Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with James Nestor (@MrJamesNestor), a science journalist and the author of the international bestseller Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, with more than three million copies sold in 44 languages. Breath was named the Best General Nonfiction Book by the American Society of Journalists and Authors […] The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: James Nestor — Breathing Protocols to Reboot Your Health, Fix Your Sleep, and Boost Performance (#829) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with James Nestor (@MrJamesNestor), a science journalist and the author of the international bestseller Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, with more than three million copies sold in 44 languages. Breath was named the Best General Nonfiction Book by the American Society of Journalists and Authors and was a finalist for Science Book of the Year at the Royal Society.
He is also the author of Deep: Free Diving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves and Get High Now (Without Drugs).
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: James, so nice to see you and hear you. Thanks for making the time.
James Nestor: Thanks for having me.
Tim Ferriss: And I must tell you a bit of background to begin. I remember when Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art first came out and I don’t know if I’ve ever had, maybe Deep Survival would be another one, I believe, but two books that have come at me from so many different vectors, from so many friends, from so many athletes, from so many doctors. And I thought to myself, “You know what? This is fascinating. I’m already really, really captured by the subject matter, but I want to let this slow bake for a while and then come back and talk to James after it’s saturated the global populace a bit, and talk about the stories, what has stuck, what he’s using personally.” And so here we are. We did it.
James Nestor: Perfect timing. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Perfect timing. And in the course of doing prep for this came across a name, Maurice Dubar. My French is rusty, but I believe I’m getting that probably 50% right. Would you mind explaining who Maurice is and why Maurice is relevant?
James Nestor: When I was first trying to research the benefit of hyperventilation breathwork practices and sort of get a deeper story into how they worked and who was doing them, I ran across this guy that completely randomly at an event, and he told me about this mysterious 90-year-old who had spent hours in the snow and swimming in frozen lakes up in the French Alps. And this was not Wim Hof, this was a predecessor of Wim Hof who has been doing this for 50, 60 years. And so I was able to contact him and learn about his path into this world and learn about how rehabilitating it was for his own health and the other people that came to see him. And I thought it was interesting that there is a long legacy of people who have been doing these things, just like most things, right? But they’re usually hidden beneath a few layers and you have to dig a bit to get there. But he’s a fascinating guy. Sadly he passed away at 93 years old and did this almost every day as often as he could.
Tim Ferriss: How did he get to the breathwork? What is his story?
James Nestor: He was extremely sick as a child, had various lung infections, various respiratory disorders, and he was slated for surgery. They were going to remove a large part of his lungs. And at that time, a missionary came in to see him and said, “Hey, I was just in the far East and I heard about this thing called yoga.” And he said, “Well, what’s yoga?” He said, “Let me tell you about it.” And he showed him some breathing techniques. So Dubar said, “I don’t want to do the surgery yet. Give me a few weeks to try to rehabilitate myself.” And everyone thought he was crazy. And not only did he rehabilitate himself, he gained this almost superhuman strength by adopting these breathing practices. And that was in the 1950s. So that’s how far ahead of the curve this guy was.
Tim Ferriss: And what was he actually doing in the sense that in the course of reading up on this guy a little bit at 71, he toured the Himalayas on his bike at an elevation of 5,000 meters. He could sit in ice water effectively for 55 minutes, ran 150 miles beneath the sun in the Sahara Desert. And it seems like these stories, if you follow the ET Reese’s peanut butter bits back lead to something called Tummo. I’m sure I’m pronouncing that incorrectly, but that seems to be the spelling at least, T-U-M-M-O. What differentiates that from different or other forms of breathing?
James Nestor: Tummo is an ancient breathwork practice from the Bon Buddhist that allows you to both generate heat in your body and store it. So this is what the monks have used in the Himalayas for thousands of years reportedly to help keep themselves warm. So it was a survival technique, and depending on who you talk to, some people say, “Oh, it’s very religious, very spiritual.” Other people say it’s very practical, it’s just a practical thing. And you can learn this. It’s a mechanical skill that you can learn. Where it gets a bit more fuzzy is what is Tummo? What is officially Tummo? What is the saccharin version of Tummo? Is Wim Hof version Tummo?
And I try not to get into the weeds too much in the book, but basically there are two different versions. There’s the traditional type in which you breathe very slowly and you reduce your metabolism and somehow the heat in your body goes up. Shouldn’t be possible. There it is. And then there’s the other type which I guess isn’t officially Tummo, but people still call it Tummo, which is the Wim Hof style breathing, the extremely intense hyperventilation techniques followed by breath holds and building pressure in your body.
Tim Ferriss: Tummo Lite, register trademark.
James Nestor: Yeah, you know what? I think it’s still available.
Tim Ferriss: I have all the URLs, guys, I’m squatting on them if you want any.
James Nestor: There you go.
Tim Ferriss: And in the case of Tummo, is that something that you have personally experimented with or have you left that on the shelf?
James Nestor: I’ve done the commercial version of it many times. I still do it today. It absolutely works. If you are cold, if you’re in the ocean, if you’re in the snow, wherever you are, if you’re cold, you can do this and you can jack your body temperature very, very quickly. The slower one is a much better kept secret. You’re not going to find too many instructions for it. I’ve talked to a few Bon Buddhist monks about this and they kind of smile and say, “Oh, maybe if you hang out with us for another 10 years and spend some time in the Himalayas,” which has not been possible. But I do know some dedicated breathwork people that have gone the various levels deep into this and are now getting hints about it. But now they won’t tell me because they say, “I’ve got a secret. You’ve got to do the work.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the fight club of breathwork.
