#829: James Nestor — Breathing Protocols to Reboot Your Health, Fix Your Sleep, and Boost Performance

James Nestor is a science journalist and the author of the international bestseller Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art https://www.amazon.com/Breath-New-Science-Lost-Art/dp/0735213615/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, with more than three million copies sold in 44 languages. This episode is brought to you by: Helix Sleep https://helixsleep.com/tim premium mattresses: https://HelixSleep.com/Tim https://helixsleep.com/tim (27% off all mattress orders) Momentous https://livemomentous.com/Tim high-quality creatine for cognitive and muscular support: https://livemomentous.com/Tim (Code TIM for up to 35% off.) AG1 https://drinkag1.com/Tim all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://DrinkAG1.com/Tim https://drinkag1.com/Tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D plus 5 free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase.) Timestamps: [00:00:00] Start. [00:01:37] Why I waited years to interview James about Breath. [00:02:35] Maurice Daubard: The mysterious 90-year-old who preceded Wim Hof. [00:05:01] Tummo breathing: Ancient Bon Buddhist heat generation. [00:08:13] James’ personal breathwork practice and the Wim Hof method (with warnings). [00:09:25] How breathwork cured James’ chronic respiratory issues. [00:11:46] Sudarshan Kriya: The weekend workshop that changed everything. [00:16:56] My nine-minute breath hold experiment (hyperbaric chamber edition). [00:18:57] Post-book revelations and angry doctors’ offices. [00:20:41] The ADHD-breathing connection: A controversial Venn diagram. [00:22:00] DIY breathing assessments for kids. [00:25:55] Mouth tape: From hostage situations to sleep optimization. [00:28:48] James’ seven-year mouth taping commitment. [00:31:14] CO2 levels: Your LEED-certified hotel is suffocating you. [00:36:50] Monitoring CO2 with the Aranet4 and building a CO2 database. [00:39:51] James’ travel kit: Red lights, granny packs, and a Soviet-era PEMF device. [00:51:59] In Weirdville, eyes sing The Body Electric. [00:52:58] The supplements included in David’s granny packs. [00:54:16] Natto vs. nattokinase. [00:56:18] Athletes and breathing: The BOLT score explained. [01:03:25] LeBron James’ alternate nostril breathing and diaphragmatic dysfunction. [01:04:47] Inspiratory muscle training and the back soreness warning. [01:08:47] The Relaxator: An adult breathing pacifier for focus. [01:12:54] San Francisco Writers Grotto and the trustafarian invasion. [01:16:10] Writer’s block: A convenient excuse for hobbyists. [01:19:04] Cutting the corporate cord: James’ visceral “I quit” moment. [01:23:25] The freediving story that launched a book deal. [01:25:41] Deep‘s disappointing launch and publisher betrayal. [01:28:10] Breath: From 290,000 words to 85,000 in a house in the woods. [01:31:51] Finding the skeleton: The Stanford experiment as through-line. [01:35:44] Prayer and coherent breathing: The 5.5-second secret. [01:38:44] James’ critique of breathwork culture and barriers to entry. [01:41:07] Sleep optimization: SnoreLab, side sleeping, and incline bed therapy. [01:44:56] Parting thoughts and where to find James and free breathing protocols. * Show notes for this episode: https://tim.blog/2025/09/30/james-nestor-breath/ For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/timferriss See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is someone I have wanted to have on for quite a few years now, James Nestor. He is a science journalist and the author of the international bestseller Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, with more than 3 million copies sold in 44 languages. And I mentioned this in the episode, but this book came at me from probably 20 different directions and close friends of mine, including folks who've been on this podcast. And he's learned a lot since that book came out. So we dig into a lot of specifics. I took a ton of notes. There is a lot related to improving sleep and particular ways that you can tweak and fine tune your sleep quality.

• 0:43Tim Ferriss?

  If you haven't read Breath, it was named the Best General Nonfiction Book by the American Society of Journalists and Authors and was a finalist for the Science Book of the Year at the Royal Society, which is a BFD. It's a big deal. He is also the author of Deep: Free Diving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves, and Get High Now Without Drugs. You can find all things James at Mr., that's M R., James Nestor, N E S T O R, mrjamesnester.com. And here we go.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 1:20Tim Ferriss?

  No, I would assume an appropriate time.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 1:36Tim Ferriss?

  James, so nice to see you and hear you. Thanks for making the time. Thanks for having me. And I must tell you a bit of background to begin. I remember when Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art first came out, and I don't know if I've ever had, maybe Deep Survival would be another one, I believe, but two books that have come at me from so many different vectors, from so many friends, from so many athletes, from so many doctors. And I thought to myself, you know what? This is fascinating. Already really, really captured by the subject matter, but I want to let this

• 2:17Tim Ferriss?

  slow bake for a while and then come back and talk to James after it's saturated the global populace a bit and talk about the stories, what has stuck, what he's using personally. And so here we are. We did it.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  It's perfect timing. Yeah.

• 2:34Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect timing. And in the course of doing prep for this, came across a name Maurice Dubar. My French is rusty, but I believe I'm getting that probably 50% right. Would you mind explaining who Maurice is and why Maurice is relevant?

• 2:53Speaker 03

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

• 3:38Speaker 03

  that came to see him. And I thought it was interesting that there is a long legacy of people who have been doing these things, just like most things, right? But they're usually hidden beneath a few layers and you have to dig a bit to get there. But he's a fascinating guy. Sadly, he passed away at 93 years old and did this almost every day, you know, as often as he could.

• 4:02Tim Ferriss?

  How did he get to the breathwork? What is his story?

• 4:07Speaker 03

  He was extremely sick as a child, had various lung infections, various respiratory disorders. And he was slated for surgery. They were going to remove a large part of his lungs. And at that time, a missionary came in to see him and said, hey, I was just, you know, in the far east and I heard about this thing called yoga. He said, well, what's yoga? I said, let me tell you about it. And he showed him some breathing techniques. So Dubard said, I don't want to do the surgery yet. Give me a few weeks to try to rehabilitate myself. And everyone thought he was crazy. And not only did he rehabilitate himself,

• 4:49Speaker 03

  he gained this almost superhuman strength by adopting these breathing practices. And that was in the 1950s. So that's how far ahead of the curve this guy was.

• 5:01Tim Ferriss?

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

• 5:43Speaker 03

  Tummo is an ancient breathwork practice from the Bhan Buddhists that allows you to both generate heat in your body and store it. So this is what the monks have used in the Himalayas for thousands of years reportedly to help keep themselves warm. So it was a survival technique. And depending on who you talk to, some people say, oh, it's very religious, very spiritual. Other people say it's very practical. It's just a practical thing. You can learn this. It's a mechanical skill that you can learn. Where it gets A bit more fuzzy is what is Tummo? What is officially Tummo? What is the saccharine version of Tummo? Is Wim Hof version Tummo?

• 6:25Speaker 03

  And I try not to get into the weeds too much in the book, but basically there are two different versions. There's the traditional type in which you breathe very slowly and you reduce your metabolism and somehow the heat in your body goes up. Shouldn't be possible. There it is. And then there's the other type, which I guess isn't officially Tummo, but people still call it Tummo, which is the Wim Hof style breathing, the extremely intense hyperventilation techniques, followed by breath holds and building pressure in your body.

• 6:58Tim Ferriss?

  Tummo light registered trademark.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know what? I think it's still available.

• 7:05Tim Ferriss?

  I have all the URLs, guys. I'm squatting on them if you want any. And in the case of Tummo, is that something that you have personally experimented with? Or have you left that on the shelf?

• 7:14Speaker 03

  I've done the commercial version of it many times. I still do it today. It absolutely works if you are cold, if you're in the ocean, if you're in the snow, wherever you are, if you're cold, you can do this and you can check your body temperature very, very quickly. The slower one is a much better kept secret. You're not going to find too many instructions for it. I've talked to a few Bon Buddhist monks about this and they kind of smile and say, oh, you know, maybe if, you know, you hang out with us for another 10 years and spend some time in the Himalayas. So, which has not been possible, but I do know some dedicated breathwork people that have gone the various levels deep into this and are now getting hints about it.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  But now they won't tell me because they say,

• 8:02Tim Ferriss?

  Of course.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  I've got a secret. You gotta do the work, so.

• 8:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Fight Club of Breathwork.

• 8:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:09Tim Ferriss?

  Most folks don't want to do the Jiro Dreams of Sushi route with the breathwork, I suppose. But in the case of what you're practicing, would it be then akin to what Wim Hof would promote in terms of the breathwork? Or could you describe what it is that you do for folks, just in brief?

• 8:26Speaker 03

  Sure. So the Wim Hof method is about thirty very deep breaths, extremely deep breaths in quick repetition, followed by a breath hold at a neutral position. And then you take one big breath in, hold for thirty seconds, and go back to that cycle. And you do this over and over and over. So the Tumo version of this is the commercial Tumo Lite, L I T E, registered trademark, is you do that, those same motions. But when you're doing the breath hold, you're holding the breath in, and you're creating a pressure in your body. You're also doing some different arm movements with it. So it's almost like

• 9:07Speaker 03

  you're creating compression. It's almost like a piston, your diaphragm is a piston, and you're creating that compression. And I'll be damned if someone does this and doesn't break out into a sweat, and it doesn't matter how cold you are. I've seen it time and time again. And anyone that's done Wim Hof can attest to it as well.

• 9:25Tim Ferriss?

