Breathing's Two Biggest Voices, Finally in the Same Room
JAMES NESTOR & PATRICK MCKEOWN
FIRST CONVERSATION, FACE TO FACE
For years, Patrick McKeown and James Nestor knew each other only through screens and signal delay. A Zoom conversation six years ago. Instagram Lives. Calls, emails, the odd voice note back and forth. James even wrote the foreword to Patrick's Breathing for Yoga book. But for all the correspondence, the two had never actually sat down together — until now.
James came to breathing sideways, the way a journalist does: following the story wherever the evidence led, not starting from a training background at all. That instinct became Breath, the New York Times bestseller that turned functional breathing into a mainstream conversation. Patrick had read the pre-publication pages years earlier and knew immediately it was something different — "this is the book to read on breath," as he put it at the time.
Meeting in person, after years of near-misses, the two barely paused for breath themselves. What was meant to be a single podcast episode ran long, covering nearly everything — and even once the microphones were off, they kept going, still talking breathing over dinner well into the evening.
On the book that almost wasn't
James is candid about how close Breath came to being a completely different book. He'd sold the publisher on one plan, then spent years in the field discovering it was wrong.
"I had a very clear plan... and I realized I was not approaching this story the right way. I had to rewrite the entire thing."
He describes losing roughly two years of research and travel to that pivot — not because the story wasn't there, but because he'd underestimated how deep it went.
On the business behind the book
The conversation doesn't stay comfortable. James talks openly about what happened when an earlier book of his underperformed commercially, despite strong reviews — and what that taught him about the publishing industry.
"You think you have these strong friendships with these people you work with over years and years... and then you realize how superficial so many of those relationships actually are. The moment you cannot deliver something of great value to someone else, you're disposable."
On the gap in modern medicine
Both agree that functional breathing has been hiding in plain sight for most of medicine's history — overlooked despite touching everything from respiratory health to dentistry to mental wellbeing. James is unequivocal that this isn't speculation.
"These are scientific facts, and all the references are in the back of the book."
Which raises the question he keeps coming back to:
"Why didn't I hear about this from my family physician?"
On where the industry goes from here
Talk turns to the breathwork field itself — the noise, the trends, the people chasing attention rather than results. James's read is unsentimental, and oddly reassuring:
"The people who are providing quality, who are showing that their clients are benefiting time and time again — these are the people that are gonna go to the top... it's a long game."
How they closed it out
Fittingly, James points out that this conversation bookends the entire journey of the book — Patrick was the very first interview he did when Breath was released, and quite possibly will be one of the last.
"We have bookended this whole breathing adventure with interviews with Patrick McKeown."
The full conversation will be released soon — there was simply too much in it to shorten.