James Nestor: Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Most folks don’t want to do the Jiro Dreams of Sushi route with the breathwork, I suppose. But in the case of what you’re practicing, would it be then akin to what Wim Hof would promote in terms of the breathwork or could you describe what it is that you do for folks just in brief?
James Nestor: Sure. So the Wim Hof method is about 30 very deep breaths, extremely deep breaths and quick repetition followed by a breath hold at a neutral position. And then you take one big breath in, hold for 30 seconds and go back to that cycle, and you do this over and over and over. So the Tummo version of this is learning the commercial Tummo Lite, L-I-T-E, register trademark is you do those same motions, but when you’re doing the breath hold, you are holding the breath in and you’re creating a pressure in your body. You’re also doing some different arm movements with it. So it’s almost like you’re creating compression. It’s almost like a piston that your diaphragm is a piston and you’re creating that compression. And I’ll be damned if someone does this and doesn’t break out into a sweat, and it doesn’t matter how cold you are. I’ve seen it time and time again and anyone that’s done Wim Hof can attest to it as well.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I think, somebody on the Internet’s going to fact check me, but I think the first large public interview that Wim Hof ever did was on this podcast, it’s a hundred years ago. I will say for folks who dive into that rabbit hole, be very cautious about the cold exposure. There are lots of documented cases of frostbite and people losing digits and so on. So don’t immediately go out and hike barefoot up to elevation up to your knees in snow, just watch that and never practice this stuff in water also. What does your personal development journey look like with breathwork? I guess another way to frame that and ask it more simply is what has breathwork done for you? What have the outcomes looked like for you?
James Nestor: I think the main outcome was at the beginning where it made me realize that there are many more things you can do with your body to improve your health and focus on food and exercise and sleep. And those are the three big things that a lot of people have been talking about for good reason. There are absolutely essential. But I had all of those things pretty well dialed in around 12 years ago now, it’s quite a long time ago. I was eating the right foods, I was sleeping eight hours, I was exercising all the time, and I had chronic respiratory issues just constantly. This was when I was in San Francisco where I had been for a couple of decades. So I was surfing a lot, but constantly getting pneumonia, constantly getting bronchitis. And I would go to my doctor and the doctor, I didn’t know better at this time, would give me antibiotics.
The Z-Pak, I would take them because I was extremely naive. And this went on for years and years until these respiratory problems became so bad that I could actually hear myself breathing at night. When I was working out I could hear there was something very deeply wrong with my respiration. And it was from a suggestion of a good doctor friend of mine who was looking at me and she said, “You need to do breath work.” And before then, I’d never done any breath work. I had heard about it because I lived in San Francisco, but I had no interest in it. And the short version of this very long story is I did it and I haven’t had one of those issues since. And so that convinced me that there was a signal here to pursue when there could be real data and science behind it. It wasn’t just some placebo thing as I had been told. It was a real biological function that you could focus on.
Tim Ferriss: What strikes me so strongly about breathing also is that you have an autonomous function that you can also control. So it’s this sort of API, this interface between conscious and automatic or autonomous nervous function, which makes it, I suppose, on so many levels really potentially powerful for you. When you began waiting into breathwork, what was the first type that seemed to in part benefits to you? Do you remember what you tested?
James Nestor: I absolutely remember it. I remember it vividly because I still do it to this day. It’s called a Sudarshan Kriya. And I went down-
Tim Ferriss: How do you spell that?
James Nestor: S-U-D-A-R-S-H-A-N, K-R-Y-I-A.
Tim Ferriss: I never would’ve gotten that right. Okay, thank you.
James Nestor: It was through the Art of Living and you do this weekend workshop before they teach you the breathwork. And a lot of the practice in the workshop were not things I was vibing with at all. A lot of people were getting benefits from them, but it was making me extremely uncomfortable and I almost bailed. And then we did this-
Tim Ferriss: Wait, can you give us an example?
James Nestor: [inaudible 00:12:22]. You’re not supposed to talk about it. And I’m going to respect the secrecy of this. I can talk around it though.
Tim Ferriss: You can talk around it.
James Nestor: Have you ever sat in front of someone and a stranger and stared into their eyes for 10 minutes unblinking?
Tim Ferriss: No. That’s counter to my evolutionary impulses.
James Nestor: Got it.
Tim Ferriss: This is that kind of thing.
James Nestor: I’m just going to leave it right there and you can draw your own conclusion for the rest. But then some people were breaking down having these awesome experiences. I’m like, “Good for them, but this was just not my thing until I did the breath work.” And then I understood why they had you do all these other practices. And the breath work absolutely blew my socks off. it’s not that intense, but my body had such a reaction that I was wearing a shirt like this, and I sweated through everything. My socks were damp, there were sweat stains on my jean. My hair was sopping wet from just sitting in a corner of a very dark and cold room just breathing at this rhythm. And I said, “Oh my God, what is this stuff unleashing in me? What else is bottled up that I need to get out?” And I don’t want to sound too [inaudible 00:13:37], but it was the physiological reaction my body had to this. It was like a switch was just flipped on. And it made me very curious about breathing and other breathwork practices.
