The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1506

00:00:01.000 Alright, we're rolling.

00:00:03.000 First of all, I really enjoyed your book.

00:00:04.000 It was really excellent.

00:00:05.000 I got deep into it.

00:00:06.000 I listened to the audiobook, and it's in your voice, so this would be weird sitting in.

00:00:10.000 It's always weird when you meet somebody for the first time, and you've heard their book, and you hear them talking for long periods of time, and then they're right there.

00:00:17.000 But I really enjoyed it, man.

00:00:18.000 I guess I can't change the tone of my voice then.

00:00:21.000 No, don't do that.

00:00:22.000 You're used to it.

00:00:22.000 Okay.

00:00:22.000 Keep it steady.

00:00:23.000 Keep it the way it is.

00:00:23.000 Keep it real.

00:00:27.000 What made you want to write this?

00:00:29.000 Where did this come from?

00:00:31.000 It's actually two things.

00:00:32.000 About 10 years ago, 11 years ago, I had this really weird experience.

00:00:35.000 I was in San Francisco with a lot of breath work, yoga stuff going on there.

00:00:39.000 And I kept getting pneumonia.

00:00:41.000 I surf a lot at Ocean Beach.

00:00:43.000 And I thought that that was the reason.

00:00:45.000 So I kept getting bronchitis, pneumonia, year after year.

00:00:48.000 It just kept happening.

00:00:50.000 So a doctor...

00:00:51.000 A friend of mine suggested a breathing class might help.

00:00:54.000 I didn't know much about this, but went down, signed up, and was sitting in the corner of this studio, cold room, legs crossed, breathing in this rhythmic pattern.

00:01:05.000 Nothing crazy, just and then really slow.

00:01:09.000 And I sweated through my t-shirt, through my socks, my hair was sopping wet, sweat all over my face.

00:01:16.000 So I went back to her and I said, What happened?

00:01:19.000 Like, you're a doctor, you should know this.

00:01:22.000 And she said, oh, you must have had a fever, or the room must have been too hot.

00:01:27.000 So she had no idea.

00:01:28.000 But I didn't know what to do with that story, so I just kind of filed it away.

00:01:32.000 Forgot about it for a number of years until I met some freedivers.

00:01:35.000 These are people who have, through the power of will, Enabled themselves to hold their breath for six, seven, eight minutes at a time and dive to depths far below what any scientist thought possible.

00:01:47.000 So I thought, wow, there's something in breathing here that I don't know about and I figured other people might not know about as well.

00:01:54.000 Ah, that's really interesting.

00:01:57.000 You know, I've known a bunch of free divers, and I've known a bunch of jiu-jitsu people that got really into yoga, primarily because of Hicks and Gracie.

00:02:07.000 Hicks and Gracie, do you know who he is?

00:02:08.000 Yeah, famous, probably the most famous of the...

00:02:13.000 Like the classic jiu-jitsu people, he's known as being the very best.

00:02:17.000 He was like one of the original real pioneers of jiu-jitsu in America as well.

00:02:23.000 And there's this documentary on him called Choke.

00:02:26.000 Have you seen it?

00:02:26.000 I have not, no.

00:02:27.000 It's really fascinating.

00:02:29.000 This documentary, he's doing all this crazy stomach breath stuff, the yogi stuff.

00:02:35.000 Because he's really into yoga as well, for flexibility and balance and all those different things.

00:02:39.000 He was probably the first guy to introduce yoga to jiu-jitsu as well.

00:02:44.000 But him and his son, who's also a world champion in jiu-jitsu, just stressed constantly that it's all about the breath.

00:02:53.000 And that breathing is everything.

00:02:56.000 That it's everything for jiu-jitsu, it's everything for martial arts, it's everything for your mindset.

00:03:02.000 You're going to find that in the foundation of so many different sports.

00:03:06.000 I think a lot of that has been forgotten.

00:03:08.000 I know that coaches in the 50s used to have their runners take a big mouthful of water, run around the track, and then they'd have to spit out that same amount of water into a cup to force them to breathe through their nose, to force them to move their diaphragms up and down a little more because breathing is so essential to the recovery,

00:03:25.000 their endurance, and their performance.

00:03:27.000 One of the things I found interesting about your book was the experiment with plugging up the nose for, what did you guys do it for a month?

00:03:34.000 Is that what it was?

00:03:35.000 Ten days.

00:03:36.000 And that ten days, my nose was broken most of my life.

00:03:41.000 I had a useless nose until I was 40. And then I got an operation to have my deviated septum corrected and the turbinates shaved down.

00:03:48.000 Man, it changed my life.

00:03:50.000 It really did.

00:03:51.000 Like, I didn't realize, like, what, like, the term mouth breather is a really interesting term, right?

00:03:56.000 Because it's a term for a moron.

00:03:57.000 But I felt like a moron, like, after I got my nose fixed.

00:04:02.000 I was like, why didn't I do this before?

00:04:04.000 Like, I was robbing myself of oxygen.

00:04:07.000 Yeah, and there's so much science supporting how injurious it is to constantly be breathing through your mouth.

00:04:13.000 There's no debate about that.

00:04:15.000 But what people don't realize is about 25 to 50% of the population habitually breathes through their mouths.

00:04:20.000 They don't realize the neurological problems that this causes, the respiratory problems this causes, problems with snoring, sleep apnea, even metabolic disorders.

00:04:30.000 I mean, it goes on and on and on.

00:04:32.000 So I had been talking to the Chief of Rhinology Research at Stanford.

00:04:36.000 We'd done many interviews over a series of months.

00:04:39.000 He's a big nose guy.

00:04:40.000 So he said, this is the most amazing organ.

00:04:42.000 No one's talking about it.

00:04:44.000 At the NIH, there's no school for studying the nose and its effects.

00:04:48.000 And he thought that that was criminal.

00:04:49.000 So he had warned me how bad mouth breathing was.

00:04:53.000 But no one knew how quickly that damage came on.

00:04:56.000 So we knew that after years, it can change the structure of your face.

00:05:00.000 It's so common in kids that it has a term called adenoid face.

00:05:04.000 You see these kids with very long faces because they've been mouth breathing so long that their faces have actually the musculature and the skeletal have changed.

00:05:12.000 It changes your skeleton.

00:05:13.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:05:14.000 It creates a longer face.

00:05:17.000 And that also makes these people much more apt to snoring and sleep apnea.

00:05:22.000 But no one knew if a month of mouth breathing would be bad, a year, like how soon those issues came on.

00:05:28.000 So I asked him, I said, well, why don't you test it?

00:05:31.000 You're one of the best universities in the world.

00:05:34.000 You have the means to do this.

00:05:36.000 And he thought, in his words, it would be unethical because he knew how damaging that it could be for people.

00:05:43.000 And so I volunteered.

00:05:44.000 I said, well, why don't you test it on me?

00:05:46.000 I'll get somebody else to do it.

00:05:48.000 They had no money for this, so we had to pay for this study just to experience what that was like.

00:05:54.000 And the point wasn't to do some, like, jackass stunt.

00:05:58.000 It was to lull ourselves into a position.

00:06:01.000 My body certainly knew.

00:06:02.000 I think I was mouth breathing through much of my youth.

00:06:04.000 And that 25 to 50% of the population knows.

00:06:07.000 And to actually measure what happens.

00:06:09.000 Now, do you think there was some bacterial growth that was inside your nose as well from this?

00:06:14.000 Do you think that some of that could be attributed to just the act of plugging the nose?

00:06:18.000 Because you physically plugged it.

00:06:19.000 It's not like you chose to breathe out of your mouth.

00:06:21.000 You actually closed up the opening.

00:06:25.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:06:27.000 And it could.

00:06:27.000 No one knows for sure, because the less you use your nose, the less you're going to be able to use your nose, just like any other muscle.

00:06:34.000 So when people start habitually breathing through their mouths, their noses are going to start to close up.

00:06:39.000 And we know this from the Doctor of Speech Language Pathology at Stanford.

00:06:43.000 She measured people who had laryngectomies, holes drilled in their throats so they could breathe.

00:06:48.000 She found between two months and two years, their noses were completely blocked, zero air coming in.

00:06:54.000 So the more you use it, the more you're going to be able to use it.

00:06:57.000 So the less you use it, the more apt you will be to have problems.

00:07:01.000 What is the process?

00:07:03.000 Why does the nose close up?

00:07:05.000 It would seem that it's a hole.

00:07:06.000 Like, why would that hole close?

00:07:08.000 It's not in use.

00:07:09.000 This turbinates all those tissues just start closing up.

00:07:13.000 And so using your nose actually makes the opening wider?

00:07:16.000 Absolutely.

00:07:17.000 Really?

00:07:17.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:07:18.000 My nose got physically wider after my operation.

00:07:21.000 It's really strange.

00:07:23.000 I look back on the photos from when I was 40 on, my actual physical...

00:07:30.000 And I attributed it to the fact that they put these big foam things and these plastic spacers in there, because the doctor that did the operation I forget the period of time afterwards I had to have these things stuffed into my nose and this plastic that was sort of sutured in place to hold it into position and I attributed that to why my nose got wider but I noticed it Like,

00:07:55.000 within a year or two afterwards, I'm like, my fucking nose is wider.

00:07:59.000 Like, it's different.

00:08:00.000 Like, if I look at older pictures of myself, my nose was more narrow, and now it's more flared out.

00:08:04.000 And I felt like it was because of that.

00:08:07.000 But now that you're saying this, now I'm thinking maybe it's just from breathing out of it.

00:08:12.000 Well, surgical interventions are going to open that airway.

00:08:15.000 There's no doubt about that.

00:08:16.000 But we know the more that you breathe through your nose, the more that it's going to open up.

00:08:20.000 And you can see this with people who are habitual mouth breathers, who are also joggers, who have just been breathing through their mouths for decades.

00:08:27.000 They start breathing through their nose.

00:08:28.000 At the beginning, it's really, really hard.

00:08:30.000 They say, I can't do this.

00:08:31.000 This is awful.

00:08:32.000 Then weeks go by, months go by, and their noses open up.

00:08:37.000 And allows them to breathe through the nose.

00:08:39.000 And the benefits of that, they're innumerable.

00:08:41.000 So many benefits of nasal breathing.

00:08:43.000 Not only oxygen, but it helps defend your body, humidifies air, conditions air, on and on and on.

00:08:48.000 And this is something I just don't think a lot of people realize.

00:08:51.000 And from the researchers I've been talking to, they were a bit frustrated too, seeing so many chronic conditions tied to mouth breathing.

00:08:59.000 And how so many of those could either be improved upon or sometimes outright cured by switching the pathway in which you breathe.

00:09:08.000 So does breathing through your nose make your actual nostril opening wider?

00:09:12.000 I don't know that.

00:09:14.000 And I haven't seen any papers on that.

00:09:18.000 But my nostril holes and everything is probably just from the surgical intervention and stuffing it with plastic and stretching it out.

00:09:24.000 I would assume so, yeah.

00:09:26.000 Now, Wim Hof, who you reference in the book, he doesn't give a fuck about nose breathing or mouth breathing.

00:09:32.000 He just goes, just breathe, motherfucker!

00:09:34.000 Breathe!

00:09:36.000 That's what he says.

00:09:37.000 Oh, yeah.

00:09:37.000 I practiced his mode of breathing all the time.

00:09:40.000 I'm used to having his little voice in my head.

00:09:43.000 Why doesn't he care about breathing from the nose or the mouth?

00:09:47.000 He just wants you to breathe.

00:09:48.000 Because if we're breathing 25,000 times a day, if you're taking 500 of those breaths through your mouth, it's not going to really make any impact on you.

00:09:55.000 I'm talking about habitual mouth breathing.

00:09:57.000 No, I understand.

00:09:57.000 I'm just talking about through breathing exercises.

00:10:00.000 So what he's done is he wants to make this easy and accessible for people.

00:10:04.000 So many people can't breathe through their noses.

00:10:07.000 So they go, they can't get that breath in, those 30 huge breaths you need to take, right?

00:10:12.000 They take too long to do it.

00:10:14.000 So he says it doesn't matter.

00:10:15.000 Don't pay attention.

00:10:17.000 You need to get that breath in.

00:10:18.000 You need to expand your lungs.

00:10:20.000 And for the rest of the time, you know, the benefits of nasal breathing, that habitual breathing is so important to health.

00:10:27.000 It seems so strange to me reading your book that I'm just learning this in terms of like, I mean, I've been doing athletics my whole life.

00:10:37.000 How do I not know that breathing through the nose is more beneficial?

00:10:41.000 How do coaches not know this?

00:10:43.000 This is something I just got running up against over and over again.

00:10:46.000 And when I first started writing this book, my friends who are journalists and authors, they said, you're writing a book about breathing?

00:10:52.000 Why would you write a book about breathing?

00:10:54.000 It's like walking.

00:10:54.000 Yeah.

00:10:55.000 Yeah.

00:10:55.000 Well, there's a good new book about walking.

00:10:58.000 Really?

00:11:00.000 So they were ripping on me quite a bit until they heard some of the details of it.

00:11:05.000 And the stuff has been right in front of us the whole time, and it's so obvious that no one's really paying attention to it.

00:11:12.000 And the scientific foundation, all the research is there.

00:11:16.000 And that's what makes these researchers, these scientists, so frustrated.

00:11:20.000 We have 50 years of rock-solid science here showing the problems with mouth breathing, showing the problems with snoring and sleep apnea.

00:11:28.000 No one's really been paying attention.

00:11:29.000 We're treating all these separate problems that are associated We're not looking at the core issue.

00:11:36.000 And I think that breathing has to be considered along with diet and exercise as a pillar of health.

00:11:43.000 Because even if you eat keto, vegan, paleo, whatever, even if you exercise all the time, if you're not breathing right, you're never really going to be healthy.

00:11:50.000 We know that to be the truth.

00:11:52.000 So air comes through your mouth, air comes through your nose.

00:11:55.000 What is the difference between the air coming through your nose?

00:11:57.000 Okay.

00:11:58.000 So your nose, if you were to take your fist, you've got a really big fist, so someone with a slightly smaller fist, and to take that fist and imagine just pushing it inside of your head, that's about the volume of your nose and all the sinus cavities.

00:12:12.000 So they even stretch up above your eyes.

00:12:15.000 The volume of your fist, that's crazy.

00:12:17.000 It's about a billiard ball.

00:12:19.000 It depends on what size fish you have, right?

00:12:24.000 And they call it the nasal concha because it looks exactly like a seashell.

