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

1. 0:00 – 0:51

   Coming up.

   1. JNJames Nestor0:00

      There was some research being done around 22, 23 years ago in Italy where they were looking at different prayers, and they noticed that all of these different prayers required people to exhale at around five to six seconds, 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 then all of these different systems of the body entered this state of coherence, and they called this breathing pattern coherent breathing after that. 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.

2. 0:51 – 1:46

   Why I waited years to interview James about Breath.

   1. TFTim Ferriss0:51

      James, so nice to see you and hear you. Thanks for making the time.

   2. JNJames Nestor0:55

      Thanks for having me.

   3. TFTim Ferriss0:56

      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, [chuckles] from so many friends, from so many athletes, from so many doctors. And I thought to myself, "You know what? This is fascinating. I'm already really, really captured by the subject matter, but I wanna let this slow bake for a while, and then come back and talk to James after it's saturated the global populace a bit and talk about the stories, what has stuck, what he's using personally."

3. 1:46 – 4:15

   Maurice Daubard: The mysterious 90-year-old who preceded Wim Hof.

   1. TFTim Ferriss1:46

      And so here we are. We did it.

   2. JNJames Nestor1:48

      It's perfect timing. Yeah.

   3. TFTim Ferriss1:49

      [chuckles] Perfect timing. And in the course of doing prep for this, came across the name Maurice Daubard. 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?

   4. JNJames Nestor2:09

      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 that r- completely randomly at an event, and he told me about this mysterious 90-year-old who would spend hours in the snow and swimming in frozen lakes up in the French Alps, and this was not Wim Hof.

   5. TFTim Ferriss2:37

      [chuckles]

   6. JNJames Nestor2:38

      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 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.

   7. TFTim Ferriss3:13

      Mm-hmm.

   8. JNJames Nestor3:14

      And did this almost every day, you know, as often as he could.

   9. TFTim Ferriss3:18

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

   10. JNJames Nestor3:22

       He was extremely sick as a child, had various lung infections, various respiratory disorders, and he was slated for surgery. They were gonna 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." And he said, "Well, what's yoga?" And he's like, "Let me tell you about it," and he showed him some breathing techniques. So Daubard said, "I don't wanna do the surgery yet. Give me a few weeks to try to rehabilitate myself," and everyone thought he was crazy. And not only did he rehabilitate himself, he gained this almost superhuman strength by adopting these breathing practices, and that was in the 1950s. So that's how far ahead of the curve this

4. 4:15 – 7:32

   Tummo breathing: Ancient Bon Buddhist heat generation.

   1. JNJames Nestor4:15

      guy was.

   2. TFTim Ferriss4:16

      And what was he actually doing in the sense that in the course of, of reading up on this guy a little bit, right, at 71, he toured 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?

   3. JNJames Nestor5:02

      Tummo is an ancient breathwork practice from the Bon Buddhist 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, 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? And I try not to get into the weeds too much in, in the book.

   4. TFTim Ferriss5:48

      Mm-hmm.

   5. JNJames Nestor5:48

      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 in-

   6. TFTim Ferriss6:10

      Mm-hmm

   7. JNJames Nestor6:10

      ... extremely intense hyperventilation techniques followed by breath holds and, and building pressure in your body.

   8. TFTim Ferriss6:18

      Tummo Lite registered trademark. [laughs]

   9. JNJames Nestor6:20

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

   10. TFTim Ferriss6:23

       [laughs] Uh, I have all the URLs, guys. I'm squatting on them if you want any.

   11. JNJames Nestor6:28

       Yeah. There you go.

   12. TFTim Ferriss6:28

       And with, in the case of Tummo, is that something that you have personally experimented with or have you left that on the shelf?

   13. JNJames Nestor6:35

       I've done the commercial version of it many times.

   14. TFTim Ferriss6:38

       Mm.

   15. JNJames Nestor6:38

       I still do it today. It absolutely works if you are cold, if you're in the ocean, if you're in the snow. Wherever you are, if you're cold, you can do this, and you can jack your body temperature very, very quickly. The slower one is a much better-kept secret.

   16. TFTim Ferriss6:56

       Mm-hmm.

   17. JNJames Nestor6:56

       You're not gonna find too many instructions for it. I've talked to a few Bon Buddhist monks about this, and they kinda smile and, and say, "Oh, you know, maybe if, 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-

   18. TFTim Ferriss7:19

       Mm-hmm

   19. JNJames Nestor7:19

       ... and are now getting hints about it, but now they won't tell me because they say-

   20. TFTim Ferriss7:24

       Of course

   21. JNJames Nestor7:24

       ... you know, [laughs] "I've got, I've got the secret."

   22. TFTim Ferriss7:26

       Fight Club. [laughs]

   23. JNJames Nestor7:28

       You gotta do the work, so.

   24. TFTim Ferriss7:30

       Yeah, the Fight Club of breathwork. [laughs]

5. 7:32 – 9:24

   James’ personal breathwork practice and the Wim Hof method (with warnings).

   1. JNJames Nestor7:32

      Yeah. Yeah.

   2. TFTim Ferriss7:32

      Most folks don't wanna 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, just in brief?

   3. JNJames Nestor7:51

      Sure. So the Wim Hof method is about 30 very deep breaths, extremely deep breaths in quick repetition, followed by a breath hold-

   4. TFTim Ferriss8:02

      Mm-hmm

   5. JNJames Nestor8:02

      ... right, at a neutral position, and then you take one big breath in, hold for 30 seconds, and go back to that cycle, and you do this over and over and over. So the Tummo version of this is learning... [laughs] The commercial Tummo Lite, L-I-T-E registered trademark-

   6. TFTim Ferriss8:18

      [laughs]

   7. JNJames Nestor8:18

      ... is you do those same motions, but when you're doing the breath hold, you are, you are holding the breath in and you're creating a pressure in your body. You're also-

   8. TFTim Ferriss8:29

      Mm

   9. JNJames Nestor8:29

      ... doing some different arm movements with it. So it's almost like you're creating compression. It's almost like a piston.

   10. TFTim Ferriss8:37

       Mm-hmm.

   11. JNJames Nestor8:37

       That 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, I've seen it time and time again, and, and anyone that's done Wim Hof can attest to it as well.

   12. TFTim Ferriss8:51

       I think, somebody on the internet's gonna fact check me, but I think the first large public interview that Wim Hof ever did was on this podcast [laughs] sort of 100 years ago.

   13. JNJames Nestor9:00

       Mm-hmm.

   14. TFTim Ferriss9:00

       I will say for folks who dive into that rabbit hole, be very cautious about the cold exposure.

   15. JNJames Nestor9:05

       Mm-hmm.

   16. TFTim Ferriss9:05

       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 does your personal development journey look like with breathwork? I guess another way

6. 9:24 – 11:08

   How breathwork cured James’ chronic respiratory issues.

   1. TFTim Ferriss9:24

      to frame that and ask it more simply is what has breathwork done for you? What have the outcomes looked like for you?

   2. JNJames Nestor9:30

      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 than 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 decades, so I was surfing a lot, but constantly getting pneumonia, constantly getting bronchitis, and I would go to my doctor and, you know, the doctor, I didn't know better at this time, would give me antibiotics, the Z-Pak. I would take them-

   3. TFTim Ferriss10:20

      Yeah

   4. JNJames Nestor10:21

      ... 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, of a good doctor friend of mine who was looking at me, and she said, "You need to do breathwork." And before then, I'd never done any breathwork. I'd, uh, I had heard about it because I lived in San Francisco, but I had no interest in it. The short version of this very long story is I did it, and I haven't had one of those issues since. And so that convinced me that there was a signal here to pursue 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

7. 11:08 – 13:47

   Sudarshan Kriya: The weekend workshop that changed everything.

   1. JNJames Nestor11:08

      on.

   2. TFTim Ferriss11:08

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

   3. JNJames Nestor11:43

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

   4. TFTim Ferriss11:50

      Oh, wow. How do you spell that?

   5. JNJames Nestor11:51

      [laughs] S-U-D-A-R-S-H-A-N space K-R-I-Y-A.

   6. TFTim Ferriss12:00

      Oh, yeah. Never would've gotten that right. Okay. Thank you.