Tim Ferriss: And for those people who are interested, please correct me if I’m getting this wrong, but there are, I believe videos on YouTube that people can find of monks, if that’s a fair description, drying wet fabric on their baths using Tummo. And you can actually watch this in real time as it’s happening. I mean, there’s a lot out there that people can find. And also from a personal perspective, I mean years ago when I was first experimenting with the Wim Hof stuff and did some things in person with him, did some things in person also with David Blaine pretty shortly after, I think he broke, if I’m getting the term right, static apnea, sort of oxygen-assisted breath hold time as 17 minutes and something, it’s been crushed since somebody did 20-something minutes, which is just bananas. In any case, did a lot of experimentation with breath holds.
And at one point, if you were to ask me to hold my breath right now, I could probably do it for 30 to 45 seconds, which is not long. And I’ve historically had a lot of respiratory issues, particularly my left lung from being born premature, insufficient surfactant, had to be intubated on a respirator, et cetera. But when at one point, this was also in the Bay Area, I was, don’t replicate this folks, do this only with medical supervision, but I did a 10-day water-only fast, and I was nine days in very, very high ketone production, which is relevant for a bunch of reasons we won’t get into right now. It helps though with breath holds, I’ll just put it that way. Went into a hyperbaric chamber, which is a hard shell, so a very hard shell medical grade up to about 2.4 atmospheres of pressure.
Then did Wim Hof breathing and did a breath hold on an exhale and got to about nine minutes and then stopped because I was like, “I’m going to melt my brain.” I didn’t have the impulse to breathe, but I was like, “You know what? I’m going to call it complete at nine minutes.” It’s really wild what you can do with gaining familiarity with techniques around breath work. Now granted, I had a number of assists on that as well, but let’s pull back for a second and look at the book. So the book comes out, you have, I’m sure a million people coming to you for help, for various things. For you, what has evolved after the book came out? I am just so interested to know what has developed since the book was published for you, whether it’s additional insights, stories out of the woodwork that have seemed worth digging into, anything that comes to mind.
James Nestor: The book came out in the depths of lockdown, and so I had nothing else to do, just like most other people. So I just did podcasts all day long, three or four or five of them a day. So I was in this little bubble for about a year and a half. And then when it was finally time to come out and see the light, I’ve spoken at medical schools and banks and hedge funds and all that. And the reason I mention that is because every single time I’ve spoken, every single time afterwards, there’s a line of people and they’re all complaining about the same things, and they’re completely pissed off. They’re pissed off that they had to learn about this stuff in a book by a journalist and not from their doctor. And they’re angry. Their kid is super sick and didn’t have to be sick for the past three years.
They’re angry because they still have asthma, they’re still snoring and sleep apnea. So it was by engaging with these people and then engaging with a number of different researchers that I went on an additional learning journey, I’m still very interested in this stuff. I want to know the things that I should have included in the book, and I want to know how to answer questions better. So I pursued it. And I think one of the biggest things that I found, and I don’t know how interesting this can be to talk about, but I’ll throw it out there and then you can edit it out if you don’t want this out, is the amount of kids that have sleep disorder breathing, this can be snoring or sleep apnea or some sort of dysfunction in their breathing at night. And then if you take that population of kids who have these breathing problems at night, and if you take the population of kids who have ADHD, those two diagrams almost completely intersect.
And so what many researchers are saying is that ADHD does not exist. What you’re looking at are sleep-deprived kids. And the most shocking thing to me is that a kid that presents with ADHD, they’re never assessed for their breathing. They’re never assessed for their sleep. They’re given drugs and put on their way, and I think it’s criminal. And so this is something that really sort of ruffled my feathers, and it’s something that I try to talk about whenever I’m discussing this stuff because it’s vitally important. I think that we’ve been approaching ADHD as a neurological condition. I think it is mostly a breathing problem.
Tim Ferriss: Could you give people an idea? I suggest everybody get the book, by the way, I mean we’re going to talk about a lot of different aspects of breathing, but it doesn’t begin to approach what you’ve covered in your book. So everybody should check it out. Nonetheless, I want to make sure that people listening, for some of them, they’re going to be on the run. They’re going to be deeply interested in this particular Venn diagram, right? The ADHD or other types of neuro atypical conditions and breathing disorders.
And it makes me also think this is separate, although maybe my parents have ADHD, but they’ve gone through sleep assessments. They are Prescribed a CPAP machine, and there is exactly zero compliance. You will not wear those things. I tried to wear a CPAP machine and I was committed to wearing it, tore it off my face every single night that I tried to use it. And therefore, I’m wondering if somebody’s listening and they’ve never had, for instance, their child assessed, do you suggest them getting a particular type of assessment or is it more a matter of testing an intervention or a type of breathwork to see if there is any type of result? And is there any research also to support the overlapping Venn diagram? I know that’s a compound question.
James Nestor: There is an incredible amount of research to support this. I heard about this from researchers. I heard about it from doctors, from leaders in the field at esteemed institutions. They’ve been hollering about this for years. And exactly 0% of the population, either on the medical side or the general population has been listening to them. So the research is there, and you could type it up in any search engine and find these studies. It’s very, very easy to find them. As far as assessments for kids, yes, there are things that you can do in your house right now. What a lot of doctors, family, physicians will do if you say, “Hey, I want to check out my kid’s breathing.” They say, “Okay, we’re going to go to sleep lab and you’re going to do this,” and they’re not going to be able to sleep very well, so we’re going to give them sleeping pills, and that’s going to mess up the breathing.