00:12:30.000 If you were to split a seashell in half and look at it, that's what's happening in your nose.

00:12:35.000 And all of this stuff evolved this way for a reason.

00:12:38.000 So that air that comes in through the nose is slowed down, it's filtered, it's humidified, and it's conditioned.

00:12:46.000 So by the time it gets to your lungs, your lungs can absorb that oxygen so much easier.

00:12:52.000 And the nose is really the first line of defense.

00:12:55.000 Another amazing thing with a nose is it produces something called nitric oxide, which is this wonderful molecule that is a vasodilator that plays an essential role in oxygen delivery.

00:13:07.000 And also helps battle off viruses and bacteria and other pathogens.

00:13:12.000 So this is all happening in the nose and slowing down that air and all of these other functions allow us to gain about 20% more oxygen breathing through the nose than breathing through the mouth.

00:13:24.000 So you can breathe less and get more by breathing through the nose.

00:13:28.000 Wow.

00:13:29.000 So breathing through the mouth, even though you're filling your lungs up, Even though you're taking a big, deep breath, you're filling your lungs up, you're not getting as much oxygen.

00:13:39.000 That's right, because you can over-breathe.

00:13:42.000 When people at a gym or when people are jogging, you see them really going to get the maximum amount of oxygen in.

00:13:49.000 That's not what happens.

00:13:51.000 What is happening to your body?

00:13:53.000 So you're offloading the CO2. By offloading too much CO2, you're causing constriction in your circulation.

00:14:00.000 So right now, if we were to breathe 30 huge breaths, you'll feel some tingling in your head.

00:14:06.000 You'll feel some, maybe your fingertips will get cool, your toes will get cool.

00:14:10.000 That's not from an increase of oxygen.

00:14:12.000 It's the opposite that's happening.

00:14:14.000 That's from a decrease of circulation.

00:14:16.000 So your body wants to be in balance.

00:14:18.000 You want to have the right amount of CO2 and oxygen for optimum delivery.

00:14:22.000 And that's what the nose helps you to do.

00:14:24.000 That was one of the craziest things about the book.

00:14:26.000 We were talking about yogis that were able to vary the temperature between each hand.

00:14:30.000 No, on the same hand.

00:14:32.000 Oh, on the same hand.

00:14:32.000 The same hand.

00:14:34.000 One area was gray, the other was red.

00:14:36.000 Oh, in the same...

00:14:37.000 In the same...

00:14:39.000 Not even this and this.

00:14:40.000 Oh, my God.

00:14:41.000 On the same hand.

00:14:43.000 And, you know, when I came across this, people were saying, this is impossible.

00:14:47.000 Who did this study?

00:14:49.000 Some guy in Taos in his garage.

00:14:51.000 No, it was at the Menager Clinic, which was the world's, at least in the U.S., the largest psychiatric research facility at the time.

00:15:00.000 And a Navy physicist did these tests.

00:15:03.000 It was reported in the New York Times.

00:15:05.000 Have they been replicated?

00:15:06.000 They haven't found someone who had the powers of Swami Rama.

00:15:09.000 They found, I think, whims about as close as we've gotten to that guy.

00:15:12.000 So this is something that is like, you know, like Michael Jordan didn't start out good at basketball, right?

00:15:20.000 He learned, he practiced, he got better.

00:15:22.000 And this, you could say the same thing perhaps about breathing?

00:15:26.000 Oh, for sure.

00:15:27.000 And just look at freedivers, right?

00:15:29.000 I was at this – my first foray into that world was at the World Freediving Championship in Greece.

00:15:35.000 And you see these people.

00:15:36.000 Some of them were short.

00:15:37.000 Some of them were tall.

00:15:38.000 Some of them were large, small.

00:15:40.000 I mean from all walks of life, every imaginable country, something like 30 countries had representatives there.

00:15:48.000 And these people weren't born with these enormous lungs, right?

00:15:52.000 They did this by the power of will, by – Breathing and expanding their lung capacity.

00:15:59.000 And so once I saw them, all of these people able to do this, once they explained to me, they said, you know, the benefits of breathing go beyond just diving deep.

00:16:10.000 It can allow us to heal our bodies of problems.

00:16:13.000 It can allow us super endurance.

00:16:16.000 It can allow us to do all these things that we've been told are medically impossible.

00:16:20.000 And I heard this, I didn't believe them, but I spent several years in the field talking to people at Stanford, Harvard, you know, the best, the leaders in the field and finding this research and what they told me was absolutely true.

00:16:36.000 The idea that there's a guy like this, Swami Rama, is that how you say his name?

00:16:40.000 That he can do that.

00:16:41.000 It's very appealing to me and very interesting to me because even though breathing has been around for a long time, you know, everybody knows that there's different styles of breathing and holotropic breathing is pretty popular and I always think even though people know the benefits of many things,

00:17:00.000 very few people go all the way with stuff.

00:17:03.000 Like, If you just talk to an average person, can someone run 250 miles?

00:17:11.000 Most people would say no.

00:17:13.000 But I know people that have done it.

00:17:14.000 So it is possible.

00:17:15.000 But you have to find someone who will go all the way and do it for a long time.

00:17:22.000 A long time.

00:17:23.000 So this Swami Rama guy, there has to be someone else like that out there.

00:17:30.000 Yeah, and they're probably not on Facebook, right?

00:17:33.000 No.

00:17:33.000 They're probably in a mushroom somewhere.

00:17:35.000 Absolutely.

00:17:36.000 So this was a guy who grew up in the Himalayas, who by the age of four was studying yoga.

00:17:42.000 He was meditating.

00:17:44.000 He was breathing.

00:17:45.000 So he lived his entire life in that world learning these tricks.

00:17:50.000 And he got so good at it that he was able, on command, to make his heart beat 300 times a minute.

00:18:08.000 300 times a minute.

00:18:20.000 Do we have the capacity?

00:18:22.000 Is there someone out there who's willing to stay off their phone, stay off Netflix, and focus on one thing for 30 years?

00:18:31.000 I'm not sure.

00:18:32.000 Maybe, hopefully, but who knows?

00:18:34.000 That was what was so interesting listening to the book.

00:18:36.000 I was like, God, I want to know what's possible, but I don't want to do it.

00:18:42.000 Let other people do it.

00:18:44.000 I don't have that kind of time man, but I believe there's something to it because my own personal benefits that I've gotten from breathing exercises is one of the reasons why that's what led me to your book and Especially in the sauna over the last year I got a sauna in my house and I've gotten really into I have a sauna here as well,

00:19:06.000 but I got really into doing these daily sessions of 180 degrees and for 25 to 30 minutes and as you can imagine the last 10 minutes are really uncomfortable you know when you get down when it's 15 minutes in and you know you got 10 more minutes to go it's not fun you know but when I breathe when I concentrate on these these breathing exercises and I have a bunch of different ones that I do and one of them that I do is I concentrate on taking shallow breaths

00:19:36.000 and holding my breath for as long as I can.

00:19:39.000 And there's this panicked moment where you feel like you have to breathe but you really don't.

00:19:45.000 You really don't.

00:19:45.000 You just gotta get over that panic moment, and then there's like a weird calm that comes over, and you could last much, much longer than you can.

00:19:53.000 And then when I do breathe in, I just concentrate on doing it slowly.

00:19:57.000 Don't, don't, don't.

00:19:58.000 Don't let myself panic.

00:20:00.000 And through, like, time just flies by.

00:20:01.000 It's crazy.

00:20:02.000 Time flies by, and because I'm thinking about the breathing, I'm barely paying attention to the fact that I'm profusely sweating and my body's not freaking out as much.

00:20:11.000 So I do these little weird tricks that I play on myself.

00:20:15.000 Inside the sauna and in concentrating on breathing and long deep breaths through my nose and holding it and long exhales through my nose, when I'm doing that, it makes everything easier.

00:20:27.000 It's weird.

00:20:29.000 It makes your body, for whatever reason, more accepting of the extreme heat.

00:20:37.000 Well, that's what I love about breathing is it allows us these levers into systems that we can't otherwise control.

00:20:44.000 So the autonomic nervous system is supposed to be beyond our control.

00:20:48.000 It's called autonomic.

00:20:50.000 Automatic.

00:20:50.000 Can't control it.

00:20:51.000 We can through breathing.

00:20:53.000 You may not be able to control your liver function.

00:20:56.000 Or your stomach.

00:20:57.000 Or your heart.

00:20:58.000 But when you breathe a certain way, you can influence all those functions.

00:21:02.000 And you can start taking control of these other elements of your body, as Wim is showing, with not only the nervous system, but with immune function.

00:21:09.000 So all of this was supposed to be impossible until he showed up and said, you know, why don't you test me?

00:21:16.000 Instead of just talking, we have measurements.

00:21:19.000 We have equipment to test this stuff.

00:21:22.000 If we can measure it, we can study it.

00:21:24.000 If we can study it, we can prove if it's right or wrong.

00:21:26.000 And that's what I find is so interesting and accessible about breathing as well.

00:21:30.000 Even if someone has a pulse ox or you have a heart rate variability monitor, you can breathe in certain ways and instantly see what it does to your body.

00:21:39.000 So people who say that this is a placebo effect don't understand that this is a biological function that you're taking control of.

00:21:47.000 And if you can elicit such a strong response in a couple of minutes, imagine what you can do in a couple of days or a couple of weeks or a couple of months.

00:21:55.000 And we're starting to see that with Wim and some of his minions and other people who have been breathing as a way to heal themselves of chronic conditions.

00:22:04.000 Yeah, Wim is a really interesting sort of...

00:22:07.000 He's a great spokesperson for it because he drinks Heineken and eats spaghetti.

00:22:14.000 Like he's a weirdo, you know what I mean?

00:22:16.000 And he swears a lot and he's fun and he's silly.

00:22:20.000 What I like about him is the fact that he doesn't seem like this mystical person that you can't relate to.

00:22:30.000 He's very relatable.

00:22:31.000 Yeah, and I think that that's where breathing really needs to move from this new-aginess into a more pragmatic and practical area.

00:22:39.000 And Wim is like the everyman, right?

00:22:41.000 And he's gone and discovered these things, and now he's showing people how to use them.

00:22:46.000 And he's very clear that he did not invent these methods.

00:22:50.000 These methods have been around for at least a thousand years, especially TUMO. And there's documentation that goes back 1,000 years, 1,200 years of people doing this to heat themselves up.

00:23:02.000 They're like, I don't have a jacket.

00:23:04.000 I don't have anything else to wear.

00:23:06.000 I'm freezing.

00:23:07.000 How do I keep my core temperature warm in these freezing temperatures?

00:23:11.000 Can you explain TUMO to people?

00:23:12.000 Yeah, sure.

00:23:13.000 So TUMO is a breathing practice that is used to build heat in the body, build inner heat.

00:23:19.000 And it was – the first documentation was from this guy Naropa who about 1100 years ago went off on a spiritual pilgrimage, ended up in the Himalayas, needed to heat himself and use this practice.

00:23:33.000 And it stayed in the monasteries for hundreds of years until this Belgian-French opera singer anarchist around the 1900s.

00:23:43.000 That's a mouthful.

00:23:44.000 Yeah.

00:23:45.000 I was going to include a few more because she did a whole bunch of – she's into free love, feminism.

00:23:50.000 I mean, you name it.

00:23:51.000 She ran the gamut.

00:23:53.000 But she went on a spiritual pilgrimage for 14 years in the Himalayas when she was in her 40s.

00:23:59.000 This is in the 1900s, which was just like unheard of at the time.

00:24:02.000 And she discovered this thing.

00:24:04.000 She said she was able to use this to not eat or drink anything at elevations of above – 18,000 feet and walk for about 19 hours at a time.

00:24:16.000 There are no fact checkers there to prove it.

00:24:18.000 And nobody believed her until Herbert Benson at Harvard had heard enough of these stories in the 1980s that he went out and tested these monks and found out that they could do exactly what they had been told that they were supposed to do for thousands of years.

00:24:34.000 Trevor Burrus And what is the technique of tumor?

00:24:35.000 The technique is it's very similar to Wim Hof's version of Tumo.

00:24:39.000 The monks do it in a slightly different way.

00:24:41.000 They slow down their nervous system.

00:24:44.000 And Benson found that they were able to slow their metabolism by 60%.

00:24:47.000 So it's lower than anything that has ever been measured before.

00:24:52.000 So they just do the...

00:24:54.000 And focus on a fire within the body and breathe out.

00:24:58.000 Sometimes they breathe a little more.

00:25:00.000 You can see videotapes of this.

00:25:02.000 For people who don't believe this stuff, you can see videotapes of this guy in a cold room, no shirt on, sweating.

00:25:09.000 They put a wet sheet on him and he dries the sheet within about a half an hour because he's so hot.

00:25:14.000 And he's only doing this through breathing.

00:25:16.000 And when you're making this noise, what is the technique?

00:25:19.000 Is this like an 80-20 thing where you fully fill the lungs out, let 20% out, and then breathe in again and let 20% out?

00:25:28.000 That kind of thing?

00:25:29.000 That version is much more complicated, the type that the Bon Tumo monks use.

00:25:34.000 So Wim's method does the exact same thing, but he's stimulating the nervous system.

00:25:39.000 So his is 30 huge breaths.

00:25:42.000 Breath hold as long as you can.

00:25:44.000 One big breath in, 15-second hold, and then out.

00:25:47.000 And what are these monks doing?

00:25:49.000 They're doing a slower version of it.

00:25:51.000 So I have not practiced that version of Tumo.

00:25:54.000 Why not?

00:25:55.000 Because it's really complicated.

00:25:57.000 And to do it right, you need to get the master there.

00:26:00.000 And I tried to contact these guys, and they did not want me there reporting on what they were doing.

00:26:06.000 God, I feel like if they knew the benefits of this, they would want the world to know.

00:26:11.000 You would think so, but what would we do with it, right?

00:26:14.000 Sell it!

00:26:15.000 We'd commercialize it, and so maybe they don't want the world to know.

00:26:22.000 Maybe they want to keep a few things in their back pocket.

00:26:26.000 What do you know of what they're doing?

00:26:28.000 Why is it so complicated?

00:26:30.000 Because so much of this is a mental practice.

00:26:32.000 Okay, so it's not just the breathing.

00:26:34.000 There's some sort of a thought process that goes along with it.

00:26:36.000 Absolutely.

00:26:37.000 And to get that visualization and to be able to focus for that amount of time takes a lot of time.