   7. JNJames Nestor12:03

      It was through the Art of Living. You do this weekend workshop before they teach you the breathwork-

   8. TFTim Ferriss12:08

      Mm

   9. JNJames Nestor12:08

      ... 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, phew, it was making me extremely uncomfortable, and I almost bailed.

   10. TFTim Ferriss12:21

       [laughs] Can you give us an example?

   11. JNJames Nestor12:23

       Oh, boy. You're gonna dig in. You're not supposed to talk about it, and I'm going to respect-

   12. TFTim Ferriss12:29

       All right. All right

   13. JNJames Nestor12:29

       ... the secrecy of this. I can talk around it, though.

   14. TFTim Ferriss12:32

       You can talk around it.

   15. JNJames Nestor12:33

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

   16. TFTim Ferriss12:40

       No. That's counter to my evolutionary impulses. Yeah. Got it. This is that kind of thing. [laughs]

   17. JNJames Nestor12:45

       I'm just gonna leave it right there, and you can-

   18. TFTim Ferriss12:47

       Yes. [laughs]

   19. JNJames Nestor12:47

       ... draw your own conclusions for the rest. 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 breathwork, and then I understood why they had you do all these other practices, and the breathwork absolutely blew my socks off.

   20. TFTim Ferriss13:06

       Hmm.

   21. JNJames Nestor13:06

       It's not that intense, but my body had such a reaction that I was wearing a shirt like this, and I'd sweated through everything. My socks were damp. There were sweat stains on my jean. My hair was sopping wet from just sitting in a corner of a very dark and cold room, just breathing at this rhythm. And I said, "Oh my God. What is this stuff unleashing in me?" [chuckles] Like, "What else is-

   22. TFTim Ferriss13:30

       Hmm

   23. JNJames Nestor13:30

       ... bottled up that I need to get out?" And I don't wanna sound too woo-woo, but it was the physiological reaction my body had to this. It was like a switch was just flipped on, and it made me very curious about breathing and other breathwork

8. 13:47 – 15:54

   My nine-minute breath hold experiment (hyperbaric chamber edition).

   1. JNJames Nestor13:47

      practices.

   2. TFTim Ferriss13:48

      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 backs using Tummo, and you can actually watch this in real time as it's happening. I mean, there's a lot out there that people can, 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, oxygen-assisted breath hold time.

   3. JNJames Nestor14:26

      Mm-hmm.

   4. TFTim Ferriss14:26

      It was 17 minutes and something. It's been crushed-

   5. JNJames Nestor14:28

      Mm-hmm

   6. TFTim Ferriss14:28

      ... since somebody did 20-something minutes, which is just bananas. In any case, did a lot of experimentation with breath holds, and at one point, if you were to ask me to hold my breath right now, I could probably do it for 30 to 45 seconds, which is not long. And I've historically had a lot of respiratory issues, particularly my left lung from being born premature, insufficient surfactant, had to be intubated on a respirator, et cetera. But when at one point, this was also in the Bay Area, I was... Don't replicate this, folks. Do this [laughs] only with medical supervision, but I did a 10-day water-only fast, and I was nine days in, very, very high ketone production, which is relevant for a bunch of reasons we won't get into right now. It helps, though, with breath hold. So 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, [chuckles] "You know what? I'm gonna call it, 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.

9. 15:54 – 17:37

   Post-book revelations and angry doctors’ offices.

   1. TFTim Ferriss15:54

      So the book comes out. You have, I'm sure, a million people coming to you for help for various things. [laughs]

   2. JNJames Nestor16:01

      Mm-hmm.

   3. TFTim Ferriss16:01

      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.

   4. JNJames Nestor16:19

      Well, 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, all day long, three or four, five of them a, a day.

   5. TFTim Ferriss16:32

      Hmm.

   6. JNJames Nestor16:32

      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, and they're all complaining about the same things, and they're completely pissed off. They're pissed off that they had to learn about this stuff in a book by a journalist and not from their doctor, and they're angry 'cause 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 still have 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 a additional learning journey, right? I'm still very interested in this stuff. I wanna know the things that I should have included in the book, right? And I, I wanna know how to answer questions better. So I, I pursued it,

10. 17:37 – 18:56

    The ADHD-breathing connection: A controversial Venn diagram.

    1. JNJames Nestor17:37

       and I think one of the biggest things that I found, and I don't know how interesting this is gonna be to talk about, but I'll throw it out there, and then you can edit it out if you don't want, is the amount of kids that have sleep-disordered breathing. This can be snoring or sleep apnea or some sort of dysfunction in their breathing at night. And then if you take that population of kids who have these breathing problems at night and if you take the population of kids who have ADHD, those two diagrams almost completely intersect. And so what so many researchers are saying is that ADHD does not exist. What you're looking at are sleep-deprived kids, and the most shocking thing to me is that a kid that presents with ADHD They're never assessed for their breathing. They're never assessed for their sleep. They're given drugs and put on their way, and I think it's criminal. And so this is something that really sort of ruffled my feathers, and it's something that I try to talk about whenever I'm discussing this stuff because it's vitally important. I think that we've been approaching ADHD as a neurological condition. I think it is mostly a breathing problem.

11. 18:56 – 22:54

    DIY breathing assessments for kids.

    1. TFTim Ferriss18:56

       Could you give people an idea? I suggest everybody get the book, by the way. I mean, this is, uh, we're gonna talk about a lot of different aspects of, 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 gonna be on the run. They're going to be deeply interested in this particular Venn diagram, right? The ADHD or other types of-

    2. JNJames Nestor19:24

       Mm-hmm

    3. TFTim Ferriss19:24

       ... neuroatypical conditions-

    4. JNJames Nestor19:25

       Mm-hmm

    5. TFTim Ferriss19:26

       ... 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. [chuckles] 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, 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 breathwork 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.

    6. JNJames Nestor20:17

       There is an incredible amount of research to support this. I heard about this from researchers. I, I heard about it from doctors, from leaders in the field at esteemed institutions. They've been hollering about this for years, and exactly zero percent of the population, either on the medical side or the general population, has been listening to them. So the research is there, and you could type it up in any search engine and find these studies. It's very, very easy to find them. As far as assessments for kids, yes, there are things that you can do in your house right now. What a lot of doctors, family physicians will do if you say, "Hey, I wanna check out my kid's breathing," they say, "Okay, we're gonna go to sleep lab, and you're gonna do this, and they're not gonna be able to sleep very well. So we're gonna give them sleeping pills, and that's gonna mess up their breathing, and then they're gonna be diagnosed with, uh, sleep-disordered breathing, given a CPAP, and, and say adios," [chuckles] 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 wanna 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. If you can hear them breathing, they are struggling to breathe. If they are breathing through the mouth, they are struggling to breathe. If they are snoring or have sleep apnea, they are inhibiting their ability to grow, physical growth. They are causing neurological damage to their brains. They're increasing their chances of having diabetes later on in life. And there's this whole laundry list, and I'm not trying to be a scaremonger here. This is easy to look up, not controversial stuff. So I would start with that. There's also an app. I have no affiliation with this app. I get no money from mentioning it. Uh, it's called SnoreLab. There's also another one called SnoreClock, and they have free versions of this. And what it is is you put it on your phone and you place it about four feet away from whatever sleeping head you want, and it records how you are breathing throughout the night with, 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.

12. 22:54 – 25:54

    Mouth tape: From hostage situations to sleep optimization.

    1. TFTim Ferriss22:54

       If they get a positive-

    2. JNJames Nestor22:55

       Mm-hmm

    3. TFTim Ferriss22:56

       ... what are some of the things that they can do? And 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 friend of mine, professional drummer-

    4. JNJames Nestor23:10

       Mm-hmm

    5. TFTim Ferriss23:11

       ... one of the top in his field, [chuckles] sent me a package of, of what he called hostage tape, right? [chuckles] And it's mouth tape, and he said it completely changed his life from a sleep perspective.

    6. JNJames Nestor23:23

       Mm-hmm.

    7. TFTim Ferriss23:24

       Ultimately, it looks like very, very, very, very expensive kinesio tape. But [chuckles] could you speak to what can be done, particularly with kids, right?