And then they’re going to be diagnosed with sleep disorder breathing and given a CPAP and say, “Adios.” And if 50% of people given a CPAP within eight weeks won’t use them and the other large percent will use them, and it actually makes their breathing worse in many cases, so it’s not a good solution. So for those parents that want to assess their kid’s breathing and your own breathing, there are a number of ways to do it. Is your kid a mouth breather? In the daytime, is your kid breathing through the mouth often? It doesn’t have to be 50% of the time or 40% of the time, but enough for you to notice. And then when the kid is sleeping, wait for the kid to go to sleep, sneak into their room and listen to their breathing. If you can hear them breathing, they are struggling to breathe.
If they’re breathing through the mouth, they are struggling to breathe. If they are snoring or have sleep apnea, they are inhibiting their ability to grow physical growth. They’re causing neurological damage to their brains. They’re increasing their chances of having diabetes later on in life. And there’s this whole laundry list. And I’m not trying to be a scaremonger here. This is easy to look up, not controversial stuff. So I would start with that. There’s also an app. I have no affiliation with this app. I get no money from mentioning it.
It’s called SnoreLab. There’s also another one called SnoreClock, and they have free versions of this. And what it is you put it on your phone and you place it about four feet away from whatever sleeping head you want, and it records how you are breathing throughout the night with audio recording, and it creates a graph for you. And then it includes a score, a sleep score, and this is a very quick way of getting an initial signal if there is a problem. And then there’s a whole bunch of things to do after that. But I would start with those things.
Tim Ferriss: If they get a positive, what are some of the things that they can do? And for instance, I don’t know if this is one of them, maybe it’s not because maybe it’s not curative or incomplete, but a friend of mine, professional drummer, one of the top in his field, sent me a package of what he called hostage tape and it’s mouth tape, and he said it completely changed his life from a sleep perspective. Ultimately it looks like very, very, very, very expensive kinesio tape. But could you speak to what can be done particularly with kids, right? Because they’re not going to want some Bane mask, Darth Vader CPAP thing on top of their face, presumably, maybe some will comply, but what are some of the things that you can use or do in a case of a positive?
James Nestor: The number one thing you can do is become an obligate nasal breather. So it would be almost impossible to help to reduce these symptoms without doing that first. That includes starting in the daytime, creating a new habit around nasal breathing, and then you can allow that to sort of bleed into the night. Once you get comfortable enough with it in the day, you can then use these different tapes. You can use hostage tape if you, there’s a bunch of different tapes. You can go down to a drugstore and get any micropore tape, right? There’s 30 different kinds.
They all work. Find one that you think is best, and you use just a little piece of tape on your lips. A lot of people think this is a hostage situation, which is why hostage tape has that name, but all you need is a little piece of tape to close your mouth. A lot of parents are going to be apprehensive about doing this to their kids. So some entrepreneurial breeding people, Patrick McEwen, developed something called MyoTape. Again, no affiliation with this. I know Patrick, I’m a huge fan of this product because it goes around the mouth
And all it does is it gently trains a kid to keep their lips shut. They can open their mouth at any time. They can even talk wearing this. It’s just when they go unconscious and muscles relax. And I think that stuff is a complete game-changer. I have heard so many parents talking about their kids once you convert to nasal breathing, doesn’t work for everybody, but that as the first step so many people have told me their kids who are wetting their beds at age 10 and 11, stop wetting their beds. The symptoms of ADHD went away in two weeks. And this sounds like some sort of sketchy, crazy talk, but if you look at the science and how the body works, if you are not getting sleep, everything’s going to go haywire. And if you are, the systems are going to start to repair and heal. And that’s what’s happened with these kids. And I’m sure that’s what’s happened to your friend because he was a mouth breather at night his whole life, just like I was.
Tim Ferriss: Is there anything else that you did to address your own mouth-breathing or sleep quality?
James Nestor: Yeah, so once I sort of hopped on the breathwork wagon, I wrote it into various strange worlds, and one of those strange worlds was into the ENT, the ear, nose, and throat surgeon world. And it was while I was down at Stanford interviewing one of the leaders in the field, Dr. Nayak. I came across a breathing and sleep and respiratory therapist, and she specialized in people who had surgeries and all this, and she had this big roll of tape on her desk, and I asked her what that tape was, and she says, “I prescribe it to everybody.” And it was sleep tape. So I thought it sounded completely wacky.
I went home and looked up online what I could about it. Everything I found online seemed insane, and so I was apprehensive and I did something, and I don’t suggest anyone do, I just started wearing it immediately at night, and it sucked for about two weeks. It was terrible. Then I got over the hump and I’ve worn it almost every single night for the past seven years, and it’s really hard for me to sleep without. If I’m camping, I’m wearing it. If I’m sleeping on an airplane, I don’t wear it. I have seen people wearing it on airplanes on long flights, which is a whole other level of commitment. But only a handful of times have I not worn it and I immediately feel it and I can see it in my sleep scores. So it’s not something I’m making up.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Sometimes I wear my gag ball on international flights. It makes people really uncomfortable.
James Nestor: It’s cool if you do that thing where you put the blanket over your head, then I don’t care, right? But when they tuck the blanket into the collar and there’s this big piece of tape, it feels a little wrong.
