people can start seeing what the air quality is in these hotels and airplanes.

• 1:27:32Theo Von?

  That's fascinating. Yeah. And when you think about where we spend most of our lives, especially since we're more indoor creatures, a lot of us are these days. Gosh, we're just in our own little air tomb, kind of.

• 1:27:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, 90% of our time we spend indoors and if that time spent indoors is not with fresh air, right? Your body is always going to be playing catch up. I don't want to get too neurotic here. Some people get

• 1:27:57Theo Von?

  No, I don't think it sounds too dour.

• 1:27:58Speaker 02

  Crazy, but this is, it's a biological thing and we know that our ancestors always had access to fresh air and it's also measurable. We can see what happens to the brain. We can see what happens to the body. We're in an old hotel right now, an old classic, right? There's windows you can open here. What a difference that makes to get fresh air.

• 1:28:18Theo Von?

  Oh, you think about an open window and just the, the energy that it does to a room too. It's so nice.

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

  It's, it's not only the, the psychosomatic effect, it's, it's a chemical effect on, on your blood pH, right? To be able to have fresh air. And I think that this is something that is easily fixable. Like there's some airlines that have great air. There's others that consistently have terrible air. There's some hotels that have great air. There's others. So you know, it's a fixable problem.

• 1:28:43Theo Von?

  Have you noticed an airline that does or one that stands out to you?

• 1:28:46Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. I've, I've, all, all that will be, will be released when it's time. Cause I want to get confirmation from other people.

• 1:28:54Theo Von?

  Well dang, I don't want to die between now and then.

• 1:28:56Speaker 02

  We'll have a little talk off camera. I'll tell you what to fly and what not to fly.

• 1:29:01Theo Von?

  What about this? I've always had this thought. If you have a lot of plants in your home, does that make it better for you in a room? Like is it, is, is like the, the cycle between plants and humans and your lungs and air, is it that quick enough?

• 1:29:13Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So fill your room with plants. Snake plants are great. Not only do they create more oxygen really efficiently, but they can remove pollutants as well. And who doesn't want to be in a room with a bunch of plants? It's such a cool look.

• 1:29:28Theo Von?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:28Speaker 02

  Right, right from the get go, but it's so beneficial and also to have that energy. You know, there's the ineffable thing. It's like you're around a bunch of living things. It's a good feeling.

• 1:29:38Theo Von?

  Bring up a snake plant. I want to see one. I think my old assistant just sent me a snake plant that came in the mail the other day. I just put some, yup, she sure did. I got this tall box and it had a plant in it. But yeah, it was a snake plant.

• 1:29:50Speaker 02

  So those are be like those, those leaves. It's, it's amazing. Those are like big air filters, right? Because that's what leaves are. They, they suck in CO2 and they give off oxygen. That's what forests do.

• 1:30:02Theo Von?

  It's like nature's lungs, kinda.

• 1:30:03Speaker 02

  It's nature's lungs and it was this perfect balance.

• 1:30:07Theo Von?

  Look at that lady, she got a big one, huh? That's a black one.

• 1:30:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, her hair is, her hair is fresh. I mean, and look at how fresh her pants are.

• 1:30:16Theo Von?

  Smiling, yeah, yeah, huh? She likes it a little mixed below the waist, you could tell down there.

• 1:30:23Theo Von?

  Could I even put plants in my car? Like, is it that close of enough thing?

• 1:30:26Speaker 02

  You could be one of those people that puts Legos on the outside of your car and plants on the inside. Like, there's no, no judgment here. You can have an art car, that's okay. I think a small plant like that isn't gonna do much. It might look cool, so why not do it?

• 1:30:42Theo Von?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:42Speaker 02

  You know, what, what some companies are doing, like algae is really efficient at sucking up CO2 and giving off oxygen. So some companies are selling algae, they're, they're selling these, these big tubes of algae that you feed. So you have, I don't know if that looks as cool as a snake plant, but to me, it's kinda, it's a nice talking point at dinner parties.

• 1:31:02Theo Von?

  Yeah, it's super interesting, algae.

• 1:31:04Speaker 02

  I mean, that's what happens to the, the ocean is, is the world's lungs, right? That's, that's where we get, what, half of our oxygen? I think it's even more than that is from, from the ocean, from algae. Yes, yes.

