James Nestor and Joe Rogan explore how nasal breathing—ignored by athletes like Rogan despite its 20% oxygen boost—filters air, produces nitric oxide, and enhances performance, while mouth breathing harms circulation and CO₂ balance. Nestor’s 10-day forced mouth-breathing experiment revealed rapid nasal deterioration, and he links modern diets (soft foods, smoothies) to shrinking airways, malocclusion rates soaring from 50% to 90%, and inherited respiratory issues like sleep apnea. The six-second breathwork technique cleared "ground glass lungs" in 9/11 survivors without side effects, while Sudarshan Kriya (CRIA), validated by 60 Harvard-backed studies, treats autoimmune disorders and anxiety. Yet extreme trauma—like broken noses in MMA—may still require surgery, underscoring breathing’s paradoxical role: both a natural cure and a necessity for structural health. [Automatically generated summary]
I listened to the audio book and it's in your voice.
So this would be weird sitting in.
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.
About 10 years ago, 11 years ago, I had this really weird experience.
I was in San Francisco.
There's a lot of breathwork, yoga stuff going on there.
And I kept getting pneumonia.
I surf a lot at Ocean Beach, and I thought that that was the reason.
So I kept getting bronchitis, pneumonia, year after year.
It just kept happening.
So a doctor friend of mine suggested a breathing class might help.
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.
Nothing crazy, just and then really slow.
And I sweated through my t-shirt, through my socks.
My hair was sopping wet, sweat all over my face.
So I went back to her.
I said, what happened?
Like, you're a doctor.
You should know this.
And she said, oh, you must have had a fever or the room must have been too hot.
So she had no idea.
But I didn't know what to do with that story.
So I just kind of filed it away, forgot about it for a number of years until I met some freedivers.
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.
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.
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.
Hicks and Gracie, do you know who he is?
Yeah, famous, probably the most famous of the classic Jiu-Jitsu people.
He's known as being the very best.
He was like one of the original real pioneers of jiu-jitsu in America as well.
This documentary, he's doing all this crazy stomach breath stuff, the yogi stuff, you know, because he's really into yoga as well for flexibility and balance and all those different things.
And he was probably the first guy to introduce yoga to jujitsu as well.
But him and his son, who's also a world champion in jiu-jitsu, just stressed constantly that it's all about the breath and that breathing is everything.
You're going to find that in the foundation of so many different sports.
I think a lot of that has been forgotten.
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 their recovery, their endurance, and their performance.
Yeah, and there's so much science supporting how injurious it is to constantly be breathing through your mouth.
There's no debate about that.
But what people don't realize is about 25 to 50% of the population habitually breathes through their mouths.
They don't realize the neurological problems that this causes, the respiratory problems this causes, problems with snoring, sleep apnea, even metabolic disorders.
I mean, it goes on and on and on.
So I had been talking to the chief of rhinology research at Stanford.
We had done many interviews over a series of months.
He's a big nose guy.
So he said, this is the most amazing organ.
No one's talking about it.
At the NIH, there's no school for studying the nose and its effects.
And he thought that that was criminal.
So he had warned me how bad mouth breathing was.
But no one knew how quickly that damage came on.
So we knew that after years, it can change the structure of your face.
It's so common in kids that it has a term called adenoid face.
If 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 skeleture have changed.
Like, I look back on the photos from when I was 40 on.
My actual physical, 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, within a year or two afterwards, I'm like, my fucking nose is wider.
Like, it's different.
Like, if I look at older pictures of myself, my nose was more narrow and now it's more flared out.
And I felt like it was because of that.
But now that you're saying this, now I'm thinking maybe it's just from breathing out of it.
Well, surgical interventions are going to open that airway.
There's no doubt about that.
But we know the more that you breathe through your nose, the more that it's going to open up.
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.
They start breathing through their nose.
At the beginning, it's really, really hard.
They say, I can't do this.
This is awful.
