James Nestor is an author and journalist who has written for Outside, Scientific American, Dwell, National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Men's Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, and others.

[5][6]" At 14, Nestor formed a straight edge punk rock band with neighboring boys inspired by the burgeoning music scene of Orange County in the 1980's.

“It was pure joy to take my time with these subjects, working alongside experts in the field, having strange new revelations about the world and our place in it, separating science from myths.

Being surrounded by other writers “who actually worked, some even seemed to almost make a living at it,[6]” inspired Nestor to quit his full time job to become a freelance magazine journalist.

[5] During that time, Outside sent Nestor to the Arctic Circle in Norway for a month with a group of professional surfers in an attempt to surf never-before-ridden waves.

Within a week of the article’s publication Nestor sold a book proposal at auction to Eamon Dolan[22] at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

By 2014, Nestor had published his first nonfiction book focused on the human connection to the ocean – mammalian diving reflex, electroreception, magnetoreception, abiogenesis.

In 2017, Nestor began working with National Geographic Explorer and marine scientist, David Gruber,[24] to research and try to understand cetacean communication.

It is a nonprofit research group that develops and employs technologies such as machine learning and Artificial Intelligence in the hopes of one day cracking interspecies communication.

Nestor’s TED X Marin talk about the inception of the project, “Deep Dive: What we are learning from the language of whales,[26]” has been viewed more than 278,000 times.

It was released by the New York Times and Within on April 18, 2016,[44] and is about the efforts of two freelance freediving researchers attempting to understand the language of dolphins and whales.

Nestor explores research that argues that this shift (due to the increased consumption of processed foods) has led to a rise in snoring, sleep apnea, asthma, autoimmune disease, and allergies.

[49][50][51] In the June 14, 2020 edition of the New York Times (one week after its release), Breath ranked #7 in the "Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction list.

Breath spent 18 weeks[53] on the New York Times bestseller in Spain, Germany,[1] Italy, and Croatia[54] and has sold more than a million copies worldwide.