  I think, I think somebody on the internet is going to fact check me. But I think the first large public interview that Wim Hof ever did was on this podcast. It's a hundred years ago. I will say for folks who dive into that rabbit hole, be very cautious about the cold exposure. There are lots of documented cases of frostbite and people losing digits and so on. So don't immediately go out and hike barefoot up to elevation, up to your knees in snow. So just watch that and never practice this stuff in water also. What is your personal development journey look like with breath work? I guess another way to frame that and ask it more simply is what has breath work done for you? What have the outcomes looked like for you?

• 10:07Speaker 03

  I think the main outcome was at the beginning where it made me realize that there are many more things you can do with your body to improve your health and focus on food and exercise and sleep. And those, those are the three big things that a lot of people have been talking about for good reason, right? They're absolutely essential. But I had all of those things pretty well dialed in around 12 years ago now. It's quite, quite a long time ago. I was eating the right foods. I was sleeping eight hours. I was exercising all the time and I had chronic respiratory issues just constantly. This was when I was in San Francisco where I'd been for a couple of decades. So I was surfing a lot, but constantly getting pneumonia, constantly getting bronchitis.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  And I would go to my doctor and the doctor I didn't know better at this time would give me antibiotics, the Z-Pak. I would take them because I was extremely naive. And this went on for years and years until these respiratory problems became so bad that I could actually hear myself breathing at night. When I was working out, I could hear like there was something very deeply wrong with my respiration. And it was from a suggestion of a good doctor friend of mine who was looking at me. And she said, you need to do breath work. And before then I'd never done any breath work. I had heard about it because I lived in San Francisco, but I had no interest in it. The short version of this very long story is I did it and I haven't had one of those issues since.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  And so that convinced me that there was a signal here to pursue. And there could be real data and science behind it. It wasn't just some placebo thing as I had been told. It was a real biological function that you could focus on.

• 11:45Tim Ferriss?

  What strikes me so strongly about breathing also is that you have an autonomous function that you can also control. It's this sort of API, this interface between conscious and sort of automatic or autonomous nervous function, which makes it, I suppose, on so many levels, really potentially powerful for you. When you began wading into breath work, what was the first type that seemed to impart benefits to you? Do you remember what you tested?

• 12:19Speaker 03

  I absolutely remember it. I remember it vividly because I still do it to this day. It's called a Sudarshan Kriya.

• 12:26Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wow. How do you spell that?

• 12:28Speaker 03

  S U D A R S H A N space K R I Y A.

• 12:37Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah, I never would have gotten that right. Okay, thank you.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  It was through the art of living and, you know, you do this weekend workshop before they teach you the breath work. And a lot of the practice in the workshop were not things I was vibing with at all. A lot of people were getting benefits from them, but it was making me extremely uncomfortable. And I almost bailed.

• 12:59Tim Ferriss?

  Wait, wait, wait, can you give a, can you give us an example?

• 13:03Speaker 03

  You're not supposed to talk about it and I'm going to respect the secrecy of this. Uh, I'll, I can talk around it, though.

• 13:11Tim Ferriss?

  You can talk around it.

• 13:12Speaker 03

  Have you ever sat in front of someone and a stranger and stared into their eyes for 10 minutes? Unblinking?

• 13:19Tim Ferriss?

  No, that's counter to my evolutionary impulses. Yeah, got it. This is that kind of thing.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  I'm just gonna leave it right there and you can draw your own conclusions for the rest.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  But then, some people were, were breaking down, having these awesome experiences. I'm like, good for them, but this was just not my thing. Until I did the breath work and then I, I understood why they had you do all these other practices. And the breath work absolutely blew my socks off. It's not that intense, but my body had such a reaction that I was wearing a shirt like this and I sweated through everything. My socks were damp. There were sweat stains on my jean. My hair was sobbing wet from just sitting in a corner of a very dark and cold room, just breathing at this rhythm. And I said, oh, my God, what is this stuff unleashing in me? Like, what else is bottled up that I need to get out?

• 14:11Speaker 03

  And I don't want to sound too woo woo, but it was the physiological reaction my body had to this. It was like a switch was just flipped on. And it made me very curious about breathing and other breath work practices.

• 14:29Tim Ferriss?

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• 15:13Tim Ferriss?

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• 15:33Tim Ferriss?

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• 16:16Tim Ferriss?

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• 16:55Tim Ferriss?

  For those people who are interested, please correct me if I'm getting this wrong, but there are, I believe, videos on YouTube that people can find of monks, if that's a fair description, drying wet fabric on their baths using Tumo. And you can actually watch this in real time as it's happening. I mean, there's a lot out there that people can find. And also, from a personal perspective, I mean, years ago, when I was first experimenting with the Wim Hof stuff, and did some things in person with him, did some things in person also with David Blaine, pretty shortly after, I think he broke the, if I'm getting the term right, static apnea, sort of oxygen-assisted breath hold time, it was 17 minutes and something.

• 17:38Tim Ferriss?

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

• 18:22Tim Ferriss?

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

• 19:05Tim Ferriss?

  for help for various things. For you, what has evolved after the book came out? I'm just so interested to know what has developed since the book was published for you, whether it's additional insights, stories out of the woodwork that have seemed worth digging into, anything that comes to mind.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  The book came out in the depths of lockdown and so I had nothing else to do, just like most other people. So I just did podcasts all day long, three or four, five a day. So I was in this little bubble for about a year and a half. And then when it was finally time to come out and see the light, I've spoken at medical schools and banks and hedge funds and all that. And the reason I mention that is because every single time I've spoken, every single time afterwards, there's a line of people, they're all complaining about the same things and they're completely pissed off. They're pissed off that they had to

• 20:07Speaker 03

  learn about this stuff in a book by a journalist and not from their doctor. And they're angry because their kid is super sick and didn't have to be sick for the past three years. They're angry because they still have asthma, they're still snoring and sleep apnea. So it was by engaging with these people and then engaging with a number of different researchers that I went on an additional learning journey, right? I'm still very interested in this stuff. I want to know the things that I should have included in the book. I want to know how to answer questions better. So I pursued it. And I think one of the biggest things that I found, and I don't know how interesting this is going to be to talk about, but I'll throw it out there and then you can edit it out if you

• 20:50Speaker 03

  don't want, is the amount of kids that have sleep disorder breathing. This can be snoring or sleep apnea, or some sort of dysfunction in their breathing at night.

• 21:04Speaker 03

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

• 21:48Speaker 03

  something that I try to talk about whenever I'm discussing this stuff, because it's vitally important. I think that we've been approaching ADHD as a neurological condition. I think it is mostly a breathing problem.

• 22:00Tim Ferriss?

  Could you give people an idea? I suggest everybody get the book, by the way. We're going to talk about a lot of different aspects of breathing, but it doesn't begin to approach what you've covered in your book. So everybody should check it out. Nonetheless, I want to make sure that people listening, for some of them, you know, they're going to be on the run, they're going to be deeply interested in this particular Venn diagram, the ADHD or other types of neuro atypical conditions and breathing disorders. And it makes me also think this is separate, although maybe my parents have ADHD, but they've gone through sleep assessments, they are prescribed a CPAP machine, and there is exactly zero compliance.

• 22:43Tim Ferriss?

  They will not wear those things. I tried to wear a CPAP machine, and I was committed to wearing it, tore it off my face every single night that I tried to use it. And therefore, I'm wondering if somebody's listening, and they've never had, for instance, their child assessed. Do you suggest them getting a particular type of assessment? Or is it more a matter of testing and intervention or a type of breath work to see if there is any type of result? Is there any research also to support the kind of overlapping Venn diagram? I know that's a compound question.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  There is an incredible amount of research to support this. I heard about this from researchers. I heard about it from doctors, from leaders in the field at esteemed institutions. They've been hollering about this for years and exactly 0% of the population, either on the medical side or the general population, has been listening to them. So the research is there and you could type it up in any search engine and find these studies. Very, very easy to find them. As far as assessments for kids, yes, there are things that you can do in your house right now. What a lot of doctors, family physicians will do if you say, hey, I want to check out my kid's breathing and they'll say, okay, we're going to go to sleep lab and you're going to do this and they're not going to be able to sleep very well, so we're going

• 24:02Speaker 03

  to give them sleeping pills and that's going to mess up their breathing and then they're going to be diagnosed with a sleep disorder breathing and given a CPAP and say adios, right? And 50% of people given a CPAP within eight weeks won't use them. And the other large percent will use them and it actually makes their breathing worse in many cases. So it's not a good solution. So for those parents that want to assess their kid's breathing and your own breathing, there are a number of ways to do it. Is your kid a mouth breather in the daytime? Is your kid breathing through the mouth often? It doesn't have to be 50% of the time or 40% of the time, but enough for you to notice. And then when the kid is sleeping, wait for the kid to go to sleep, sneak into their room and listen to their breathing.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  If you can hear them breathing, they are struggling to breathe. If they are breathing through the mouth, they are struggling to breathe. If they are snoring or have sleep apnea, they are inhibiting their ability to grow, physical growth, they are causing neurological damage to their brains, they're increasing their chances of having diabetes later on in life. And there's this whole laundry list and I'm not trying to be a scaremonger here. This is easy. Easy to look up, not controversial stuff. So I would start with that. There's also an app. I have no affiliation with this app. I get no money from mentioning it. It's called Snore Lab. There's also another one called Snore Clock. And they have free versions of this.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  And what it is, is you put it on your phone and you place it about four feet away from whatever sleeping head you want, and it records how you are breathing throughout the night with audio recording and it creates a graph for you. And then it includes a score, a sleep score. And this is a very quick way of getting an initial signal if there is a problem. And then there's a whole bunch of things to do after that, but I would start with those things.