• 1:31:16Theo Von?

  Wow, I didn't know that at all.

• 1:31:18Speaker 02

  Isn't that funny, though? If you look at that, they're just mimicking leaves of a large tree, of a large plant, you know? It's an artificial plant, which is cool.

• 1:31:30Theo Von?

  It is cool, but it's definitely like, hey, just get some plants.

• 1:31:33Speaker 02

  Just get some plants. But you can't, you know, to charge an airport 20 grand for that thing or for 200 for plants, no one's making a lot of cash from that.

• 1:31:44Theo Von?

  Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. They always find a way to take something that we already have, redo it and make it like more fancy and then sell it back to you. And really, it's just the same thing. Germany uses algae tubes on buildings to produce biofuel, generating energy and absorbing CO2 at the same time. Wow, that's pretty, pretty interesting.

• 1:32:01Speaker 02

  They use that to make biodiesel, that you can run that oil that they extract from that in a diesel car. I have a 40 year old Mercedes old 300D that you can run it off of vegetable oil, used vegetable oil.

• 1:32:15Theo Von?

  No way.

• 1:32:16Speaker 02

  Yes, I've been doing this for years. It's a real thing. So they're kind of, they have a twofer right there. They're removing CO2, making new oxygen, and they're also creating fuel.

• 1:32:28Theo Von?

  Yeah, in Germany, buildings are going green, literally. With the use of algae-filled tubes mounted on their exteriors, these transparent tubes house fast-growing microalgae that absorb carbon dioxide from the air and use sunlight to grow, all while producing valuable biomass. The living facade serves two purposes. It helps cool the building by providing shade and generates biofuel. The system is known as the bioreactor facade. The algae not only captures CO2 emissions, but also produces oxygen, making them natural air purifiers. What plants produce the most oxygen?

• 1:33:02Speaker 02

  I believe it's algae. I think Irish ivy, snake plants are also really good. They're all gonna do it, but at different levels of efficiency. I'm curious what, what the researchers here find.

• 1:33:15Theo Von?

  Erica, Erica palm and snake plant top the list for indoor plants that produce the most oxygen. These plants excel at photosynthesis and air purification, releasing significant oxygen while absorbing toxins like benzene and formaldehyde.

• 1:33:31Theo Von?

  Let me see, other high, Pothos, P O T H O S, reduces CO2 effectively and filters pollutants at night. Spider plant purifies air of carbon dioxide and formaldehyde while boosting oxygen. Aloe vera releases oxygen nocturnally and removes toxins like benzene. It's kind of cool. You go to sleep and your plants are out there helping you out, night little soldiers.

• 1:33:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you got four billion years of evolution here to, to build systems.

• 1:33:57Theo Von?

  Yeah, it is crazy. It's so crazy how it's like, um, we do all these steps to get back to, to just try to get back to baseline.

• 1:34:08Theo Von?

  And that's pop those right there. Oh yeah, I've seen those before. I think my mom has moms have a lot of those. Um, yeah, you just forget it. I forget about most people don't, but I forget about nature so much. Unfortunately, um, I don't forget about I long for it. I think I just work a lot, mostly indoors, you know? Um, I wanted to ask you about asthma. I feel like growing up, like we all had a friend with asthma or being lazy. That's what our PE teacher called it. But, um, what, what, uh, do you have any advice for parents that have children with asthma or for people suffering with asthma about how they could adjust their breathing techniques? Or is that not associated?

• 1:34:48Speaker 02

  Sure. So asthma is treated now with bronchodilators and oral steroids. This is what they get people with asthma and they both work really, really well. But again, they're not addressing the core issue. What's the core issue of asthma? Like sudden inflammation of the airway, right? To where you can't breathe and it's this constriction and this paranoia. What we have learned, irrefutably, this is what we've learned. It's that people with asthma almost always have a very low tolerance for carbon dioxide. And another way I'll say this is they can hardly hold their breath. You ask an asthmatic to hold their breath, they go.

• 1:35:32Theo Von?

  Wow.