00:26:43.000 I think one of the reasons that WIM's process is so easy and accessible, you can think about whatever you want while you're breathing that way.

00:26:50.000 You think about emails, think about what you're going to have for dinner.

00:26:53.000 And as long as you're breathing that way, it'll do what it does.

00:26:56.000 And their method requires you to think about very specific things?

00:26:59.000 Think about a fire inside of your belly, moving your belly in and out.

00:27:05.000 So you know this?

00:27:06.000 I don't know every single step.

00:27:08.000 No, I do not.

00:27:09.000 But what other steps could there be?

00:27:12.000 There's fast breathing, there's slow breathing, and there's a ton of mental focus.

00:27:17.000 So there's like 20 steps that you have to go through to really get this right.

00:27:22.000 Are we in danger of losing this?

00:27:24.000 It seems like you know about it, but you don't know how to do it.

00:27:29.000 I don't know.

00:27:31.000 I know the elements of it and what I've read online and who knows how true that stuff is, right?

00:27:37.000 There's a few guys teaching this.

00:27:39.000 One's in Colorado and the others are in India.

00:27:42.000 Is he in Boulder?

00:27:42.000 He must be in Boulder.

00:27:43.000 He has to be.

00:27:45.000 Where else?

00:27:48.000 But you think about how many languages that we're losing, right?

00:27:52.000 Along with those languages, we're losing knowledge very, very quickly.

00:27:55.000 And this is happening every decade.

00:27:57.000 And so especially if you consider what's happened to Tibet, to these civilizations that have been there practicing this technology of breathing for thousands of years, a lot of it's just disappearing.

00:28:08.000 Yeah, that's a shame.

00:28:10.000 Have you thought about going there and like hanging out with those guys?

00:28:14.000 I'd love to.

00:28:15.000 You can't do that now.

00:28:17.000 Right, of course.

00:28:17.000 I spent some time, you know, the book, I talk about Tumo in about half of one chapter, and I wanted to cover it.

00:28:24.000 Wim's been written about all over the place.

00:28:26.000 People know his method, but I wanted to look at the science from it and look at the history of it.

00:28:31.000 Because the how was one story, but to me it was more interesting to find what's happening to the body.

00:28:37.000 Why does this happen?

00:28:38.000 Where does it come from?

00:28:39.000 So that's what I focused on.

00:28:40.000 So this gentleman that teaches in Colorado, where did he learn it from?

00:28:44.000 He must have learned it from the great sages, you know, in Dharamsala or Tibet.

00:28:49.000 Or maybe he's like one of those kung fu guys who just fakes it.

00:28:52.000 Or maybe he's just, yeah, a faker.

00:28:54.000 A faker.

00:28:55.000 Yeah, it could be.

00:28:56.000 He just made something up.

00:28:57.000 It could be.

00:28:58.000 I don't want to accuse him.

00:29:01.000 But in the martial arts world, that happens a lot.

00:29:04.000 At least it used to happen a lot.

00:29:06.000 There's a lot of fakers that have...

00:29:08.000 You know, the thing in martial arts world was always chi.

00:29:11.000 And, you know, you talk about that in the book as well.

00:29:14.000 About people having this power, this chi touch.

00:29:18.000 And it was...

00:29:19.000 99.9% horseshit, meaning that most of the people that were talking about it were really teaching sort of a fraudulent, made-up version of martial arts.

00:29:29.000 And there's a bunch of Instagram pages that are dedicated to these people.

00:29:32.000 It's really to making fun of them because it's so strange.

00:29:37.000 It's such a weird thing that these people do where they have huge classfuls of people and they pretend to have this death touch and they touch people in the...

00:29:46.000 And the people, they're essentially in a cult, and so they spasm, they fall to the ground.

00:29:51.000 And it always made me laugh, but there was a part of me that says, there's a thing in the body And this thing can be activated whether it's whether you want to call it energy or spirit there's there's different mindsets and Inspiration and through these different mindsets and inspiration you can achieve some pretty spectacular results physical results and people that are in this mindset They can

00:30:21.000 perform better.

00:30:22.000 There's something about them in terms of martial arts.

00:30:24.000 There's something about that.

00:30:25.000 So I've always wondered, like, if someone really pursued this, without all the nonsense, without all the chicanery, if you really pursued this, what could be done?

00:30:36.000 I think the first thing you do is get these people in the lab.

00:30:38.000 If they're claiming to have these skills that are incredible, why not measure it?

00:30:44.000 I mean, it's not that hard to measure stuff.

00:30:46.000 And so if they deny having any lab work done or having it be measured, then I think you have to be a little apprehensive.

00:30:56.000 And that's something that so much of this technology is cheap now to get.

00:31:01.000 So even if you were to show up with $2,000 worth of equipment, you could see if there was some scientific basis to what these people are doing.

00:31:09.000 But from my understanding, I didn't go down the chi hole too deep, but a lot of these people aren't showing up and offering, volunteering to have their skills tested.

00:31:21.000 And that's how science works.

00:31:22.000 You have to test it, right?

00:31:24.000 And it has to be replicable.

00:31:25.000 Yeah.

00:31:25.000 Well, everybody wants to be Swami Rama, but nobody wants to do what Swami Rama did, right?

00:31:31.000 Yeah, who wants to sit in a cave?

00:31:32.000 Well, some people do.

00:31:33.000 Sit in a cave for 30 years.

00:31:35.000 Right?

00:31:35.000 Yeah.

00:31:36.000 He would go away for years at a time in a dark cave and just sit there and breathe.

00:31:41.000 So I just, in the modern age, I just don't know.

00:31:44.000 What a freak that guy must have been.

00:31:45.000 God, I would love to have talked to him.

00:31:47.000 Yeah, he had it all down.

00:31:49.000 Because there are people that can do that.

00:31:51.000 You know, they're like the Unabomber of breathing.

00:31:53.000 You know, they just move to the woods and just breathe without the negativity.

00:31:58.000 But what was cool about him is he wasn't the only one who could do this.

00:32:03.000 So there were researchers in the 20s and in the 40s who went out with a bunch of equipment, whatever equipment they could cobble together, and tested other yogis who were able to do this exact same thing, right?

00:32:15.000 So Swami was part of this long lineage of people who had this knowledge.

00:32:20.000 Is it still there?

00:32:21.000 It could be, but again, I don't think it's online.

00:32:24.000 I think you really have to get out in the weeds and earn these people's trust in order to get that story.

00:32:31.000 And what is the history of these people doing this?

00:32:35.000 Like, what was their initial motivation?

00:32:38.000 I mean, is there a written history of this?

00:32:40.000 The earliest evidence that we have for breathing practices dates back about 4,000 or 5,000 years from these little statuettes in the Indus Valley, which is in northern India.

00:32:51.000 So there was this huge thriving civilization.

00:32:54.000 They had paved roads.

00:32:56.000 They had running water.

00:32:57.000 They were dealing with tin and copper.

00:33:00.000 And they had no – in this whole civilization, they still have not found any political or governmental buildings.

00:33:07.000 They haven't found any religious iconography.

00:33:10.000 So these people in some ways could have been more advanced than we are now.

00:33:13.000 And they had all of these figures of these people in these yoga poses with their – Stomachs out.

00:33:20.000 So that's how they date the earliest archaeological evidence of that.

00:33:24.000 And since then, then all of these practices were moved into the Rig Veda and all of the earliest yoga texts.

00:33:33.000 And they were codified in the Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali.

00:33:39.000 That's where a lot of the yoga methods come from.

00:33:41.000 And that's about 2,000 years old.

00:33:43.000 So the methods predate all that.

00:33:47.000 I'm sure they predate probably anything that has been in writing.

00:33:52.000 That's what's so curious to me, what makes me so curious.

00:33:54.000 If you really think about what life must have been like back then, when they were creating this, you would think that people were hunting and gathering and it was probably a very hard life.

00:34:05.000 Well, not in that civilization.

00:34:08.000 Right, but they got to a point where they had some sort of agriculture or some structures and buildings.

00:34:14.000 But how did they get to the point, because the rest of the world obviously didn't do this.

00:34:18.000 This is not like common practice in Germany or in Italy or in all these other civilizations.

00:34:24.000 Like, what made these people focus on breathwork so much?

00:34:29.000 Well, it could have been, but we just haven't found anything related to that yet, right?

00:34:33.000 So if you think about hunter-gatherers, we're imagining them as, man, they're just working all day.

00:34:38.000 They're hunting all day.

00:34:40.000 They're gathering.

00:34:40.000 They weren't, from what I know and from what I've seen of the science there.

00:34:45.000 Probably three or four hours of work, you know?

00:34:47.000 And then you have no other distractions to spend time and build these systems of breathing and health, which is what started in ancient China, which is what started in India, which is what started in ancient Greece.

00:34:59.000 Think about all the distractions we're dealing with today.

00:35:02.000 Constant interruptions.

00:35:04.000 If you've already done your work for the day and there's nothing else to do, you're going to get more interested and you're going to have the time to do some empirical studies to see what works and what doesn't.

00:35:16.000 It just seems to me that learning something like that, learning something like prolonged breath work and the benefits of it, it seems like this is a really long-term practice that doesn't show you immediate benefits.

00:35:32.000 Yes and no.

00:35:33.000 I think that you can take someone who has a serious problem, maybe someone who's already very fit.

00:35:38.000 It's going to take a while to really see those big benefits.

00:35:41.000 We see that with athletes, with nasal breathing.

00:35:44.000 It takes them weeks or sometimes months to really see gains in performance.

00:35:47.000 But if you've got someone with a chronic condition like asthma or anxiety who are struggling to breathe every single day and you teach them some basic breathing, some normal breathing patterns, Their lives can be absolutely transformed.

00:36:01.000 We've seen this in study after study.

00:36:04.000 So these people, their breathing has become so disrupted.

00:36:07.000 They're breathing in such an unhealthy way that they don't know what proper breathing is.

00:36:12.000 Just shifting that has a tremendous impact.

00:36:15.000 So for people like that, they can see the benefits in a couple of hours, maybe even less than that.

00:36:22.000 Someone with high blood pressure right now If they're sitting at home, they can take their blood pressure and then breathe at a rate of about six seconds in, six seconds out.

00:36:31.000 Take their blood pressure after that.

00:36:33.000 And there's a good chance their blood pressure is going to go down.

00:36:36.000 I've seen mine go down 10 or 15 points just by breathing because your body is operating in its most efficient way that way.

00:36:43.000 And over how long a period of time would it take your blood pressure to drop that much?

00:36:48.000 After a few minutes, I've found it about three or four minutes of breathing this way.

00:36:52.000 And they've found there's devices that they sell now, which trains people to sit down, take a seat, and breathe in a certain pattern for 10 or 15 minutes.

00:37:02.000 And they've shown marked Decreases in blood pressure by that.

00:37:06.000 You don't need this device to do this.

00:37:08.000 It helps.

00:37:09.000 It reminds you.

00:37:10.000 All you need to do is focus on your breath, right?

00:37:12.000 We have the technology in our heads.

00:37:15.000 We have lungs.

00:37:16.000 We have a nose.

00:37:17.000 We can use that to really help optimize our health.

00:37:21.000 And what is the benefit for asthmatics?

00:37:24.000 The benefit for asthmatics is they traditionally oftentimes mouth-breathe, not all the time.

00:37:30.000 They very oftentimes are breathing too much.

00:37:34.000 So you see an asthmatic...

00:37:35.000 That's usually how they breathe because they are offloading all of the CO2. By offloading that CO2, they are causing constriction.

00:37:45.000 And they're so paranoid that they're going to have an asthma attack that every time they feel it coming on, they go...

00:37:52.000 Guess what happens when you start breathing more and more?

00:37:54.000 You're causing more constriction.

00:37:56.000 So they teach them to take control of their breath to relax at those times.

00:38:01.000 So that's what hyperventilating is?

00:38:03.000 Yes.

00:38:04.000 And there's a study done about 10 years ago.

00:38:07.000 It was one of the best studies I came across where they took 120 asthmatics and the technology they used to treat them was breathing.

00:38:14.000 They would have them bring around this capnometer Which would gauge their CO2. Every time their CO2 started getting low, which meant they were breathing too much, they would have them slow down and slow down their breathing.

00:38:25.000 Within a month, they had a significant effect on asthma attacks and also respiratory health.

00:38:32.000 Their airways got larger.

00:38:33.000 So just by breathing.

00:38:35.000 And this is a well-known study.

00:38:37.000 It's available for anyone to look up.

00:38:38.000 So do you know what causes asthma?

00:38:40.000 Is it just a genetic?

00:38:41.000 It's an allergic reaction.

00:38:43.000 It's an inflammatory reaction.

00:38:45.000 So there's different types of asthma.

00:38:47.000 There's allergic asthma.

00:38:48.000 There's exercise-induced asthma, which is caused by breathing too much.

00:38:52.000 And a lot of people think, oh, I was born with asthma.

00:38:55.000 I'm stuck with asthma.

00:38:57.000 That could be true for a lot of people who don't want to take some additional measures to help abate the symptoms of that asthma.

00:39:04.000 And I think we're just finding now a lot of really legit, solid science showing that breathing is implicated both in the onset of asthma, but it can also be used as a tool to help attenuate the symptoms of it.

00:39:17.000 So, when you're, it's like if you're talking to someone with asthma, what would you, like my friend Hannibal, he has, he was here yesterday, he was telling a story about freaking out on mushrooms and hyperventilating and had to get his inhaler.

00:39:31.000 What would you tell someone like him who's an asthmatic?

00:39:35.000 I would first tell him I'm not a breathing therapist.

00:39:37.000 I'm not a doctor.

00:39:39.000 And he should continue going to his doctor and taking his bronchodilator.

00:39:42.000 So I'm a journalist who went into this field with zero slant, with zero objective.

00:39:48.000 Then I would tell him after that disclaimer that I would seek a therapist who has experience dealing with asthmatics and using breathing to help them.

00:39:58.000 Is that common?

00:39:59.000 They are out there, and they're starting to grow.

00:40:02.000 Papworth method was developed in England in the 1960s, really effective.

00:40:07.000 A system called Buteyko breathing has shown there's a lot of quackery in Buteyko, so be careful who you're using.

00:40:15.000 A lot of people have taken up Buteyko techniques and appointed themselves as breathing therapists, and they don't know the They don't know the basis of how exactly it works.

00:40:28.000 What is Buteyko?

00:40:47.000 Has been doing this for 20 years.

00:40:48.000 He's rock solid.

00:40:49.000 He's done the science.