    8. JNJames Nestor23:34

       Mm-hmm.

    9. TFTim Ferriss23:34

       'Cause they're, they're not gonna want some Bane mask, Darth Vader CPAP thing up, uh, on top of their face, presumably. Maybe some will comply. But what are some of the things that you can use or do in a case of a positive?

    10. JNJames Nestor23:49

        The number one thing you can do is become an obligate nasal breather.

    11. TFTim Ferriss23:52

        Mm-hmm.

    12. JNJames Nestor23:53

        It would be almost impossible to help to reduce these symptoms without doing that first. That includes starting in the daytime-

    13. TFTim Ferriss24:02

        Mm-hmm

    14. JNJames Nestor24:02

        ... creating a new habit around nasal breathing. And then the-- 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 w- There's a bunch of different tapes. You can go down to a drugstore and get any micropore tape. There's 30 different kinds. They all work. Find one that you think is best, and you use just a little piece of tape on your lips. A lot of people think this is a hostage situation, which is why hostage tape has that name. But all you need is a little piece of tape to close your mouth. A lot of parents are gonna be apprehensive about doing this to their kids. So some entrepreneurial breeding people, Patrick McKeown developed something called Myotape. Again, no affiliation with, with this. I know Patrick. I'm a huge fan of this product because it goes around the mouth, and all it does is it gently trains a kid to keep their lips shut. They can open their mouth at any time. They can even talk wearing this. It's just when they go unconscious and muscles relax... And I think that stuff is a complete game changer. I have heard so many parents talking about their kids. Once you convert to nasal breathing, doesn't work for everybody, but that as the first step, so many people have told me their kids who were wetting their beds at age 10 and 11 stopped 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 gonna go haywire. And if you are, the systems are gonna 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

13. 25:54 – 28:14

    James’ seven-year mouth taping commitment.

    1. JNJames Nestor25:54

       like I was.

    2. TFTim Ferriss25:54

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

    3. JNJames Nestor26:01

       Yeah. So once I sort of hopped on the breathwork wagon, I, I rode it into various strange worlds. And, and one of those strange worlds was into the ENT, the ear, nose, and throat surgeon world. And it was while I was down at Stanford interviewing one of the leaders in the, in the field, Dr. Nayak, that I came across a breathing and sleep and respiratory therapist. And she, 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." And 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-

    4. TFTim Ferriss26:45

       [laughs]

    5. JNJames Nestor26:46

       ... and so I was apprehensive. And I did something I don't suggest anyone do. I just started wearing it immediately at night, and it sucked for about two weeks. It was terrible. Then I got over the hump, and I've worn it almost every single night for the past seven years. And it's-

    6. TFTim Ferriss27:02

       Wow

    7. JNJames Nestor27:02

       ... really hard for me to sleep without. If I'm camping, I'm wearing it. If I'm sleeping on a airplane, I don't wear it. I have seen people wearing it on airplanes [laughs]

    8. TFTim Ferriss27:10

       [laughs]

    9. JNJames Nestor27:11

       On long flights, which is a whole other level of commitment. But, um, at only a handful of times have I not worn it, and I immediately feel it. And I can see it in my sleep scores, right?

    10. TFTim Ferriss27:21

        [laughs]

    11. JNJames Nestor27:22

        So it's, it's not something I'm making up.

    12. TFTim Ferriss27:24

        Yeah. Sometimes I wear my gag ball on international flights. It makes people really uncomfortable. [laughs]

    13. JNJames Nestor27:29

        It's cool if you do that thing where you put the blanket over your head.

    14. TFTim Ferriss27:33

        [laughs]

    15. JNJames Nestor27:34

        Then, then I don't care, right? But when they tuck the blanket into the collar and there's this big piece of tape, it feels a little wrong.

    16. TFTim Ferriss27:41

        Just tears streaming down their face.

    17. JNJames Nestor27:43

        Yeah.

    18. TFTim Ferriss27:44

        All right. So the mouth tape, I'm gonna give this another shot because I've, I've frequently wondered what I can do that is also easy for travel-

    19. JNJames Nestor27:52

        Mm-hmm

    20. TFTim Ferriss27:52

        ... 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.

    21. JNJames Nestor28:13

        Mm-hmm.

14. 28:14 – 33:46

    CO2 levels: Your LEED-certified hotel is suffocating you.

    1. TFTim Ferriss28:14

       But I would love to segue perhaps from the mouth tape to the measurement of air quality that you've done. I guess specifically CO2 levels. [laughs] Do you wanna just take that and explain what it is that you documented?

    2. JNJames Nestor28:34

       This was something I had no idea about when I was writing the book, and it's something I got clued 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, you can look at any graph. You can go out and measure it. Right now it's 424 parts per million. But a lot of us aren't considering what the air quality, specifically the amount of CO2, is in indoor environments. We spend 90% of our time indoors, and we're not looking at the air quality. So I had heard from a researcher, he said, "You know, you're the breath guy. You should be checking this out." I said, "Well, what do I do?" He said, "Why don't you get a carbon dioxide monitor and take it around with you and just look at the air quality?" And so initially I was just like, "Well, who cares? Who cares if there's more CO2 or not?" Until I found all of these studies, and there's about 30 to 40 years of studies, and they're, 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.

    3. TFTim Ferriss29:36

       [laughs]

    4. JNJames Nestor29:36

       No disrespect. Love that place. But this is real science, real data that anyone has access to. And what it turns out is when you get to about triple the rate of CO2 in an indoor environment, so starting at around 1,500 parts per million... Again, outdoors it's around 425 parts per million. You start to find that in schools, certain cognitive test scores can go down about 50%, 5-0%, 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. That's what you're looking at. That's the chart. I've been carrying this thing around with me for about three and a half years. I've been absolutely aghast by what I've found. I travel a lot. I travel around 100 days a year. And You know, the average CO2 when you are entering onto a, an airplane and all suddenly everyone just starts falling asleep. They're not tired. [laughs] It's because the CO2 levels are around 2,500 parts per million. 2,500 parts per million. So if you wonder why you feel like crap after a 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 there have been all of these recommendations from engineering associations saying it should never be over 1,000 parts per million. That's when it's gonna 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.

    5. TFTim Ferriss31:29

       I'm sitting in a hotel right now, and [laughs] I'm not sure. I think they're trying to prevent suicide, so I may not be able to open any windows. But are there, [laughs] are there any approaches that you can embrace to address this if you travel a lot? What can you do?

    6. JNJames Nestor31:48

       I could tell you what I've done. I will tell you a little information about hotels.

    7. TFTim Ferriss31:52

       [laughs]

    8. JNJames Nestor31:52

       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, 'cause they don't wanna get sued if you commit suicide, but at least this much, six inches-

    9. TFTim Ferriss32:15

       Mm-hmm

    10. JNJames Nestor32:15

        ... 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%-

    11. TFTim Ferriss32:25

        Mm

    12. JNJames Nestor32:26

        ... of the cost of maintenance.

    13. TFTim Ferriss32:27

        LEED Platinum. Good news, we are LEED Platinum. Bad news, your brain is dying when you stay here.

    14. JNJames Nestor32:33

        [laughs] Yeah.

    15. TFTim Ferriss32:33

        Yeah. [laughs]

    16. JNJames Nestor32:34

        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 LEED certified, Green certified, that are the most expensive, have by far the worst quality air.

    17. TFTim Ferriss33:04

        Mm.

    18. JNJames Nestor33:04

        I've recorded 2,800 parts per million waking up in one of these hotels.

    19. TFTim Ferriss33:09

        Wow. I was joking, but I nailed it.

    20. JNJames Nestor33:12

        Yeah, I know.

    21. TFTim Ferriss33:12

        Wow.

    22. JNJames Nestor33:13

        This is just a bummer parade coming from me.

    23. TFTim Ferriss33:15

        [laughs]

    24. JNJames Nestor33:15

        But this is something... Because once you see this and carry these things around, you're like, "I am so screwed because-

    25. TFTim Ferriss33:23

        Yeah

    26. JNJames Nestor33:23

        ... I'm stuck in here, and I can't open a window," and it starts to make you crazy.