• 25:55Tim Ferriss?

  If they get a positive, what are some of the things that they can do? For instance, I don't know if this is one of them. Maybe it's not because maybe it's not curative or incomplete, but a friend of mine, professional drummer, one of the top in his field, sent me a package of what he called hostage tape, right? And it's mouth tape. And he said it completely changed his life from a sleep perspective. Ultimately, it looks like very, very, very, very expensive kinesio tape, but could you speak to what can be done, particularly with kids? They're not going to want some Bayon Mask Darth Vader CPAP thing on top of their face, presumably.

• 26:35Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe some will comply, but what are some of the things that you can use or do in a case of a positive?

• 26:42Speaker 03

  The number one thing you can do is become an obligate nasal breather. So it would be almost impossible to help to reduce these symptoms without doing that first. That includes starting in the daytime, creating a new habit around nasal breathing. And then you can allow that to sort of bleed into the night. Once you get comfortable enough with it in the day, you can then use these different tapes. You can use hostage tape if you want. There's a bunch of different tapes. You can go down to a drugstore and get any micro pore tape. There's 30 different kinds. They all work. Find one that. You think is best and you use just a little piece of tape on your lips.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  A lot of people think this is a hostage situation, which is why hostage tape has that name. But all you need is a little piece of tape to close your mouth. A lot of parents are going to be apprehensive about doing this to their kids. So some entrepreneurial breathing people, Patrick McEwen, developed something called Myo Tape. Again, no affiliation with this. I know Patrick, I'm a huge fan of this product because it goes around the mouth. And all it does is it gently trains a kid to keep their lips shut. They can open their mouth at any time. They can even talk wearing this. It's just when they go unconscious and muscles relax. And I think that stuff is a complete game changer.

• 28:06Speaker 03

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

• 28:47Tim Ferriss?

  Is there anything else that you did to address your own mouth breathing or sleep quality?

• 28:54Speaker 03

  Once I sort of hopped on the Breathwork wagon, I rode it into various strange worlds. And one of those strange worlds was into the ENT, ear, nose and throat surgeon world. And it was while I was down at Stanford interviewing one of the leaders in the field, Dr. Nyack, that I came across a breathing and sleep and respiratory therapist. And she specialized in people who had surgeries and all this. And she had this big roll of tape on her desk. And I asked her what that tape was. And she says, I prescribe it to everybody. It was sleep tape. So I thought it sounded completely wacky. I went home and looked up online what I could about it. Everything I found online seemed insane. And so I was apprehensive.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  And I did something I don't suggest anyone do. I just started wearing it immediately at night, and it sucked for about two weeks. It was terrible. Then I got over the hump, and I've worn it almost every single night for the past seven years. And it's really hard for me to sleep without. If I'm camping, I'm wearing it. If I'm sleeping on airplane, I don't wear it. I have seen people wearing it on airplanes, on long flights, which is a whole other level of commitment. Only a handful of times have I not worn it, and I immediately feel it. I can see it in my sleep scores, right? So it's not something I'm making up.

• 30:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, sometimes I wear my gag ball on international flights. It makes people really uncomfortable.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  It's cool if you do that thing where you put the blanket over your head. Then I don't care, right? But when they tuck the blanket into the collar, and there's this big piece of tape, it just, it feels a little wrong.

• 30:42Tim Ferriss?

  Just tears streaming down their face. Alright, so the mouth tape, I'm gonna give this another shot because I've frequently wondered what I can do that is also easy for travel to improve sleep quality. This has been the thorn in my side since I was very, very young. I've always had very, very challenged sleep quality. And I chip away at it here or there. I figured out a number of different things that are reasonably under my control, at least in a hotel room, like temperature, for instance. But I would love to segue perhaps from the mouth tape to the measurement of air quality that you've done.

• 31:25Tim Ferriss?

  I guess specifically CO2 levels. Do you want to just take that and explain what it is that you documented?

• 31:34Speaker 03

  This was something I had no idea about when I was writing the book and it's something I got glued into about three and a half years ago. And so it's the concept that we acknowledge that CO2 is going up in the atmosphere, right? You can look at any graph, you can go out and measure it right now, it's 424 parts per million. But a lot of us aren't considering what the air quality, specifically the amount of CO2 is in indoor environments. We spend 90% of our time indoors and we're not looking at the air quality. So I had heard from a researcher, he said, you know, you're the breath guy, you should be checking this out. I said, well, what do I do? He said, why don't you get a carbon dioxide monitor and take it around with you and just

• 32:18Speaker 03

  look at the air quality. And so initially I was just like, well, who cares? Who cares if there's more CO2 or not? Until I found all of these studies and there's about 30 to 40 years of studies and they're done by governments around the world. So again, this is not sketchy stuff by some dude in a garage in Taos or something. These are like real, which no, no disrespect, love that place. But this is real science, real data that anyone has access to. And what it turns out is when you get to about triple the rate of CO2 in an indoor environment, so starting at around 1,500 parts per million, again outdoors, it's around 425 parts per million.

• 33:00Speaker 03

  You start to find that in schools, certain cognitive test scores can go down about 50% 5-0% by tripling the amount of CO2. And then you get up to 2,500 parts per million, you're looking at headaches, chronic migraines, further decrease of test score. And then it goes up from there all the way into like serious cognitive disabilities up into 5,000 parts per million. So that's what you're looking at. That's the chart. And I've been carrying this thing around with me for about three and a half years. I've been absolutely gassed by what I've found. I travel a lot, I travel around 100 days a year and you know,

• 33:44Speaker 03

  Average CO2 when you were entering on to a an airplane. And all suddenly everyone just starts falling asleep. They're not tired. It's because the CO2 levels are around 2,500 parts per million. So if you wonder why you feel like crap after four hour flight. I think it has a lot to do with the very low amount of oxygen and the very high amount of CO2. And then all of these recommendations from engineering association saying it should never be over 1,000 parts per million. That's when it's going to start to feel stuffy. I have not recorded one flight anywhere on planet earth where it hasn't been over 1,000 parts per million. Every single flight is.

• 34:29Tim Ferriss?

  I'm sitting in hotel right now. And I'm not sure. I think they're trying to prevent suicides. I may not be able to open any windows, but are there any approaches that you can embrace to address this? If you travel a lot, what can you do?

• 34:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I could tell you what I've done. I will tell you a little information about hotels. So I carry this thing around and I record every hotel I go into. And some are pretty good and some are extremely bad. And if you've noticed, and I'm sure you have, I just know you have. In the past 10 years, something very curious has happened. In every hotel, you used to be able to open the window, maybe not all the way because they don't want to get sued if you commit suicide. But at least this much, six inches, seven inches, right? Almost every hotel had that. Now they're all glued up and they are glued up because heating and cooling accounts for like 50% of the cost of maintenance. So what they do to save money.

• 35:30Tim Ferriss?

  Good news, we are lead platinum. Bad news, your brain is dying when you stay here.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, so what they do instead of pumping in fresh air and heating it and cooling it, which would cost them money. They recirculate the air from all the rooms. And you know this because you're recording the CO2 levels. And what I've found is in the hotels that have the big plaques outside that say lead certified, green certified, that are the most expensive. Have by far the worst quality air. I've recorded 2,800 parts per million waking up in one of these hotels.

• 36:11Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, I was joking, but I nailed it.

• 36:14Speaker 03

  No.

• 36:14Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 36:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. This is just a bummer parade coming from me, but this is something. Because once you see this and carry these things around, you're like, I am so screwed. Because I'm stuck in here and I can't open a window and it starts to make you crazy. So my solution for that is you have yourself or your assistant. Call ahead and ask a hotel, do you have windows? Well, sir, of course we have windows. Can you open those windows just a little bit? Just a little bit. And those are the hotels you stay at.

• 36:49Tim Ferriss?

  Wow. What CO2 monitor do you use? Or what's a good option for folks if they want to embrace? I'm just thinking of how many people, we were talking about Venn diagrams. So there are, I mean, my like psyche Venn diagram, there's like a OCD and hypochondria. And you're like, pushing those over. And then in the bullseye is CO2 levels in hotels.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  And listen, I, I know those hypochondriacs everywhere you go, they're assessing everything. They drive, some of them are my lovely friends. I love them, but they drive me fricking crazy. I never want to be that, but this is a real, real thing. And it's something that you should pay attention to. So I bought about 10 different CO2 monitors and assessed them against a professional device. And most of the crap you see on Amazon is worthless. Don't bother with it. There is one brand, again, I get no money. I wish I did, maybe I should endorse these products. But uh, it's called an Aranet 4. Aranet 4, A R A N E T 4. That's the best one. You know what?

• 37:56Speaker 03

  I probably even have it in my pack right now. I could show you. It's the most accurate one and the battery life lasts forever. It lasts about three to four months. And once you start doing it, it's hard to stop. And I got so fired up about this that we're now creating, we're working on it right now. Creating the database, I'm trying to arm about a hundred people with these things. And then everything will automatically upload to this database. So you could see what hotels have good air quality, what restaurants have good air quality, because governments, let me tell you, governments are going to do nothing about this. It's when companies start getting outed for recirculating all of this breath backwash from all of these people in the hotel that they're going to start paying attention.

• 38:40Tim Ferriss?

  Wow. How safe is it to assume that if you're in a major city like LA, Chicago, New York, that you're getting better quality air if you open the window in the hotel? Is that pretty much always a safe assumption? Where do you get to a point where you're like, I'm better drinking in this backwash in the hotel than opening the windows?

