Joe Rogan Experience #1506 — James Nestor Transcript

Transcript

0:00 All right, we're rolling. for long periods of time, and then they're right there. What made you want to write this? Where'd this come from? wet, sweat all over my face. So I went back to her and I said, what happened? Like you're a doctor, that I don't know about. And I figured other people might not know about as well. And there's this documentary on him called Choke. Have you seen it? I have not, no. It's really fascinating. This documentary, he's doing

3:02 You're going to find that in the foundation of so many different sports. had a useless nose till I was 40. And then I got an operation to have my deviated But what people don't realize is about 25% to 50% of the population So he had warned me how bad mouth breathing was, but no one knew how quickly that damage came on. one of the best universities in the world. You have the means to do this. And he thought,

6:04 And that 25% to 50% of the population knows and to actually measure what happens. this from the doctor of speech language pathology at Stanford. She measured people who had laryngectomies, It would seem that it's a hole. My nose got physically wider after my operation. like it's different like if I look at older pictures of myself my nose was more narrow and

8:29 It's really, really hard. So does breathing through your nose make your actual nostril opening wider? head. Why doesn't he care about breathing from the nose or the mouth? He just wants you to breathe. So he says it doesn't matter. This is something I just got running We have 50 years of rock-solid science here showing the problems with mouth breathing,

11:59 if you were to take your fist, you've got a really big fist. So someone with a slightly smaller fist, And all of this stuff evolved this way for a reason. less and get more by breathing through the nose. Wow. So breathing through the mouth, even though You'll feel some maybe your fingertips will get cool. That was one of the craziest things about the book

14:37 In the same, not even this and this. Have they been replicated? And you see these people, some of them were short, some of them were tall, some of them were large, And I heard this. And I, out there. Yeah. And they're probably not on Facebook, right? No, they're probably in a They were looking at the EKG readoutout and they said he stopped his heart.

18:34 Maybe, hopefully, but who knows? Over the last year, I got a sauna in my house and I've gotten really into, I have a sauna here as well, but you really don't. It's crazy. So the autonomic nervous system is supposed to be beyond our control. Instead of just talking, we have measurements. function that you're taking control of. Yeah. And I think that that's where breathing really needs to move from this, this new aginess

23:02 They're like, I don't have a jacket. Yeah. This is in the 1900s, which was just like unheard of at the time. They slow down their nervous system. They put a wet sheet on him and he dries the sheet within about a half an hour because he's so hot. They're doing a slower version of it. it. And so maybe they don't want the world to know. Maybe they want to keep a few things in

26:37 And to get that visualization and to be able to focus for that amount of time takes a lot of time. I don't know every single step. I don't know. Where else? to these civilizations that have been there Right, of course. He must've learned it from the great sages, you know, in Dharamsala or Tibet. were talking about it were really teaching and inspiration. And through these different mindsets and inspiration, you can achieve some

30:43 why not measure it? right? And it has to be replicable what was cool about him is he wasn't the only one who could do this. So there were researchers in I mean, is there a written history of this? The earliest evidence that we have for breathing So these people in some ways could have been more advanced than we are now. That's what's so curious to me, what makes me so curious.

34:24 Like what made these people focus on breathwork so much? probably three or four hours of work, you know, 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, or sometimes months to really see gains in performance. But if you've got someone with a they can take their blood pressure and then breathe at a rate of about six seconds in,

37:05 by that. You don't need this device to do this. It helps. It reminds you. All you need to do is Guess what happens when you start breathing more and more? capnometer, which would gauge their CO2. Every time their CO2 started getting low, which meant measures to help abate the symptoms of that asthma. And I think we're just I'm not a doctor, and he should continue going to his doctor and taking his bronchodilators.

40:27 What is Buteyko? And he said, why the hell isn't anyone else doing this? And breathing less, see, that sounds very counterintuitive to people. When you say I'm actually making it harder for my body to offload oxygen into the tissues, muscles, and organs. Just doing that? much as you can to give your body more time to extract that oxygen. And you want to do that through the nose because that pressure of breathing in helps the lungs in that gas exchange.

43:24 breathing methods or some other- So you didn't get surgery? I did not, no. Interesting. also people who don't necessarily need it and should start by practicing some breathing Do you know that? It easily could be more than a dozen. My right nostril was useless, like totally closed up. It's because my nose is stuffed all the time. So what you're doing when you're breathing through the nose is you're slowing down that breath.

45:26 We even got on stationary bikes on the Stanford experiment. So their endurance increased, their performance increased, and their recovery increased. That was another really fascinating aspect of your book, the importance of carbon dioxide. But that's so counterintuitive, right, to what a normal person believes to be true. You're exhaling it back out. So when you go to a high-altitude place and they give you oxygen, that's nonsense? healthy body is not doing anything. You're exhaling it back out.

48:20 myself it was doing something. Well, the low lights are doing, And I kept asking pulmonologists. What? Like a bottle where you screw the cap off? I don't think they're making that much money. So people in that So for athletes that are accustomed to having these really hard workouts, say like they're doing interval training and they're sprinting and things along those lines, CrossFit style workouts, and they're used to going, what they should do is train themselves to slowly take in air from their nose.

