Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1506 - James Nestor
Uploaded: 2020-07-10T19:00:06.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1506 - James Nestor' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-07-10. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1506 - James Nestor' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-07-10. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1506 - James Nestor

all right we're rolling uh first of all i really enjoyed your book it was
really excellent i got
deep into it 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 know you've
heard their
book and you hear them talking for like long periods of time then they're right
there but
i really enjoyed it man i guess i can't change the tone of my voice then no you're
used to it
okay keep it keep it the way it is keep it keep it real um what what made you
want to write this
like where did this come from it's actually two things uh about 10 years ago 11
years ago i had
this really weird experience i was in san francisco a lot of breath work 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
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 and 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 free divers 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 ah that's that's that's
really interesting you
know um i've known a bunch of free divers and uh 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 uh
probably the most famous of the of the like the classic jiu-jitsu people he's
known as being the very
best he was like one of the uh original real pioneers of jiu-jitsu in america
as well and there's this uh
documentary on him called choke have you seen it i have not no it's really
fascinating this documentary
he's doing all this crazy stomach breath stuff the yogi stuff you know because
he's he's really into yoga
as well for flexibility and balance and all those different things and he was
uh probably the first
guy to introduce yoga to jiu-jitsu as well but um 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
it's everything and it's
everything for jiu-jitsu it's everything for martial arts it's everything for
your mindset
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 the recovery their endurance and their
performance
yeah one of the things i found interesting about your book was the experiment
with plugging up the nose
for what did you guys do it for a month is that what it was 10 days 10 days and
that that 10 day i
my nose was broken most of my life i had a useless nose till i was 40 and then
i got an operation to
have my deviated septum corrected and the turbinates shaved down and then it
changed my life it really did
like i didn't realize like what like the term mouth breather is a really
interesting term right because
it's a term for a moron but i i felt like a moron um like after i got my nose
fixed i was like why
didn't i do this before like i was robbing myself of oxygen yeah and there's so
much science supporting
how injurious it is to constantly be breathing through your mouth there's there's
no debate about that
but what people don't realize is about 25 to 50 percent 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've 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 uh 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 the musculature
and the
skeletal has have changed changes your skeleton yeah yeah it it makes it
creates a longer face
so and that that also makes these people much more apt to snoring and sleep apnea
so but but no one knew
if if a month of mouth breathing would be bad a year like how soon those those
issues came on so i asked
him i said well why don't you test it you're one of the best universities in
the world you have the means to
do this and he thought in his words it would be unethical because he knew how
damaging that it
could be for people and so i volunteered i said well why don't you test it on
me i'll get somebody else to
do it uh they had no money for this so we had to pay for this study um just to
experience what what that
was like and the point wasn't due to do some like jackass stunt it was to lull
ourselves into a position
my body certainly knew i think i was mouth breathing through much of my youth
and that 25 to 50 percent
of the population knows and to actually measure what happens now do you think
there was some bacterial
growth that was inside your nose as well from this do you think that some of
that could be attributed
to just the the act of plugging the nose because you physically plugged it it's
not like you chose
to breathe out of your mouth you actually like see you closed up the opening
yeah that's that's right
and and it could no one knows for sure because the less you use your nose the
less you're going to be
able to use your nose just like any other muscle so when people start habitually
breathing through
their mouths their noses are going to start to close up and we know this from
the doctor of speech
technology at stanford she measured people who had laryngectomies holes drilled
in their throats so
they could breathe she found between two months and two years their noses were
completely blocked
zero air coming in so the more you use it the more you're going to be able to
use it so the less you
use it the more apt you will you will be to have problems with what is the
process well why does the
nose close up it would seem that it's a hole like why would that hole close it's
not in use those
turbinates all those tissues just just start closing up um and so using your
nose actually makes the
opening wider absolutely really yeah absolutely my nose got physically wider
after my operation it's
really strange like i was i look back on the photos from when i was 40 on my
actual physical and i 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 he's for 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 i attributed that to why my nose got wider but i noticed it like
within a year or two
afterwards like my 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 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 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 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 and allows them
to 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 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 or sometimes outright cured by by
switching the pathway in
which you breathe so does breathing through your nose make your actual nostril
opening wider i don't know
that i i i and and uh i haven't seen any papers on that so it's but my nostril
holes and everything is
probably just from the surgical intervention and stuffing it with plastic and
stretching it out and
i would assume so yeah yeah now what wim hof who you reference in the book he
doesn't give a
fuck about mouth about nose breathing or mouth breathing he just goes just
breathe motherfucker
breathe well that's what he says oh yeah i practiced i his his mode of
breathing all the time i'm used to
having you know his his little voice in my head why doesn't he care about
breathing out from the nose
of the mouth he just wants you to 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 i'm
talking about habitual mouth breathing no i understand i'm just talking about
through breathing
exercises he's he's so what he's done is he wants to make this easy and
accessible for people so many
people can't breathe through their noses so they go they can't get that breath
in those 30 huge
breaths you need to take right they take too long to do it so he says it doesn't
matter don't pay
attention you need to get that breath in you need to expand your lungs and for
the rest of the time
you know i the the benefits of nasal breathing that habitual breathing is is so
important to health
it seems so strange to me reading your book um that i'm just learning this in
terms of like i mean i've
been doing athletics my whole life how do i not know that breathing through the
nose is more beneficial
how do coaches not know this this is something i just got running up against
over and over again
and when i first started writing this book my friends who are journalists and
authors they said you're
writing a book about breathing what why would you write a book about breathing
walking yeah well there's
there's a good new book about walking is there really um so so they were
ripping on me quite quite a bit
until they heard some of the details of it um 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 these
researchers these scientists
so frustrated is they we have 50 years of rock solid science here showing the
problems with m