00:40:50.000 And he cured his own allergies, severe asthma and allergies.

00:40:54.000 And he said, why the hell isn't anyone else doing this?

00:40:58.000 And so he stopped when he was a business major and stopped.

00:41:01.000 And he's written like four books on this stuff.

00:41:04.000 What's his name again?

00:41:05.000 Patrick McKeown.

00:41:06.000 Patrick McKeown.

00:41:07.000 Yeah, Irish dude.

00:41:08.000 And breathing less.

00:41:11.000 See, that sounds very counterintuitive to people.

00:41:13.000 When you say breathing less, they're like, what are you talking about?

00:41:16.000 You're supposed to breathe a lot, right?

00:41:17.000 Like, the more you breathe, the more air you get, right?

00:41:20.000 Yeah, this is such a contrarian concept.

00:41:22.000 It took me months to really figure out what was going on here.

00:41:27.000 Most of us breathe too much, just like most of the population is eating too much.

00:41:32.000 When we're taking in that much air, we're just breathing it back out.

00:41:36.000 So 75% of the oxygen we take in, we breathe back out.

00:41:39.000 So if we're breathing, if we're just sitting here now, And I'm doing this.

00:41:45.000 I'm not gaining any oxygen.

00:41:47.000 I'm actually making it harder for my body to offload oxygen into the tissues, muscles, and organs.

00:41:52.000 Is that because it takes time for your body to take the oxygen in through the breath and disperse it through the body?

00:41:58.000 Yeah, it's two things.

00:41:59.000 So it's the CO2 when I'm breathing like this.

00:42:03.000 I'm offloading too much CO2, and without that CO2, I'm not getting that vasodilation.

00:42:07.000 I'm not getting that circulation, which is why just doing that, a little lightness in my head, you know, my fingers get a little tingly.

00:42:13.000 Just doing that?

00:42:14.000 Just from that.

00:42:16.000 Keep going.

00:42:19.000 So as you're doing that, you're going to feel a little dizzy.

00:42:23.000 You'll probably feel some circulation problems in your hands and fingers.

00:42:29.000 You can do this for two hours and you'll really see what I'm saying.

00:42:33.000 So the point by breathing less and deeply is to optimize each of those breaths as much as you can to give your body more time to extract that oxygen.

00:42:43.000 And you want to do that through the nose because that pressure...

00:42:47.000 Breathing in helps the lungs in that gas exchange.

00:42:50.000 So if you know someone that has a deviated septum, you would instantly recommend them get that fixed?

00:42:55.000 This is what I have.

00:42:56.000 So 75% of the population has a deviated septum that is clearly visible to the naked eye.

00:43:01.000 So I've had my nose broken two or three times.

00:43:04.000 So I'm as when they took a CAT scan of my head.

00:43:07.000 I'm as more messed up as anyone.

00:43:08.000 Nyack said, you are the perfect candidate for surgery.

00:43:11.000 But I tried to see what I could do outside of surgery.

00:43:14.000 I know people who have been, just like you, have had their health transformed by it.

00:43:18.000 It's very important.

00:43:19.000 But there are also people who don't necessarily need it and should start by practicing some breathing methods.

00:43:25.000 So you didn't get surgery?

00:43:27.000 I did not, no.

00:43:27.000 Interesting.

00:43:28.000 And I changed my airways and I changed how my nose worked over the course of a year.

00:43:33.000 We took CAT scans before and after just by breathing.

00:43:36.000 You know how people get cauliflower ear?

00:43:38.000 Do you know that?

00:43:39.000 Calcified blood gets trapped inside the tissues.

00:43:42.000 My nose was filled like that.

00:43:43.000 So I really did need surgery.

00:43:45.000 And my nose had probably been broken.

00:43:49.000 I broke my nose the first time when I was five falling down a flight of stairs.

00:43:52.000 And then a lifetime of combat sports.

00:43:55.000 I don't know how many times I broke it.

00:43:57.000 It easily could be more than a dozen.

00:44:00.000 And that's why you are a perfect candidate for this and it changed your life.

00:44:04.000 Yeah, but it was surgery.

00:44:05.000 Yeah, no, but that's what I'm talking about.

00:44:07.000 Surgical interventions are absolutely necessary for a large part of the population.

00:44:12.000 I had one quarter of one nostril that was open.

00:44:16.000 My right nostril was useless, like totally closed up.

00:44:19.000 I mean, when I would try to breathe, it would be like nothing would go through.

00:44:24.000 That's bad news.

00:44:25.000 Yeah, I'd go to yoga class.

00:44:27.000 They'd go, breathe through your nose.

00:44:28.000 My nose is useless.

00:44:29.000 And if you listen, like if someone hears me from like the Fear Factor days and you listen to my voice, it's a different voice.

00:44:36.000 It's a more nasally voice.

00:44:38.000 It's because my nose was stuffed all the time.

00:44:40.000 I had to breathe out of my mouth.

00:44:42.000 But for someone like you, now you know the benefits of nasal breathing, right?

00:44:46.000 Well, just the cardio benefits alone was crazy.

00:44:49.000 It's like I gained 10% cardio instantly.

00:44:52.000 Yeah, and I've heard this numerous times by so many people.

00:44:56.000 So what you're doing when you're breathing through the nose is you're slowing down that breath.

00:45:00.000 You're taking in less breath, but you're using more of it.

00:45:03.000 So by breathing less, you're going to be able to lower your heart rate.

00:45:07.000 And we know this.

00:45:08.000 If anyone has a pulse oximeter at home, you would think that breathing six breaths a minute, which is about a third of what's considered normal, you think there's no way I'm getting enough oxygen.

00:45:18.000 That's impossible.

00:45:19.000 Put on a pulse ox and watch what happens.

00:45:22.000 And what I've found is your oxygen's either going to stay the same or sometimes go up.

00:45:26.000 We even got on stationary bikes on the Stanford experiment, and we were trying to see if we could breathe six breaths a minute while going as hard as we could and watching what happened to our oxygen.

00:45:37.000 And our oxygen did not go down.

00:45:38.000 Once we got to about three or four breaths per minute, it started going down.

00:45:42.000 As long as you have these huge breaths, right?

00:45:45.000 This huge circle, you're...

00:45:51.000 And you can work out that way.

00:45:52.000 And they found Dr. John Duyar did a bunch of studies of this in the 90s and found for cyclists who were normally breathing 47 times a minute, they were able to breathe at 14 times a minute by nasal breathing.

00:46:05.000 So their endurance increased, their performance increased, and their recovery increased.

00:46:09.000 The instinct when you're exhausted is to...

00:46:13.000 So what you're saying is you have to fight that instinct and breathe through your nose and you will recover just as well.

00:46:20.000 I'm saying you need to slowly acclimate your body to this.

00:46:23.000 That need to breathe is not dictated by oxygen.

00:46:25.000 And this is another thing that's really hard to get your head around.

00:46:28.000 It's dictated by carbon dioxide.

00:46:30.000 So if you were to hold your breath right now and you feel that need to breathe, that's dictated by rising levels of CO2, not by oxygen.

00:46:39.000 That was another really fascinating aspect of your book, the importance of carbon dioxide.

00:46:46.000 I had always thought of carbon dioxide as a waste product.

00:46:50.000 When you were talking about that one researcher that was saying that carbon dioxide is probably more important than oxygen for life, I was like, what is...

00:47:01.000 What?

00:47:02.000 What is this?

00:47:03.000 That guy's from Yale, too.

00:47:05.000 Yandel Henderson.

00:47:06.000 Check out his work.

00:47:08.000 It's rock solid.

00:47:10.000 But that's so counterintuitive, right?

00:47:13.000 To what a normal person believes to be true.

00:47:16.000 Yeah, and I wouldn't pick between oxygen and CO2. You're going to lose either way.

00:47:22.000 But CO2 is not just a waste product.

00:47:24.000 No, you need a balance of these two things.

00:47:28.000 Everyone's focused on oxygen, which is why you see at an airport in Singapore an oxygen bar.

00:47:34.000 You see a linebacker on the side of the field huffing pure oxygen.

00:47:40.000 That oxygen for a healthy body is not doing anything.

00:47:43.000 You're exhaling it back out.

00:47:45.000 So when you go to a high-altitude place and they give you oxygen, that's nonsense?

00:47:48.000 No, that's completely different.

00:47:49.000 High-altitude, there's less oxygen.

00:47:51.000 You absolutely need it.

00:47:53.000 No, at sea level, for health...

00:47:56.000 Right now, you probably have 97% O2 blood sats, right?

00:48:01.000 I probably do, too.

00:48:02.000 If you think about that, huffing pure oxygen, it might bump you up 1% or 2%, but that oxygen has nowhere to go if you don't have CO2 to off...

00:48:12.000 Those bars kind of disappeared, didn't they?

00:48:14.000 They used to have those in Vegas.

00:48:15.000 You put tubes up your nose and sit there like an idiot.

00:48:18.000 I remember doing that and trying to convince myself it was doing something.

00:48:22.000 Well, the low lights are doing, the air conditioning is doing something.

00:48:25.000 The chaise lounge that you're sitting on is doing something.

00:48:28.000 Relaxing you.

00:48:28.000 Yeah, it's relaxing you.

00:48:30.000 But I was completely stumped by this.

00:48:32.000 And I'm not talking about people with emphysema or at altitude.

00:48:35.000 I'm talking about healthy people at sea level or around sea level.

00:48:39.000 And I kept asking pulmonologists, my father-in-law is a pulmonologist, so I asked him all of these questions, and he's just like, it's the biggest placebo effect in the world.

00:48:48.000 Wow.

00:48:49.000 And so I'm sorry if people are out there, oxygen bar owners, hearing me say this, but...

00:48:54.000 I don't know if they're there anymore.

00:48:56.000 When was the last time you saw an oxygen bar?

00:48:58.000 It's been a while, you know, but who knows?

00:49:00.000 Maybe they're going to be coming back soon.

00:49:02.000 Someone's investing money right now as we speak, listening to this podcast about the sign on the dotted line.

00:49:06.000 What?

00:49:07.000 Wait a minute.

00:49:08.000 That shit's not real?

00:49:10.000 Hold on.

00:49:11.000 I did see in a gift store, though, a bottle of oxygen.

00:49:15.000 Yes.

00:49:16.000 Like, literally, you screw the cap off.

00:49:19.000 What?

00:49:20.000 Like a bottle where you screw the cap off?

00:49:23.000 Aluminum bottle of oxygen.

00:49:24.000 Those people, that's like a pet rock, right?

00:49:26.000 Those people are assholes.

00:49:28.000 Yeah.

00:49:30.000 I'd love to say they're laughing all the way to the bank.

00:49:32.000 I'm not sure about that.

00:49:33.000 I don't think they're making that much money.

00:49:34.000 But whatever money they're making, they're stealing.

00:49:37.000 Now, why don't we have this—why isn't it not generally acknowledged that carbon dioxide is very beneficial to life?

00:49:47.000 I think CO2 has gotten this really bad rap.

00:49:50.000 We talk about CO2 increasing in the atmosphere, acidification of the ocean, global warming.

00:49:56.000 It's the stuff that comes off a rotting fruit.

00:49:58.000 But we're not looking...

00:50:00.000 A pulmonologist is going to know the importance of a balance of CO2. So people in that field absolutely know it.

00:50:08.000 And so they've written and they've said, thank you for getting this out in the open because people don't realize it.

00:50:14.000 They...

00:50:15.000 You can go outside right now, see people jogging, gotta get more O2 in.

00:50:20.000 And the fact is, like, not only is that not doing anything for them, it's actually making their breathing worse and making it harder for them to offload oxygen, which is just something I don't think a lot of people realize.

00:50:32.000 Like, slower, deeper breaths can be so much more efficient, can allow you to go further for longer.

00:50:38.000 And that's really what you want.

00:50:40.000 So for athletes that are accustomed to having these really hard workouts, they're doing interval training and they're sprinting and things along those lines, CrossFit-style workouts, and they're used to going...

00:50:51.000 What they should do is train themselves to slowly take in air from their nose.

00:50:58.000 And how would you recommend someone doing that?

00:51:00.000 There's some great therapists who can show you all the wonders of doing this.

00:51:03.000 And by practicing these breathing techniques, you're going to increase...

00:51:10.000 So it's just like altitude training, and you can increase your VO2 max as well.

00:51:14.000 So I don't know what sort of exercise each person is doing, and so you can't give a blanket prescription to everyone.

00:51:21.000 So someone would have to be there and be, what's your heart rate?

00:51:25.000 Let's say running.

00:51:26.000 What if someone does like hill sprints or something along those lines?

00:51:29.000 What I've found is nasal breathing is the way to go.

00:51:32.000 You can see what Sandy or Richard Ross, who for 10 years was the top sprinter in the world, Obligatory nose breathing the whole time.

00:51:41.000 And to me, the pictures just say everything.

00:51:44.000 She's in these races.

00:51:45.000 The people right next to her look like they're dying.

00:51:48.000 She has the most placid look on her face.

00:51:51.000 Mouth is shut, kicking everyone's butt across the finish line.

00:51:55.000 So there's tons of research.

00:51:57.000 There's tons of therapists that can work with people individually because you just don't know how old is the person, what's their maximum heart rate, where they're going.

00:52:06.000 But we do know that nasal breathing is a more efficient way of breathing, and you're going to be able to go further and perform better once that becomes a habit.

00:52:18.000 What's fascinating to me is the sport that I commentate on, mixed martial arts, there's a giant issue with broken noses.

00:52:26.000 A large percentage of the fighters have deviated septums, smashed in noses, they're clogged up, and you see them breathing out of their mouth, particularly when they're tired.

00:52:36.000 You see, like, when a fighter has their nose broken, and you see blood trickling out of their nose, one of the first signs you see is they breathe out of their mouth.

00:52:45.000 And that seems like...

00:52:48.000 Well, obviously it's terrible to get punched in the nose, right?

00:52:51.000 You have this delicate instrument and you're using it as a target.

00:52:55.000 But for someone who does get punched in the nose for a living, what can they do if they have this other than not do it?

00:53:07.000 I think do what you did, right?

00:53:09.000 So if you're talking about these extreme cases...

00:53:11.000 Yeah, but I'm not fighting anymore.

00:53:12.000 If I was fighting, I don't know if I would get it fixed.

00:53:15.000 Well, I guess I probably would anyway now that I know.

00:53:17.000 But a lot of guys don't because they think they're just going to get it broken again.

00:53:21.000 Well, for those extreme cases, they're going to need surgical intervention.