• 39:00Speaker 03

  That's a really, really good point. Maybe Shanghai in summer, you know, maybe, maybe Mumbai in, in spring. I have not assessed that. I think that's a good point. If you're in a hotel that's very high up, right? And the CO2 level is just absolutely pedal to the metal, 3,000 parts per million. My assumption would be that opening that window, you would have, there's more benefits than harm from that. Again, I think there's a lot of variables, but the CO2, if you're talking immediate acute harm versus chronic harm, the acute

• 39:39Speaker 03

  harm from CO2, your ability to rebound after a long flight, not feel hung over, not feel jet lag, not feel drowsy. I think that's a big one.

• 39:51Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I don't know if this is true. People can do their own due diligence. I wish I knew the answer offhand, but I know that ketones, exogenous ketones, for instance, I mean, there are many different types, ketones, salts, ketone, monoesters, diesters, et cetera, but have been developed to protect.

• 40:08Tim Ferriss?

  Divers, specifically military divers, from oxygen toxicity. But I wonder if it increases CO2 tolerance. I wonder if that might have a place in the travel kit. I'll let people do their own research on that. But what else is in your travel kit? Given how much you travel, whether it's related to breath or not, is there anything that is non-obvious, like the CO2 monitor, that you can speak to?

• 40:31Speaker 03

  Right when I was ripping on hypochondriacs and people obsessed with... We really want to go there.

• 40:38Tim Ferriss?

  You have a gallon of Purell in three ounce packets.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. I didn't used to be one of those people until I just got completely drained after doing too many tours and then got older, right? And now I'm kind of one of those people-ish. I have a couple of nightlights that are red lights and very typical. Everyone's just like nodding, tell me something new. Those are the only light source that I have in hotels. And especially important after a long flight. So I have this CO2 monitor. If there's a window, I will absolutely open that. I'll try to take a cold shower before bed, you know, especially if I am very jet lagged. As far as the other tech, I carry, you know, a lot of vitamin D, K2, vitamin E,

• 41:27Speaker 03

  in case I feel something coming on. I have some other supplements I carry around as well. And without getting too weird here, I have this very small electric device, that a frequency device that I am currently assessing its validity. Anecdotally, I could say it's been a complete game changer for me. And what I usually do at night is I plug into that thing and I really feel a difference. I know about six other people that have these. And so we're starting to sniff around at collecting some real data about it. So that's the main thing. In that little zip pocket that you have in suitcases, this stuff just stays in there. It's more important than a toothbrush. You can get a toothbrush anywhere.

• 42:11Speaker 03

  You can't get a frequency device anywhere and you can't get a red nightlight anywhere. So I just keep this in there and I carry it with me wherever I go.

• 42:21Tim Ferriss?

  All right, so a couple of clarifying questions, since all of my listeners are denizens of Weirdville. So the red light, is that, just looks like a children's nightlight that plugs into an outlet next to the sink? Or are we talking? Something more substantial so that you can actually operate and walk around your room.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  I have two that are able to fade up and fade down in the bathroom. You usually don't need anything. I can keep the door open at night and I also will often carry a light bulb, a small, not a big one, because those are pain, but I have these little light bulbs. One of the most important things I didn't mention is, is the sleep tape thing. And if I don't bring that, or if I've forgotten it, I'm the guy at 12:30 a.m. walking down the street looking for a liquor store that had some sort of packing tape or something. It's that critical to me. But for the red lights, they have little bulbs and also these nightlights are bright enough. At night, I try not to be too productive, especially if I'm tired. I want to sit, maybe I'll listen to something, but I want the lights to be very low. And I think that there's plenty of good research on that, not disturbing

• 43:23Speaker 03

  your circadian rhythm. So we won't need to get into that.

• 43:30Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. Many of you know how deeply I love Japan and its culture of unwavering dedication to craft, refinement, commitment to continuous improvement. But why do I bring this all up? Well, the same focus on improving one thing over the span of years is found in today's sponsor, AG1. They are now unveiling AG1 Next Gen, the same single scoop, once a day product that I use myself, but now with more vitamins, more minerals, and five new clinically studied probiotic strains shown to support digestive and immune health. AG1 is also NSF certified for sport, one of the most rigorous independent quality and safety certification programs in the supplement industry. So check them out. Subscribe today

• 44:15Tim Ferriss?

  to try the next gen of AG1. Listeners will also get a free bottle of D3K2 and AG1 Welcome Kit and five of the upgraded AG1 Travel Packs with your first order. So start your journey with AG1's Next Gen and experience the difference firsthand. Simply go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drinkag1.com/tim.

• 44:42Tim Ferriss?

  How do you pack a light bulb without it shattering? Is, and now I'm just envisioning a normal old light bulb. I imagine there's a little more to it, but how do you pack that?

• 44:54Speaker 03

  These are the small LED ones. So the bulb is actually plastic. It's plastic. I would love to find an incandescent one because now I've been hearing about flickering and I'm starting to notice that a bit because I'm going clinically insane. And you have just, you've just outed me unfortunately. So any of you inventors out there, since now incandescence, you don't have to get, you know, charge $400 if they find one in your house. Need to invent a small, little red incandescent bulb and I'll buy a dozen of them. So there you go.

• 45:29Tim Ferriss?

  All right. This STEM device that's too tantalizing. What does this look like? Because I am very much, very deep down the rabbit hole of all things kind of biomedical, not to say this is medical, talk to your professional, entertainment and informational use only, but what is this thing? And where do you apply it? How do you administer it?

• 45:52Speaker 03

  I'm in a, about a six year journey into this world that's led me down. I would say the vast majority of the paths that's led me down have been complete BS. There's so much stuff, if you look up online, that is just absolute garbage. If they haven't even tested the stuff on biological matter, on cells at least, don't buy it. Who cares what their claims are? So that's the most important thing. If you're starting to look at electric medicine, but it is a real thing. PMFs, which were considered quackery, you know, 30 years ago are now becoming a staple of many offices.

• 46:29Tim Ferriss?

  What are PMFs?

• 46:30Speaker 03

  That's pulse electromagnetic fields. These devices that you can plug into, they're amazing for pain, but it turns out that the history of these devices is much deeper than that. It goes back to the 50s and 60s and Russia was doing a ton of research into this. So to answer your question, this is a somewhat Russian device. It's about this big.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  I won't say it's officially Russian. It's more Soviet than Russian, to be honest. You'll get what I mean.

• 47:02Speaker 03

  The aesthetics of this thing are so like Atari 2600 that it's just so, I just really dave myself with that one. Anyway, so it's about this big and it has all of these.

• 47:12Tim Ferriss?

  This big, so it's like 10 inches or so for those people who can't see.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  Okay, I'm sorry. I was holding my hands too close to the, uh, so like when you catch a fish, right?

• 47:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I was just gonna say.

• 47:23Speaker 03

  So, so it's about five, okay, you want specifics, about five inches wide by about four inches tall. And it's about an inch and a half thick and it has about 40 preset programs on it. And programs for grounding, when you're not able to ground, programs for Schumann waves, programs for cardiovascular health, programs for respiratory health. And I will be damned if this thing hasn't really fixed a lot of issues. And again, this is 100% anecdotal.

• 47:56Tim Ferriss?

  You know, anecdotes, okay.

• 47:58Speaker 03

  You name it, you start getting into this.

• 48:00Tim Ferriss?

  Unpaid bills? I have a VMF device for you.

• 48:04Speaker 03

  It's just you manifest money, everybody. You plug this thing in and you can't keep it out of the doors and windows. It just starts coming in.

• 48:14Tim Ferriss?

  Another reason to have your hotel window open, yeah.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  There are many reasons, that's, that's one of them. But, uh, it sends out, we're really gonna get into this. It sends out certain frequencies that have been studied, that have been found to reduce the loads of viruses and bacteria and fungi and more. And I know what a lot of you are thinking, this is completely based on zero. But I'm here to tell you, there's a lot of legit research. And if I was gonna place my money on anything, this is where things are gonna go. We have exhausted chemicals. We've reached chemical overload. Chemicals are fantastic. They're great. They can do so much.

• 48:59Speaker 03

  There's this whole other layer to health and I really feel like this is where stuff is moving.

• 49:05Tim Ferriss?

  So we're on the same page there. I mean, I recently interviewed scientists by the name of Dr. Kevin Tracy, who's, I would argue, the most cited, most credible, or certainly one of the most credible. I mean, he's incredibly well-published. Researchers looking at legitimate vagus nerve stimulation. And then you have researchers at Tufts, like Professor Levin and others, who are doing incredible things. I mean, ranging from looking at salamanders and axolotls, I want to say, for regeneration and how electricity can be used in cancer applications. I'm very much looking at this incredibly closely, as it sounds like you

• 49:48Tim Ferriss?

  are. For people who want to specifically, was it PMF or PEMF?

• 49:54Speaker 03

  PEMF. PEMF devices.

• 49:58Tim Ferriss?

  For people who wanted to learn more about this, what should they search online? If they wanted to read up on the type of thing that you're using?

• 50:05Speaker 03

  They should read my new book, coming out next year. No, no, no, no, no. This is actually not in my new book. So what I would do is 100% don't go on Amazon and look up these devices. Some of them can. I keep saying, don't go on Amazon. Have you heard that three or four times? Because I certainly have. Amazon's great, just not for certain things. And this is not one of the things you want to go on it for. Because the problem is, some of these devices can put out the specific frequency that has been studied to be beneficial, but they're not putting it out at the load, at the power it needs to be. So they're paying

• 50:45Speaker 03

  lip service to the science without actually going deep and providing the therapeutic effect. So some of these devices are very expensive, you know, up to 20, 30 grand. Some of the smaller devices-

• 50:59Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, okay, that is expensive.