Then weeks go by, months go by, and their noses open up and allows them to breathe through the nose.
And the benefits of that, they're innumerable.
So many benefits of nasal breathing.
Not only oxygen, but it helps defend your body, humidifies air, conditions air, on and on and on.
And this is something I just don't think a lot of people realize.
And from the researchers I've been talking to, they were a bit frustrated, too, seeing so many chronic conditions tied to mouth breathing and how so many of those could either be improved upon or sometimes outright cured by switching the pathway in which you breathe.
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.
So they were ripping on me quite a bit until they heard some of the details of it.
And the stuff is like, has been right in front of us the whole time, and it's so obvious that no one's really paying attention to it.
And the scientific foundation, all the research is there.
And that's what makes these researchers, these scientists, so frustrated.
We have 50 years of rock-solid science here showing the problems with mouth breathing, showing the problems with snoring and sleep apnea.
No one's really been paying attention.
We're treating all these separate problems that are associated with these core issues, and we're not looking at the core issue.
And I think that breathing has to be considered along with diet and exercise as a pillar of health.
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.
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.
So a little less, depends on what size fists you have, right?
So all and they call it the nasal concha because it looks exactly like a seashell.
If you were to split a seashell in half and look at it, that's what's happening in your nose.
And all of this stuff evolved this way for a reason.
So that air that comes in through the nose is slowed down, it's filtered, it's humidified, and it's conditioned.
So by the time it gets to your lungs, your lungs can absorb that oxygen so much easier.
And the nose is really the first line of defense.
Another amazing thing with the 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 and also helps battle off viruses and bacteria and other pathogens.
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.
So you can breathe less and get more by breathing through the nose.
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.
I was at this, my first foray into that world was at the World Freediving Championship in Greece.
And you see these people, some of them are short, some of them are tall, some of them are large, small.
I mean, from all walks of life, every imaginable country, something like 30 countries had representatives there.
And these people weren't born with these enormous lungs, right?
They did this by the power of will, by breathing and expanding their lung capacity.
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.
It can allow us to heal our bodies of problems.
It can allow us super endurance.
It can allow us to do all these things that we've been told are medically impossible.
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.
The idea that there's a guy like this Swami Rama, is that he says his name, that he can do that, 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, very few people go all the way with stuff.
Like, you know, if you just talk to an average person, can someone run 250 miles?
Most people would say no, but I know people that have done it.
So it is possible.
But you have to find someone who go all the way and do it for a long time, a long time.
So this Swami Rama guy, there has to be someone else like that out there.
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, well, I have a sauna here as well, but I got really into doing these daily sessions of 180 degrees 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 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 and holding my breath for as long as I can.
And there's this panicked moment where you feel like you have to breathe, but you really don't.
You really don't.
You just got to get over that panic moment.
And then there's like a weird calm that comes over, and you can last much, much longer than you can.
And then when I do breathe in, I just concentrate on doing it slowly.
Don't, don't, don't, don't let myself panic.
And through, like, time just flies by.
It's crazy.
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.
So I do these little weird tricks that I play on myself inside the sauna.
And in concentrating on breathing and long, deep breaths through my nose and holding it and then long exhales through my nose.
When I'm doing that, it makes everything easier.
It's weird.
It makes your body, for whatever reason, more accepting of the extreme heat.
Well, that's what I love about breathing: it allows us these levers into systems that we can't otherwise control.
So the autonomic nervous system is supposed to be beyond our control.
It's called autonomic, automatic.
Can't control it.
We can through breathing.
You may not be able to control your liver function or your stomach or your heart, but when you breathe a certain way, you can influence all those functions 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.
So all of this was supposed to be impossible until he showed up and said, you know, why don't you test me?
Instead of just talking, we have measurements.
We have equipment to test this stuff.
If we can measure it, we can study it.
If we can study it, we can prove if it's right or wrong.