00:53:25.000 If you can't breathe through your nose, you have to find a way.

00:53:28.000 So Nyack, the guy at Stanford, told me, if your toilet is clogged, what are you going to do?

00:53:32.000 You're going to find a way of cleaning it out and getting that flowing again.

00:53:35.000 And when it clogs again, just fix it again.

00:53:38.000 That's one way of doing it.

00:53:40.000 Or you could make a permanent fix to it, right?

00:53:43.000 Yeah.

00:53:44.000 So that it's always functioning.

00:53:46.000 If someone's used to getting punched in the nose every month and their nose is getting broken again, that's going to be really hard to nasal breathe.

00:53:54.000 So I think that either they need to stop getting punched in the nose or they have to make some other lifestyle choices.

00:54:01.000 If they want to continue doing that, they're going to have a hard time nasal breathing.

00:54:04.000 That just seems like...

00:54:05.000 Simple physics.

00:54:07.000 But it's so crazy because it is one of the more difficult things to do athletically.

00:54:12.000 And athletically, it seems from your work and the work that you're citing that it would be of extreme benefit to learn how to breathe through your nose, but yet most of them can't.

00:54:22.000 Yeah, and I asked Patrick McKeown this, and he's like, when you're competing, you do what you can to compete.

00:54:29.000 You do what you can to win, which is why if you see Michael Jordan, right before he dunks on someone, he goes, takes this huge breath of air.

00:54:38.000 That one breath of air is not going to affect his endurance or his performance, right?

00:54:43.000 It's about habitual nasal breathing and breathing while you're training.

00:54:46.000 If someone has a bloody nose or something is stuffed up there, you have to breathe somehow, right?

00:54:52.000 Right.

00:54:52.000 You're gonna breathe through your mouth, especially for boxers, you know.

00:54:56.000 Yeah.

00:54:56.000 It is interesting though, you look at any other animal in the wild, look at a horse running, look at a full-on sprint, it's never breathing out of its mouth.

00:55:04.000 Right.

00:55:04.000 Ever.

00:55:05.000 Look at a cheetah, like hunting down some prey, it's never breathing out of its mouth.

00:55:10.000 Horses are, when they start breathing out of their mouths, they're in deep trouble.

00:55:14.000 Right, and dogs just do it to cool themselves off.

00:55:17.000 Thermo regulation, that's right.

00:55:20.000 The carbon dioxide thing is a real trip.

00:55:25.000 When you're saying that this need to take a deep breath is really because your body recognizes the level of carbon dioxide is very high, what happens when you become accustomed to holding your breath?

00:55:41.000 Are there physiological changes that are taking place?

00:55:45.000 So this is what Dr. Justin Feinstein is working on right now at the Laureate Institute of Brain Research.

00:55:50.000 He has found that asthmatics and people with anxiety have this extremely low threshold for CO2. So they need to keep breathing.

00:56:00.000 They're so paranoid that they're not going to be able to breathe that they've become accustomed to...

00:56:06.000 And whenever that CO2 increases, they freak out.

00:56:12.000 So he is found by slowly acclimating them to have more of a, to be able to take more CO2 and become more comfortable with it.

00:56:21.000 That's how they can change their breathing.

00:56:23.000 That's how they can change their habits, which is exactly what those asthma techniques do, right?

00:56:28.000 They teach these people to breathe less and to breathe slowly, to slowly acclimate themselves.

00:56:34.000 Like someone with asthma or panic, don't go and start holding your breath as long as you can.

00:56:38.000 That's a bad idea.

00:56:39.000 Like let the body adjust.

00:56:42.000 Slowly.

00:56:42.000 So I was recently around someone having a panic attack and what she was saying is, I can't breathe.

00:56:49.000 I'm having a hard time breathing.

00:56:50.000 Obviously she was breathing and she was talking, but she was like, I can't breathe.

00:56:55.000 What would you say to a person who's doing that?

00:56:57.000 Just try to get them to calm down, slowly breathe?

00:57:00.000 What would you say?

00:57:01.000 I would quote Dr. Alicia Moret at Southern Methodist University who said, the idea that people should be breathing more when they have panic is exactly the opposite of what they should be doing.

00:57:11.000 So they should be, what is happening is their CO2 levels are getting so low, what they need to do is breathe more slowly or hold their breath.

00:57:18.000 Can you increase your tolerance for CO2 like this?

00:57:22.000 Is that like a physical thing or is it a mental thing?

00:57:26.000 Absolutely.

00:57:26.000 It's a physical thing.

00:57:28.000 There are chemoreceptors right around here, right?

00:57:30.000 And these are the things that gauge levels of CO2. So if you think about a freediver, what allows them to hold their breath for four, five, six, seven, eight minutes?

00:57:39.000 They've gotten this threshold of CO2 that's very high compared to me or you or anyone else.

00:57:44.000 You think about someone who's able to summit Everest without...

00:57:47.000 Oxygen, right?

00:57:49.000 They've got this threshold of CO2. So, so much of fitness, not all of it, but a lot of it is dictated by the level of CO2 that you can withstand, at least with surfing or with freediving or with alpine climbing.

00:58:05.000 So these receptors, you train them or they get stronger?

00:58:09.000 Is it like an endurance thing?

00:58:11.000 Like, you know, your cardiovascular endurance increases, your resting heart rate decreases.

00:58:15.000 Like, does that happen with these carbon dioxide receptors?

00:58:19.000 You can train them.

00:58:21.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:58:21.000 You can acclimate them to accept a higher threshold of CO2 so that you become comfortable with it.

00:58:28.000 So one of the hard things about training to free dive is those breath holds at the beginning.

00:58:33.000 You do these static breath holds, not in water, never in water, but on land.

00:58:37.000 You see how long you can hold your breath.

00:58:39.000 And they're miserable.

00:58:40.000 People, you know, maybe hold their breath maximum two minutes.

00:58:43.000 But once you get used to it, you can go four minutes or five minutes.

00:58:46.000 And what is happening when you're getting used to it?

00:58:48.000 You are allowing those signals, those chemoreceptors are going off and sending messages to your amygdala, which is the area in the brain that dictates fear.

00:58:57.000 And you're ignoring them or you're just accustomed to it?

00:59:00.000 You're getting accustomed to it.

00:59:02.000 You are becoming more comfortable with it.

00:59:05.000 Because when I've heard of freedivers diving seven minutes and holding their breath for that time, and they're doing it underwater, and then I try to hold my breath, I'm like, what is wrong with me?

00:59:14.000 Do I have a weak mind?

00:59:16.000 Why am I giving in?

00:59:18.000 What is that thing?

00:59:21.000 So what he's doing, he's found that he's been trying to train people in mindfulness and trying to train these people in breathing practices, but it's really hard because he can't be with them 24 hours a day.

00:59:32.000 So what he's now experimenting with, and he's got an NIH grant to do this, is instead of having them practice these mini breath holds throughout the day, he's having them come in and take a huge inhale of CO2 because his hypothesis is that that can help reset The tolerance of those chemoreceptors.

00:59:53.000 Fascinating.

00:59:54.000 It's a little shortcut.

00:59:55.000 Yeah, it's a little because, you know, it's the modern age.

00:59:58.000 No one wants to actually put in the work, right?

01:00:00.000 No one wants to be Swami Rama.

01:00:03.000 I think a lot of people want to be Swami Rama, just no one wants the 30 years in a cave.

01:00:08.000 Yeah.

01:00:08.000 And what is his results of these people taking in the burst of CO2? It is too soon to say he's going to be publishing everything next year or the year after that.

01:00:18.000 Excellent.

01:00:18.000 He's in the middle of it right now.

01:00:20.000 But the premise of it makes perfect sense to me.

01:00:23.000 And this is why it describes and explains why so many of these slow, breathing-less practices are so effective for anxiety, why they're so effective for asthma as well.

01:00:34.000 Now, are there specific coaches that work with people that have anxiety and use these anxiety breath coaches?

01:00:45.000 Yeah, Dr. Richard Brown and Patricia Gerbarg, a psychiatrist in New York.

01:00:50.000 I believe he's at Columbia.

01:00:52.000 They've developed this whole program, and most of it revolves, it's so simple that people think, oh, there's no way this can work for me, until they try it.

01:00:59.000 So they bring in patients, have them start with this six seconds in, six seconds out.

01:01:05.000 That's it.

01:01:06.000 You'd be surprised how few people actually have breathed that way in the past year, or five years, or ten years.

01:01:13.000 They've found that this method of breathing was effective for 9-11 survivors who had this awful condition called ground glass lungs.

01:01:20.000 They had a bunch of gunk in there.

01:01:22.000 There was no therapy to get rid of it.

01:01:24.000 But this breathing pattern was able to do what no other therapy could do just by breathing.

01:01:29.000 What happened to the people that had this ground glass stuff?

01:01:32.000 Their lungs were filled with garbage and they were constantly exhaling this gunk, right?

01:01:41.000 And so by breathing slowly and by helping the lungs to open up and helping with that gas exchange with CO2 and O2, They were able to help them recover so much more effectively.

01:01:53.000 And they've written books on this stuff, so they're a great place to start.

01:01:57.000 If you want the how, they're legit too.

01:02:01.000 They're leaders in their field.

01:02:03.000 And so this breathing in and breathing out cleared their lungs or just made them feel better?

01:02:07.000 It had a significant benefit in clearing their lungs.

01:02:09.000 Wow.

01:02:10.000 And it makes them feel better.

01:02:11.000 And that's the thing.

01:02:13.000 Like, there's no side effects to doing this stuff.

01:02:15.000 If at the end of it you're like, I still have asthma, I still have anxiety.

01:02:19.000 It's not going to hurt you.

01:02:20.000 The minimum is you're going to feel better.

01:02:22.000 And that's not too bad, you know, considering all the other side effects to so many other therapies.

01:02:28.000 It's obviously, yeah, it's not a drug.

01:02:30.000 What do you do?

01:02:32.000 What do I do for breathing?

01:02:53.000 Absolutely transformed their lives.

01:02:55.000 So you can't help getting a little emotionally caught up in this practice and in these stories.

01:03:01.000 And I learned a few tricks along the way.

01:03:03.000 I noticed what a poor breather I was.

01:03:06.000 I used to, at night, sleep with my mouth open for decades, right?

01:03:12.000 I thought this was normal to go to sleep with 22 ounces of water by the bed, wake up every few hours, dunk some water.

01:03:18.000 It's completely not normal at all.

01:03:21.000 So you recommend sleeping with, like, do you use mouth tape?

01:03:25.000 Absolutely, yeah.

01:03:26.000 You tape your mouth up every night.

01:03:27.000 Yeah, I thought this sounded pretty sketchy until I heard about it from the, you know, Doctor of Speech Language Therapy at Stanford until I heard about it from Dr. Mark Burhenny.

01:03:38.000 So what they've found, and they had, Burhenny's been using this stuff for decades.

01:03:43.000 This is not a fat piece of duct tape, people.

01:03:46.000 Don't go on YouTube and see what people, nine pieces of tape down...

01:03:50.000 No.

01:03:51.000 You need a piece of tape that has a really light and easy adhesive about the size of a stamp.

01:03:57.000 You put it in the middle of your lips.

01:03:59.000 Do you do that even with your beard and mustache?

01:04:01.000 Absolutely.

01:04:02.000 It's on your lips.

01:04:03.000 Okay.

01:04:04.000 So it just keeps your lips closed.

01:04:05.000 So many people are like, how dare you write about this?

01:04:09.000 I'm offended.

01:04:10.000 Meanwhile, a quarter of the population has sleep apnea.

01:04:13.000 Half the population is snoring.

01:04:14.000 I have sleep apnea.

01:04:15.000 I have sleep apnea and I use a mouthpiece.

01:04:17.000 Okay.

01:04:18.000 I use a mouthpiece that presses my tongue down to keep my airway open.

01:04:22.000 As long as you have that airway open, that is key, especially at night because sleep apnea has so many chronic problems associated with that downstream from hypertension, metabolic issues.

01:04:32.000 But do you think I would still have sleep apnea if I use this tape and close my mouth?

01:04:36.000 There's only one way to find out.

01:04:37.000 Oh my goodness.

01:04:39.000 I don't know.

01:04:41.000 I'm not here to prescribe anything, but this tape is free.

01:04:45.000 You can do it.

01:04:47.000 You can gauge.

01:04:47.000 I'm sure you have some sensors to monitor your sleep.

01:04:50.000 Do you have a pulse aux?

01:04:51.000 No, just go to sleep with this mouthpiece on.

01:04:54.000 That would be a good thing to test it.

01:04:56.000 Seems like a lot of work.

01:04:57.000 But let me ask you this.

01:04:59.000 My sleep apnea occurs because I have a fat tongue and a thick neck.

01:05:04.000 A lot of wrestlers get this, and that's basically probably where I got it, from jujitsu.

01:05:11.000 But I can breathe out of my nose.

01:05:13.000 So do you think that sleep apnea would still occur if I'd breathe out of my nose, primarily or only?

01:05:19.000 It can, because sleep apnea is caused by your tongue falling back.

01:05:22.000 So my tongue could fall back against that hole anyway.

01:05:25.000 It's less apt to with nasal breathing because nasal breathing is going to tone your airways more.

01:05:29.000 And I know from the Stanford experiment that I went from opening my mouth the whole time, okay, so 10 days I could not breathe through my nose.

01:05:39.000 Within two days I was snoring, had not been snoring.

01:05:43.000 Within about four days I was snoring.

01:05:45.000 Half the night I got sleep apnea.

01:05:47.000 The other subject in the study Had the exact same thing happened, even worse than me.

01:05:52.000 The day we took that stuff out and we taped our mouths and we're nasal breathing, snoring went away, sleep apnea went away, my blood pressure dropped about 10 to 15 points.

01:06:02.000 So it's something that people can test as well.

01:06:07.000 You can test the quality of your sleep and it's not asking too much.

01:06:09.000 And once I learned that this did not require a fat piece of tape, That the point wasn't to hermetically seal your mouth shut, which sounds a little scary to a lot of people and it should be.

01:06:21.000 It's just to train the jaw shut at night so you don't go...

01:06:25.000 I saw there's a device, not a device, like a neoprene strap.

01:06:29.000 It goes under your chin and wraps around your head and keeps your jaw shut.

01:06:32.000 Is that dumb?

01:06:33.000 There's all kinds of stuff.

01:06:35.000 I'm not going to say.

01:06:36.000 I haven't tried it.