• 51:01Speaker 03

  But those are the ones used in clinics. These are the ones used for people with severe chronic pain issues. For everyday devices, there are some cheaper ones. I don't want to endorse anything. I don't want to name them by name because I'm not done studying how legit they are. But once you start digging in a little deeper, you start to see that in Eastern Europe, these things have been used continuously for 60, 70 years. And maybe they're all crazy and are suckers for a placebo effect, or maybe these things work. And so that's where I've started sniffing around. And this thing I got that I've convinced a few other people to get, I mean, we've seen

• 51:43Speaker 03

  just some extraordinary stuff that doesn't make any sense. And so I'm just trying to parse how much of that is a, you know, a placebo-ish effect and how much of it can be measured and repeated in animal models.

• 51:59Tim Ferriss?

  If somebody just wanted to read up on the research or learn a bit more about this without selecting a device necessarily, where would you suggest they start?

• 52:09Speaker 03

  I would say read The Body Electric by Robert O. Becker, doctor who basically paved the way for Michael Levin at Tufts.

• 52:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 52:20Speaker 03

  And if any of this sounds crazy, all you have to do is read any of Michael Levin's papers and you're like, oh my God.

• 52:28Tim Ferriss?

  Your head will explode. Yeah.

• 52:30Speaker 03

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

• 52:59Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for that. Now, you also glossed over other supplements. I recognized D, K2, E, what's in your et cetera other supplement bucket?

• 53:09Speaker 03

  Oh, boy. Again, I never thought I'd be one of those guys carrying around the granny vitamin packs

• 53:19Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I've got two of them 10 feet from me. And can I tell you, I just to endorse the granny pill packs? I thought those looked so ridiculous, added more labor. So I would carry around basically a pharmacy of bottles with me. And then when I started using the granny packs, I was like, why did I not start doing this 30 years ago? It saves so much time on a daily basis. So just to give you permission to use the granny packs.

• 53:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've got the granny XLs going on and those are also in the suitcase. So, I mean, this is, everyone talks about supplements, but if you want to go there, we can go, I've got all the typical stuff. I wish I had some cutting edge new thing you've never heard of, but all of you will be yawning in unison if I told you there's a little CoQ10 in there. There's a little Natto kinase, there's the old classics that are in there. Nothing cutting edge.

• 54:15Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, got it. So the Natto kinase, that's going to have the K2 in it presumably, right? Is that, that's the source?

• 54:21Speaker 03

  It will, but I have this special pack in case I get sick, in case I get COVID on the road. I have a special pack because if you're taking heroic doses of D, then you need to be taking E and A and extra K2 with that. So very important. So that's why I have that in its own separate little container, the sort of emergency pack.

• 54:47Tim Ferriss?

  And if anyone out there is thinking, you know, I'm looking for the next way to prove that I'm really tough. Well, forget about doing breath work and freezing cold water. If you've never had Natto from Japan, then just eat a bowl of that dish and that'll be the new tough man TikTok challenge for people who have never tried it.

• 55:08Speaker 03

  Speaking of that, like, I was like, screw this. I don't need supplements, man. I just need to eat better. And then you start to do the research and realize that no vegetables contain the minerals that they used to, right? It's virtually impossible to get all these things the way our ancestors did. And NATO was one of those things. I went down to a Japanese market and I said, I'm not taking these pills, man. I'm gonna start my morning. How many, Japan's awesome. That place is perfect. There's no crime. It's beautiful. Said, I'm gonna start my day every day with this. Wow. You know, day two, no way. It's the stringiness that will really get you.

• 55:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so people can try that out if they haven't tried it. That'll be the podcast challenge. Let's, I appreciate you indulging me on all those questions since I pay attention to my travel kit. I do. And I've got all sorts of electronic devices all over the place. It's kind of absurd. I literally have an extra suitcase for all my blood flow restriction stuff. I did just have elbow surgery. So granted, I have kind of an excuse. My e-stim for lymphatic drainage. I've got so much crap with me right now. But on that note, I guess this is a bit of a, kind of an awkward sequitur, I suppose. But my surgery came from a sports injury. So I'm thinking about athletes.

• 56:28Tim Ferriss?

  And there were a few things in some of my prep materials here that I wanted to touch on because I hadn't seen them before. So for athletes and professional athletes and so on, we see nasal breathing during training, breath hold sprints, which I first was exposed to way back in the day with Laird Hamilton at his house. One of the kings of big wave surfing, surfing giants, I think, or riding giants, documentary. What are the two? People should watch. It's insane, especially for people who don't know the name Laird. If you've ever seen toe in surfing, Laird helped develop and popularize that. Stand up paddle boarding, he kind of resurrected it and helped make it popular. Just a beast of an athlete. And so I remember seeing him on an assault bike, one of those bikes where you're also pushing with your arms,

• 57:12Tim Ferriss?

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

• 57:35Speaker 03

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

• 58:20Speaker 03

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

• 59:01Speaker 03

  And what they find with almost all these athletes is the majority of them are not engaging their diaphragm. The diaphragm is this muscle organ that sits beneath the lungs. And when you breathe in, the diaphragm goes down. And when you breathe out, it relaxes and comes back up. What they've found is most athletes are just breathing into the chest. Very limited diaphragmatic movement. And if you do that, it's a complete waste of energy and it's not efficient. The reason is you are just able to take little bits of breath each time. So that requires you to breathe so much more and it jacks your heart rate. If you were able to breathe 10 times a minute or 20

• 59:45Speaker 03

  Times a minute instead of forty times or sixty times or a hundred times a minute. Then your heart rate will go down, which means your tolerance for whatever thing that you're doing will go up. And your recovery time goes down. So it's basic math here, but so many people aren't clued into it. And once they start focusing on the breath and adopting these better habits. I mean, these trainers are just making monsters out of these people. Their performance goes through the roof, recovery times go down, makes a huge difference. Still, I can count on one hand how many joggers I see out running in the morning that are breathing in and out of their nose. And that's the number one thing at lower zones to be breathing in and out of your nose. And just no one's doing it.

• 1:00:29Tim Ferriss?

  And is Bolt Score Tracking a shorthand, simple way of tracking breathing efficiency or what is that?

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  It is the body oxygen level test. It used to be called the blood oxygen level test. But Patrick McEwan changed that because he got some flack from some pulmonologists. What this is, is you take, we're all gonna do it. I'm not gonna tell you. I'm gonna show you like a good writer. That's what they do. So we're gonna relax your shoulders a little bit. We're gonna relax the space between our eyes, relax your tongue. You're gonna be breathing in and out of your nose and you're gonna take an inhale in, just real calm and out. We're gonna do this two more times, inhaling and out, inhaling and out. Let that breath naturally come out. Hold your breath, hold your nostrils, hold your nostrils.

• 1:01:21Speaker 03

  So on that exhale, you're holding your breath in your nostrils. And you're gonna hold your breath until you feel the first urge to breathe. This is not a competition. So if your diaphragm quivers, if you swallow, if that urge to breathe is palpable. And you're aware of it, you stop and you calculate how much time has passed. That's it.

• 1:01:45Tim Ferriss?

  So it's three normal breaths or are they deeper than normal?

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  No, and this is where people try to cheat because they're athletes and they're competing, try to get ahead. Normal breaths and then on the exhale, this is not a Laird Hamilton.

• 1:02:00Speaker 03

  This is down to neutral, hold your breath, down to neutral, hold your breath, and then you start the timer. And what you're going to find is the more you focus on your breath, the more you learn how to take fewer, deeper, slower breaths, which oxygenate your body so much more efficiently, which lower your heart rate, which also increase your heart rate variability, all of these other benefits, you're going to watch that Bolt score go up and up and up and up. Usually after about maybe a week or two, you could see it double. And then after that,

• 1:02:34Tim Ferriss?

  Oh wow, that's fast.

• 1:02:35Speaker 03

  Triple. It depends who you are. Okay, I don't want to make blanket comments for everyone. And it also depends how honest you are with yourself.

• 1:02:44Tim Ferriss?

  Right. If you're gaming the system.

• 1:02:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you're gaming. And if no one's looking, why would you want to game the system? Be honest with yourself when you feel that need to breathe to stop. You're also going to notice it changes throughout the day. So if you're very tired, if you're coming off of a long flight, if you're stressed out, your Bolt score is going to suck. If you're very well rested and you're in a good zone, your Bolt score is going to be three times what it was before. So there's a lot of variability.

• 1:03:12Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm reading here, AI overview, so caveat, but a higher score indicates better carbon dioxide tolerance and efficient breathing, which you can improve with breathing exercises over time. Is there anything else from the world of sports that you've seen that has been particularly impressive or surprising, besides the fact that most athletes, just like normal civilians, are suboptimal in their breathing?

• 1:03:40Speaker 03

  I think the other important thing, and this really goes hand in hand with what I was just talking about, is proper breathing biomechanics. A lot of people have lost the ability to breathe properly, and that includes athletes. So what you can do is you can train, learn how much you can expand. Your rib cage down here. Learn what a really a full, deep, enriching breath feels like. Learn how that changes your posture and then start adopting and adapting your body to these biomechanics when you are practicing whatever sport. And there are a bunch of trainers that do this now.