    27. TFTim Ferriss33:28

        Wow.

    28. JNJames Nestor33:28

        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-"

    29. TFTim Ferriss33:41

        Mm-hmm

    30. JNJames Nestor33:41

        ... just a little bit? Just a little bit." And those are the hotels you stay at.

15. 33:46 – 36:44

    Monitoring CO2 with the Aranet4 and building a CO2 database.

    1. TFTim Ferriss33:46

       Wow. What, uh, 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... [laughs] We were talking about Venn diagrams earlier. I mean, my, like, psyche Venn diagram, there's, like, a OCD and hypochondria, and [laughs] it's like-

    2. JNJames Nestor34:02

       Yeah. I know, dude

    3. TFTim Ferriss34:04

       ... pushing those over. And then in the bullseye is CO2 levels in hotels. [laughs]

    4. JNJames Nestor34:08

       [laughs] And listen, I, I know those hypochondriacs that every- everywhere you go, they're assessing everything.

    5. TFTim Ferriss34:14

       [laughs]

    6. JNJames Nestor34:14

       Some of them are my lovely friends. I love them, but they drive me fricking crazy.

    7. TFTim Ferriss34:18

       Yeah.

    8. JNJames Nestor34:19

       I never want to be that, but this is a real, real thing.

    9. TFTim Ferriss34:23

       This is a real thing.

    10. JNJames Nestor34:23

        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, is worthless. Don't bother with it.

    11. TFTim Ferriss34:36

        Mm.

    12. JNJames Nestor34:36

        There is one brand... Again, I get no money. I wish I did. Maybe I should en- endorse these, [laughs] these products.

    13. TFTim Ferriss34:42

        [laughs]

    14. JNJames Nestor34:43

        It's called an Aranet4. Aranet4, A-R-A-N-E-T-4. That's the best one. You know what? I probably even have it in my pack right now. I could show you.

    15. TFTim Ferriss34:55

        Sure.

    16. JNJames Nestor34:55

        But it's the most accurate one, and the battery life lasts forever. It lasts about three to four months.

    17. TFTim Ferriss35:01

        Mm.

    18. JNJames Nestor35:01

        And, 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 a database. I'm trying to arm about 100 people with these things, and then everything will automatically upload to this database, so you could see what hotels have good air quality, what restaurants have good air quality. Because governments, let me tell you, governments are gonna 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-

    19. TFTim Ferriss35:34

        Mm

    20. JNJames Nestor35:34

        ... that they're gonna start paying attention.

    21. TFTim Ferriss35:36

        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? W- like, 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"? [laughs]

    22. JNJames Nestor35:57

        That's a really, really good point. Maybe Shanghai in summer.

    23. TFTim Ferriss36:00

        [laughs]

    24. JNJames Nestor36:01

        Maybe Mumbai in spring. I have not assessed that. I think that's a good point. If you're in a, 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, there's more benefits than harm from that.

    25. TFTim Ferriss36:25

        Yeah.

    26. JNJames Nestor36:26

        Again, I think there's a lot of variables, but the CO2, if you're talking immediate, you know, acute harm versus chronic harm, the acute harm from CO2, your ability to rebound after a long flight, not feel hungover, not feel jet lagged, not feel drowsy, I

16. 36:44 – 47:22

    James’ travel kit: Red lights, granny packs, and a Soviet-era PEMF device.

    1. JNJames Nestor36:44

       think that's a big one.

    2. TFTim Ferriss36:45

       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, ketone salts, ketone monoesters, diesters, et cetera, but have been developed to protect divers, specifically military divers, f- 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, is there anything that is non-obvious, like the CO2 monitor-

    3. JNJames Nestor37:25

       Ah

    4. TFTim Ferriss37:26

       ... that you can speak to?

    5. JNJames Nestor37:27

       Right when I was ripping on hypochondriacs and, and-

    6. TFTim Ferriss37:30

       [laughs]

    7. JNJames Nestor37:30

       ... people obsessed with... We really wanna go there, I guess.

    8. TFTim Ferriss37:34

       Yeah, like I have a gallon of Purell in three-ounce packets.

    9. JNJames Nestor37:37

       [laughs] Yes, exactly. I didn't use to be one of those people until I just got completely drained after doing too many tours.

    10. TFTim Ferriss37:47

        Mm-hmm.

    11. JNJames Nestor37:47

        And then got older, and now I'm kinda one of those people-ish. I have a couple nightlights that are red lights, and I'm very typical. Everyone's just, like, nodding, "Tell me something new." Those are the only light source that I have in hotels, and especially important after a long flight. So I have this CO2 monitor. If there's a window, I will absolutely open that. I'll try to take a cold shower before bed, you know, especially if I am very jet-lagged. As far as the other tech, I carry, you know, a lot of vitamin D, K2, vitamin E in case I feel something coming on. I have some other supplements I carry around as well, and w- without getting too weird here, [laughs] I have this very small electric frequency device that I am currently assessing its validity. Anecdotally, I could say it's, it's been a complete game changer for me, and what I usually do at night is I, 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, 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-

    12. TFTim Ferriss39:02

        Mm-hmm

    13. JNJames Nestor39:02

        ... than a toothbrush. You can get a toothbrush anywhere. You can't get a frequency device [laughs] anywhere-

    14. TFTim Ferriss39:07

        [laughs]

    15. JNJames Nestor39:07

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

    16. TFTim Ferriss39:13

        All right. So a couple of clarifying questions, since all of my listeners are denizens of Weirdville.

    17. JNJames Nestor39:18

        Mm-hmm.

    18. TFTim Ferriss39:18

        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?

    19. JNJames Nestor39:30

        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, 'cause those are a 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 AM walking down the street looking for a liquor store that had some sort of packing tape or something.

    20. TFTim Ferriss39:56

        Mm.

    21. JNJames Nestor39:57

        It's that critical to me.

    22. TFTim Ferriss39:58

        Hmm.

    23. JNJames Nestor39:58

        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 wanna sit. Maybe I'll listen to something, but I want the light to be very low, and I think that there's plenty of good research on that, not disturbing your circadian rhythm. So we won't need to get into that.

    24. TFTim Ferriss40:20

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

    25. JNJames Nestor40:32

        These are these small LED ones, so the bulb-

    26. TFTim Ferriss40:35

        Mm

    27. JNJames Nestor40:35

        ... is actually plastic.

    28. TFTim Ferriss40:37

        Got it.

    29. JNJames Nestor40:37

        I would love to find an incandescent one because now I've been hearing about flickering, and I'm, I'm starting to notice that a bit because-

    30. TFTim Ferriss40:45

        Mm-hmm
17. 47:22 – 48:22

    In Weirdville, eyes sing The Body Electric.

    1. JNJames Nestor47:22

       animal models.

    2. TFTim Ferriss47:23

       If somebody just wanted to read up on the research-

    3. JNJames Nestor47:27

       Mm-hmm

    4. TFTim Ferriss47:27

       ... or learn a bit more about this without selecting a device necessarily, where would you suggest they start?

    5. JNJames Nestor47:34

       I would say read The Body Electric by Robert O. Becker.

    6. TFTim Ferriss47:38

       Mm-hmm.

    7. JNJames Nestor47:38

       Doctor who basically paved the way for Michael Levin at Tufts.

    8. TFTim Ferriss47:42

       Mm-hmm. Yeah.

    9. JNJames Nestor47:43

       And if any of this sounds crazy, all you have to do is read any of Michael Levin's [laughs] papers-

    10. TFTim Ferriss47:48

        Oh

    11. JNJames Nestor47:49

        ... and you're like, "Oh my God."

    12. TFTim Ferriss47:51

        Your head'll explode. Yeah.

    13. JNJames Nestor47:53

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

    14. TFTim Ferriss48:21

        All right.

18. 48:22 – 49:36

    The supplements included in David’s granny packs.

    1. TFTim Ferriss48:22

       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?

    2. JNJames Nestor48:34

       Oh, boy. Again, I never thought I'd be one of those guys-

    3. TFTim Ferriss48:37

       [laughs]

    4. JNJames Nestor48:38

       ... carrying around the, the granny vitamin packs [laughs] full of supplements.