51:21 So someone would have to be there and be, what's your heart rate? The people right next to her look like they're dying. What's fascinating to me is the sport that I commentate on, mixed martial arts, and you see blood trickling out of the nose, again. Well, for those extreme cases, they're going to need surgical intervention. If you can't breathe through your nose, you have to find a way. So

53:49 broken again, you know, that's going to be really hard to nasal breathe. and he's like, when you're competing, It's about habitual nasal breathing and breathing while you're training. Look at a cheetah, like hunting down some prey. 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?

56:40 body adjust. Slowly. Yeah. So I was recently around someone having a panic attack, and what she was saying is, I can't breathe. What they need to do is breathe more slowly or hold their breath. 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, Yeah, yeah. And what is happening when you're getting used to it?

59:14 Like, why? Fascinating. It's a little shortcut. Now, are there specific coaches that work with people that have anxiety and use these anxiety breath coaches? Yeah. Dr. Richard Brown and Patricia Gerbarg, They had a bunch of gunk in there. breathing out cleared their lungs or just made them feel better? It had a significant benefit in clearing their lungs.

1:02:39 I've got a long, long way to go. My job as a journalist was to go out and report on this stuff and then heard about it from the, you know, doctor of speech language therapy at Stanford until I Absolutely. I have sleep apnea. anything, but this tape is free. My sleep apnea occurs because I have a fat tongue and a thick neck. Okay. So it's something that people can test as well.

1:06:52 And if you look at Burhenne'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. the jaw develops and the size of the jaw, and that there's a way to improve that, They had straight teeth because they had these very wide and large mouths too small for its teeth? You have a smaller airway. So this is one of the reasons why so

1:09:38 we have straight teeth, but, but because of industrialization, specifically because of food, our mouths have After that, about 80%. After that, look around. That's us now, about 90%. they have this backward slant to their faces, just like I have, just like so many people in which is why so many kids have sleep apnea and snore now, So it's just the polished seed as things began to get canned and bottled.

1:12:40 So we're changing our bodies by force of will to the way that nature had made them before we messed them up. never if you were going to get it, it's just when are you going to get your braces. So the point of Orthodontics meaning braces as well? had all of these other problems where they were having problem chewing and breathing. So they The one that I used was called a homeoblock,

1:15:06 Jamie's got a picture of it. I showed this through CAT scans. And by that, you can open your airway and you can breathe better. Five pennies. But we can. You're a good looking man. What are you doing? it was probably maybe 15%, 20%, but it was mostly the toning of the airway. in my mouth and go to sleep. But there's a bunch of factors, though, too, right?

1:18:30 The difference is when you clench your jaws right now, just like, you know, you're boxing, I'm well aware. But I got curious. already done, but I just, I'm curious to see what will happen if you keep wearing this if you can really keep them if you're the Swami So the one I use was the homeoblock. But they go in and drill in this thing. The upper palate.

1:21:31 Oh. And he knows this stuff better than anyone. Oh, okay. And so they're reassessing how they've been doing things. most simple ones, right? Anyone can breathe in six seconds in, six seconds out. If you want to in holotropic breathwork. And what I had been told by the instructors kind of threw me off where what I've seen is that there's been a ton of subjective anecdotal studies, not a ton, a few of them.

1:25:41 Not that I know of. A wolf? Maybe he was just an asshole. That's possible too. And just like acted out. Or maybe he really So there's a lot of gray area, Now, this guy that had this experience and he turned into a wolf, did you talk to him before? You got to go hunt him down. Yeah, yeah. 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 case they have problems so i was a sitter during this process i was not breathing i was looking at

1:29:20 That's the kind of music they're playing? Something good. And when you did it, what did you experience? But the shifts in temperature and in circulation, because the body is trying to compensate, right? You are extremely lightheaded. You feel very high. I was talking to Ben Greenfield about it. When you say spacey, what do you mean by that? You are extremely lightheaded. You feel

1:31:22 afterwards? How does it affect us physically? I think these are good questions and it would be interesting to find out. because they can't say it's going to help with your asthma. They can't say. But what's interesting You breathe as hard and as fast as you are able to breathe. They say through the mouth is going to allow you to get more air in. people with schizophrenia and other serious problems.

1:33:55 And that number three hours, is that consistent? Three hours is America, man. they could achieve states that are very psychedelic experiences before? But the difference is it's much more controlled. which is very effective for some autoimmune issues, And these very hard and heavy breathing methods, people think, why do I want to stress myself out? You turn it on specifically so you can turn it off.

1:37:39 So it's only – he's the only guy who does it. So – And that's what I think is so important. I think it's to open up the lungs. Yeah, to create flexibility. on for about, again, I haven't timed this because I've been in a class, but probably seven minutes, this in the class dozens and dozens of times, and they had a YouTube video of, of this practice

1:41:03 what am I doing now? and watch my O2 just go straight down. You lose focus on your posture. So you're saying like this, which makes it really hard to take a and he was able to bait so many of the symptoms of those things. His anxiety is abated. And it's nightly? doing that especially if i was traveling spending a lot of times in in hotels i would do this to

1:44:19 Because they did a lot of crazy shit, right? area I think that we're just starting to learn about how effective this stuff is and how we can So the book, it's called Breath. So it's Mr. James Nestor on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, all that. I really appreciate it.