Tim Ferriss: Just tears streaming down their face. All right, so the mouth tape, I’m going to give this another shot because I’ve frequently wondered what I can do that is also easy for travel to improve sleep quality. This has been the thorn in my side since I was very, very young. I’ve always had very, very challenged sleep quality. And I chip away at it here or there. I figured out a number of different things that are reasonably under my control, at least in a hotel room like temperature for instance. But I would love to segue perhaps from the mouth tape to the measurement of air quality that you’ve done, I guess, specifically CO₂ levels. Do you want to just take that and explain what it is that you documented?
James Nestor: This was something I had no idea about when I was writing the book and it’s something I got glued into about three and a half years ago. And so it’s the concept that we acknowledge that CO₂ is going up in the atmosphere. You can look at any graph, you can go out and measure it. Right now it’s 424 parts per million. But a lot of us aren’t considering what the air quality, specifically the amount of CO₂ is in indoor environments. We spend 90% of our time indoors and we’re not looking at the air quality. So I had heard from a researcher, he said, “You’re the breath guy. You should be checking this out.” I said, “Well, what do I do?” He said, “Why don’t you get a carbon dioxide monitor and take it around with you and just look at the air quality?”
And so, initially I was just like, “Well, who cares? Who cares if there’s more CO₂ or not?” Until I found all of these studies, and there’s about 30 to 40 years of studies and they’re done by governments around the world. So again, this is not sketchy stuff by some dude in a garage in Towson or something. These are real, which no disrespect, love that place. But this is real science, real data that anyone has access to. And what it turns out is when you get about triple the rate of CO₂ in an indoor environment, so starting at around 1,500 parts per million. Again outdoors, it’s around 425 parts per million. You start to find that in schools, certain cognitive test scores can go down about 50%, five, zero percent by tripling the amount of CO₂. And then you get up to 2,500 parts per million. You’re looking at headaches, chronic migraines, further decrease of test scores. And then it goes up from there all the way into serious cognitive disabilities up into 5,000 parts per million.
So that’s what you’re looking at. That’s the chart. And I’ve been carrying this thing around with me for about three and a half years, and I’ve been absolutely aghast by what I’ve found. I travel a lot. I travel around 100 days a year. And the average CO₂, when you are entering onto an airplane and suddenly everyone just starts falling asleep, they’re not tired. It’s because the CO₂ levels are around 2,500 parts per million, 2,500 parts per million. So if you wonder why you feel like crap after four-hour flight, I think it has a lot to do with the very low amount of oxygen and the very high amount of CO₂. And there have been all of these recommendations from engineering associations saying it should never be over 1,000 parts per million. That’s when it’s going to start to feel stuffy. I have not recorded one flight anywhere on Planet Earth where it hasn’t been over 1,000 parts per million, every single flight is.
Tim Ferriss: I’m sitting in a hotel right now and I am not sure. I think they’re trying to prevent suicides, I may not be able to open any windows. But are there any approaches that you can embrace to address this? If you travel a lot, what can you do?
James Nestor: Yeah, so I could tell you what I’ve done. I will tell you a little information about hotels. So I carry this thing around and I record every hotel I go into. And some are pretty good and some are extremely bad. And if you’ve noticed, and I’m sure you have, I just know you have. In the past 10 years, something very curious has happened. In every hotel, you used to be able to open the window, maybe not all the way because they don’t want to get sued if you commit suicide. But at least this much, six inches, seven inches, almost every hotel had that. Now they’re all glued up and they are glued up because heating and cooling accounts for 50% of the cost of maintenance. So what they do to save money-
Tim Ferriss: Good news, we have LEED Platinum. Bad news, your brain is dying when you stay here.
James Nestor: Yeah. So what they do, instead of pumping in fresh air and heating it and cooling it, which would cost them money, they recirculate the air from all the rooms. And you know this because you’re recording the CO₂ levels. And what I’ve found is in the hotels that have the big plaques outside that say LEED certified, Green certified that are the most expensive, have by far the worst quality air. I’ve recorded 2,800 parts per million waking up in one of these hotels.
Tim Ferriss: Wow. I was joking, but I nailed it.
James Nestor: No.
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
James Nestor: Yeah, I know this is just a bummer parade coming from me. But this is something. Because once you see this and carry these things around, you’re like, “I am so screwed because I’m stuck in here and I can’t open a window.” And it starts to make you crazy. So my-
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
James Nestor: … solution for that is you have yourself or your assistant call ahead and ask a hotel, “Do you have windows?” “Well sir, of course we have windows.” “Can you open those windows just a little bit? Just a little bit?” And those are the hotels you stay at.
Tim Ferriss: Wow. What CO₂ monitor do you use or what’s a good option for folks if they want to embrace? I’m just thinking of how many people, we were talking about Venn diagrams earlier. In my psyche Venn diagram, there’s a OCD and hypochondria.
James Nestor: I know dude.
Tim Ferriss: But you know it’s over. And then in the bullseye is CO₂ levels in hotels.
James Nestor: And listen, I know those hypochondriacs that everywhere you go, they’re assessing everything. Some of them are my lovely friends, I love them, but they drive me fricking crazy. I never want to be that, but this is a real, real thing.
Tim Ferriss: This is a real thing. Yeah.