• 1:04:22Speaker 03

  If you look at LeBron now, you know, waiting in between plays, what's he doing? Most of the time he's doing breath work and he's doing it properly. He's doing alternate nostril breathing. You look at his diaphragmatic movement because you can see his chest and his abdominal area. So this makes a huge difference. This is biology. It's not psychology. And I think athletes can benefit the most from it.

• 1:04:46Tim Ferriss?

  So two questions, and these may be dead ends, so I apologize if they are. But two questions related to the diaphragm and also inspiratory muscle training. So resistance at the mouth for building, well, effectively training the muscles involved with respiration. The first question around the diaphragm is, and I'm not sure if you've dug into this, I guess, pun intended, but is any type of soft tissue treatment or manual therapy sometimes helpful for people to get better at diaphragmic breathing? That's kind of number one. The number two, do you have any thoughts on the various training devices

• 1:05:29Tim Ferriss?

  that can be used for developing actual muscle strength or endurance for the respiratory muscles?

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the first part of that, absolutely. Find a good physio or find a good masseuse who knows what they're doing and to loosen up this area because for a lot of people it's frozen. And what's really sad is for a lot of older people, when the bones and the muscles start to atrophy a bit, things get brittle and you just lose all flexibility. So to find someone that can loosen up the rib cage around here, you can do it yourself. There's a bunch of different exercises you can do to help facilitate that process. It's kind of better having someone who really knows how to do it. Help to open that up and then you can start playing with your breath and after an hour of this, you can feel what a difference it makes, right? Everything just starts to open up.

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  And now we're talking about those different devices that the air resistance, the breath resistance devices, they work great. There's a bunch of different brands. They all basically do the same thing. And what they do is they just create extra pressure to allow you to develop that better muscle memory. It's like putting a donut on a baseball bat. That's probably a very aged way of saying it too, but that's what we used to call them. Right? So you swing that bat around a few times. It feels very heavy. And then when you take it off, you it feels so much lighter. It's so much easier to use it. So that's essentially what these devices are doing. And it doesn't matter if it's a mask. It doesn't matter if it's one of those inspiratory muscle trainers,

• 1:07:06Speaker 03

  which is just one of the things that you you put in your mouth. It almost looks like the end of a snorkel with without the tube.

• 1:07:12Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly.

• 1:07:12Speaker 03

  They all work. They all work.

• 1:07:14Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:07:58Tim Ferriss?

  So I just want to tell people, start with a lower dose than you think you can handle when you're getting used to this stuff.

• 1:08:04Speaker 03

  I think that that's good advice for every single thing we've talked about. Like people hear stuff, they want to go out and like kick its ass immediately. This is especially true for the sleep tape. What you should do is you should be wearing it for 10 minutes, answering emails one day. And the next day, wear it for 20 minutes, answering emails. And then the next day, wear it for an hour. You see where I'm going with this. After two weeks of acclimating your body and getting yourself used to this, then try it when you're taking a nap for 15 minutes. And then eventually work into using it at night. And this is very true for these different devices. I, this is not a plant, by the way. I have this little desk here and this is on it.

• 1:08:47Speaker 03

  So this is a device, it doesn't need to have a ton of pressure to be beneficial. This just has slight pressure to it. And when I'm working on something. So it looks like an adult pacifier, basically of sorts. In other words, extremely sexy. Something you want to be bringing on that airplane along with your sleep tape and your blanket. Just a heads up. But it's a little thing that you put in your mouth that has just a little bit of resistance. Cause what I notice is when I get extremely focused, when I'm writing something, my breathing patterns go to hell. And this is very common. It's called email apnea. It's so common, like the NIH spent 20 years researching it, right? And blood pressure goes up, you get headaches.

• 1:09:32Speaker 03

  It can cause some chronic issues later on because you, you're holding your breath when you get scared or you focus, you're having this reaction. If I use a little device like this, you can even put a straw in your mouth if you want something simpler. It just reminds your body to keep with that rhythm. And if you have to work for four straight hours because you have to crank something out, you need every bit of focus and energy that you can get. And so that's when those, at those very intense times, I use this thing and it works. What is that called?

• 1:10:06Speaker 03

  Okay, again, I am not endorsing this by any way. People give me things. This one's by my friend Anders Olsson, who was in the book. He's been studying breathing for 20 years. I love this thing. It's called the Relaxator.

• 1:10:22Speaker 03

  This really feels like a commercial now. It's called the Relaxator, right?

• 1:10:29Tim Ferriss?

  Use code NESTER for 30% off.

• 1:10:31Speaker 03

  Buy two and get one for free. Yeah, I've really screwed myself not getting a percentage of these things. This thing is cool because these other devices that you see are big.

• 1:10:43Tim Ferriss?

  Big. Yeah, that you can stick in your shirt pocket.

• 1:10:46Speaker 03

  Like bondage level big. A lot of bondage themes going on this podcast. But this thing, literally, you wear it around your neck, you stick it in your pocket. It doesn't look so, so weird. And I love this thing. And, and this is one of the things I keep in the suitcase.

• 1:11:02Tim Ferriss?

  So if you're jamming and working on something, writing for four hours, do you just take a few breaths with that every hour? What's the, what does the use look like?

• 1:11:11Speaker 03

  I have it in my mouth.

• 1:11:13Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, the whole time? Okay. I'm glad I asked for clarification.

• 1:11:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I should have provided you the whole time. I won't say every single minute, you know, but.

• 1:11:28Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So you're breathing in through your mouth and out through your nose in that case?

• 1:11:32Speaker 03

  I'm mixing it up a little bit. I know I've, I talked about all the wonderful things to do with nasal breathing. This simulates them in some ways, but what it does is it creates extra pressure, a little extra pressure to force you to slow down. So if you are going to be mouth breathing, mouth breathe with a device in that causes that extra pressure.

• 1:11:55Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Yeah, I found it.

• 1:11:56Speaker 03

  Sometimes I breathe through my nose and I breathe out through this. Right? So it just extends that exhalation. So the exhalation's twice as long as the inhalation. And that will put your body into that parasympathetic state.

• 1:12:13Tim Ferriss?

  The Relaxator Breathing Retrainer. Yeah. So I'm looking at Anders Olsen, all those goods. I presumably Scandinavian.

• 1:12:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's as Swedish as you could be. Yes.

• 1:12:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Conscious Breathing Institute AB. All right. Excellent. I'll need to grab one of these before everyone in my audience buys an adult breathing pacifier.

• 1:12:37Speaker 03

  It's a beautiful world we're gonna create out there, everybody. You're all gonna be looking good.

• 1:12:42Tim Ferriss?

  It'll be, it'll be like Fight Club. People can kinda wink and have the secret handshake when they see other people with the bright green adult pacifier.

• 1:12:49Speaker 03

  Or you just look the other direction and pretend you don't know them, you know, which is what I prefer to do.

• 1:12:55Tim Ferriss?

  So you mentioned writing. We're gonna take a little breather, pun intended, on the breath talk. I wanna talk about writing for a little bit because I'm hoping you can help me sort out this 800-page draft of a book that I've got on my hands. But let's begin with something that folks may not be familiar with. The San Francisco Writers Grotto. What the hell is the San Francisco Writers Grotto and how did you become involved with it?

• 1:13:20Speaker 03

  Oh my God, that was a long time ago. It was a group of professional writers, that real professional writers, when there were things called magazines around that you could actually write for magazines and make a semi-living out of that. And they wrote books and Pope Bronson was one of them, Julia Shears, Caroline Paul. And it was a group of writers who didn't wanna write at home anymore. They wanted to write in little offices and be able to have lunches where they could complain about their agents. And this was a very sought-after place and I was able to get in there and I absolutely love it. I made so many good friends there who are still my friends. And then it got a bit diluted. One thing about

• 1:14:04Speaker 03

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

• 1:14:36Tim Ferriss?

  What did you learn there, you know, before the trust of farians got roped in to raise the average rent price? What are some of the lessons that you learned? I mean, because one of the major challenges that I have as a writer is that I've spent so much of my time in self-imposed solitary confinement. I'm just kind of like, I'm just like kind of over it. Right. And sometimes the solution can be going to a cafe and working at a cafe. And that's an improvement. But is there anything that you really took from that experience in terms of lessons learned, habits developed, anything like that?

• 1:15:09Speaker 03

  So many lessons. What these people taught me was the business part of it. I know that that probably isn't something people want to hear about, but you know, I had prized myself as a very precious artist, that I only wanted to do certain things in a certain way. And all of that's bullshit. It's completely not sustainable. So they taught me that this was a real job that you had approached with a business mind, which I thought at the time was, you know, clouding it over, or it wasn't as pure as I would like it to be, but it was a very quick heads up. So they introduced me to how to find an agent and how to talk to an agent, how to deal with your publisher when your publisher was being difficult.

• 1:15:50Speaker 03

  So really pragmatic skills and how to navigate the publishing world, which as you know, can be extremely, extremely tricky. And those lessons I've taken with me, and I think it's allowed me to actually make a living doing what I'm doing by applying some of those lessons to what I, to the books I write.

• 1:16:10Tim Ferriss?

  I was reading, you sent to me some of these snippets on writing, and I want to read part of it. So this is quoting you. So I think the concept of writer's block is a convenient out for people who want an excuse to not work and complain or get attention by talking about writer's block. Every professional writer I know that writes for a living, that is, writing is the only source of income for these people. I think that's actually really important parenthetical. Has never experienced writer's block. I'll just add my comment, or maybe they just kind of got over it when they were put in an environment like the writer's grotto. Every hobbyist who introduces him or herself as a writer in quotation marks at dinner parties has chronic writer's block. So I have heard something similar from every friend of mine. Here's a distinction, though.