And that's what I find is so interesting and accessible about breathing as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So tumo is a breathing practice that is used to build heat in the body, build inner heat.
And it was the first documentation was from this guy Naropa, who about 1,100 years ago went off on a spiritual pilgrimage, ended up in the Himalayas, needed to heat himself and use this practice.
And it stayed in the monasteries for hundreds of years until this Belgian French opera singer anarchist around the 1900s.
Yeah, I was going to include a few more because she did a whole bunch of, she's into free love, feminism.
I mean, you name it.
She ran the gamut.
But she went on a spiritual pilgrimage for 14 years in the Himalayas when she was in her 40s.
This is in the 1900s, which was just like unheard of at the time.
And she discovered this thing.
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.
There are no fact checkers there to prove it.
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, you know, for thousands of years.
But you think about how many languages that we're losing, right?
Along with those languages, we're losing knowledge very, very quickly.
And this is happening every decade.
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.
I don't want to accuse him, but in the martial arts world, that happens a lot.
At least it used to happen a lot.
There's a lot of fakers that have, you know, the thing in martial arts world was always chi.
And, you know, you talk about that in the book as well, about people having this power, this chi touch.
And it was 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.
And there's a bunch of Instagram pages that are dedicated to these people.
It's really to making fun of them because it's so strange.
It's such a weird thing that these people do, where they have huge class fulls of people and they pretend they have this death touch and they touch people.
And the people are essentially in a cult.
And so they spasm, they fall to the ground.
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 you want to call it energy or spirit.
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 perform better.
There's something about them in terms of martial arts.
There's something about that.
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?
I think the first thing you do is get these people in a lab.
If they're claiming to have these skills that are incredible, why not measure it?
I mean, it's not that hard to measure stuff.
And so if they deny having any lab work done or having it being measured, then I think you have to be a little apprehensive, you know?
And that's something that so much of this technology is cheap now to get.
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.
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.
But what was cool about him is he wasn't the only one who could do this.
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?
So Swami was part of this long lineage of people who had this knowledge.
Is it still there?
It could be.
But again, I don't think it's online.
I think you really have to get out in the weeds and earn these people's trust in order to get that story.
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.
So there was this huge thriving civilization.
They had paved roads, they had running water, they were dealing with tin and copper.
And they had no, in this whole civilization, they still have not found any political or governmental buildings.
They haven't found any religious iconography.
So these people in some ways could have been more advanced than we are now.
And they had all of these figures of these people in these yoga poses with their stomachs out.
So that's how they date the earliest archaeological evidence of that.
And since then, then all of these practices were moved into the Rig Veda and all of the earliest yoga texts.
And they were codified in the yoga sutras of Pantanjaoli.
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.
Well, it could have been, but we just haven't found anything related to that yet, right?
So if you think about hunter-gatherers, we're imagining them as, man, they're just working all day, they're hunting all day, they're gathering.
They weren't, from what I know and from what I've seen of the science there, 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, which is what started in India, which is what started in ancient Greece.
Think about all the distractions we're dealing with today.
Constant interruptions.
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.
I think that you can take someone who has a serious problem.
Maybe someone who's already very fit.
It's going to take a while to really see those big benefits.
We see that with athletes with nasal breathing.
It takes them weeks or sometimes months to really see gains in performance.
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.
And we've seen this in study after study.
So these people, their breathing has become so disrupted.
They're breathing in such an unhealthy way that they don't know what proper breathing is.
And just shifting that has a tremendous impact.
So for people like that, they can see the benefits in a couple of hours, maybe even less than that.
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, take their blood pressure after that.
And there's a good chance their blood pressure is going to go down.
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.
After a few minutes, I've found it about three or four minutes of breathing this way.
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.
And they've shown marked decreases in blood pressure by that.
You don't need this device to do this.
It helps.
It reminds you.
All you need to do is focus on your breath, right?
We have the technology in our heads.
We have lungs.
We have a nose.
We can use that to really help optimize our health.