James Nestor: It’s something that you should pay attention to. So I bought about 10 different CO₂ monitors and assess them against a professional device. And most of the crap you see on Amazon is worthless. Don’t bother with it. There is one brand, again, I get no money. I wish I did. Maybe I should endorse these products, but it’s called an Aranet4, Aranet4, A-R-A-N-E-T-4. That’s the best one. You know what? I probably even have it in my pack right now, I could show you, but it’s the most accurate one. And the battery life lasts forever, last about three to four months. And once you start doing it, it’s hard to stop.
And I got so fired up about this that we’re now creating, we’re working on right now, creating the database. I’m trying to arm about 100 people with these things. And then everything will automatically upload to this database. So you could see what hotels have good air quality, what restaurants have good air quality. Because governments, let me tell you, governments are going to do nothing about this. It’s when companies start getting outed for recirculating all of this breath backwash from all of these people in the hotel that they’re going to start paying attention.
Tim Ferriss: Wow. How safe is it to assume that if you’re in a major city like LA, Chicago, New York, that you’re getting better quality air if you open the window in the hotel? Is that pretty much always a safe assumption? Where do you get to a point where you’re like, I’m better drinking in this backwash in the hotel than opening the windows?
James Nestor: That’s a really, really good point. Maybe Shanghai in summer, maybe Mumbai in spring. I have not assessed that. I think that’s a good point. If you are in a hotel that’s very high up and the CO₂ level is just absolutely pedal to the metal, 3,000 parts per million, my assumption would be that opening that window you would have, there’s more benefits than harm from that. Again, I think there’s a lot of variables, but the CO₂, if you’re talking immediate acute harm versus chronic harm, the acute harm from CO₂. Your ability to rebound after a long flight, not feel hung over, not feel jet lag, not feel drowsy. I think that’s a big one.
Tim Ferriss: I don’t know if this is true, people can do their own due diligence. I wish I knew the answer offhand, but I know that ketones, exogenous ketones for instance, I mean, there are many different types of ketones, salts ketone, monoesters, diesters, etc. But have been developed to protect divers, specifically military divers from oxygen toxicity. But I wonder if it increases CO₂ tolerance. I wonder if that might have a place in the travel kit. I’ll let people do their own research on that. But what else is in your travel kit, given how much you travel, whether it’s related to breath or not, is there anything that is non-obvious like the CO₂ monitor that you can speak to?
James Nestor: Right when I was ripping on hypochondriacs and people obsessed with it. We really want to go there?
Tim Ferriss: [inaudible 00:39:27] a gallon of Purell.
James Nestor: Gallon of Purell. You know, I didn’t use to be-
Tim Ferriss: In three ounce packets.
James Nestor: I didn’t used to be-
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly.
James Nestor: I didn’t use to be one of those people until I just got completely drained after doing too many tours and they got older. And now I’m kind of one of those people-ish. I have a couple of night lights that are red lights and I’m very typical. Everyone’s just nodding, tell me something new. And those are the only light source that I have in hotels and especially important after a long flight. So I have this CO₂ monitor. If there’s a window, I will absolutely open that. I’ll try to take a cold shower before bed, especially if I am very jet-lagged. As far as the other tech, I carry a lot of vitamin D, K2, vitamin E in case I feel something coming on. I have some other supplements I carry round as well. And without getting too weird here, I have this very small electric device, a frequency device that I am currently assessing it’s validity.
Anecdotally, I could say it’s been a complete game changer for me. And what I usually do at night is I plug into that thing and I really feel a difference. I know about six other people that have these, and so we’re starting to sniff around at collecting some real data about it. So that’s the main thing in that little zip pocket that you have in suitcases, this stuff just stays in there. It’s more important than a toothbrush. You can get a toothbrush anywhere. You can’t get a frequency device anywhere, and you can’t get a red nightlight anywhere. So I just keep this in there and I carry it with me wherever I go.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So a couple of clarifying questions since all of my listeners are denizens of Weirdville. So the red light, is that just looks like a children’s nightlight that plugs into an outlet next to the sink, or are we talking something more substantial so that you can actually operate and walk around your room?
James Nestor: I have two that are able to fade up and fade down in the bathroom. You usually don’t need anything. I can keep the door open at night and I also will often carry a light bulb, a small, not a big one because those are pain. But I have these little light bulbs. One of the most important things I didn’t mention is the sleep tape thing. And if I don’t bring that or if I’ve forgotten it, I’m the guy at 12:30 AM looking for a liquor store that had some sort of packing tape or something. It’s that critical to me. But for the red lights, they have little bulbs and also these nightlights are bright enough. At night, I try not to be too productive, especially if I’m tired, I want to sit, maybe I’ll listen to something, but I want the light to be very low. And I think that there’s plenty of good research on that, not disturbing your circadian rhythm. So we won’t need to get into that.
Tim Ferriss: How do you pack a light bulb without it shattering? And now I’m just envisioning a normal old light bulb. I imagine there’s a little more to it, but how do you pack that?
James Nestor: These are these small LED ones. So the bulb is actually plastic. It’s plastic. I would love to find an incandescent one because now I’ve been hearing about flickering and I’m starting to notice that a bit because I’m going clinically insane, and you’ve just outed me unfortunately. So any of you inventors out there, it’s now incandescence, don’t have to charge $400 if they find one in your house. Need to invent a small little red incandescent bulb and I’ll buy a dozen of them. So there you go.
Tim Ferriss: All right. This stim device, that’s too tantalizing, Scooby snap. What does this look like? Because I am very much, very deep down the rabbit hole of all things kind of biomedical. Not to say this is medical, talk to your professional. And entertainment and informational use only. But what is this thing? And where do you apply it, how do you administer it?