    5. TFTim Ferriss48:42

       Oh, I've got two of them. [laughs]

    6. JNJames Nestor48:43

       [laughs]

    7. TFTim Ferriss48:44

       10 feet from me.

    8. JNJames Nestor48:45

       But-

    9. TFTim Ferriss48:45

       And can I tell you, just to endorse the, the granny pill packs I thought those looked so ridiculous, added more labor, so I would carry around-

    10. JNJames Nestor48:54

        [laughs]

    11. TFTim Ferriss48:54

        ... 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." Just to give you permission to use the granny, the granny packs.

    12. JNJames Nestor49:10

        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 wanna 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.

    13. TFTim Ferriss49:27

        [laughs] Okay.

    14. JNJames Nestor49:28

        There's a little CoQ10 in there. There's a little-

    15. TFTim Ferriss49:30

        Yeah

    16. JNJames Nestor49:30

        ... nattokinase. It's the old classics that are in there. Nothing cutting-edge.

19. 49:36 – 51:36

    Natto vs. nattokinase.

    1. TFTim Ferriss49:36

       Okay, got it. So the nattokinase, that's gonna have the K2 in it, uh, presumably, right? Is that, that's the source?

    2. JNJames Nestor49:41

       It will, but I have this special pack in case I get sick. In case I get COVID-

    3. TFTim Ferriss49:47

       Mm

    4. JNJames Nestor49:47

       ... 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.

    5. TFTim Ferriss50:06

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

    6. JNJames Nestor50:28

       You know, speaking of that, 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 [laughs] that they used to, right? It's virtually impossible to get all these things the way our ancestors did, and natto 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."

    7. TFTim Ferriss50:51

       [laughs]

    8. JNJames Nestor50:51

       Japan's awesome. That place is perfect. There's no crime. It's beautiful. I said, "I'm gonna start my day every day with this." Wow. You know?

    9. TFTim Ferriss51:01

       [laughs]

    10. JNJames Nestor51:01

        Day two, no way. It's the stringiness that will really get you.

    11. TFTim Ferriss51:07

        Oh. Yeah. People can try that out if they haven't tried it. That'll be the podcast challenge. [laughs] I appreciate you indulging me on, on all those questions since I pay attention to my travel kit. I do. And I've got all sorts of elec- electronic devices all over the place.

    12. JNJames Nestor51:23

        [laughs]

    13. TFTim Ferriss51:23

        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 [laughs] E-stim for lymphatic drainage. I've got so much crap

20. 51:36 – 58:42

    Athletes and breathing: The BOLT score explained.

    1. TFTim Ferriss51:36

       with me right now. On that note, I guess this is a bit of an awkward sequitur, I suppose, but my surgery came from a sports injury, so I'm thinking about athletes. And there were a few things in some of my prep materials here that I wanted to touch on because I hadn't seen them before. So for athletes and professional athletes and so on, we see na- 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. Riding Giants-

    2. JNJames Nestor52:07

       Mm-hmm

    3. TFTim Ferriss52:07

       ... is the documentary. One of the two. People should watch. It's insane, especially for people who don't know the name Laird, if you've ever seen tow-in surfing, Laird helped develop and popularize that. Standup paddleboarding, he kind of resurrected it and helped make it popular. Just a beast of an athlete. And so I remember seeing him on an assault bike, one of those bikes where you're also pushing with your arms, where he would do long exhale breath holds and push basically until he would pass out and fall off the bike. [laughs] 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?

    4. JNJames Nestor52:44

       Mm-hmm.

    5. TFTim Ferriss52:44

       All caps, B-O-L-T, presumably an acronym. I had never come across this. And anything else that you'd want to add.

    6. JNJames Nestor52:51

       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, of a little inconvenience or a little discomfort, right? This is what they thrive in to get ahead of everyone. As a big wave surfer, you have to focus on breathwork. You have to focus on your breath hold. If you don't, you die, which is one of the reasons why Laird is 60 years old, you know, looks like he's 30. [laughs] The guy is just constantly focusing on his breath because he wants to stay active in the field at, at the top of his class. So surfers have known this for a very long time, but a lot of runners, and rowers, and baseball players, and football players, and soccer players haven't been clued into this. And so the elite trainers that I know, they said this is the number one thing that they do for athletes right now is to focus on their breath. And what they've found is the vast majority of athletes, you would think that they would have their breath completely focused, right? That they would be the best breathers in the world. But they absolutely are not. They're as dysfunctional as everyone else. They've learned how to push through the pain to win the game, but that doesn't mean they're breathing properly. So the first thing they do is retrain their breathing, and what they find with almost all these athletes is the majority of them are not engaging their diaphragm. The diaphragm is this muscle organ that sits beneath the lungs, and when you breathe in, the diaphragm goes down. 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 times a minute instead of 40 times or 60 times or 100 times a minute, then your heart rate will go down, which means your tolerance for whatever thing that you're doing will go up and your recovery time goes down. So it's a basic math here, but so many people aren't clued into it. And once they start focusing on the breath and adopting these better habits, I mean, these trainers are just making monsters out of these people. Their performance goes through the roof, recovery times go down. It makes a huge difference. But 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. [chuckles] 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.

    7. TFTim Ferriss55:45

       Is this BOLT score tracking a shorthand, simple way of tracking breathing efficiency, or what is that?

    8. JNJames Nestor55:52

       Okay, sorry. Didn't answer that, that question. It is the body oxygen level test. It used to be called the blood oxygen level test, but Patrick McKeown changed that because he got some flak from some pulmonologists.

    9. TFTim Ferriss56:04

       [chuckles]

    10. JNJames Nestor56:04

        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, like a good writer, that's, 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. And 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. 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.

    11. TFTim Ferriss57:01

        That's it?

    12. JNJames Nestor57:01

        That's it.

    13. TFTim Ferriss57:02

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

    14. JNJames Nestor57:05

        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. [exhales]

    15. TFTim Ferriss57:17

        [chuckles] Yeah.

    16. JNJames Nestor57:18

        This is down to neutral, hold your breath. Down-

    17. TFTim Ferriss57:21

        Mm-hmm

    18. JNJames Nestor57:21

        ... to neutral, hold your breath, and then you start the timer. And what you're gonna 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 gonna watch that BOLT score go up and up and up and up. Usually-

    19. TFTim Ferriss57:47

        Hmm

    20. JNJames Nestor57:47

        ... after about maybe a week or two, you could see it double, and then after that you could see it triple.

    21. TFTim Ferriss57:53

        Oh, wow. That's fast.

    22. JNJames Nestor57:55

        It depends who you are, okay? I d- I don't wanna make-

    23. TFTim Ferriss57:57

        Mm-hmm

    24. JNJames Nestor57:57

        ... blanket comments for everyone, and it also depends how honest you are with yourself.

    25. TFTim Ferriss58:02

        Right, if you're gaming the system.

    26. JNJames Nestor58:03

        Yeah. And if no one's looking, why would you wanna game the system? [chuckles] Right?

    27. TFTim Ferriss58:08

        Mm-hmm.

    28. JNJames Nestor58:08

        Be honest with yourself. When you feel that need to breathe, just stop, right? And you're, you're also gonna 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 gonna suck. If you're very well-rested and you're in a good zone, your BOLT score is gonna be three times what it was before. So there's-

    29. TFTim Ferriss58:29

        Hmm

    30. JNJames Nestor58:29

        ... a lot of variability.
21. 58:42 – 1:00:04

    LeBron James’ alternate nostril breathing and diaphragmatic dysfunction.

    1. TFTim Ferriss58:42

       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 s- normal civilians, are suboptimal in their breathing?

    2. JNJames Nestor58:58

       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 [inhales] your rib cage down here. Learn what a really, a full, deep, enriching breath feels like. Learn how that changes your posture, and then start adopting and adapting your body to these biomechanics when you are practicing whatever sport. And there are a bunch of trainers that do this now. If you look at LeBron now waiting in between plays, what's he doing? Most of the time he's doing breathwork. [chuckles]

    3. TFTim Ferriss59:46

       Mm-hmm.