• 1:35:33Speaker 02

  So they have habituated themselves, not, not all asthmatics, but a lot of them have habituated themselves to be mouth breathers, to be constantly over breathing. So when they sense that they are unable to breathe and that CO2 goes up, because that's what happens when you hold your breath, that CO2 goes up, it sets off alarm bells in their brain that this is an emergency. They're having an attack. So then they over breathe more,

• 1:36:00Speaker 02

  which constricts everything more, makes it harder for them to breathe, makes it harder for them to get oxygen. And then they over breathe more and then they have an attack. So what we've known for over 70 years is that one of the most effective ways of reducing symptoms of asthma is to learn to breathe slower, is to learn to breathe through the nose, and is to learn when you feel an attack, instead of hyperventilating and exacerbating that attack.

• 1:36:33Speaker 02

  To take control of it, to start to breathe slow, to hold your breath for two seconds, two, three seconds, to let it go, to slightly and calmly build that carbon dioxide, which will keep your airways open. There is a Russian doctor called Butenko, who studied this and researched it for decades, 70, 80 years ago. This is still taught all over the place. And I have heard from so many people, and there's about two dozen studies showing how effective just learning how to breathe slower, and how intimately your breathing habits are tied to your symptoms of asthma.

• 1:37:16Theo Von?

  Yeah, I never, I never struggle with it. But yeah, when you see people that struggle with it, uh, yeah, I know that's, yeah, I know a lot of people deal with that.

• 1:37:25Theo Von?

  Oh, before you leave, uh, you always hear the theory, uh, you always hear the saying, in through your nose, out through your mouth. Is that true?

• 1:37:32Speaker 02

  It depends if you're working out, sometimes that's really effective. When I'm talking about mouth breathing, just so people aren't confused, I'm not talking about if you willingly want to take a breath through your mouth. You're doing some breath work, you want to breathe through your mouth. You're LeBron and you're dunking on some dude and you want to take a mouth breath. All that's good because that's something you're consciously doing. I'm talking about the unconscious stuff. I'm talking about the stuff at night. So in through the nose, out through your mouth can be effective in some stages of athletic performance. For most zone one, two, and three, in through the nose, out through the nose is going to be so much more beneficial. And this is the one thing elite trainers are really getting into now. The number one thing they have their athletes do, it doesn't matter if they're an Olympian

• 1:38:16Speaker 02

  or a fighter or a cyclist, is they look at their breathing and they teach them how to breathe slower and lower. If you think about it, if you're able to conserve more energy by taking fewer breaths and getting more oxygen, what can you do with that energy? You can beat your opponent, right? And that's why they're interested in it, but not only for competitive athletes, for everybody can benefit from this.

• 1:38:39Theo Von?

  So it's safe to say, no, look, we can go ahead and change it then. It's in through your nose, out through your nose.

• 1:38:44Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Well, depending on what you're doing, right? And so you need context around this. It is the vast majority of the time for 80, 85% of athletic endurance sports, it's in through the nose, out through the nose, yes.

• 1:38:57Theo Von?

  Amen. I like that. Yeah.

• 1:39:04Theo Von?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, for people that have smoked most of their lives and are changing that now, are there breathing techniques that they can do or anything specific? Or is it, is it just in through the nose, out through the nose?

• 1:39:17Speaker 02

  I don't know. Uh, I don't think it's been well studied. I, I would suggest if in through the nose, out through the nose, for that five to six seconds in, five to six seconds out, if that can help people with ground glass lungs, the way it can, the way we know it can, it could probably be very beneficial for smokers. But I don't know any data that would support that. But again, you're going to get other benefits, you know, beyond the potential benefit of removing more toxins from your lungs.

• 1:39:46Theo Von?

  Yeah. Oh, if you got nine 11 lung or you got dang, I'm sure they can handle parliament lungs or whatever, you know? James Nestor, thanks so much for joining us today, man.

• 1:39:56Speaker 02

  Thanks a lot for having me.

• 1:39:57Theo Von?

  Yeah, I appreciate it. And I appreciate your patience. You guys can all go grab his New York Times Bestseller. The Revised Edition is out now.

• 1:40:05Speaker 02

  It's out now. Yeah, just, just released about last week.

• 1:40:08Theo Von?

  Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art. Thank you so much, brother.

• 1:40:11Speaker 02

  Thanks a lot.