James Nestor: I’m in about a six-year journey into this world that’s led me down, I would say the vast majority of the past that’s led me down that have been complete BS. There’s so much stuff if you look up online, that is just absolute garbage. If they haven’t even tested this stuff on biological matter, on cells at least, don’t buy it. Who cares what their claims are? So that’s the most important thing if you’re starting to look at electric medicine. But it is a real thing. PEMFs which were considered quackery 30 years ago are now becoming a staple of many offices.
Tim Ferriss: What are PEMFs?
James Nestor: I’m sorry. That’s pulse electromagnetic fields, these devices that you can plug into, they’re amazing for pain. But it turns out that the history of these devices is much deeper than that. It goes back to the ’50s and ’60s, and Russia was doing a ton of research into this. So to answer your question, this is a somewhat Russian device. It’s about this big. I won’t say it’s officially Russian, it’s more Soviet than Russian, to be honest. You’ll get what I mean if you-
Tim Ferriss: [inaudible 00:45:06] on it.
James Nestor: The aesthetics of this thing are so like Atari 2600 that it is just so, I just really dated myself with that one. Anyway, so it’s about this big and it has all of [inaudible 00:45:17].
Tim Ferriss: This big, so it’s like 10 inches or so for those people who can’t see.
James Nestor: Okay, I’m sorry.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s okay.
James Nestor: I’m taking my hands too close to the… So it’s like when you catch a fish, right? You put it right up to the camera.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I was just going to say.
James Nestor: Okay. You want specifics. It’s about five inches wide by about four inches tall, and it’s about an inch and a half thick. And it has about 40 preset programs on it. And programs for grounding when you’re not able to ground, programs for Schumann waves, programs for cardiovascular health, programs for respiratory health. And I will be damned if this thing hasn’t really fixed a lot of issues. And again, this is 100%-
Tim Ferriss: What kind of stuff?
James Nestor: … anecdotal.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, anecdotal’s okay.
James Nestor: You name it. You start getting into this.
Tim Ferriss: Unpaid bills. I have a PMF device for you.
James Nestor: It’s just you manifest money, everybody. You plug this thing in and you can’t keep it out of the doors and windows. It just starts coming in.
Tim Ferriss: Another reason to have your hotel window open.
James Nestor: There are many reasons. That’s one of them. But it sends out, we’re really going to get into this. It sends out certain frequencies that have been studied, that have been found to reduce the loads of viruses, and bacteria, and fungi, and more. And I know what a lot of you’re thinking, this is completely based on zero. But I’m here to tell you, there’s a lot of legit research. And if I was going to place my money on anything, this is where things are going to go. We have exhausted chemicals, we’ve reached chemical overload, and chemicals are fantastic. They’re great. They can do so much. But there’s this whole other layer to health and I really feel like this is where stuff is moving.
Tim Ferriss: So we’re on the same page there. I mean, I recently interviewed a scientist by the name of Dr. Kevin Tracy, who’s I would argue the most cited, most credible or certainly one of the most credible. He’s incredibly well-published, researchers looking at legitimate vagus nerve stimulation. And then you have researchers at Tufts like Professor Levin and others who are doing incredible things ranging from looking at salamanders and axolotls, I want to say, for regeneration and how electricity can be used in cancer applications. I’m very much looking at this incredibly closely as it sounds like you are. For people who want to specifically, was it PMF or PEMF?
James Nestor: P-E-M-F.
Tim Ferriss: P-M-F.
James Nestor: P-E-M-F devices.
Tim Ferriss: For people who wanted to learn more about this, what should they search online if they wanted to read up on what it is, the type of thing that you’re using?
James Nestor: They should read my new book coming out next year.
Tim Ferriss: I see.
James Nestor: No, no, no, no, no. This is actually not in my new book. So what I would do is 100% don’t go on Amazon and look up these devices. Some of them can’t. I keep saying, don’t go on Amazon. Have you heard that three or four times? Because I certainly have. Amazon’s great just not for certain things. And this is not one of the things you want to go on it for. Because the problem is some of these devices can put out the specific frequency that has been studied to be beneficial, but they’re not putting it out at the load, at the power it needs to be. So they’re paying lip service to the science without actually going deep and providing the therapeutic effect. So some of these devices are very expensive, up to 20, 30 grand.
Tim Ferriss: Wow, okay. That is expensive.
James Nestor: But those are the ones used in clinics. These are the ones used for people with severe chronic pain issues for everyday devices. There are some cheaper ones. I don’t want to endorse anything. I don’t want to name them by name because I’m not done studying how legit they are. But once you start digging in a little deeper, you start to see that in Eastern Europe, these things have been used continuously for 60, 70 years and maybe they’re all crazy and are suckers for a placebo effect or maybe these things work. And so that’s where I have started sniffing around. And this thing I got that I’ve convinced a few other people to get. We’ve seen just some extraordinary stuff that doesn’t make any sense. And so I’m just trying to parse how much of that is a placebo-ish effect and how much of it can be measured and repeated in animal models.
Tim Ferriss: If somebody just wanted to read up on the research or learn a bit more about this without selecting a device necessarily, where would you suggest they start?
James Nestor: I would say read The Body Electric by Robert O. Becker, doctor who basically paved the way for Michael Levin at Tufts. And if any of this sounds crazy, all you have to do is read any of Michael Levin’s papers. You’re like, “Oh my God.”
