Nestor has appeared on dozens of national radio and television shows, including ABC's Nightline, the CBS Morning News and NPR.

He joins us from member station KQED in San Francisco. His book, Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What The Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves, was a finalist for the PEN American Center Best Sports Book of the Year and a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Journalist James Nestor is writing a book about free diving and is a free diver himself. James Nestor has written for Scientific American, Outside Magazine, Men's Journal, National Public Radio, The New York Times, and more. Drawing on thousands of years of ancient wisdom and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. None of this should be possible, and yet it is. Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance, rejuvenate internal organs, halt snoring, allergies, asthma and autoimmune disease, and even straighten scoliotic spines. In Breath, journalist James Nestor travels the world to discover the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya and Tummo, to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences.

There is nothing more essential to our health and wellbeing than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat 25,000 times a day.

James nestor freediving