The benefit for asthmatics is they traditionally oftentimes mouth breathe, not all the time.
They very oftentimes are breathing too much.
So you see an asthmatic, that's usually how they breathe, because they are offloading all of the CO2.
And by offloading that CO2, they are causing constriction.
And they're so paranoid that they're going to have an asthma attack that every time they feel it coming on, they go, guess what happens when you start breathing more and more?
You're causing more constriction.
So they teach them to take control of their breath, to relax at those times.
There's exercise-induced asthma, which is caused by breathing too much.
And a lot of people think, oh, I was born with asthma, I'm stuck with asthma.
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.
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.
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 how to get his inhaler.
What would you tell someone like him who's an asthmatic?
Yeah, and I've heard this numerous times by so many people.
So what you're doing when you're breathing through the nose is you're slowing down that breath.
You're taking in less breath, but you're using more of it.
So by breathing less, you're going to be able to lower your heart rate.
And we know this.
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.
That's impossible.
Put on a pulse ox and watch what happens.
And what I've found is your oxygen's either going to stay the same or sometimes go up.
We even got on stationary bikes with 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.
And our oxygen did not go down.
Once we got to about three or four breaths per minute, it started going down.
As long as you have these huge breaths, right?
This huge circle, you're and you can work out that way.
And they found Dr. John Duyard 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 it 14 times a minute by nasal breathing.
So their endurance increased, their performance increased, and their recovery increased.
You know, we talk about CO2 increasing in the atmosphere, acidification of the ocean, global warming.
It's the stuff that comes off a rotting fruit, you know.
But we're not looking.
A pulmonologist is going to know the importance of a balance of CO2.
So people in that field absolutely know it.
And so they've written, they've said, thank you for getting this out in the open because people don't realize it.
You can go outside right now, see people jogging.
Got to get more, got to get more O2 in.
And the fact is, 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.
Like slower, deeper breaths are going to be so much more efficient, going to allow you to go further for longer.
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.
What I've found is nasal breathing is the way to go.
You can see what Sanya Richard Ross, who for 10 years was the top sprinter in the world, obligatory nose breathing the whole time.
And to me, the pictures just say everything.
She's in these races.
The people right next to her look like they're dying.
She has the most placid look on her face.
Mouth is shut, kicking everyone's butt across the finish line.
So there's tons of research.
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.
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.
What's fascinating to me is the sport that I commentate on, mixed martial arts.
There's a giant issue with broken noses.
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.
You see, like when a fighter has their nose broken and you see blood trickling out of the nose, one of the first signs you see is they breathe out of their mouth.
And that seems like, well, obviously it's terrible to get punched in the nose, right?
You have this delicate instrument and you're using it as a target.
But for someone who does get punched in the nose for a living, like what can they do if they have this other than not do it?
If someone's used to getting punched in the nose every month and their nose is getting broken again, you know, that's going to be really hard to nasal breathe.
So I think that either they need to stop getting punched in the nose or they have to make some other lifestyle choices.
You know, if they want to continue doing that, they're going to have a hard time nasal breathing.
But it's so crazy because it is one of the more difficult things to do athletically.
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.
So this is what Dr. Justin Feinstein is working on right now at the Laureate Institute of Brain Research.
He has found that asthmatics and people with anxiety have this extremely low threshold for CO2.
So they need to keep breathing.
They're so paranoid that they're not going to be able to breathe that they've become accustomed to.
And whenever that CO2 increases, they freak out.
So he has found by slowly acclimating them to have more of a, to be able to take more CO2 and become more comfortable with it, that's how they can change their breathing.
That's how they can change their habits, which is exactly what those asthma techniques do, right?
They teach these people to breathe less and to breathe slowly, to slowly acclimate themselves.
Like someone with asthma or panic, don't go and start holding your breath as long as you can.
I would quote Dr. Alicia Maret 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.
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.
There are chemo receptors right around here, right?