01:06:37.000 I don't know.

01:06:38.000 I think maybe some people get some benefit from it, and that's great.

01:06:42.000 I do know that tape is almost free.

01:06:46.000 And I've seen some incredible results myself, subjectively, but they're also doing some studies.

01:06:52.000 And if you look at Burheny's work that he's done for the past few decades, I mean, it's a quick and easy fix that can work for a lot of people.

01:07:00.000 And this is something that you use every night?

01:07:02.000 I use it every night.

01:07:03.000 When I don't, guess what happens?

01:07:05.000 Yeah, your mouth comes open and you start snoring.

01:07:07.000 Yeah, and I wish that I didn't have to.

01:07:10.000 I would figure at this time that it would become habit, but I'm not one of those people who have that really strong jaw that stays shut.

01:07:18.000 My mouth just opens, and the difference in quality of sleep from doing this has been profound.

01:07:24.000 I'm glad you brought that up because that was something else I wanted to talk to you about.

01:07:27.000 You were talking about the changes in human diet and eating soft foods and how it affects the way the jaw develops.

01:07:34.000 And the size of the jaw and that there's a way to improve that, which I found fascinating.

01:07:41.000 Yeah.

01:07:41.000 And this was something when you set out to write a book about breathing, the last thing you think you're going to be doing is handing around a bunch of ancient skulls and looking at teeth.

01:07:50.000 But that's where this journey led me.

01:07:53.000 I had heard from some biological anthropologists that our faces have changed and that our mouths have gotten too small.

01:08:00.000 And that was one of the reasons so many of us were breathing so poorly.

01:08:04.000 And so I thought, well, this sounds interesting.

01:08:06.000 These people are legit.

01:08:07.000 I want to check it out.

01:08:09.000 And if you take an ancient skull, anything older than 500 years old, 5,000 years old, 50,000 years old, you're going to see, by and large, about 99% chance these skulls are going to have perfectly straight teeth.

01:08:22.000 They never had their wisdom teeth removed.

01:08:24.000 They never had braces, any orthodonture, anything.

01:08:27.000 They had straight teeth because they had these very wide and large mouths and these powerful jaws.

01:08:33.000 If you start getting into the modern era of industrialized food, mouths start shrinking.

01:08:38.000 So why do we have crooked teeth?

01:08:40.000 Not from genetics.

01:08:42.000 It's because our mouths have grown so small that the teeth have nowhere to go.

01:08:46.000 So they grow crooked.

01:08:48.000 And what else happens when you have a mouth that's too small for its teeth?

01:08:52.000 You have a smaller airway.

01:08:53.000 So this is one of the reasons why so many people have snoring, sleep apnea, and other respiratory problems.

01:08:59.000 This sounded so bizarre because it's nothing I'd ever learned in school.

01:09:04.000 But all anyone needs to do is look up some ancient skulls if you're online.

01:09:08.000 And check out their teeth.

01:09:10.000 And check out how they have these huge jaws, these big, flat, wide faces, powerful faces.

01:09:16.000 And they all had this.

01:09:18.000 And then you go into the wild, 5,400 different mammals, and check out and see how many have crooked teeth.

01:09:24.000 The answer is zero.

01:09:26.000 So some bulldogs do because they've been bred to have this flat face just like humans.

01:09:32.000 But animals in the wild have straight teeth.

01:09:35.000 And we did too.

01:09:37.000 As a species, we have straight teeth.

01:09:40.000 But because of industrialization, specifically because of food, our mouths have grown too small.

01:09:47.000 You would never believe that.

01:09:49.000 If someone told me that other than reading your book and kind of understanding where you're coming from, I would think this is nonsense.

01:09:56.000 It's genetics.

01:09:57.000 Yeah.

01:09:57.000 Just like why people have small hands or people have big feet or whatever.

01:10:02.000 Well, it's become a heritable trait.

01:10:03.000 So what's happened now is they've found the researchers who've done this, Robert Corchini worked on this stuff for 30 years, has 250 scientific papers on it.

01:10:14.000 They found within the first generation of switching to industrialized foods, about 50% of the population is going to have malocclusion, which means a crooked jaw, crooked teeth.

01:10:22.000 After that, about 60 to 70 percent.

01:10:25.000 Next generation.

01:10:26.000 After that, about 80 percent.

01:10:28.000 After that, look around.

01:10:30.000 That's us now.

01:10:31.000 About 90 percent.

01:10:32.000 Jesus.

01:10:33.000 So if...

01:10:34.000 Sorry.

01:10:35.000 No.

01:10:35.000 I was going to bum you out a little more.

01:10:37.000 So Dr. Kevin Boyd is now doing studies where he's looking at fetuses in the womb and has seen their mouth size is too small and they have this backward slant to their faces just like I have, just like so many people in the population have.

01:10:52.000 If you were to measure a skull and you were to draw one line from its ear to its nose and another line perpendicular to that, almost every single ancient skull would be above that line.

01:11:04.000 Very powerful jaw.

01:11:06.000 Now, 90% of modern skulls are below it, so they are behind it.

01:11:11.000 And this is happening now.

01:11:13.000 It is becoming a heritable trait.

01:11:15.000 So kids are messed up to begin with, which is why so many kids have sleep apnea and snore now, which is so injurious to their health.

01:11:25.000 And this came about because they weren't chewing tougher food.

01:11:30.000 They didn't need the muscles.

01:11:32.000 And what can be done to sort of reverse that or mitigate that?

01:11:37.000 In adulthood it's harder and for kids it's much easier because their muscles and their bones are much more malleable.

01:11:44.000 But that's exactly what they found is once you introduce...

01:11:47.000 We used to chew for about four hours a day, okay?

01:11:50.000 That's just how it was from the dawn of time to about 500 years ago.

01:11:55.000 But as wheat started getting processed into white flour, as rice became...

01:12:01.000 We started taking the germ and the bran away from rice.

01:12:03.000 It's just the polished seed.

01:12:05.000 As things began to get canned and bottled, if you think about even what's considered healthy food right now, Smoothies, avocado, oatmeal, all this stuff is soft.

01:12:17.000 Power bars.

01:12:18.000 So in adulthood, you can make some changes, and that's what I tried to do in my own faith as an experiment.

01:12:27.000 For kids, what they're finding is these problems need to be diagnosed very early, and they need to be treated.

01:12:34.000 And what they do is they whiten the mouth to the way that they were supposed to be.

01:12:39.000 500 years ago.

01:12:40.000 So we're changing our bodies by force of will to the way that nature had made them before we messed them up.

01:12:47.000 There was a doctor that you were talking about that developed some sort of a retainer that actually changed the volume of your jaw as an adult and changed the volume of your mouth.

01:12:55.000 That's right.

01:12:57.000 I had crooked teeth growing up.

01:12:59.000 I had braces.

01:13:00.000 I had extractions.

01:13:01.000 I had headgear.

01:13:02.000 And me and everyone I knew had the same thing.

01:13:05.000 It was never if you were going to get it.

01:13:07.000 It's just when are you going to get your braces?

01:13:09.000 Right.

01:13:09.000 So the point of all those things was to straighten teeth, but they're not looking at airway health, right?

01:13:14.000 So what happens just as a principle?

01:13:17.000 You've got a mouth that's too small for its face.

01:13:19.000 The teeth are growing and crooked.

01:13:21.000 You extract teeth from that, get some headgear and go...

01:13:26.000 You're creating, at least there's a significant argument by many people in the field that say you're making a small mouth smaller.

01:13:32.000 And one leader in the field, Dr. Michael Gelb, has said 50% of people who have orthodontics are going to have more breathing problems because of it.

01:13:41.000 Orthodontics meaning braces as well?

01:13:43.000 Braces are craning in.

01:13:45.000 So it's a combination of braces and especially headgear and some of that stuff is being phased out.

01:13:51.000 Braces are still, you're forcing teeth into a smaller space to make them straight.

01:13:57.000 So there's this, the very first orthodontics weren't craning teeth in to make them straight.

01:14:04.000 They would expand the mouth.

01:14:06.000 Because even back then, 120 years ago, they knew our mouths were growing too small.

01:14:10.000 They knew that.

01:14:11.000 So the first devices, I thought this was fascinating.

01:14:14.000 They were using this for kids who had cleft palates, had all of these other problems where they were having problems chewing and breathing.

01:14:21.000 So they would expand their mouths with this device that went to the roof of your mouth and it had a little dowel screw and you slowly opened it up to expand the mouth.

01:14:30.000 What does it feel like?

01:14:32.000 It doesn't feel great.

01:14:34.000 So this is where I think a lot of orthodontics is heading because it allows you to have straighter teeth, but it also opens your airway.

01:14:43.000 But how long do you keep it in your, you keep it in your mouth like braces all day long?

01:14:47.000 No, no.

01:14:48.000 The one that I use was called a homeoblock.

01:14:50.000 And this guy had been using it for 30 years.

01:14:53.000 And I used it at night.

01:14:55.000 So you put it on the pallet, upper pallet, and you slowly, you have this little screw thing, this little handle that every couple weeks you open it a little more, just slowly.

01:15:05.000 There it is.

01:15:06.000 Jamie's got a picture of it.

01:15:07.000 All right.

01:15:08.000 So that you used one of those?

01:15:10.000 Yeah, I did.

01:15:12.000 None as gnarly as that.

01:15:14.000 Yeah, it looks intense.

01:15:16.000 But if you feel your head right now, you feel these sutures, right?

01:15:20.000 These cracks in your head, you have one of those on your upper palate.

01:15:25.000 So that can open, okay?

01:15:28.000 That's what it's made to do.

01:15:30.000 It can open and you can widen your mouth in adulthood.

01:15:33.000 And I showed this through CAT scans.

01:15:35.000 And by that, you can open your airway and you can breathe better.

01:15:40.000 And how long did you wear it for?

01:15:41.000 I wore it for one year.

01:15:42.000 One year to the week I took the other CAT scan.

01:15:45.000 And you gained how much volume in your mouth?

01:15:48.000 I gained about five pennies worth of bone in my face, which is crazy.

01:15:54.000 Five pennies?

01:15:55.000 So stack them up.

01:15:57.000 Yeah.

01:15:58.000 Five pennies.

01:16:00.000 That's a lot of bone, man.

01:16:01.000 So we've been told that we can't grow bone past 30, right?

01:16:06.000 It's just entropy.

01:16:08.000 We're only going to be losing.

01:16:09.000 We can stop it from disappearing.

01:16:12.000 We can do some things to help prevent that loss, but we can't build it.

01:16:16.000 But we can.

01:16:16.000 We can build it in the center of our face, in the maxilla.

01:16:20.000 So you can really change the structure of your face from doing...

01:16:23.000 You can widen your face?

01:16:24.000 You can add more bone.

01:16:26.000 You can model more bone inside of your face.

01:16:29.000 Do you look better?

01:16:29.000 While you're...

01:16:30.000 Do you think you look better?

01:16:31.000 Can't you tell?

01:16:31.000 You're a good-looking man.

01:16:32.000 But I mean, do you think you look better?

01:16:34.000 I will not say better.

01:16:36.000 I won't use those.

01:16:37.000 Different?

01:16:38.000 No.

01:16:38.000 Worse, worse.

01:16:39.000 People, be forewarned.

01:16:41.000 Don't build bone in your face.

01:16:43.000 No.

01:16:43.000 I did notice after about six weeks of wearing this thing, people were like, dude, what happened?

01:16:49.000 What are you doing?

01:16:50.000 They could see a shift?

01:16:52.000 Absolutely.

01:16:53.000 And it's very apparent.

01:16:55.000 And you can see a bunch of case studies on this, and you can see it for yourself.

01:16:59.000 And the neat thing is it's not subjective.

01:17:01.000 It's not, well, I think I look different.

01:17:03.000 There's CAT scans, and there's metrics to it.

01:17:06.000 And it also opened my airways.

01:17:08.000 It allowed me to expand.

01:17:10.000 I don't know how much is probably...

01:17:13.000 Maybe 15%, 20%, but it was mostly the toning of the airway.

01:17:17.000 Why did you stop using it after a year?

01:17:19.000 I'm still using it.

01:17:21.000 You are?

01:17:21.000 So for the book, for the research, I said, I'm going to do this for one year and I'm going to wear it every night.

01:17:27.000 I'm really going to be dedicated.

01:17:29.000 Even after having a few beers, I was like, the last thing I want to do is put this thing in my mouth and go to sleep.

01:17:35.000 But I did it because I was curious because I'd heard these stories.

01:17:38.000 I'd seen the case studies.

01:17:40.000 I'd see the data.

01:17:41.000 But I wanted to see what would happen in my own body.

01:17:44.000 And I tell you, on a subjective level, I breathe more easily now than I can ever remember breathing.

01:17:51.000 I haven't had pneumonia, bronchitis, any of those problems.

01:17:54.000 But there's a bunch of factors, though, too, right?

01:17:56.000 There's the nose breathing.

01:17:57.000 There's the breath work.

01:17:58.000 So it's a combination of all these things.

01:18:01.000 Yeah, but nose breathing wouldn't help you build more bone in your face.

01:18:04.000 Right, of course.

01:18:25.000 The difference is when you clench your jaws right now, just like, you know, you're boxing, you're intense, you're clenching your jaws, that does not stimulate that good beneficial chewing stress, okay?

01:18:37.000 Because our bodies identify that as sympathetic stress.

01:18:41.000 So cortisol levels go up, right?

01:18:43.000 That means growth isn't going to happen.

01:18:44.000 But if you think about eating a big piece of steak or a carrot, you're not chewing on both sides of your molars.

01:18:51.000 You're chewing on one side or the other.

01:18:54.000 So when you stimulate the stress on one side or the other, next time you're chewing on something, think about that.

01:19:03.000 That's why you salivate and you become more relaxed and that's when that growth can happen.

01:19:09.000 So, chewing on one side or the other stimulates stem cells that don't get stimulated if you're just like biting down on a mouthpiece.

01:19:16.000 Because of cortisol and osteoplasts, yeah.

01:19:19.000 Now, how often do you have this thing in your mouth now?

01:19:23.000 I took a break after a year to see what life was like on the other side of that.

01:19:27.000 How was it?

01:19:28.000 Was it nice?

01:19:28.000 It was great.

01:19:30.000 But I got curious.

01:19:32.000 I talked to the guy who gave me this device, Dr. Ted Belfort, and he's used this thing for 30 years.

01:19:38.000 And his case studies are pretty fascinating.

01:19:42.000 And I talked to him.