    4. JNJames Nestor59:47

       Right? And he's doing it properly. He's doing alternate nostril breathing. [inhales] You look at his d- his diaphragmatic movement because you can see his chest and his abdominal area. So this makes a huge difference. This is, this is biology. It's not psychology. And I think athletes can benefit the most from

22. 1:00:04 – 1:04:01

    Inspiratory muscle training and the back soreness warning.

    1. JNJames Nestor1:00:04

       it.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:00:04

       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, effectively training the muscles involved with respiration. Right. So the, 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 diaphragmatic breathing? That's kind of number one. Then number two, do you have any thoughts on the various training devices that can be used for developing actual muscle strength or endurance for the respiratory muscles?

    3. JNJames Nestor1:00:55

       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, 'cause for a lot of people it's frozen.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:01:06

       Mm-hmm.

    5. JNJames Nestor1:01:06

       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 ribcage around here. You can do it yourself. There's a bunch of different exercises you can do to help facilitate that process, but it's, it's kind of better having someone who really knows how to do it help to open that up. And then you can start playing with your breath, and after an hour of this, you can feel what a difference it makes, right? Everything just starts to open up. And now we're talking about those different devices that the air resistance, the breath resistance devices. They work great.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:01:47

       Mm-hmm.

    7. JNJames Nestor1:01:48

       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, uh, baseball bat. That, that's probably a very aged way of saying it too, but that's what we used to call them, right? So you swing that bat around a few times, it feels very heavy, and then when you take it off, it, it feels so much lighter and 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 train- which is just one of the things that you put in your mouth. It almost looks like-

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:02:26

       Mm-hmm

    9. JNJames Nestor1:02:26

       ... the end of a snorkel without the tube.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:02:28

        Exactly.

    11. JNJames Nestor1:02:28

        They all work. They all work.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:02:31

        I recall also, just a warning for some folks, so if you use one of these inspiratory sort of muscle trainers, I recall I had Bas Rutten, 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, you will feel like you've just done six hours of deadlifts. I mean, it is [laughs] shocking how sore you will be. So I just wanna tell people, start with a lower dose than you think you can handle [laughs] when you're getting used to this stuff.

    13. JNJames Nestor1:03:19

        I think that that's good advice for every single thing we've talked about. Like, people hear stuff, they wanna 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.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:03:42

        Mm-hmm.

    15. JNJames Nestor1:03:42

        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

23. 1:04:01 – 1:07:58

    The Relaxator: An adult breathing pacifier for focus.

    1. JNJames Nestor1:04:01

       is on it. So this is a device. It doesn't need to have a ton of pressure to be beneficial. This just has [inhales] slight pressure to it.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:04:10

       So it looks like an adult pacifier, basically, of sorts.

    3. JNJames Nestor1:04:13

       Yeah. In other words, extremely sexy.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:04:16

       [laughs]

    5. JNJames Nestor1:04:17

       Something you wanna be bringing on that airplane along with your sleep tape and, and your blanket. Just a heads-up. But it's a little thing that you put in your mouth that has [inhales] 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.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:04:36

       Mm-hmm.

    7. JNJames Nestor1:04:36

       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. And it can cause some chronic issues later on because you're holding your breath when you get scared or you focus. You're having this reaction. If I use a little device like this, you can even put a straw in your mouth if you want something simpler, it just reminds your body to keep with that rhythm. And if you have, 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, at those very intense times, I, I use this thing and it works like a charm.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:05:19

       What is that called?

    9. JNJames Nestor1:05:20

       Oh, boy. [laughs] Okay. Again, I am not, uh, endorsing this by any way.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:05:25

        [laughs]

    11. JNJames Nestor1:05:25

        People give me things. This one's by my friend Anders Olsson, who was in the book. He's, uh, been studying breathing for, for 20 years. I love this thing. It's called The Relaxator. [laughs]

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:05:36

        [laughs] I love the name.

    13. JNJames Nestor1:05:37

        This really feels like a commercial now. It's called The Relaxator.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:05:41

        Use code NESTOR for 30% off. [laughs]

    15. JNJames Nestor1:05:43

        You can buy two and get one for free.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:05:45

        [laughs]

    17. JNJames Nestor1:05:46

        Yeah, I've really screwed myself not getting a percentage of these things. But this thing is, is cool because it's... These other devices that you see are, are big.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:05:55

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

    19. JNJames Nestor1:05:58

        Like bondage level big.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:06:00

        [laughs]

    21. JNJames Nestor1:06:01

        A lot of bondage themes going on in this podcast. But this thing literally you can wear it around your neck, you can stick it in your pocket. No one... It doesn't look so, so weird.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:06:09

        Mm-hmm.

    23. JNJames Nestor1:06:10

        And I love this thing and, and this is one of the things I, I keep in the suitcase.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:06:14

        So if you're jamming and working on something, writing for four hours-

    25. JNJames Nestor1:06:17

        Mm-hmm

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:06:18

        ... do you just take a few breaths with that every hour? What does the use look like?

    27. JNJames Nestor1:06:23

        No. I have it in my mouth.

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:06:24

        Oh, the whole time? Okay.

    29. JNJames Nestor1:06:26

        Yes.

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:06:26

        I'm glad I asked for clarification.
24. 1:07:58 – 1:11:16

    San Francisco Writers Grotto and the trustafarian invasion.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:07:58

       You mentioned writing. We're gonna take a little, little breather, pun intended, on the breath talk. Uh, I wanna talk about writing for a little bit because I'm hoping you can help me sort out this 800-page draft-

    2. JNJames Nestor1:08:10

       Mm

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:08:10

       ... 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?

    4. JNJames Nestor1:08:24

       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 Poe Bronson was one of them, Julia Scheeres, 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.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:08:52

       [laughs]

    6. JNJames Nestor1:08:53

       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. [laughs] One thing about writers is, especially later on towards, like, the 2010s when the magazine industry was going through a bunch of issues, you know, they didn't have consistent income. So they noticed that people would just stop paying rent. So then they had to-

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:09:21

       [laughs]

    8. JNJames Nestor1:09:21

       ... get some other quote, unquote "writers" in there. [laughs]

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:09:25

       [laughs]

    10. JNJames Nestor1:09:26

        Basically people who had very large amounts of money who wanted to-

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:09:30

        Yeah

    12. JNJames Nestor1:09:30

        ... tell everyone at parties that they were writers. They paid rent, man. 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.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:09:41

        What did you learn there? Uh, you know, before the trustafarians got roped in to raise the average rent price.

    14. JNJames Nestor1:09:47

        [laughs]

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:09:47

        What are some of the lessons that you learned? I mean, because part of the, 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, "God, I'm just, like, kind of over it," right? And sometimes the solution can be going to a cafe and working at a cafe, and that's an improvement.

    16. JNJames Nestor1:10:05

        Mm-hmm.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:10:06

        Right? But is there anything that you really took from that experience in terms of lessons learned, habits developed, anything like that?

    18. JNJames Nestor1:10:13

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

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:11:06

        [laughs]

    20. JNJames Nestor1:11:06

        And those lessons I've taken with me, and I think it's allowed me to actually make, make a living doing what I'm doing by, by applying some of those lessons to what I,

25. 1:11:16 – 1:14:09

    Writer’s block: A convenient excuse for hobbyists.

    1. JNJames Nestor1:11:16

       to the books I write.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:11:17

       I was reading, you sent to me some of these snippets on writing, and I wanna read part of it. So... [laughs]

    3. JNJames Nestor1:11:23

       Oh, no.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:11:24

       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. [laughs] 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 a 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, 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." I have heard something similar from every friend of mine, here's a distinction though, who has written for newspapers or magazines. I do know some professional writers who focus and have focused exclusively on books who still talk about 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?

    5. JNJames Nestor1:12:23

       [laughs]

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:12:24

       Could you maybe just speak to this writer's block term and excuse perhaps?

    7. JNJames Nestor1:12:29

       I have a feeling I'm gonna 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 this is, and if you don't hand the thing in, you're not gonna get paid, and you're gonna be in a very precarious situation. ... finds a way out. [laughs] 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-

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:13:10

       Mm

    9. JNJames Nestor1:13:10

       ... because I came from a place where I cut the cord in the corporate world, and I had to do this to pay my mortgage. It was the only way I was gonna 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.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:13:30

        Mm.