And these are the things that gauge levels of CO2.
So if you think about a free diver, what allows them to hold their breath for four, five, six, seven, eight minutes, they've gotten this threshold of CO2 that's very high compared to me or you or anyone else.
You think about someone who's able to summit Everest without oxygen, right?
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 free diving or with alpine climbing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Their lungs were filled with garbage and they were constantly exhaling this gunk, right?
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.
And this is, they've written books on this stuff, so they're a great place to start.
Yeah, I thought this sounded pretty sketchy until I heard about it from the doctor of speech language therapy at Stanford until I heard about it from Dr. Mark Braheni.
So what they've found, and they had, Braheni's been using this stuff for decades.
This is not a fat piece of duct tape, people.
Don't go on YouTube and see what people, nine pieces of tape down.
No, you need a piece of tape that has a really light and easy adhesive, about the size of a stamp.
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.
It's less apt to with nasal breathing because nasal breathing is going to tone your airways more.
And I know from the Stanford experiment that I went from opening my mouth up the whole time.
Okay, so 10 days, I could not breathe through my nose.
Within two days, I was snoring, had not been snoring.
Within about four days, I was snoring.
Half the night, I got sleep apnea.
The other subject in the study had the exact same thing happen to him, even worse than me.
The day we took that stuff out and we taped our mouths and were nasal breathing.
Snoring went away, sleep apnea went away, my blood pressure dropped about 10 to 15 points.
So it's something that people can test as well.
You can test the quality of your sleep and it's not asking too much.
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.
It's just to train the jaw shut at night so you don't go.
I'm glad you brought that up because that was something else I wanted to talk to you about.
You were talking about the changes in human diet and eating soft foods and how it affects the way the jaw develops and the size of the jaw and that there's a way to improve that, which I found fascinating.
Yeah, 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.
But that's where this journey led me.
I had heard from some biological anthropologist that our faces have changed and that our mouths have gotten too small.
And that was one of the reasons so many of us were breathing so poorly.
And so I thought, well, this sounds interesting.
These people are legit.
I want to check it out.
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 a 99% chance these skulls are going to have perfectly straight teeth.
They never had their wisdom teeth removed.
They never had braces, any orthodonture, anything.
They had straight teeth because they had these very wide and large mouths and these powerful jaws.
If you start getting into the modern era of industrialized food, mouths start shrinking.
So why do we have crooked teeth?
Not from genetics.
It's because our mouths have grown so small that the teeth have nowhere to go.
So they grow crooked.
And what else happens when you have a mouth that's too small for its teeth?
You have a smaller airway.
So this is one of the reasons why so many people have snoring, sleep apnea, and other respiratory problems.
This sounded so bizarre because it's nothing I'd ever learned in school.
But all anyone needs to do is look up some ancient skulls if you're online and check out their teeth and check out how they have these huge jaws, these big flat, wide faces, powerful faces.
And they all had this.
And then you go into the wild, 5,400 different mammals, and check out and see how many have crooked teeth.
The answer is zero.
So some bulldogs do because they've been bred to have this flat face just like humans.
But animals in the wild have straight teeth.
And we did too.
As a species, we have straight teeth.
But because of industrialization, specifically because of food, our mouths have grown too small.
So what's happened now is they've found the researchers who have done this.
Robert Corcini worked on this stuff for 30 years, has 250 scientific papers on it.
They found within the first generation of switching to industrialized foods, about 50% of the population is going to have maloclusion, which means a crooked jaw, crooked teeth.
So Dr. Kevin Boyd is now doing studies where he's looking at fetuses in the womb and is seeing 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.
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, very powerful jaw.
Now, 90% of modern skulls are below it.
So they are behind it.
And this is happening now.
It is becoming a heritable trait.
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.
And for kids, it's much easier because their muscles and their bones are much more malleable.
But that's exactly what they found is once you introduce, we used to chew for about four hours a day.