01:19:43.000 He's like, oh, we should do another CAT scan and see what happened.

01:19:47.000 Didn't quite admit to him that I had stopped using it.

01:19:50.000 So I felt a little guilty.

01:19:51.000 And now for the past about month and a half, I've been back on the train to see what happens.

01:19:57.000 So we're going to take another one just for kicks.

01:20:00.000 I'm not going to write about it.

01:20:01.000 The book's already done.

01:20:02.000 But I'm curious to see what will happen if you keep wearing this, if you can really keep improving.

01:20:07.000 If you're the Swami Rama of orthodontics.

01:20:10.000 If you could hold that bad boy in your mouth for a few years, I mean, I'd be really fascinated if you change your face and all of a sudden you have like this big Clark Kent, Superman type jaw.

01:20:19.000 Can you let me shack up here for a couple years and I'm just gonna focus on this all day.

01:20:24.000 Just stay in the sauna too.

01:20:26.000 Do what you gotta do.

01:20:28.000 So where would one get one of these things?

01:20:30.000 There's many different devices.

01:20:32.000 So the one I used was the homeoblock.

01:20:34.000 Ted Belfort can set you up with that.

01:20:36.000 Would you have to go to a doctor to get measured?

01:20:38.000 Is that what you do?

01:20:39.000 Yeah, you have to go to a dentist or an orthodontist would set you up with this.

01:20:43.000 But there's many different ones that do the same thing.

01:20:46.000 What a lot of people do, instead of having this thing in your mouth for a year, they go in and this sounds gnarly.

01:20:53.000 Apparently it's not as gnarly as it sounds.

01:20:55.000 But they go in and drill in this thing.

01:20:57.000 Yeah.

01:20:58.000 And open it up that way.

01:21:00.000 But people who have done this and they're using this especially for kids and they're using this for teenagers, repeatedly their allergies go away.

01:21:09.000 They can breathe better.

01:21:11.000 They look totally different because they're expanding because growth is centered around this right here.

01:21:16.000 So where are they drilling in?

01:21:18.000 The upper palate.

01:21:20.000 They drill into the upper palate and they put a device in there?

01:21:22.000 Yep.

01:21:23.000 So it's permanent.

01:21:24.000 So you can't get it out.

01:21:25.000 Until they take it out.

01:21:26.000 But it's much quicker.

01:21:27.000 This expansion happens quickly over the course of a couple of months.

01:21:31.000 Oh.

01:21:32.000 So you keep it in your mouth for a couple of months.

01:21:34.000 Yeah.

01:21:34.000 And your teeth start widening out, you know?

01:21:37.000 And then they fix it.

01:21:38.000 So Marianna Evans is an expert at this.

01:21:42.000 Dr. William Hang, who's right around here, he's been doing this for 30 years.

01:21:48.000 Very respected.

01:21:49.000 And he knows this stuff better than anyone.

01:21:53.000 So, yeah.

01:21:54.000 And what do they do for your lower jaw?

01:21:57.000 Nothing.

01:21:58.000 It's all about this upper palate.

01:22:00.000 What if you have crooked teeth on your lower jaw?

01:22:00.000 Well, they could use braces or something.

01:22:03.000 But it's all about the upper palate.

01:22:06.000 Oh, okay.

01:22:06.000 And there are some devices you'd have to ask Hang.

01:22:09.000 They've got all the gizmos to do.

01:22:11.000 The reason...

01:22:13.000 I thought this was so interesting that...

01:22:15.000 This was how orthodontists, this is how teeth were straightened, right?

01:22:19.000 A hundred years ago.

01:22:21.000 And then by the 40s, they found a way of making dentistry more of a production line where one size fits all.

01:22:28.000 We're getting yank teeth, braces on, done, done, done.

01:22:31.000 But this expansion takes a lot of expertise and a lot of focus.

01:22:36.000 But what I'm seeing now within that industry, there's this huge moment of change where they've realized, so many people have realized that some of these processes might have caused breathing problems.

01:22:49.000 And so they're reassessing how they've been doing things.

01:22:52.000 And, you know, one orthodontist told me, he's like, we're going to look back in 10 years and be horrified by what we've done.

01:23:01.000 It's so interesting to me that breathing and breath work and knowing how to breathe properly, it's not common knowledge, but it's so critical to health.

01:23:12.000 And it's free.

01:23:14.000 We're not talking about something that requires devices or a long learning curve or just some of these benefits.

01:23:25.000 So many of them, and especially the most simple ones, right?

01:23:29.000 Anyone can breathe in, six seconds in, six seconds out.

01:23:32.000 If you want to really go up to the next stage and figure out what breathing can really do for you on a bigger and more powerful level, you can do Tummo, you can do Wim Hof, you can do Holotropic, you can do Kriyas, you can do Pranayamas.

01:23:45.000 They're all doing the same thing.

01:23:47.000 And Holotropic, I haven't done it, but it makes you trip, right?

01:23:51.000 It's an interesting experience.

01:23:53.000 What was it like for you?

01:23:55.000 You know, I know a lot of people have found profound benefits from this.

01:24:00.000 They used it in a hospital.

01:24:03.000 11,000 people were put through this thing and they showed it was more effective than any other therapy.

01:24:09.000 Me personally, that the science is much more thin in holotropic breathwork.

01:24:14.000 And what I had been told by the instructors kind of threw me off where they're like, they sit you in a room and And they blast music, and for three hours you breathe as hard as you can.

01:24:25.000 And they told me that you're going to be able to enter into this space because so much oxygen is getting into your body.

01:24:32.000 The opposite is happening.

01:24:34.000 You're inhibiting blood flow to your brain, and so your brain is processing that as a threat, and sometimes you inhibit so much blood flow that perhaps your brain is interpreting this as though you are dying, which is why so many people have...

01:24:51.000 This reaction where they said, I am reborn after holotropic.

01:24:54.000 And that's awesome.

01:24:56.000 I don't want to take that away from anyone.

01:24:58.000 But what I've seen is that there's been a ton of subjective anecdotal studies, not a ton, a few of them.

01:25:07.000 But the actual science behind it, no one's gone into an fMRI and looked at what's really happening.

01:25:13.000 And that's something I really want to do and hopefully I'm going to be doing in the next few months just for curiosity.

01:25:19.000 That makes sense if people are having psychedelic experiences because many psychedelic experiences are tied to near-death experiences.

01:25:26.000 A lot of people that have near-death experiences, they report these moments that mimic what a lot of people have experienced on psychedelics.

01:25:34.000 So what they're doing through this holotropic breathing, they're not harming themselves, right?

01:25:39.000 Or do we not know?

01:25:41.000 Not that I know of.

01:25:43.000 The doctor who put 11,000 people in said nobody had any problems.

01:25:48.000 There were no side effects.

01:25:49.000 So I've heard that some people can freak out.

01:25:52.000 I heard that there's possible bowel issues involved and some real meltdowns.

01:25:58.000 In the class that I took, I wasn't sure how much was psychosomatic and how much was actually because of the breathing.

01:26:05.000 I had a pretty strange experience where a guy turned into a wolf for a while.

01:26:10.000 Whoa.

01:26:11.000 A wolf?

01:26:12.000 Like a real wolf?

01:26:13.000 Went humping around the room.

01:26:14.000 Oh, so a guy.

01:26:16.000 Not to you.

01:26:18.000 I wish if it were a real wolf, that would have been incredible.

01:26:23.000 But he thought he was a wolf.

01:26:24.000 He inhabited the body of a wolf.

01:26:27.000 Maybe he was just an asshole.

01:26:28.000 That's possible, too, and just act it out.

01:26:31.000 Or maybe he really became a wolf.

01:26:33.000 We will never know, which is why this stuff should be studied.

01:26:37.000 There's a lot of talk that breathing this way will trigger endogenous DMT, and that's the reason people trip out so hard.

01:26:45.000 I tried to do a study in which I would breathe this way, and they would take blood before and after, but the scientists that I was talking to said it would be such a small amount, they wouldn't be able to So there's a lot of gray area, which to me is not a bad thing.

01:26:59.000 It's great.

01:26:59.000 There's still mysteries to breath.

01:27:01.000 There's mysteries to the human body, right?

01:27:03.000 And if people are finding great benefit from this and there's no side effect, then that's great.

01:27:09.000 I just found it was a little thinner than the other techniques like Wim Hof Method or like CREA. Now, this guy that had this experience and he turned into a wolf, did you talk to him before?

01:27:22.000 Awesome guy.

01:27:23.000 Super solid dude.

01:27:24.000 He was a lawyer working in San Francisco and left and went to live off the grid in a cabin in Mendocino, which is completely legit and admirable.

01:27:35.000 And he was a groovy dude.

01:27:38.000 And afterwards, really warm, welcoming guy.

01:27:41.000 So I don't want to take away any process that he went through.

01:27:45.000 He said it was very cleansing for himself, and I think that that's great.

01:27:51.000 You're a very nice guy.

01:27:52.000 Who might have to rip on it, right?

01:27:56.000 I understand.

01:27:57.000 I understand.

01:27:58.000 Yeah, I'm just saying you're a very nice guy with your disclaimer.

01:28:01.000 I'd like to talk to him.

01:28:05.000 You know where we can find him.

01:28:06.000 He's out in the tundra right now.

01:28:08.000 You gotta go hunt him down.

01:28:09.000 Is he?

01:28:10.000 No, I have no idea.

01:28:11.000 Maybe, right?

01:28:12.000 Maybe he's got like a caribou in his mouth.

01:28:14.000 Could be.

01:28:15.000 So this guy ran around.

01:28:17.000 Did he have clothes on when he did this?

01:28:18.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:28:19.000 He was scratching his crotch a little bit and growling.

01:28:25.000 Growling?

01:28:25.000 And it got interesting.

01:28:27.000 Yeah, everyone saw it.

01:28:29.000 And again, you know, he was going through his process.

01:28:32.000 That was cool.

01:28:33.000 But the whole time I was watching him breathing and he wasn't really breathing any differently than me.

01:28:38.000 Because what you do is you have half the class are the sitters for the people who are breathing and you watch over these people in case they have problems.

01:28:45.000 So I was a sitter during this process.

01:28:48.000 I was not breathing.

01:28:49.000 I was looking at his respiration, it really didn't look any different.

01:28:52.000 So I'm wondering how much of this is the set and setting of this.

01:28:56.000 You're in Mendocino, you're at a hot springs, there's really loud music, fake lutes.

01:29:02.000 What kind of music is this?

01:29:03.000 You know, that's something I wish they could have worked on a little bit.

01:29:06.000 Death metal?

01:29:07.000 I wish.

01:29:09.000 But it was a lot of, like, fake keyboard lutes and cymbals.

01:29:14.000 The fake tinny cymbal crashes.

01:29:16.000 The Macam Hall.

01:29:20.000 That's the kind of music they're playing?

01:29:22.000 That kind of thing, yeah.

01:29:22.000 But that would seem, like, you know, when you talk about set and setting, that would seem to be, like, a terrible set and setting.

01:29:28.000 Well, a lot of people enjoyed that music and good for them.

01:29:34.000 It would be interesting to mix it up with three hours of death metal and just see where that would take you.

01:29:40.000 Or Zeppelin, something good.

01:29:41.000 Zeppelin, that would be fine.

01:29:45.000 So when you did it, so you were a sitter, but then you also did it, right?

01:29:50.000 And when you did it, what did you experience?

01:29:52.000 Well, it definitely affects you because you're breathing in a certain way.

01:29:56.000 It's going to affect your physiology.

01:29:57.000 So I got really cold.

01:29:58.000 I got really hot.

01:30:00.000 I got really spacey.

01:30:01.000 I felt like I was kind of dreaming for a while.

01:30:04.000 Three hours is a long time to breathe as hard as you possibly can.

01:30:08.000 But the shifts in temperature and in circulation, because the body is trying to compensate, right?

01:30:13.000 So the more you're breathing...

01:30:15.000 Your pH is going to be, you know, going down.

01:30:18.000 So you're becoming more alkaline.

01:30:20.000 So your body doesn't like that.

01:30:23.000 It really wants the pH because all the cellular functions happen at a certain pH, some 0.4.

01:30:28.000 So to me, it was fascinating to feel my body fighting against this and constantly trying to balance itself throughout the whole thing.

01:30:36.000 But it's definitely spacey.

01:30:39.000 There's no doubt about it.

01:30:40.000 When you say spacey, what do you mean?

01:30:42.000 You are extremely lightheaded.

01:30:44.000 You feel very high.

01:30:46.000 I was talking to Ben Greenfield about it, and he said it was the most profound spiritual experience he's ever had just by breathing.

01:30:53.000 And a lot of people say the same thing.

01:30:55.000 You know, those subjective experiences are cool, but I think it would be a lot more interesting to find out what happens to everybody, not just one person, when they do this and to look at the brain and to look at the body.

01:31:07.000 And really analyze that to see if there's some physiological reaction.

01:31:12.000 We know what's happening with blood flow to the brain.

01:31:15.000 We know what happens to the brain when it's denied blood flow to certain areas.

01:31:19.000 But how does that affect us psychologically afterwards?

01:31:23.000 How does it affect us physically?

01:31:24.000 I think these are good questions and it'll be interesting to find out.

01:31:28.000 How long did it take you to feel like you recovered from that experience?

01:31:31.000 Pretty quickly.

01:31:33.000 I went outside afterwards and drank a beer in my car and just sort of But it was mostly just the feeling of extreme lightheadedness, dreaminess, and then everything just sort of boils back down and you're back in Mendocino at the hot tubs.

01:31:52.000 And when they sell you on this, when they have a class for holotropic breathing, what are they saying it's going to do?

01:32:01.000 Well, they can't claim any medical benefits because the FDA would come after them.

01:32:05.000 But they say it is a spiritual journey and for many people it is.

01:32:09.000 And I think that's a wonderful thing that they're getting benefit from this.

01:32:13.000 And they use this fuzzy language like that because they can't say it's going to help with your asthma.

01:32:19.000 They can't say.

01:32:19.000 But what's interesting is there are other methods like Kriya, Sudarshan Kriya, 60 independent studies and is so similar to holotropic.

01:32:28.000 The difference is You don't breathe super hard for three hours.

01:32:32.000 You breathe extremely intensely for about five minutes, then slow it down.

01:32:36.000 But let me ask you about holotropic breathing first before Kriya.

01:32:39.000 So holotropic breathing, what is the actual technique?

01:32:43.000 How do you do it?

01:32:46.000 You breathe as hard and as fast as you are able to breathe.