• 1:16:53Tim Ferriss?

  Who has written for newspapers or magazines. I do know some professional writers who focus and have focused exclusively on books, who still talk about writer's block. Do you think that is just a function of in the trenches, regular deadlines where you don't have the luxury perhaps of long lead time for a book? Could you maybe just speak to this writer's block term and excuse perhaps?

• 1:17:24Speaker 03

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

• 1:18:07Speaker 03

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

• 1:18:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there's a, there are a lot of topics that fit in that category. It's like if someone's taking 10 minutes to tell you about their dreams, you're like, uh huh, uh huh. All right.

• 1:19:02Speaker 03

  That's exactly right.

• 1:19:04Tim Ferriss?

  In any case, I could keep giving examples, but I want to try to focus here. So when you cut the sort of corporate umbilical cord, was that at a point where you were already replacing your income? Or was it a leap of faith on some level? And in either case, like, how did you make the decision to go 100% into writing? At what point did you make that decision?

• 1:19:28Speaker 03

  I was a well-respected member of corporate America for a very, very long time. And I was making a living and bought me a house, all that stuff. And there was obviously something missing in that. And so what I would do on nights and weekends is I would write magazine articles. And I absolutely loved it because it allowed me an excuse to knock on doors that I wouldn't ordinarily knock on and talk to weirdos. So I unfortunately started off by just writing stories I wanted to write because I didn't need to do it. Right. And then the money wasn't that good anyway. But just writing things I wanted to write.

• 1:20:12Speaker 03

  And I got so absolutely absorbed in these worlds and would take months writing these stories. And I thought it was impossible for me to do this full time. And that's what I did for six, seven, eight years until I got to a point where I had several different magazine contracts. And I was at a four-year review for my work performance. My boss was like, oh, you know, really good. And, you know, this is exciting and, you know.

• 1:20:42Tim Ferriss?

  What were you doing at the time in corporate America?

• 1:20:45Speaker 03

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

• 1:21:29Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a visceral, it was like animal response.

• 1:21:33Speaker 03

  It was. And, uh, and it's almost like I heard myself saying this.

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  And he was shocked.

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  I, I was like, I'm gonna go out and just kick ass. And this was around 2009. Guess what happened next? Everything imploded and I lost all of my contracts. And I had a couple of extremely difficult years trying to find my way, navigate my way through this. But I said, I can't go back until I really give this a go. So I could tell you so many horror stories. A year after, everything went wrong. Everything. Book contracts got canceled. Uh, magazine stories got canned. It was horrible. But, uh, I kept with it. Yeah.

• 1:22:20Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:22:38Speaker 03

  I could have gone back to a corporate gig for sure. At any time, I could have gone back. But I found another lifestyle and another feeling and another calling that felt almost illegal from my upbringing. Like I was doing everything I was told not to do. And there was an aspect of that and a danger to that. That I liked. I was also, I didn't cut the cord when I was 22, right? I cut the cord when I was like later and I said, if I don't do this now, if I don't do it now, I'm never ever gonna do it. It's gonna be so hard to do it now, but if I wait any longer, it's never gonna happen and I'm never gonna be happy.

• 1:23:23Speaker 03

  That's what drove me.

• 1:23:25Tim Ferriss?

  When did it click? When did you, after the canceled contracts and the disasters and just train wreck after train wreck? Was there a moment, it doesn't have to be a financial moment, but was there a moment where you're like, oh, okay, this is starting to build some momentum? Or like this is giving me the spider sense, which is somewhat the opposite of the quick blurting out of I quit in the corporate meeting, which is like, oh, here we go. Like something is here. Was there a particular moment where things started to click into gear?

• 1:24:01Speaker 03

  There was a moment I was sent by Outside Magazine to write about the World Free Diving Championships in Greece. And I remember being out there and sitting on the prow of this boat and watching these people do this thing that is not supposed to be biologically possible, swimming down on a single breath of air to 350 feet for four minutes at a time, coming back. And it sent chills through me and it still does when I think about it. And I remember writing my editor, Alex Heard, at Outside and I said, there's something bigger than the story going on here. And he's like, okay, but you gotta finish the story.

• 1:24:45Speaker 03

  So no writer's block there. It's weird how that happens. So I delivered the story within a couple of weeks. The story made a splash. I got a book deal out of it and was finally able to have some semblance of comfort. And that's when the lever turned on pretty big for me. It's also when things got really serious, right? Because you're dealing with a larger sum of money. You're dealing with something I've never done, which was write a book. Written a ton of articles, but writing a book was a different thing. But I loved the challenge and I just went 100% and seven days a week, just like. I was so absorbed in it and I was so happy. I was very tired. I should have paced myself better,

• 1:25:28Speaker 03

  but every day I was so grateful not to be in an office and so happy to be doing something that was able to really stir my curiosity and my fascination with the world.

• 1:25:42Tim Ferriss?

  When did writing become self-sustaining financially?

• 1:25:46Speaker 03

  It became pretty self-sustaining from that contract. It was a larger contract, but then I won't give you the the whole dirty story, but you know, the book came out and I got quite a large advance and the book didn't sell as much as the publisher had hoped.

• 1:26:02Tim Ferriss?

  This is deep.

• 1:26:03Speaker 03

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

• 1:26:48Tim Ferriss?

  What were the things not to do? Were these business dimensions or were they other things?

• 1:26:53Speaker 03

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

• 1:27:31Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I also had to learn a lot of these things.

• 1:27:34Speaker 03

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

• 1:28:10Tim Ferriss?

  So I want to read something. This is to give credit where credit's due. It's leadersmag.com. This is from 2022. So this might take a second because it's a chunky paragraph, but I'm going to read this because I'm hoping for some some advice, but we can do that, I think, sort of autobiographically with your experience. So here we go. Quote, "I think of my wife, who had to watch me rewrite this book over and over, then watch my deadlines slip away by months, then a year. I was bringing in no paychecks during this process. Writing this book was 24/7 job for several years. So now, like right, fourth time rewriting, being two years late on delivery of the book. She definitely got nervous when I went to the Paris catacombs on research and traveled to talk with all these dentists. She kept

• 1:28:52Tim Ferriss?

  asking me, this is a book on breathing, right? This is like a lot of my friends who are proofreaders of my current 800-page draft." Back to the quote, "I told her yes, and it would all make sense in the end. The truth is, I had no idea how I was ever going to put the pieces of this puzzle together." All right. So I find myself in maybe a similar place. How did you find yourself out of the catacombs and into an actual coherent book?

• 1:29:16Speaker 03

  I worked. I know, I know it worked, but how the hell? I would love to say it's more complicated than that. I worked until it was done. And some of these projects, as you well know, some of them kind of feel like they slide off. Like things find their place, they find their footing. You're almost out of control of the process. The process takes you over and takes you along for a while, for a ride. And it's a wonderful feeling, like if only every project. And some of these, you cannot find your way out. You cannot see daylight for a very, very long time. And that was this book. So many people were so nervous. I think about my,

• 1:30:00Speaker 03

  my mental state, my physical state, because hey, I'm talking to Dennis. They're like, cool. Why aren't you talking to pulmonologists? I said, because dentists know about breathing more than pulmonologists. And I'm doing all of this crazy stuff that has nothing to do with breathing. And, you know, I would call my agent and tell her this. And she, she kind of trusted me, but also was just like, we have to hand in this book, right? And I said, okay. And it was at that time, it was 290,000 words and I had to bake it down to 85,000. Wait, say that one more time? It was 290,000 words. Again, that makes me feel better. That had to come down, that had to come down to 80, 85,000.

• 1:30:42Speaker 03

  The key is what, where I was gaining real clarity is I did something completely cliched. Is I got a house in the woods where there was absolutely nothing around. No Starbucks to go to, no store to go to. And I just did that thing. I thought, huh, if I have no distractions around, what will happen? And it turns out that boredom is the most wonderful muse of all. I was renting the house and all these problems with it. I don't care. I'm renting it. Right. I'm just here to work. And it was through the process of thinking about it night and day, just becoming completely absorbed in every thread of the story.

• 1:31:26Speaker 03

  I started to see the matrix after a while and then it came together. And as you know, like you know, when it's getting there, like once things start locking in and then you know exactly what your job is. But sometimes that process can take a few months or even a year for all of those pieces, those Tetris pieces to find their way to start to make sense.

• 1:31:51Tim Ferriss?

  What were some of the, if you remember, some of the breakthrough moments or key decisions that allowed you to go from the 290,000 words to the 85,000 words? Because you'd have to cut a lot, right? There may have been some very new structural decisions that you would have to make about the overall architecture of the book. What were some of the sort of key moments or decisions that allowed you to ultimately do that?

• 1:32:18Speaker 03

  The key moments were being comfortable enough with the story and being so uncomfortable with how I had told the story that I was able to ask for help from my agent, who is a master editor, veteran in this world, and from my editor at the publisher. You know, I gave them just this complete dog crap and I said, "The information here, I think is really compelling, but there's no story. There's nothing to hold on to."

• 1:32:50Tim Ferriss?

  As a through line, you mean?

• 1:32:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, not only the main through line, but all these sub threads that sort of need to weave together around that through line. So it feels like you're reading a book and not a Wikipedia entry of, anyone can get information anywhere, right? What they're coming to you for, for a book is they need to be absorbed in it. I mean, as a journalist, people don't like to hear this, but you're in the entertainment industry. If people stop reading your stuff, you have failed. So you have to keep them reading and you want to include information that's going to help enrich their lives too. And you do that through stories. So it was through their intervention and advice

• 1:33:35Speaker 03

  that they were able to see something I was not able to see. And once We had that skeleton and I remember the day it all came together. I was sketching it out and I said, oh my God, this is finally it. Then fleshing out that skeleton was just almost mechanical work because I already knew the story and I knew exactly where to go.