    11. JNJames Nestor1:13:30

        And so this preciousness around writing, this is one thing I learned a lot at the Writers' Grotto. [laughs] Maybe one of the negative things is people just love to talk about it, kinda like when someone's on a fast and they just wanna tell you all about their cleanse or their fast.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:13:45

        [laughs]

    13. JNJames Nestor1:13:46

        And it's the last thing anyone wants to hear about. People just wanna talk about writer's block all the time because I think it's a convenient way for them not to do the thing.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:13:55

        [laughs] 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."

    15. JNJames Nestor1:14:02

        Yes. [laughs]

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:14:03

        "All right."

    17. JNJames Nestor1:14:04

        That's exactly right. Yeah.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:14:05

        In any case, I could keep giving examples, but I wanna try to focus here.

26. 1:14:09 – 1:20:36

    Cutting the corporate cord: James’ visceral “I quit” moment.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:14:09

       So when you cut the sort of corporate umbilical cord-

    2. JNJames Nestor1:14:13

       Mm-hmm

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:14:13

       ... 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?

    4. JNJames Nestor1:14:31

       I was a well-respected, you know, member of corporate America for a very, very long time, and I was making a living, bought me a house, all that stuff, and there was obviously something missing in that. And so what I would do on nights and weekends is I would write magazine articles, and I absolutely loved it because it allowed me an excuse to knock on doors that I wouldn't ordinarily knock on and talk to weirdos. So I unfortunately started off by just writing stories I wanted to write 'cause I didn't need to do it, right? The, the money wasn't that good anyway. It's just writing things I wanted to write, and I got so absolutely absorbed in these worlds and would take months writing these stories, and I thought it was impossible for me to do this full time. And that's what I did for six, seven, eight years until I got to a point where I w- had several different magazine contracts and I was at a four-year review for my work performance, and my boss was like, "Oh, you know, it's really good," and, you know, "This is exciting," and-

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:15:45

       What were you doing at the time in corporate America?

    6. JNJames Nestor1:15:47

       Oh, God. I was the head of an editorial department.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:15:51

       Mm-hmm.

    8. JNJames Nestor1:15:52

       And so I was doing a lot of editing and a lot of writing for a organization which shall remain unnamed-

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:16:00

       [laughs]

    10. JNJames Nestor1:16:00

        ... at this time. And it was a very easy job. 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."

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:16:28

        [laughs] It's just a visceral... It was a, like, animal response.

    12. JNJames Nestor1:16:33

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

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:16:37

        [laughs]

    14. JNJames Nestor1:16:38

        And he was shocked. I was like, "I'm gonna go out and just kick ass," and this was around 2009. Guess what happened next? [laughs]

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:16:47

        Yeah.

    16. JNJames Nestor1:16:47

        Everything imploded, and I lost all of my contracts, and I had a couple of extremely difficult years trying to find my way, navigate my way through this, but I said, "I can't go back until I really give this a go." So I could tell you so many horror stories. A year after, everything went wrong. Everything. Book contracts got canceled. Magazine stories got canned, and, uh, it was horrible, but I kept with it. Yeah.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:17:17

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

    18. JNJames Nestor1:17:35

        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 like, I didn't cut the cord when I was 22, right? [laughs] 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."

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:18:20

        Mm.

    20. JNJames Nestor1:18:21

        And so that, that's what drove me.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:18:23

        When did it click? When did you, after the canceled contracts and the disasters and just train wreck after train wreck, was there a moment, doesn't have to be a financial moment, but was there a moment where you're like, "Ooh, 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?

    22. JNJames Nestor1:18:58

        There was a moment. I was sent by Outside Magazine to write about the World Freediving 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 this story going on here." And he's like, "Okay, but you gotta finish the story."

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:19:39

        [laughs]

    24. JNJames Nestor1:19:40

        So no writer's block there. It's weird how that happens.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:19:42

        [laughs]

    26. JNJames Nestor1:19:42

        So I deliver 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, [laughs] right?

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:20:01

        Mm-hmm.

    28. JNJames Nestor1:20:01

        Because you're dealing with a larger sum of money, you're dealing with something I've never done, which was write a book.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:20:08

        Mm-hmm.

    30. JNJames Nestor1:20:08

        I've written a ton of articles, but, but writing a book was a different thing, but I love the challenge, and I just went 100% in seven days a week, just like I was so absorbed in it, and I was so happy. I was very tired, and I should have paced myself better, but every day I was so grateful not to be in an office and so happy to be doing something that was able to really stir my curiosity and my fascination

27. 1:20:36 – 1:23:03

    The freediving story that launched a book deal.

    1. JNJames Nestor1:20:36

       with the world.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:20:37

       When did writing become self-sustaining financially?

    3. JNJames Nestor1:20:41

       Became pretty self-sustaining from that contract. It was a larger contract.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:20:46

       Mm.

    5. JNJames Nestor1:20:46

       I won't give you the whole dirty story, but the book came out, and I got quite a large advance, and the book didn't sell as much as the publisher had hoped.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:20:55

       This is deep.

    7. JNJames Nestor1:20:56

       Yes, yes. [laughs] 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. And, uh, I was so heartbroken by not just the financial part of that, but the fact that 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.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:21:41

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

    9. JNJames Nestor1:21:47

       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.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:21:58

        Mm-hmm.

    11. JNJames Nestor1:21:58

        And 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've hired an agency to, to take care of PR and not relied on the publisher. All these things that I'm [laughs] su- sure you already know, right?

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:22:26

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

    13. JNJames Nestor1:22:29

        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 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, and fill

28. 1:23:03 – 1:26:34

    Deep‘s disappointing launch and publisher betrayal.

    1. JNJames Nestor1:23:03

       them in.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:23:03

       So I wanna read something. This is, uh, to give credit where credit's due. It's leadersmag.com. This is from 2022. So this might take a second-

    3. JNJames Nestor1:23:11

       Yeah

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:23:11

       ... because it's a chunky paragraph, but I'm gonna read this because I'm, I'm hoping for some, some advice. But we can do that, I think, 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," da, da, da, da, da, da, da, like right, four- 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 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." [laughs] 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? [laughs]

    5. JNJames Nestor1:24:08

       I worked.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:24:09

       I know it worked, but how, how the hell?

    7. JNJames Nestor1:24:12

       I would love to say it's more complicated than that. I worked until it was done.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:24:17

       Mm-hmm.

    9. JNJames Nestor1:24:17

       And some of these projects, as you well know, some of them kinda feel like they slide off.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:24:23

        Yeah.

    11. JNJames Nestor1:24:23

        Like, things find their place. They find their footing. You, you're almost out of control of the process.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:24:30

        Yeah.

    13. JNJames Nestor1:24:30

        The process takes you over and takes you along for a ride, and it's a wonderful feeling. Like, if only every project. And some of these, you cannot find your way out. You cannot see daylight for a very, very long time, and that was this book. So many people were so nervous, I think, about my mental state, my physical state, because, hey, I'm talking to dentists. They're like, "Cool, why aren't you talking to pulmonologists?" [laughs] I said, "Because dentists know about breathing more than pulmonologists."

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:25:00

        [laughs]

    15. JNJames Nestor1:25:00

        And I'm doing all of this crazy stuff that has nothing to do with breathing. And you know, I, I would call my agent and tell her this, and she kinda 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.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:25:21

        [laughs] Say that one more time.

    17. JNJames Nestor1:25:22

        It was 290,000 words.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:25:24

        [laughs] Okay, that makes me feel better. [laughs]

    19. JNJames Nestor1:25:26

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

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:26:18

        Mm-hmm. Yeah.

    21. JNJames Nestor1:26:19

        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

29. 1:26:34 – 1:28:15

    Breath: From 290,000 words to 85,000 in a house in the woods.

    1. JNJames Nestor1:26:34

       to make sense.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:26:35

       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?

    3. JNJames Nestor1:26:47

       Mm-hmm.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:26:47

       There may have been some very new structural decisions that you would have to make about the overall architecture of the book. What, what were some of the sort of key moments or decisions that allowed you to ultimately do that?