01:32:49.000 So you're not taking big deep breaths?

01:32:51.000 Whatever you want to do.

01:32:52.000 Whatever you want to do.

01:32:53.000 You can do that.

01:32:57.000 And you're breathing through the nose, through the mouth?

01:33:00.000 Whatever you want to do.

01:33:01.000 They say through the mouth is going to allow you to get more air in.

01:33:04.000 Is that real?

01:33:06.000 Yeah, you'll get more air in.

01:33:08.000 Because you get larger volume?

01:33:09.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:33:10.000 And this was created in the 70s by Stanislav Grof, who is a psychiatrist, who was one of the first test subjects of LSD. And he started using LSD at Johns Hopkins and in other universities and found it had this profound effect for people with schizophrenia and other serious problems.

01:33:28.000 It got banned in what, 68?

01:33:30.000 And so he wanted to find a way to allow people to have these experiences without the drug.

01:33:36.000 And so he developed this specifically to mimic the effects of LSD. And he's written 12 books on this stuff, some of the science, mostly the psychology of what's happening with it.

01:33:49.000 I wish that there was some more hard science to it.

01:33:52.000 There's not yet, but hopefully that's forthcoming.

01:33:55.000 And that number, three hours, is that consistent?

01:33:59.000 It's interesting.

01:34:00.000 When I did this, and this was several years ago, it was three hours.

01:34:03.000 So you had to go three hours.

01:34:05.000 Now they're doing, I guess that was too hard for a lot of people, they're doing these hour sessions, which is news to me.

01:34:12.000 Again, everybody wants to be Swami Rama.

01:34:15.000 Nobody wants to live in a cave for 30 years.

01:34:17.000 Three hours is America, man.

01:34:19.000 That's too much time, bro.

01:34:22.000 But if you're going to go into that zone, I think you want the full pie, not just the peas.

01:34:28.000 Yeah, I would imagine.

01:34:29.000 But I guess it's pretty hard for people to do that for that long.

01:34:34.000 I've had some friends who've done the holotropic breathing, one of the reasons why I asked you this, and these friends are pretty hardcore psychedelic experimenters, and they found it very profound.

01:34:45.000 They said that they could achieve states that are very similar to psychedelic experiences.

01:34:51.000 You hear that all the time.

01:34:52.000 But you didn't find that.

01:34:55.000 I found it very lightly.

01:34:57.000 I did not go into the spectral universe.

01:35:00.000 And you have done that before?

01:35:01.000 Have you had psychedelic experiences before?

01:35:03.000 I went to college, but I did not dabble too deeply.

01:35:12.000 All these disclaimers.

01:35:13.000 My mom's.

01:35:14.000 Oh, I understand.

01:35:15.000 Okay.

01:35:16.000 You can wink.

01:35:18.000 Okay.

01:35:18.000 I got it.

01:35:20.000 Now, Crea.

01:35:21.000 What is the difference in Crea?

01:35:22.000 Okay.

01:35:22.000 So Crea is a breathing technique that is very similar to holotropic breathwork.

01:35:30.000 But the difference is it's much more controlled.

01:35:33.000 So you're having these bursts of heavy breathing, but then you have these bursts of very slow breathing.

01:35:41.000 And this was developed in the 80s, and they started opening up to studies.

01:35:46.000 And just as I mentioned, there's been 60 independent studies showing how effective this stuff is that have been done at Harvard, that have been done at legitimate institutions, showing how effective for some autoimmune diseases, for anxiety, for depression,

01:36:02.000 for other issues.

01:36:03.000 And what I think is interesting is, so you've got Wim Hof's Breathing, which is very effective for some autoimmune issues, for some asthma, for anxiety.

01:36:14.000 You've got Kriya, which is doing the same thing.

01:36:16.000 So what I found in the book is people have been coming at this stuff from different directions, but they're coming to the same conclusions about these breathing methods.

01:36:24.000 And these very hard and heavy breathing methods, people think, why do I want to stress myself out?

01:36:30.000 I'm stressed out enough with work, with my kids, whatever.

01:36:34.000 When I breathe, I want to chill out.

01:36:36.000 But that's exactly what these very powerful breathing methods do, is they focus that stress into one 20-minute time period so that the rest of the time you can actually go to sleep, so you can actually be rested and relaxed.

01:36:50.000 And that's what Wim Hof's version of Tumo does, and that's what Creo does at all.

01:36:56.000 Also, it stimulates that sympathetic stress.

01:36:59.000 You're completely...

01:37:01.000 Really going for it.

01:37:02.000 You turn it on specifically so you can turn it off.

01:37:06.000 So what is the rhythm in terms of like hard breathing versus slow breathing?

01:37:13.000 In Kriya, it is a lot of slow breathing at the beginning.

01:37:21.000 And then there's a medium breathing phase.

01:37:23.000 When you say slow breathing, how much time are the breaths?

01:37:27.000 I have not counted.

01:37:29.000 I've been following an instructor, but it's usually I'm thinking of because this guy, Ravi Shankar, is the one who dictates this thing.

01:37:39.000 So he's the only guy who does it.

01:37:41.000 So he sends out these cassette tapes, which are so quaint, or CDs.

01:37:45.000 People play these.

01:37:47.000 So the slower ones are about...

01:37:52.000 So two, three seconds?

01:37:54.000 Yeah, about that.

01:37:55.000 And then after that are medium.

01:38:01.000 And then you go for it as hard and as fast as you can.

01:38:07.000 Is there any literature on how they arrived at that specific rhythm?

01:38:12.000 He had been studying.

01:38:14.000 He's another guy who spent his lifetime in meditation and in yoga and went on his spiritual enlightenment quest and came out of it with, this is a breathing technique that I want to help share with people.

01:38:28.000 All of that sounds really fuzzy, right?

01:38:30.000 Until you start studying it, until you start doing studies to see how people have benefited from this.

01:38:36.000 And that's what I think is so important.

01:38:39.000 No matter how granola it sounds, if you can measure it, you can study it.

01:38:43.000 If you can study it, you can find whether or not it works.

01:38:46.000 And it certainly has worked for so many people.

01:38:48.000 And these studies, what have they shown in terms of the benefits?

01:38:52.000 What was the duration that the people were doing it for?

01:38:56.000 So even after a few weeks of doing this, this isn't the only...

01:39:00.000 So there's four different tangents of this breathing, and they say that you can only really learn it in one of their schools.

01:39:07.000 So there's this very soft breathing where you put your hands like this, then you put your hands like this underneath your armpits, then you put your hands like this, and you breathe in to a count of four.

01:39:18.000 What is the purpose of the hand positions?

01:39:20.000 I think it's to open up the lungs.

01:39:23.000 Yeah, to create flexibility.

01:39:26.000 So it starts with that.

01:39:28.000 There's the obligatory ohms, which everyone's doing nowadays.

01:39:31.000 And then there's that really intense, that cleansing breath at the end, which to me is by far the most potent.

01:39:38.000 So there's almost like a warm-up.

01:39:40.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:39:41.000 And what's the duration of their practice?

01:39:47.000 The slower breathing where you have your hands and your hips will probably go on for about, again, I haven't timed this because I've been in a class, but probably seven minutes, seven or eight minutes.

01:39:58.000 Ohms, you do three ohms with a couple minutes, but that long cleansing breath is about 40 minutes long.

01:40:04.000 So the whole thing you've done in an hour?

01:40:06.000 Yeah.

01:40:07.000 And how many times have you done this?

01:40:10.000 I've probably done it hundreds of times.

01:40:12.000 Really?

01:40:12.000 Yeah.

01:40:13.000 And do you get the same sort of trippy feeling that you got with holotropic breathing?

01:40:16.000 The body is different every day.

01:40:19.000 So it depends where your mind is, depends on where your body is.

01:40:22.000 But every single time I feel very different at the end.

01:40:25.000 I feel much better Clear-headed.

01:40:28.000 I'm able to sleep a lot better.

01:40:29.000 So, you know, I've done this in the class dozens and dozens of times, and they had a YouTube video of this practice that I downloaded.

01:40:38.000 Now it's offline.

01:40:40.000 So I downloaded that, and I'm able to follow along with that.

01:40:45.000 So what are you doing currently?

01:40:47.000 We kind of barely touched on it, but what is your daily routine?

01:40:51.000 Do you have a daily routine?

01:40:52.000 My daily routine for the last couple of months has been awful because I've just been on book tour, virtual book tour.

01:40:58.000 And when you notice something when you talk for four or five hours a day, what am I doing now?

01:41:03.000 I'm breathing through my mouth over and over.

01:41:05.000 I think that's one of the reasons it's Exhausting, you know, mentally exhausting, physically exhausting.

01:41:11.000 But one thing I try to do is I set up a little timer.

01:41:14.000 There's a zillion different apps you can do to focus on those six seconds in, six seconds out breaths.

01:41:20.000 Because I notice the first thing that I do in the morning, I sit down at my computer, Look at, you know, 40 different emails.

01:41:26.000 I stop breathing.

01:41:27.000 And I know this because I put on a pulse ox and watch my O2 just go straight down.

01:41:33.000 And this is so, they say that up to 80% of office workers have this.

01:41:37.000 It's called email apnea.

01:41:38.000 And they've studied it, some researchers at the NIH. Email apnea.

01:41:42.000 Yeah.

01:41:43.000 If you think about it, the next time you sit down at a computer, you've got your Twitter on, you've got your phone open, you just lose focus on your body.

01:41:51.000 You lose focus on your posture.

01:41:53.000 So you're saying like this, which makes it really hard to take a deep breath.

01:41:56.000 And then you lose focus on how healthily you're breathing.

01:42:01.000 And so I've found that If I focus on that right from the get-go, I can sort of set myself up for some good habits.

01:42:09.000 I also try to incorporate when I'm working out, I always nasal breathe, and I try to breathe less and increase my tolerance for CO2. But I do Wim Hof's Tumo, I do Kriya, I do some Pranayamas, I try to do those.

01:42:25.000 We're good to go.

01:42:45.000 Chuck McGee is the one who does it.

01:42:47.000 It's in the back of my book, the URL. You can look up his name also online, Chuck McGee, Wim Hof instructor.

01:42:54.000 And what's so cool, you have no idea this guy is even a breathing thing.

01:42:58.000 He doesn't advertise anything.

01:42:59.000 He does this because breathing has fundamentally changed his life in a measured way.

01:43:05.000 So he no longer is on blood pressure medicine.

01:43:07.000 He's taking 80% less insulin.

01:43:10.000 His anxiety is abated.

01:43:11.000 His depression is debated.

01:43:13.000 And these are things that have been, for the Wim Hof guys, there's thousands of these people reporting this.

01:43:18.000 Drops in CRP of 40-fold within two weeks of doing this.

01:43:22.000 So it's fascinating stuff.

01:43:24.000 So he leads a live stream?

01:43:28.000 Is that what it is?

01:43:28.000 Yeah.

01:43:28.000 And it's nightly?

01:43:30.000 No, it's on Monday night, 9 p.m.

01:43:33.000 PT. But what's cool is he will then send you a recording of this so you can practice it whenever you want.

01:43:39.000 An audio recording that you can get on your phone, or is it a physical?

01:43:43.000 No, no.

01:43:44.000 He'll send you.

01:43:44.000 You can get it on your phone, download it, and listen to it whenever you want, which is what I've done.

01:43:48.000 I have about four of his different sessions here.

01:43:51.000 So whenever I was traveling, when people were doing that, especially if I was traveling, spending a lot of time in hotels, I would do this to really reset myself and help go to sleep.

01:44:01.000 And you said his name is Chuck McGee, is it?

01:44:03.000 Yeah, that's it.

01:44:03.000 And so it was like chuckmcgee.com or something like that?

01:44:07.000 His website is somethingvikingbreathworks.

01:44:13.000 Oh, one of those guys.

01:44:14.000 It's a hard URL. Why Viking?

01:44:18.000 You have to ask him.

01:44:19.000 Because they did a lot of crazy shit, right?

01:44:21.000 They were free divers.

01:44:22.000 They were free divers.

01:44:24.000 But there was a lot of weird chanting and stuff.

01:44:27.000 Iced Viking.

01:44:29.000 Oh, Iced Viking.

01:44:30.000 Iced Viking.

01:44:31.000 Tie into the Wim Hof cold exposure thing.

01:44:33.000 Ah, okay.

01:44:33.000 Yes.

01:44:34.000 And he's dealing a lot, not just with people who are healthy, who want to go up that next rung of human potential, but with people of chronic pain, who have chronic diseases.

01:44:45.000 And that's an area I think that we're just starting to learn about, how effective this stuff is and how we can better treat these people instead of giving them tranquilizers, help to treat the core problem and do that through breathing properly.

01:44:59.000 Well, listen, man, I really enjoyed your book, and I really enjoyed talking to you.

01:45:03.000 I think the information is so valuable.

01:45:06.000 It's so interesting, and I know from my own personal experience that there's a great benefit to really learning how to breathe correctly and concentrating on breathing.

01:45:15.000 I'm going to start working out now through my nose.

01:45:17.000 I'm going to try that now.

01:45:19.000 I do my kickboxing, clench my mouth down, just completely breathe through my nose, and I'll let you know.

01:45:30.000 Breath.

01:45:30.000 You can basically get it everywhere.

01:45:33.000 And again, I got the audio recording, and I really enjoyed it.

01:45:37.000 Do you have an Instagram, Facebook, all that jazz?

01:45:40.000 Yeah, my website, Mr. James Nestor.

01:45:43.000 I knew that these claims are going to sound impossible to people, so there's more than 500 scientific references there with x-rays, with videos, with pictures.

01:45:52.000 Also, I'm trying to get better at the social media thing.

01:45:55.000 So it's Mr. James Nestor on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, all that.

01:45:59.000 I always appreciate when a journalist or an author is terrible at Instagram because it makes me think they're much more authentic.

01:46:06.000 When people are really good at it, I get very suspicious.

01:46:09.000 Well, I don't have to scare you off on that.

01:46:11.000 I suck at it.

01:46:13.000 I'm trying to get better.

01:46:14.000 Good for you.

01:46:15.000 Thank you for everything, man.

01:46:16.000 I really appreciate it.

01:46:17.000 Thanks for being here.

01:46:18.000 Thank you very much for having me.

01:46:19.000 Goodbye, everybody.

01:46:20.000 Breathe, bitch!

The Joe Rogan Experience - July 10, 2020

Joe Rogan Experience #1506 - James Nestor

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