That's just how it was from the dawn of time to about 500 years ago.
But as wheat started getting processed into white flour, as rice became, we started taking the germ and the bran away from rice, so it's just the polished seed, 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.
Power bars.
So in adulthood, you can make some changes, and that's what I tried to do in my own face as an experiment.
For kids, what they're finding is these problems need to be diagnosed very early, and they need to be treated.
And what they do is they widen the mouth to the way that they were supposed to be 500 years ago.
So we're changing our bodies by force of will to the way that nature had made them before we messed them up.
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.
So it's a combination of braces and especially headgear.
And some of that stuff is being phased out.
Braces are still, you're forcing teeth into a smaller space to make them straight.
So there's this, the very first orthodontics weren't craning teeth in to make them straight.
They would expand the mouth.
Because even back then, 120 years ago, they knew our mouths were growing too small.
They knew that.
So the first devices, I thought this was fascinating.
They were using this for kids who had cleft palates and all of these other problems where they were having problem chewing and breathing.
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.
So you put it on the palate, upper palate, and you slow, you have this little screw thing, this little handle that every couple weeks you open it a little more to slowly.
So a lot of that was due to this device not only spread open that suture in the upper palate, but also stimulated chewing stress.
So on one side, there was this little bump.
So every time you closed your mouth, you got some chewing stress, which would stimulate stem cells, which would go into those sutures and build more bone.
The difference is when you clench your jaws right now, just like you're boxing, you're intense, you're clenching your jaws, that does not stimulate that good beneficial chewing stress, okay?
Because our bodies identify that as sympathetic stress.
So cortisol levels go up, right?
That means growth isn't going to happen.
But if you think about eating a big piece of steak or a carrot, you're not chewing on both sides of your molars.
You're chewing on one side or the other.
So when you stimulate the stress on one side or the other, next time you're chewing on something, think about where that's why you salivate and you become more relaxed, and that's when that growth can happen.
I talked to the guy who gave me this device, Dr. Ted Belfort, and he's used this thing for 30 years.
And his case studies are pretty fascinating.
And I talked to him.
He's like, oh, we should do another CAT scan, see what happened.
I didn't quite admit to him that I had stopped using it.
So I felt a little guilty.
And now for the past about month and a half, I've been back on the train to see what happened.
So we're going to take another one just for kicks.
I'm not going to write about the books already done, but I'm curious to see what will happen if you keep wearing this, if you can really keep improving.
If you're the Swami Rama of orthodontics, if you could hold that bad boy in your mouth for a few years, I mean, that'd be really fascinating if you change your face and all of a sudden you have like this big Clark Kent Superman type jaw.
Well, they could use braces or something, but it's all about the upper palate.
And there are some devices you'd have to ask, Hang, they've got all the gizmos to do.
The reason, I thought this was so interesting that this was how orthodontics, this is how teeth were straightened, right?
100 years ago.
And then by the 40s, they found a way of making dentistry more of a production line where one size fits all.
We're going to yank teeth, braces on, done, done, done.
But this expansion takes a lot of expertise and a lot of focus.
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.
And so they're reassessing how they've been doing things.
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 to our breathing.
But it's so interesting to me that breathing and breath work and knowing how to breathe properly is it's not common knowledge, but it's so critical to health.
And it's free.
It's not like we're not talking about something that requires devices or like a long learning curve or just some of these benefits.
So many of them, and especially the most simple ones, right?
Anyone can breathe in six seconds in, six seconds out.
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 tumo.
You know, I know a lot of people have found profound benefits from this.
They used it in a hospital.
11,000 people were put through this thing, and they showed it was more effective than any other therapy.
Me personally, the science is much more thin in holotropic breath work.
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 they blast music and for three hours you breathe as hard as you can.
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.
The opposite is happening.
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 this reaction where they said, I am reborn after holotropic.
And that's awesome.