    5. JNJames Nestor1:27:00

       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-

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:27:16

       Mm

    7. JNJames Nestor1:27:16

       ... 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 onto."

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:27:32

       As a through line, you mean?

    9. JNJames Nestor1:27:34

       Yeah. Not only the main through line, but, but all these, all these subthreads that sort of-

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:27:40

        Mm-hmm

    11. JNJames Nestor1:27:40

        ... need to weave together around that through line so it feels like you're reading a book and not a Wikipedia entry.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:27:48

        [laughs]

    13. JNJames Nestor1:27:48

        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. [laughs]

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:28:01

        Yeah.

    15. JNJames Nestor1:28:01

        If people stop reading your stuff, you have failed. So you have to keep them reading, and you wanna include information that's gonna help enrich their lives too, and you do that through, through stories. So

30. 1:28:15 – 1:30:42

    Finding the skeleton: The Stanford experiment as through-line.

    1. JNJames Nestor1:28:15

       it was through their intervention and advice that they were able to see something I was not able to see. And once we had that skeleton... And I remember the day it all came 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, 'cause I already knew the story-

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:28:39

       Mm

    3. JNJames Nestor1:28:39

       ... right? And I knew exactly where to go.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:28:41

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

    5. JNJames Nestor1:28:44

       Had the blueprint.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:28:45

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

    7. JNJames Nestor1:28:49

       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 levels. Ev- every imaginable thing that we could possibly do. And in my imagination, this was gonna be three paragraphs towards the end of the book, because I was like, "It's cool," and the results confirmed everything I had been told, right? But 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."

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:29:47

       Mm.

    9. JNJames Nestor1:29:47

       "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 mean, I'm working on this fricking thing for five years." They said, "Nope, that's what it's gonna be." And so I quickly put it together, you know, after a couple of weeks, and I went, "Wow, that's it." And we finally had it. And I remember that feeling too of just extreme relief more than anything. But there's always a way out. I, I know you're in the weeds right now. I can sense-

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:30:21

        Yeah

    11. JNJames Nestor1:30:21

        ... that you're just like, "What the hell? I can't figure this." There is always a way out, and you'll, you'll find it.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:30:28

        [laughs] All right. Yeah, your starting point of almost 300,000 words makes me feel a lot better, 'cause I think that's roughly-

    13. JNJames Nestor1:30:33

        [laughs] Okay, good

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:30:34

        ... I might be slightly over that, but yeah, it's a big old honking [laughs] block of granite that I need to start chipping away

31. 1:30:42 – 1:33:29

    Prayer and coherent breathing: The 5.5-second secret.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:30:42

       on. [laughs]

    2. JNJames Nestor1:30:42

       Yep.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:30:43

       We've covered a lot here. I wanna touch on perhaps one other piece that I've also explored personally, which is now in modern terms, worked with a woman named Leah Lagos. This is quite a few years ago now. But to use particular patterns and cadence of breathing to affect heart rate variability, to improve heart rate variability, and it would seem that using very particular cadences of breathing is not a new thing.

    4. JNJames Nestor1:31:17

       [laughs]

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:31:19

       And I was hoping maybe you could speak to Prayer cross-culturally and breathing practices and what, what you've observed or found in the literature.

    6. JNJames Nestor1:31:29

       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 om man padme hum and sa ta na ma, 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 [inhales] very slowly. And they looked at what happened to the bodies of all of these subjects, and they looked at how heart rate variability went through the roof, how blood pressure decreased, how oxygen increased in the brain, and all of these different systems of the body entered 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. And 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, 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.

32. 1:33:29 – 1:35:55

    James’ critique of breathwork culture and barriers to entry.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:33:29

       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?

    2. JNJames Nestor1:33:53

       I think the, the main thing, and this is my... I won't call it my, my issue with the breathwork culture that's out there, but it's just something I want to bring awareness to. Breathwork's a huge deal right now, right? There's retreats, there's different schools, there's classes all over the place, there's breathwork fashion, you know, there's breathwork jewels, there's all that stuff. But what I think that that culture is doing is a bit of a disservice to everybody else in that it's complicating and creating a, a barrier around something that already belongs to everybody. This is what my book was mostly about. It wasn't breathwork. It was about this biological function of breathing. And if you look at 90% of people on the planet right now suffer from some form of breathing dysfunction, the most helpful thing you can do for yourself is just to be a normal breather. You don't have to go sign up for a breathwork class. And the breathwork classes that I've gone to have been amazing. They're incredible. And then I watch people walk away mouth breathing, right?

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:35:06

       [chuckles]

    4. JNJames Nestor1:35:06

       Or complain about their snoring or sleep apnea. So it's, it's like going to like a culinary school and just learning how to make desserts and not learning how to make entrees, uh, and not learning how to make food that is nutritious for you. I'm not saying breathwork's bad. I love it. 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 breathwork, get your breathing to a normal place and see the benefits from that.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:35:54

       Hmm.

33. 1:35:55 – 1:39:44

    Sleep optimization: SnoreLab, side sleeping, and incline bed therapy.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:35:55

       Sage words. Yeah, 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, 'cause I have to make this, of course, sort of self-interested [chuckles] as we start to land the plane. But I have been having, this last week, for reasons I, 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.

    2. JNJames Nestor1:36:23

       Mm-hmm.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:36:23

       But besides tape on the mouth and the things we already talked about, is there anything else that you recommend to people for sleep position, head position, anything at all, doesn't have to be what I just mentioned, for purposes of improving or regulating sleep?

    4. JNJames Nestor1:36:44

       If you have-- I'm sure you have various devices that measure your sleep quality, right?

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:36:50

       Mm-hmm.

    6. JNJames Nestor1:36:50

       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, with different little things that you can do around. I would start with assessing your SnoreLab or SnoreClock. They both do the exact same thing. I'd put-

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:37:10

       Mm-hmm

    8. JNJames Nestor1:37:11

       ... your phone on the side of your bed, and I would record it not for one day, but for a week. And I would start with that to see if you are mouth breathing, to see if you are snoring, to see if you are holding your breath. And then from there, I would slowly adopt nasal breathing through the methods that I mentioned. Start in the daytime. Start extremely slowly. And you can try to get Myotape as well. They make it for adults as well as kids.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:37:39

       M-Y-O?

    10. JNJames Nestor1:37:40

        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 positions. So what they used to do back in the day is get a T-shirt and tape a sock or a ping pong ball or something light to the back of that T-shirt, because so often when you are lying on your back, breathing is more difficult. This is what happened with COVID patients, right? Which is why they started proning them. They started putting them on their stomachs and sides, and they were saving so many more people this way.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:38:18

        Hmm. I didn't know that.

    12. JNJames Nestor1:38:19

        The same thing is true with breathing at night. When you are on your back, [sniffs] 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, right? With SnoreLab and with all of your wearables. After that, you can try incline bed therapy, which is where you raise the head of the bed around six inches. That can help a lot of people. And then there's several other things you can do after that, but I would start there. And for most people, not everybody, for most people, they will see a reduction, and sometimes snoring to be completely resolved. And for some people with sleep apnea, they will see significant reductions. Granted, I will say that sometimes troubled sleep is caused by stress, right? When your mind-- you're waking up and your mind is just racing. Sometimes it's not so much a physiological thing, sometimes it's psychological. But if I were you, I would want to get the physiological stuff out of the way first. Check all of those boxes, make sure your breathing is consistent and normal and fluid at night, and then you can dive deeper

34. 1:39:44 – 1:41:24

    Parting thoughts and where to find James and free breathing protocols.

    1. JNJames Nestor1:39:44

       into it.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:39:44

       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 breathwork seminar. These are very much within reach at low cost or no cost. Where can people find you online? Is there a best place for people to find James Nestor if they wanna dive deeper, see what you're up to?

    3. JNJames Nestor1:40:23

       Yeah. I, 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. Some jerk took James Nestor, so I'm under MrJamesNestor, MrJamesNestor. That's also my website. A lot of the stuff we're gonna be giving out, different breathing protocols, different breathwork audio tracks and all that stuff. So if you go to the website, you can sign up and get all these freebies that way.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:40:52

       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. Till next time.

Episode duration: 1:41:34