Tim Ferriss: Your head will explode. Yeah.
James Nestor: With electricity and specifically frequency, you can grow two heads on a salamander. You can regrow another leg where it’s not supposed to be. You can grow with the frequency of eyeballs and eyeball on an animal’s back. So it just shows you that there’s a lot more to the story than chemicals. And if you can do that to a salamander and to a frog, then obviously we’re going to be affected by these frequencies as well.
Tim Ferriss: All right. Thank you for that. Now, you also glossed over other supplements. I recognized D, K2, E. What’s in your et cetera, other supplement bucket?
James Nestor: Oh boy. Again, I never thought I’d be one of those guys carrying around the granny vitamin packs, all the supplements.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I’ve got two of them 10 feet from me. And can I tell you, just to endorse the granny pill packs. I thought those looked so ridiculous. Added more labor. So I would carry around basically a pharmacy of bottles with me. And then when I started using the granny packs, I was like, “Why did I not start doing this 30 years ago? It saves so much time on a daily basis.” So just to give you permission to use the granny packs.
James Nestor: Yeah, I’ve got the granny XLs going on and those are also in the suitcase. So everyone talks about supplements, but if you want to go there, we can go. I’ve got all the typical stuff. I wish I had some cutting edge new thing you’ve never heard of, but all of you will be yawning in unison if I told you. There’s a little CoQ10 in there, there’s a little nattokinase, there’s… It’s the old classics that are in there. Nothing cutting edge.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it. So the nattokinase that’s going to have the K2 in it, presumably, right? Is that the source?
James Nestor: It will. But I have the special pack in case I get sick, in case I get COVID on the road, I have a special pack. Because if you’re taking heroic doses of D, then you need to be taking E, and A, and extra K2 with that. So very important. So that’s why I have that in its own separate little container, the sort of emergency pack.
Tim Ferriss: And if anyone out there is thinking, I’m looking for the next way to prove that I’m really tough. Well, forget about doing breath work in freezing cold water. If you’ve never had natto from Japan, then just eat a bowl of that dish and that’ll be the new tough man TikTok challenge for people who have never tried it.
James Nestor: Speaking of that, I was like, “Screw this. I don’t need supplements, man. I just need to eat better.” And then you start to do the research and realize that no vegetables contain the minerals that they used to. It’s virtually impossible to get all these things the way our ancestors did. And natto was one of those things. I went down to a Japanese market and I said, “I’m not taking these pills, man. I’m going to start my morning.” How many… Japan’s awesome. That place is perfect. There’s no crime. It’s beautiful. I said, “I’m going to start my day every day with this.” Wow. Day two. No way. It’s the stringiness that will really get you.
Tim Ferriss: Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So people can try that out if they haven’t tried it, that’ll be some podcast challenge. So I appreciate you indulging me on all those questions since I pay attention to my travel kit, I do. And I’ve got all sorts of electronic devices all over the place. It’s kind of absurd. I literally have an extra suitcase for all my blood flow restriction stuff. I did just have elbow surgery. So granted, I have kind of an excuse my e-stim for lymphatic drainage. I’ve got so much crap with me right now.
But on that note, I guess this is a bit of an awkward sequitur, I suppose. But my surgery came from a sports injury. So I’m thinking about athletes, and there were a few things in some of my prep materials here that I wanted to touch on because I hadn’t seen them before. So for athletes and professional athletes, so on, we see nasal breathing during training, breath hold sprints, which I first was exposed to way back in the day with Laird Hamilton at his house. One of the kings of big wave surfing. Surfing Giants, I think Riding Giants is the documentary. One of the two, people should watch it, it’s insane. Especially for people who don’t know the name, Laird, if you’ve ever seen tow-in surfing, Laird helped develop and popularize that. Stand up paddle boarding, he kind of resurrected it and helped make it popular, just a beast of an athlete. And so I remember seeing him on an assault bike, one of those bikes where you’re also pushing with your arms where he would do long exhale breath holds and push basically until he would pass out off the bike. I’m not suggesting anyone do that, but there were a number of other BOLTs, I won’t go through them all, but could you speak to BOLT score tracking, all caps, B-O-L-T, presumably an acronym. I’d never come across this. And anything else that you’d want to add?
James Nestor: Yeah, if there’s one population that has actually paid attention and started to get much more serious about looking and focusing on their breathing, it’s athletes. Athletes aren’t as scared of a little inconvenience or a little discomfort. This is what they thrive in to get ahead of everyone.
As a big wave surfer, you have to focus on breath work. You have to focus on your breath hold. If you don’t, you die. Which is one of the reasons why Laird is 60 years old, looks like he’s 30, that the guy is just constantly focusing on his breath because he wants to stay active in the field at the top of his class.
So, surfers have known this for a very long time, but a lot of runners and rowers and baseball players and football players and soccer players haven’t been clued into this. And so the elite trainers that I know, they said this is the number one thing that they do for athletes right now is to focus on their breath.
And what they’ve found is the vast majority of athletes, you would think that they would have their breath completely focused, that they would be the best breathers in the world, but they absolutely are not. They’re as dysfunctional as everyone else. They’ve learned how to push through the pain to win the game, but that doesn’t mean they’re breathing properly.
So, the first thing they do is retrain their breathing. And what they find with almost all these athletes is the majority