I don't want to take that away from anyone, but what I've seen is that this science, there is not, there's been a ton of subjective anecdotal studies, not a ton, a few of them.
But the actual science behind it, no one's gone into an fMRI and looked at what's really happening.
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.
We will never know, which is why this stuff should be studied.
You know, there's a lot of talk that breathing this way will trigger endogenous DMT, and that's the reason people trip out so hard.
I tried to do a study in which I would breathe this way, and they would take blood before and after, but the scientist that I was talking to said it would be such a small amount, they wouldn't be able to detect it.
So there's a lot of gray area, which to me is not a bad thing.
It's great.
There's still mysteries to breath.
There's mysteries to the human body, right?
And if people are finding great benefit from this and there's no side effect, then that's great.
I just found it was a little thinner than the other techniques like Wim Hoff method or like CRIA.
And again, you know, he was going through his process.
That was cool.
But the whole time, I was watching him breathing, and he wasn't really breathing any differently than me.
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.
So I was a sitter during this process.
I was not breathing.
And I was looking at his respiration.
It really didn't look any different.
So I'm wondering how much of this is the set and setting of this.
You're in Mendocino, you're at a hot springs, there's really loud music, fake lutes.
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.
And a lot of people say the same thing.
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 and really analyze that to see if there's some physiological reaction.
We know what's happening with blood flow to the brain.
We know what happens to the brain when it's denied blood flow to certain areas.
But how does that affect us psychologically afterwards?
How does it affect us physically?
I think these are good questions and it'll be interesting to find out.
I went outside afterwards and drank a beer in my car and just sort of recentered.
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.
And this was created in the 70s by Stanislav Groff, who was 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.
It got banned in, what, 68?
And so he wanted to find a way to allow people to have these experiences without the drug.
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.
I wish that there was some more hard science to it.
There's not yet, but hopefully that's forthcoming.
So CRIA is a breathing technique that is very similar to holotropic breath work.
But the difference is it's much more controlled.
So you're having these bursts of heavy breathing, but then you have these bursts of very slow breathing.
And this was developed in the 80s, and they started opening up to studies.
And just as I had mentioned, there's been 60 independent studies showing how effective this stuff is for, and that have been done at Harvard, that have been done at legitimate institutions, showing how effective for some autoimmune diseases, for anxiety, for depression, for other issues.
And what I think is interesting is, so you've got Wim Hoff's breathing, which is very effective for some autoimmune issues, for some asthma, for anxiety.
You've got CRIA, which is doing the same thing.
So what I found on 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.
And these very hard and heavy breathing methods, people think, why do I want to stress myself out?
So I'm stressed out enough with work, with my kids, whatever.
When I breathe, I want to chill out.
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.
And that's what Wim Hoff's version of Tumo does, and that's what Creo does it all.
Also, it stimulates that sympathetic stress.
You're completely really going for it.
You turn it on specifically so you can turn it off.
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.
All of that sounds really fuzzy, right?
Until you start studying it, until you start doing studies to see how people have benefited from this.
And that's what I think is so important.
No matter how granola it sounds, if you can measure it, you can study it.
If you can study it, you can find whether or not it works.
The slower breathing where you have your hands on 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.
Ohms, you do three ohms.
That's a couple minutes.
But that long cleansing breath is about 40 minutes long.
You can look up his name also online, Chuck McGee, Wim Hoff instructor.
And what's so cool, you have no idea this guy's even a breathing thing.
He doesn't advertise anything.
He does this because breathing has fundamentally changed his life in a measured way.
So he no longer is on blood pressure medicine.
He's taking 80% less insulin.
His anxiety is abated.
His depression is debated.
And these are things that have been, for the Wim Hoff guys, there's thousands of these people reporting this, drops in CRP of 40-fold within two weeks of doing this.
You can get it on your phone, download it, and listen to it whenever you want, which is what I've done.
I have about four of his different sessions here.
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 more.
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 who have chronic pain, who have chronic diseases.
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.