• 1:33:57Tim Ferriss?

  Right. You had the blueprint, then you could lay the bricks.

• 1:34:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:01Tim Ferriss?

  What did the skeleton look like? I know this is very getting into the weeds, but.

• 1:34:05Speaker 03

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

• 1:34:46Speaker 03

  And I was able to feel them personally and it just confirmed across the board, everything about the dangers of mouth breathing, benefits of nasal breathing. So that two paragraph section is my editor and agent, they said, no, that's your through line. Tell the first three quarters of this book through those 20 days and have all of the other stories branching out through that 20. I said, but it's 20 days. I've been working on this fricking thing for five years. They said, nope, that's what it's going to be. And so I quickly put it together, you know, after a couple of weeks and I went, wow, that's it.

• 1:35:26Speaker 03

  And we finally had it. And I remember that feeling too, of just extreme relief more than anything. But there's always a way out. I know you're in the weeds right now. I can sense that you're just like, what the hell? I can't figure this. There is always a way out and you'll find it.

• 1:35:44Tim Ferriss?

  All right, yeah, your starting point of almost 300,000 words makes me feel a lot better because I think that's roughly, I might be slightly over that, but yeah, it's a big old honkin' block of granite that I need to start chipping away on. We've covered a lot here. I want to touch on perhaps one other piece that I've also explored personally, which is now in modern terms, worked with a woman named Lea Lagos, this is quite a few years ago now, but to use particular patterns and cadence of breathing to affect heart rate variability, to improve heart rate variability.

• 1:36:22Tim Ferriss?

  And it would seem that using very particular cadences of breathing is not a new thing. And I was hoping maybe you could speak to prayer cross culturally and breathing practices and what you've observed or found in the literature.

• 1:36:42Speaker 03

  Everything I've mentioned today about how to improve breathing through biomechanics, through different breathwork patterns, all of this stuff is literally thousands of years old. So we have instruments now to measure how they affect us, but back then, they were able to see this in real time by these people practicing these different methods. So there was some research being done around 22, 23 years ago in Italy, where they were looking at different prayers, specifically the Buddhist mantra, "Oman Padmihom" and

• 1:37:21Speaker 03

  "Satanama", which is a Kundalini chant, and the Catholic prayer cycle of the rosary. And they noticed that all of these different prayers required people to exhale at around five to six seconds, right? And when you're speaking a prayer, you are exhaling, and then there was this pause where you take this about five to six second inhale. Very slowly. And they looked at what happened to the bodies of all of these subjects, and they looked at how heart rate variability went through the roof, how blood pressure decreased, how oxygen increased in the brain, and all of these

• 1:38:02Speaker 03

  different systems of the body entered this state of coherence. And they called this breathing pattern coherent breathing after that. You don't need to pray to breathe this way. All you have to do is inhale five to six seconds and exhale five to six seconds. If you don't believe me, if you're able to track your heart rate variability live, if you have a heart math monitor or whatever, you can see this play out in real time within a few seconds of breathing this way. And what you're seeing and what you're feeling is your body working at the state it's designed to work at, at the state of coherence, at the state of peak efficiency.

• 1:38:44Tim Ferriss?

  James, we've talked about a lot, I'm tempted to ask you about the new book, but I don't know if you can divulge anything about it. But if we're focusing on the breath side of things, is there anything else that you would like to mention, whether it's about technique, the book itself, plans for the book, anything at all outside of that too, that we haven't covered?

• 1:39:06Speaker 03

  I think the main thing, and this is my, I won't call it my issue with the breath work culture that's out there, but it's just something I want to bring awareness to. Breath work's a huge deal right now, right? There's retreats, there's different schools, there's classes all over the place, there's breath work fashion, you know, there's breath work jewels, there's all that stuff. But what I think that that culture is doing is a bit of a disservice to everybody else in that it's complicating and creating a barrier around something that already belongs to everybody. This is what my book was mostly about, wasn't breath work.

• 1:39:49Speaker 03

  It was about this biological function of breathing. And if you look at 90% of people on the planet right now, suffer from some form of breathing dysfunction. The most helpful thing you can do for yourself is just to be a normal breather. You don't have to go sign up for a breath work class. And the breath work classes that I've gone to have been amazing. They're incredible. And then I watch people walk away, mouth breathing, or complain about their snoring or sleep apnea. So it's like going to like a culinary school and just learning how to make desserts and not learning how to make entrees and not learning how to make food that is nutritious for you. I'm not saying breath work's bad. I love it.

• 1:40:34Speaker 03

  I try to do it as often as I can. But you have to understand the foundations and the fundamental part of that. And the fundamental part is very basic. It's very simple. It's very natural, which is why I think it gets overlooked. People think it's just too simple to be effective until you do it and until you look at the science. So that would be the one suggestion I would have for people. Before you go into hardcore breath work, get your breathing to a normal place and see the benefits from that.

• 1:41:06Tim Ferriss?

  Sage words. I mean, it's true of so many types of workshops, right? People are working on A, B, and C, and then they walk out doing the exact opposite. Just get to normal, natural breathing. Question related to sleep. So I have to make this, of course, self-interested as we start to land the plane. But I have been having, this last week, for reasons I won't bore you with, but have been having a hell of a time with sleep. A lot of it's due to the environment. But besides tape on the mouth and the things we already talked about, is there anything else that you recommend to people for sleep position, head position, anything at all? Doesn't have to be what I just mentioned

• 1:41:49Tim Ferriss?

  for purposes of improving or regulating sleep.

• 1:41:56Speaker 03

  I'm sure you have various devices that measure your sleep quality, right? If you have a device that is able to look at dips in oxygen, then that's even better. I'd wear as many of those devices as you can, and then I would start experimenting with different little things that you can do around. I would start with assessing your snore lab or snore clock. They both do the exact same thing. I'd put your phone on the side of your bed and I would record it, not for one day, but for a week. And I would start with that to see if you are mouth breathing, to see if you are snoring, to see if you are holding your breath. And then from there, I would slowly adopt nasal breathing through the methods that I mentioned.

• 1:42:41Speaker 03

  Start in the daytime, start extremely slowly. And you can try to get Myo Tape as well. They make it for adults as well as kids. It's much more M Y O. M Y O T A P E. Again, I have heard so many people, big fans of that. If you have your breathing locked in, you're not snoring, okay? You're not mouth breathing. Then I would start to look at physicians. So what they used to do back in the day is get a T-shirt and tape a sock or a ping pong ball or something light to the back of that T-shirt. Because so often, when you are lying on your back, breathing is more difficult. This is what happened with COVID patients, right? Which is why they started proning them.

• 1:43:25Speaker 03

  They started putting them on their stomachs and sides, and they were saving so many more people this way. I didn't know that. The same thing is true with breathing at night. When you are on your back, most of the expansion in the lungs when you breathe happens in the back. It's not the front, it's the back. So you could be inhibiting that. So try side sleeping. And by placing that ping pong ball or sock, taping it on the back of a T-shirt, this, when you're unconscious, it will be so uncomfortable that you will go from side to side as you continue to record your sleep with Snore Lab and with all of your wearables. After that, you can try incline bed therapy. Which is where you raise the head of the bed around six inches.

• 1:44:10Speaker 03

  That can help a lot of people. And then there's several other things you can do after that, but I would start there. And for most people, not everybody, for most people, they will see a reduction and sometimes snoring to be completely resolved. And for some people with sleep apnea, they will see significant reductions. Granted, I will say that sometimes troubled sleep is caused by stress. You're waking up and your mind is just racing. Sometimes it's not so much a physiological thing. Sometimes it's psychological, but I would want, if I were you, I would want to get the physiological stuff out of the way first. Check all of those boxes. Make sure your breathing is consistent and normal and fluid at night.

• 1:44:54Speaker 03

  And then you can dive deeper into it.

• 1:44:56Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing. Thank you. James Nestor, everybody. Breath, the new science of a lost art. Highly recommended. Man, do my friends just, I recall and still to this day, just the barrages of texts that I get about it and how within grasp these approaches are for people, right? Like you said, you don't have to sign up for a $5,000 breath work seminar. These are very much within reach at low cost or no cost. Where can people find you online? Is there a best place for people to find James Nestor if they want to dive deeper? See what you're up to?

• 1:45:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I took a year off of all social media and everything. I just felt like I needed a reboot. I'm crawling back into the morass right now. So I'm on Instagram on some jerk took James Nestor. So I'm under MR James Nestor, Mr. James Nestor. That's also my website. A lot of the stuff we're going to be giving out, different breathing protocols, different breath work, audio tracks and all that stuff. So if you go to the website, you can sign up and get all these freebies that way.

• 1:46:06Tim Ferriss?

  Beautiful. And we will link to everything in the show notes for folks listening and watching as usual. So all the resources, all the gadgets and adult pacifiers and so on that we mentioned will be at tim.blog/podcast. You can just search Nestor on that page, N-E-S-T-O-R, and you'll find everything. And to everybody out there, be just a bit kinder than is necessary, as always, to others, but also to yourself. And thanks for tuning in. Until next time.

• 1:46:40Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including

• 1:47:20Tim Ferriss?

  a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

• 1:47:49Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:48:33Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:49:17Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:50:01Tim Ferriss?

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